President Trump is driving into his second term with an aggressive agenda, and late-night TV hosts are showing no signs of pumping the brakes on barbs aimed at him.
“Trump has now been president for eight days. I’m not kidding you, it’s only been eight days. I’ve aged nine-and-a-half years,” Jimmy Kimmel quipped Tuesday on his eponymous ABC show.
“I’ve had three grandchildren since Jan. 20,” Kimmel added.
Kimmel, “The Late Show’s” Stephen Colbert and “Late Night” host Seth Meyers have been some of the most prominent media voices speaking out against Trump, criticizing him with a flurry of one-liners and wisecracks on a daily basis in their opening monologues. While Jimmy Fallon has poked fun at Trump on “The Tonight Show” — recently quipping that “America is rolling the dice with a second Trump presidency: It’s like we somehow survived the first ‘Squid Game’ and then signed back up for a second,” — the NBC host’s punchlines typically aren’t as political in nature.
“It happened. Donald Trump is president again,” Colbert told his audience last week following Trump’s inauguration.
“For the next four years, we get to live by airport rules: Calories don’t count and it’s perfectly reasonable to have a vodka tonic at 8 a.m.,” said the CBS host, who for years refused to utter Trump’s name on-air as a form of protest.
The mockery from Colbert, Kimmel and others isn’t likely to soften in Trump’s second term, according to political and TV experts.
“One would expect that a wider range of comedic targets would be appealing from a marketing perspective, but there has been an intense focus on Donald Trump since he first went down that escalator in Trump Tower 10 years ago,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington and co-author of “Late Night with Trump: Political Humor and the American Presidency.”
And even after a decade in the political spotlight, Trump can deliver ratings. Colbert, as with other late-night hosts, saw a ratings surge during Trump’s first term, as he regularly took pointed jabs at the commander in chief.
But recently, viewership for late-night television has seen a decline thanks to what media business observers say is an increasingly saturated market for comedy and changes in viewer habits.
Seeing an opening for conservative-leaning comedy, Fox News in 2021 launched an eponymous program for comedian Greg Gutfeld, who in 2024 consistently outrated the long-running late-night programs and carried a nightly average of audience of more than 2 million viewer each weekday.
Overall viewership for late-night television was down in 2024 from the year prior, and many of the networks are hoping their late-night comics will be able capitalize on a “Trump Bump” as his second term begins.
“I think it’s important to remember that part of Trump’s appeal is that he is an entertaining topic. And that’s true for people who like Trump, as well as people who don’t like Trump,” Farnsworth said.
Ahead of Trump’s 2016 White House win, NBC’s Meyers opened up to ITK about whether he was concerned about alienating some of his viewership with his political comedy zingers directed at the then-GOP presidential nominee.
“If it has been off-putting to some, it seems like we have at least stayed even-keeled due to other people tuning in as we’ve become more political,” he said.
A ratings dip “might change the course of NBC’s enthusiasm for us,” Meyers laughed. “But as far as us internally, we don’t think about that very much, as far as where we aim our jokes on any given day.”
As Trump’s second term begins, Wayne Federman, a comedian who teaches a history of standup comedy course at the University of Southern California, said, “We’re going to find out if audiences are tired of these jokes or can’t get enough of them.”
“There’s been so many of them over the past eight years, even when [Trump] was out of office, they felt like he was still — even more than Biden — the main topic of late-night comedy,” said Federman, who served as a head monologue writer on NBC’s “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon.”
While Trump appeared as a guest last year on “Gutfeld!”, he’s often publicly sparred over the years with the Big Three’s lineup of late-night funnymen, calling them “low-rated creeps” and “true losers.”
Earlier this month, Trump ripped Meyers, perhaps the most emphatic of his late-night critics, saying he and others “are not shows or entertainment, they are simply political hits, 100 percent of the time, to me and the Republican Party.”
The president has also repeatedly threatened to investigate Comcast — the parent company of NBCUniversal, NBC News and MSNBC — over the networks’ news coverage of him.
It remains unclear if the shared animosity will have a negative impact on one critical part of the late-night circuit: the celebrity guest list. So far, Hollywood’s A-listers haven’t shied away from yucking it up with late-night hosts who have expressed a critical take on the 47th president.
But even if entertainers continue to sit down on the couches despite their hosts packing a more pointed political punch, White House hopefuls and lawmakers might not see late-night as an essential stop on the campaign trail.
Trump, already a celebrity by the time he ran for president 2016, used the late-night circuit to drive the news cycle that election, visiting with the likes of Colbert, Kimmel and Fallon on the way to the White House.
“You forget late-night used to be a great avenue for politicians to meet the public in a nonconfrontational situation,” Federman said.
“It was always a safe place to go to get your message out and to sort of humanize yourself,” the “History of Standup” author said.
Other than “Gutfeld!,” Federman said, “I can’t imagine Trump on any late-night talk show ever anymore.”
But the president’s rhetoric against them is unlikely to have late-night’s entertainers thinking twice about filling their shows with several clown cars’ worth of one-liners at his expense, Farnsworth said.
“I’m not sure we’re going to see a lot of self-censorship on the part of the hosts. But of course, they have to answer to the broadcasting executives who control the airwaves,” the author said.
“Network executives may turn out to be more skittish because of the threats, and we’ll see if the hosts are put in a situation where that they find unacceptable,” Farnsworth said.
That doesn’t mean that the late-night writers and hosts aren’t OD’d on Trump material, after coming up with new jokes night after night.
“My feeling is, as somebody who wrote late-night jokes, I’m sure some of the staff members are like, ‘Oh my God, we have to do another four years of these kind of jokes,’” said Federman.
“But guess what? Trump always manages to give you a number of what we call premises to hang these jokes on almost every day. So it might not be as bad as it seems,” the comedy pro said.
“And I’m just thinking about what’s happened in the last week!” Federman added.
As he kicked off his monologue a day after Trump was inaugurated, Kimmel exclaimed: “We are in a very weird, precarious time in the history of our country.”
“Half of us are worried Trump won’t do the things he promised, the other half are worried he will do those things. I’m in the latter category,” the comic said.
“We’re not even a day in, he’s already done so many terrible deeds,” Kimmel told his audience.
That same night, Colbert offered up some insight into his approach to the next four years: “Hard to believe that we’re already at the end of day two of the second Trump administration…I’m choosing to think of it as day -1,385 before the 2028 election.”
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