Stephen Colbert stood on a stage at Radio City Music Hall and raised $26 million for Joe Biden's presidential campaign.
This week he sat down with the New York Times and told them he was never partisan.
Find out what he said that the White House just destroyed him for.
The Fundraiser He Cannot Walk Back
The event was March 2024 – Biden, Obama, and Clinton on one stage, with Colbert running the conversation at the biggest Democratic fundraiser in party history.
Tickets started at $250.
Photos with all three Democratic presidents cost $100,000.
That is not a comedian doing commentary on power from the outside.
That is a man embedded inside the machinery of one political party using his platform to help elect their president.
Now Colbert tells the Times: "Partisan means you're never, ever going to make a joke about a Democrat, and that's just not true."
He hosted the single largest fundraiser in Democratic Party history.
https://twitter.com/WinnieSchola/status/1773987422465933634?s=20
His own show booked 34 Democratic politicians against one Republican over a recent stretch – and that one Republican was Liz Cheney.
Thirty-four to one.
What the White House Said
The White House was not polite about it.
A spokesman told Fox News: "Stephen Colbert is a pathetic trainwreck with no talent and terrible ratings, which is exactly why CBS canceled his show and is booting him off the airwaves."
Colbert spent 11 years on The Late Show building a monologue franchise around the premise that Donald Trump and everyone who supported him was a threat to civilization.
CBS canceled the show in July 2025, citing high costs and declining ratings.
The network called it "purely a financial decision."
Colbert suspects otherwise.
He told the Times that less than two years before the cancellation call, CBS was pushing him to sign a contract as long as five years – then abruptly reversed course just days after he called Paramount's $16 million settlement with Trump a "big fat bribe."
Timing, he says, is everything.
What Colbert will not say out loud is the simpler explanation: America stopped watching.
Variety called his final season "not very good TV" and described the show as having lost touch with everyday Americans.
Late-night audiences have collapsed across the board as podcasts replace appointment television.
Colbert's replacement on CBS is a syndicated game show originally produced in 2006.
The Argument He Cannot Win
Here is the line Colbert is betting his legacy on: "I don't have any problem with Trump being a Republican. I have a problem with Trump being a complete narcissist who is only working for his own interest and does not appear to care if the entire world burns. That's not a partisan position."
That argument collapsed the moment he walked onstage that night and raised $26 million for the Democrat presidential campaign.
Non-partisan people do not do that.
He told the Times he thought of himself as a gunfighter who had buried his weapons – and that Trump's rise was what made him dig them back up.
What he dug up was not courage.
It was a decade-long audition to be the official court comedian of the American left – and now, standing in the ashes of a canceled show with ratings nobody will mourn, he is trying to tell the New York Times it was never about politics.
America already gave its verdict.
Roughly 74 million people voted for Trump in 2020 and then 77 million voted for him again in 2024.
They did not stop watching Colbert because they were authoritarians.
They stopped watching because he stopped being funny and started being a Democrat with a desk.
Sources:
- Alexander Hall, "Colbert calls Trump 'authoritarian' but rejects 'partisan' label in exit interview with NY Times," Fox News, April 28, 2026.
- "CBS Reveals What Will Fill 'Late Show' Time Slot After Colbert's Final Sign-Off," CBS8/AP, April 2026.
- Alexander Hall, "Colbert's most partisan moments as 'Late Show' host, from leading Biden fundraiser to dancing with Schumer," Fox News, July 2025.
- "Late Night DNC: 94 Percent of Late Night Guests Are Liberal," NewsBusters/Media Research Center, July 2024.
