What The Numbers in Late Night Tell Me About Hollywood's War on Trump. What They Tell You…Judge for Yourself

 

 

I've always felt a comfort in numbers and statistics. Perhaps that is because so much of my writing involves fields where they can be use to buttress theories far more than so much speculation on both sides tends to do. For all that's changed in the world we live in I cling to these three simple words: "Figures don't lie."

In the last decade Hollywood has been engaged in War on Trump almost non-stop since election day 2016. I've spent a lot of time arguing that this conflict has done far more harm to Hollywood then it has to Trump but most of this has been in the realm of speculation. I've seen numbers of the industries, I see so many of the mergers and dropping ratings across the board and they would seem to be making a convincing argument – but the critical word is 'seems'. I don't have any raw data to back it up.

Then in the aftermath of Stephen Colbert's final show I actually got some. On its own it's not quite enough to convince me that my theories are correct and I have little hope that they will do much to convince those who are divided among partisan lines. But here's the thing: those very numbers actually give me reason to believe that maybe, just maybe, there is room that those divisions may not be as great as we think.

 That will be the subject of a later article; for now let's just focus on what those numbers tell me about four separate points: Stephen Colbert, ratings in late night now as opposed to in the past, ratings of late night in two very distinct period and the electoral appeal of the President as of this week. Because these number would seem to illustrate several pictures about Hollywood's war on Trump that puncture in the biggest way possible so much of their argument about their vehement and increasingly unpleasant attitude towards all things associated with him and the right in the last decade.

First of all let's look at the ratings for Colbert's last appearance on Late Night on Thursday, which have been verified by multiple sources. Now let's look at several points. First the date has been set in stone for over a year and there has been immense attention paid to it in the media. Second the other hosts in late night, Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and The Daily Show all decided to go dark 'out of respect to their colleague." Third, according to the New York Times, these were the largest numbers, not just Colbert but any late night show had drawn in a very long time.

The final numbers were…6.75 million.

I know that the arithmetic for television, particularly network TV, has changed a lot in this decade alone. But for a live event, that has had a year's publicity, with no competition and so much media attention from circles that aren't outside entertainment that seems disappointing to say the least.

Now compare that with David Letterman's last show. He drew 13.7 million viewers.  One year earlier Jay Leno's last show drew 11. 9 million viewers. And on Johnny Carson's final show back in May of 1992 drew 55 million viewers. That is, for the record, more than 10 million people who voted for Clinton just six months later.

I can hear all the arguments that the world is a very different place then it was thirty-four years ago. That's true. What's also true is that Carson would never have done the kind of material then any of his contemporaries in late night have spent the last decade doing. As was pointed out quite a bit in the aftermath of the assassination of Ronald Reagan the night before the Oscars Johnny Carson was hosting. The first thing he did was offer the best wishes to Ronald Reagan and say that he was hoping the President was off for a speedy recovery, made a joke about how the President was doing and the ceremony paused for Reagan to give a videotaped introduction. Carson would never have made a joke about Nancy Reagan having the glow of an expectant widow under any circumstances and if he thought he'd said something would have given offense he would absolutely have apologized the next night. That's not something any of his predecessors would have thought of doing.

 

Now let's extrapolate what these raw numbers would seem to tell us...or at least me.

1. Jay Leno was being kind in his estimations.

Last year when Leno was interviewed and said that today's comedians go out of their way to isolate half the country with their jokes, everyone in late in turn attacked Jay Leno as not being funny. It's now looking like Leno was being generous in his figures because according to the math Colbert did alienate half the country. He drew less than  half the audience of Letterman's last show just eleven years earlier, never mind talking about Carson. And that's before you consider other math.

If we argue that the three combined audiences of the major late show were all watching on Thursday, well then at most all of them had around 2.25 million viewers – and that's being generous.  So that means in the 2020s, each of the three late night shows are drawing 2 million viewers a night live. Their defenders will argue that people like Colbert and Kimmel must speak truth to power.  Well looking at these numbers, power may be the only people watching because the rest of America sure isn't. And based on that…

 

2. The final numbers of late show actually strengthen CBS's argument that the show was becoming a financial drain.

This part had actually been verified long before Colbert's cancellation in multiple stories which revealed that across the board late night shows had to economize. All the shows had cut to four nights a week instead of five and Seth Meyers had to give up his band. This isn't the sign of world that's flourishing.

And if you're drawing at best 2 million viewers a night, for a network show in this era that's a huge loss. Network TV is already struggling financially across the board in part because the largest audiences for many shows are still becoming money losers. TV networks are not charities, they are to make money and Colbert was an employee. There are those who will argue he was the number one person in late night, but all that meant was that he was a big fish in a pond that was shrinking.

This brings up another argument they don't want here.

 

3. Trump was right when he said nobody watched late night.

I will grant you by the dictionary definition the President was punching down every time he tweeted when someone in late night chose to say something nasty about him. But sadly, the numbers do bear him out. 2 million viewers a night is not a big deal; six million isn't really that impressive and Colbert hadn't drawn that in years.

To be clear he did act even more like a bully then he should have with everything he has done against the networks ever since his second term. He would have done better to concentrate on governing. But there's a bigger story.

 

4. The numbers for late night tell us that Colbert and his colleagues vastly underestimated the sway they had over America.

In 2016 Donald Trump received just under 63 million votes in his first run for the Presidency. 8 years later after throwing everything they had at him, he received 77.3 million votes 14.3 million more then he did in 2016.

You can debate about a lot of things but it's hard to argue that late night had any real effect in changing anyone's mind. Why would it? If at most you are reaching 2 to 3 million viewers a night – and they're almost always the same ones, which means they agree with the political views Colbert and his colleagues aired -  how do you rationally expect to have any sway over the political conversation?

 Hell in 2024 Kirsten Gillibrand got 4.7 million votes in New York running for reelection. She was drawing more people in her state than Colbert was in the country! That's bring me to…

 

5. Unlike in late night, in the last decade Trump's hold on his base has not shrunk.

During this week Trump's approval numbers had reached record lows, almost the lowest of any President in history. And yet despite that he still retains the hold over his base in a way that Hollywood never has. The Saturday before his final episode Trump Bill Cassidy one of the Senators who voted to impeach Trump was demolished in his primary. 300,000 Louisiana Republicans voted against him. We saw he was capable in Kentucky and we will no doubt see it in the Texas runoff on Tuesday.

This is a national following in a way that late night has never had. I seriously doubt that Colbert has 60,000 viewers watching him in the state of Kentucky his final week, much less in the fourth district that Thomas Massie lost his primary.

 

Its worth reminding people that Colbert had only 1 republican guest on his show during the entire Biden administration and I seriously doubt he had any during his last year. If Colbert had been serious about speaking truth to power – hell if anyone in Hollywood had been – they would have invited almost anyone in the last decade who'd publicly stood against him and held them as heroes while they were still running for office. Cassidy, Romney, John Cornyn, any of the Indiana state legislators who tried to stop the gerrymandering effort last fall.

Hell Colbert made it clear he had nothing to lose. And honestly nothing would have pissed off Trump more than helping Republicans who were against him hold office?

But did he? Of course he didn't. Nor has anyone in late night. Nor has anyone in Hollywood. Not because they're loyal Democrats – end of the day they're too conservative for their taste -  or because they care if Trump is wrecking the country.  

No they want to make it very clear that they hate Trump and everything he stands for. If that means that they lay waste to their own industry – and given the raw numbers for late night that these statistics illustrate its very hard to argue that they're not doing just that – so be it.

Colbert's behavior in the last year bears that out. His behavior was a combination of nostalgia and scorched earth. He clearly believes or has convinced himself that he is the aggrieved party, the victim of the machinations of the powers that be to silence him for speaking the truth. First of all, that's an ego that is nearly comparable to his enemy and second of all, even if it were true that only proves how deluded he is.

Colbert wasn't an activist, not a politician. He was a white multi-millionaire who was employed by a corporation. He had a fiduciary obligation to that corporation to generate revenue for it. The numbers illustrate he was failing at that job.

Compared to most working stiff he was given a more than generous severance package: they gave him a year's notice, allowed him to keep his job while he found other employment and allowed him to get fully paid. They even allowed him to engage in the bad behavior that very well might have led to the company firing him in the first place, in public, private and at his job. He got a much better deal that anyone else who works in the world of late-stage capitalism then he and his colleagues have been saying is destroying the country.

Furthermore none of this will hurt him with future employers, if anything his bad behavior has guaranteed that he will be successful for the rest of his life. He will be wealthy beyond his dreams, celebrated by his peers and those who think that way, championed as a hero even though he accomplished nothing of note – including his supposed goal of bringing down the President. Talk about a golden parachute.

 These numbers paint a picture that is diametrically opposed to the one that Colbert and his colleagues in both late night and the industry are convinced is what actually happened. For me these numbers tell me something different. They tell me that Colbert's decision to attack Trump with full furor did nothing to reduce his hold on power and shrunk his audience to almost nothing. This caused his show to become less popular, causing it to become a financial drain for the company, forcing CBS to let him go to cut their losses.  He and his colleagues never had any real influence on America to make up for it and have done nothing to reduce the President's hold on the electorate right up until his last week on the air.

Colbert is not a victim of an unjust system. The Late Show was the casualty of his own actions and so are the people who were turning to it for entertainment night after night. Some of them might have been hard working people who wanted nothing more then to have an escape from the world around them and turned on TV at 11:30 and got reminded just how horrible it was and that some of them were, by extension, to blame for it. I have a feeling there might have been less of them then we think and that will be the subject of the next article related to this.

 

 

 

 

Suggestions for A Post-Trump America: The DNC's Autopsy of the 2024 Election Was Devastatingly Accurate. The People Who Need To Hear It The Most Say Its Fake News

 

I've been told on multiple occasions by numerous progressive groups in the aftermath of the 2012 election that the GOP did an autopsy of why Mitt Romney had lost against Obama, what those weaknesses were and that they chose to ignore them. Progressive Democrats chose to argue years later this was a moral flaw and proof of the GOP's failings – while ignoring, as they have done, the results of the 2016 election that followed.

For that reason when Ken Martin, the head of the DNC, finally released the official (albeit still incomplete) autopsy of the reasons Democrats lost in 2024, I was neither shocked nor angered that the loudest voices of the left did more than ignore what it said, they basically said that the people who'd painstakingly performed it had no idea what they were talking about.

I've known for a long time that when it comes to election denialism the progressive left makes anything that Trump or his colleagues say or do look like sane, rational people.  They have spent an incredible amount of time and energy arguing, with a straight face, that the conservative revolution is either a complete illusion and that America not only still wants liberal policies they've actually become more liberal in their thinking to the present day, results of elections be damned.  The incredible electoral demolitions of McGovern, Mondale and Dukakis didn't take place because Americans rejected liberalism but because the electorate was either misled or is too dumb to realize how much the conservatives and GOP are lying to them.  Furthermore if Democrats try to reach the rest of the country, either by the Third Way or Obama's attempts, they have betrayed the cause and their victories are irrevocably tainted. The fact that the voters have made their choices clear on multiple occasions is just another in the endless list of proving you can't trust voters with making decisions that affect their lives. If they're dumb enough to believe that the left all but says out loud, why should anyone trust them with the direction of the country?

The left has, if anything, less use for democracy or politics then the right does and in the last decade they've doubled down on that believe. Increasingly the academic wing of the party has pushed as hard as they can that Bernie Sanders, who is a socialist who only caucuses with the Democrats, should be the baseline for any Democratic candidate in any office around the country. That Sanders never won the Democratic nomination and has no real legislation to his credit, is irrelevant to the discussion as is the fact that the more the Democrats made Sanders the face of their party, their electoral footprint in much of the country, including rural America and white working class voters, has eroded to its lowest points in years. The party has allowed Sanders a ridiculous amount of influence in its thinking since the 2016 election and the Biden administration, none of which, I should make clear has done anything to convince the majority of left-wing thinkers to embrace the party even after Trump's first term. They remain convinced AOC and the Squad are the future of the party even though they are still a fragment of the party overall.

The arithmetic of the 2024 election made it very clear why Harris lost in 2024: she carried just eight percent of rural America and barely a third of the white working class voter, the lowest numbers for any Democrat in history. For all the abuse Martin has taken in some circles every indication is he is doing the hard work of what is necessary to rebuild the party. That included eventually firing David Hogg as Vice Chair when he made it clear he was planning to primary active Democrats, something that has been forbidden by DNC rules, the slow long process of rebuilding the party at a national level in every state of the union and recruiting candidates to run in every state and local office, including some deep red states and districts. There have been many signs in 2025 this strategy has been paying dividends: Democrats have been overperforming across the board, winning state seats in deep red districts, including in Iowa and Louisiana and overperforming – though not winning – in deep red districts Republicans carried by larger margins just last year. Martin should be applauded for making hard decisions that may very well may enormous dividends in a few months' time for his party.

The postelection report also tells uncomfortable truths. It says millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to health care and a failing infrastructure yet continue to be persuaded to vote against their own best interests with the Democratic party. It calls for a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South who 'have come to believe that they are not included in the Democratic vision of a stronger and more dynamic America for everyone." It speaks to a reduction in support and training for Democratic state parties, voter registration shifts and 'a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters."

All of these are conclusions that are hard to escape for anyone who has been a Democrat for an extended period. More importantly it's clear that Martin is doing the work that the autopsy is calling for. And yet many Democrats are still calling for Martin to resign, particularly from progressives because it is not what they want to hear. They want to be told that the failings of the Democrats have nothing to do with them and everything to do with the Democrats complete and utter unwillingness to embrace their agenda.

In their mind multiple publications, including the left wing leaning The Guardian, say that the fact that the Democrats did not, in their opinion, put Gaza front and center during the election was a key factor in their defeat. It was a key factor in why progressives chose not to vote for Democrats – I've seen multiple left-wing articles arguing this point even prior to the election – but that's part of the left's reductive thinking: that what their top priority is at any given moment, must therefore be not just the Democratic Party, but America, if not the world. That none of the candidates of either party were running to be elected President of Gaza but rather to be President of the United States is not a consideration for the left.

The argument that publications like The Guardian make is that a significant portion of Biden voters who didn't vote for Harris said that her position on Gaza was key to their not voting. The problem is exit polling for every swing state on election night made it very clear that for the majority of voters, their top issue was the economy. The left wants to ignore that, mostly because for the majority of them, economic improvement is not their top concern but as the autopsy points out that's the problem the party cares about more then the left, for whom its clearly more abstract.

Furthermore The Guardian wants to make the argument, more or less indirectly that Harris was not a flawed candidate but that Harris was given unfair treatment because of her race and gender. Or in the progressive translation, they want the report to indict the media in all forms as racist and sexist, even though that's not a problem the Democratic Party should have to solve. By that definition they can continue to label the parts of the country they don't like as racist and sexist and therefore the party should not bother to win them over. To be clear the Guardian says it acknowledges gaps among male voters, suburban voters, rural voters and the Latino voter shift which is what a political party has to do because that's something they can solve. But as always they want them to call institutions racist and sexist at the same time even though it won't solve anything and will almost certainly isolate the very voters they're trying to win back.

The Guardian's contradictions can be the definition of hairsplitting. They argue that the autopsy doesn't mention Trump's appearance on Joe Rogan or Harris's decision to decline. The report spends a lot of time dealing with the Democrats failure to reach young men on digital platforms and the need to meet voters 'where they are' – which would seem to be by extension on podcasts like Rogan. But because they don't spell it out directly in the minds of the left, they're not saying it at all. To be clear by saying anything that is obvious to the left one gets no credit for it, so if they mentioned: "Harris should have gone on Joe Rogan" in big bold font, The Guardian no doubt would have said: "Why should we give them credit for saying what we already knew to be true?"

Its worth noting the remarks about the autopsy basically break down along ideological lines.  Liam Kerr, head of a centrist Democrat coalition, made it clear that their losses were because of 'a decade accepting all edits from every progressive group." Johnathan Cowan, the head of Third Way said this report was shelved because it would anger progressives – which as we can see is exactly what happened.

The clearest line that makes me think that the report is correct is this: At times, it seems Democrats are trying to win arguments while Republicans are focused on winning elections."  Martin by any measure is doing everything to help the Democrats do so in the last year and has been remarkably successful. For people like Hogg, who are very clear that winning elections is less important then ideological candidates who win the arguments.

The autopsy did what it was supposed to and provided lessons in order to move forward in the midterms. But most of the people involved want the lessons to be the ones that place blame on someone else whether it is those associated with the Harris campaign or the progressive wing.

Martin has spent the last year attempting to steer the party forward, which is honestly the right move. But numerous progressive groups made it clear that they wanted it released. Now groups like Roots Action, keeping with progressives, are angry with what was released, mainly because it didn't tell them exactly what they wanted to hear.

And of course the only thing they want to here is that the only reason the Democrats lost in 2024 is that they didn't agree to endorse the Justice Democrats platform fully and completely as part of the Democratic platform along with anything that the Squad chose to say in a tweet. That the reason any voter dares to vote Republican is because they are a racist even if their African-American, part of the patriarchy even if their female, xenophobic even if their LatinX etc. That the Democratic party should start giving voters IQ tests if they come to the polls and pull our voter outreach from any part of America that isn't on the coast. That they should stop trying to win voters in red states and focus on making the Virgin Islands and America Samoa full states.  And that when it wins its next election President AOC must dissolve the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and install herself as Queen for life to enact the warmth of collectivism throughout America.

It's a complete and utter fantasy, as ridiculous and absurd as any of the rants that you find at a MAGA rally. But if you, like me, have spent enough time among the progressives and liberals you know that in their hearts its what they believe America is and always wants regardless of the results of any election. They don't want an autopsy that reveals the truth; they want fanfiction.

Even in its admittedly incomplete form the autopsy of the 2024 has many strengths, not the least of which that it once again provides a key hypocrisy of a progressive talking point. It has become the gospel of the progressive that one of their critical objectives, one that justifies so much of their behavior, is that they are 'speaking truth to power'. This autopsy literally did just that and as always the progressives in power made it very clear that when they were told a truth that didn't agree with their preconceptions they could be as thin-skinned and mean-spirited as any reaction the once and current President ever reveals when he feels as wronged. That this autopsy basically gave an argument why he has this power is another irony that I can appreciate even as I know that the progressive voices will never see it for themselves, much less accept it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

The West Wing Didn't Lose A Step After 9/11. TV Took A Big Step Forward

 

In some circles among critics there's a story about the quality of The West Wing. The argument was that it was at the peak of its powers in its first two seasons. Then, immediately after the attacks of September 11^th when America's view on government became more cynical in many ways within weeks, the liberal idealism of the Bartlet administration seemed out of touch and the show was no longer a masterpiece. They will argue both the drop in the ratings in Season 3 (it fell from 20 million to something like 15 million as part of the logic) and a certain staleness in the reelection storyline. Even before Sorkin left the show at the end of Season 4, The West Wing was already a shell of its former self.

This is a classic case of what the show referred to as 'Post Hoc, Ergo Prompter Hoc': 'After it, therefore because of it." As Bartlet said: "One thing follows the other, therefore it caused the other. But its not always true; in fact it's hardly ever true."

And that's the case here. While Season 3 and Season 4 were somewhat weaker than the first two seasons having seen every episode multiple times I can assure you they were overall superb TV with everyone in the cast of the height of the powers. And considering just how during W's presidency America was increasingly looking towards the show and wondering: "Why couldn't Jed Bartlet be President now?" that rarely holds. So that narrative is faulty.

The truth is simpler. When The West Wing debuted in September of 1999 network TV was still the alpha dog. The Sopranos had established itself as a masterpiece but up until the spring of 2001, there were no signs yet that HBO or for that matter cable was the future of television. Considering The Sopranos was about to engage in what would end up being an unprecedented hiatus – it wouldn't return until September 2002 -   the idea of cable being the future of TV wasn't cemented yet.

That end of that argument began within weeks of The West Wing ended and by the time the Emmy nominations for the 2001-2002 season it was completely flushed. And during that same period network TV was giving its share of examples of what 21^st century TV would like.

In June of 2001 Six Feet Under debuted on HBO. In many ways this series was even more revolutionary then The Sopranos. For one thing it dealt with the typical American family whose patriarch happened to own a funeral home. It began with Nathaniel Fisher's hearse being hit by a bus on Christmas Eve and the entire family having to deal with it in bizarre ways: Claire, the youngest daughter, learns of it while smoking crystal meth while Ruth the mother confesses she cheated on her father with her hairdresser during the wake. And indeed the Fishers start having conversations with Nathaniel after he dies – and Alan Ball the showrunner never really explains if these are ghosts or mental conversations.

Six Feet Under was far closer to a black comedy much of the time then a drama and it certainly didn't fit the model of White Male Antihero dramas that would dominate cable over much of the next 20 years. The show dealt with death on a week by week basis but it frequently never took it seriously. It was the first series to deal with a major character – David Fisher, played exquisitely by Michael C. Hall – who was a closeted gay man who spent the first season slowly coming out to his family, all of whom had suspected for years. Just like with The West Wing Hall and the entire cast have become fixtures in television to this very day.

More to the point Six Feet Under more or less confirmed that HBO was the home of great drama. OZ was still on the air but it never been critically received by contemporaries as a great drama and most critics still think of it as an ancestor show rather than a classic in its own right. And while The Sopranos had become a critical and ratings hit for HBO it could have been a one-off if during that hiatus HBO had not come up with another great drama that could be an audience hit and do just as well with awards shows.

By the end of 2001 it was clear Six Feet Under was going to fill that gap. The 2002 Golden Globes would have it nominated for three awards and it would win Best Drama over The West Wing and Best Supporting Actress for Rachel Griffiths. Almost overnight everyone was talking about Six Feet Under.

Network TV took an even bigger shift when 24 debuted in November of 2001. This series was delayed and in many ways reshot because of the events of 9/11 which is ironic considered the series is considered by many as the TV series that defines entertainment in the world of War on Terror better than anything. It wasn't clear that was going to be the case watching the first season: what was clear to everyone was how revolutionary it was.

24 was more radical then anything TV had done, network or cable. There were going to be 24 hours and events were going to unfold in real time. The show would follow Jack Bauer – who Kiefer Sutherland nailed from minute one – as one of the heads of CTU: Los Angeles. He's called in on midnight of the day of the California Presidential primary and is told that there is a credible threat that there will be an attempt on Senator David Palmer (Dennis Haysbert) an African-American who's the front for the Democratic nomination for President. Jack is informed by his mentor that there's a high probability that people within the government are working with the forces that will want Palmer killed. He's told not to trust anybody.

And while this is going on his teenage daughter Kim has run away from home and his wife – who he has just reconciled with after a separation – spends the night trying to track her down. As the night proceeds it becomes clear that the forces that are after the President are also targeting Jack.

We see all of this through a series of what was groundbreaking cinematography and editing, particularly with the use of split screens and the presence of a digital clock counting down that fans of the show – and I very quickly became one of them – would fall in love and a combination of violence and paranoia that fit the 2000s in the same way The X-Files had the 1990s. (Both shows, it might not shock you to know, shared writers and directors in common.)

24 didn't become a ratings hit during its first season (it wouldn't get there until it aired after American Idol during Season 2) but the critical response was almost immediately as favorable as it had been for The West Wing with many critics putting it on their top ten list. The show would be nominated for Best Drama by the Golden Globes and SAG-AFTRA and Kiefer Sutherland would win Best Actor in a Drama, defeating among others, Martin Sheen.

The final series that made clear the revolution had begun started airing in March of 2002 and it came from the most unlikely of places: FX. A fringe cable network that wasn't even carried by many cable systems until 2001 and like so many known entirely for syndication: it was about to take a swing at the original series. Michael Chiklis would shave his head to take on the role of LA cop Vic Mackey, the head of the strike Team, in The Shield.

In the opening episode Vic tells a suspect: "Good cop and bad cop went home for the day. I'm a different kind of cop." And then he begins to lay a beating on him – which is tacitly accepted as a necessary evil even by the detectives in his unit.

The series deals with the profanity and violence that we were only getting used to on HBO. And more to the point it made Vic even more frightening that Tony Soprano because it quickly became clear he was corrupt, taking money from drug dealers and at the end of the pilot, shoots an undercover cop in the face.  This series would reinvent the police procedural in a way completely different then The Wire would in a few months' time.

The critics were not quite as awed by it initially but the audiences were. The Shield debuted to 4.4 million viewers, the highest ratings any original cable drama had ever received to that point in history.

So by the time the Emmy nominations came out in July of 2002 the voters made it very clear that TV was a whole new world. ER and The Practice, which had been nominated for Best Drama the first two years The West Wing was on the air and had been perennial favorites for years before that, were gone from the ranks in almost every major category never to return. Law & Order was still there but the following year it would be gone as well.

The West Wing would be nominated for 21 Emmys, the most in its tenure with every series regular (save Rob Lowe) being nominated for an acting award.  But it wasn't the most nominated drama that year. That honor went to Six Feet Under which was nominated for 23, a number of nominations not even The Sopranos had managed to achieve.

And it was nominated in every category that The West Wing was. Martin Sheen was competing against Michael C. Hall and Peter Krause for Best Actor. Allison Janney, competing in Best Actress in a Drama for the first time, was up against Frances Conroy and surprisingly Rachel Griffiths. (Griffiths would compete in supporting actress for the rest of her tenure.) Dule Hill, Richard Schiff, John Spencer and Bradley Whitford were up against Freddie Rodriguez for Supporting Actor and Stockard Channing, Janel Moloney and Mary Louise-Parker were up against Lauren Ambrose.

Nor was this the only new face. 24 was nominated for 10 Emmys in its first season and while Kiefer Sutherland was the only acting nominee, it would nominated in the directed and writing categories. And even more historical were the three nominations The Shield received: Michael Chiklis for Best Actor in a Drama, Clark Johnson for directing the pilot, Shawn Ryan for writing it. No basic cable drama had ever received this many nominations.

The West Wing by any measure did quite well during the 2002 Emmys: it won Best Drama and Janney Spencer and Channing all won on Emmy night. But no one could deny how different the landscape was. Six Feet Under won six Emmys including Best Direction for the Pilot. 24 would win Best Writing for a Drama series. And Michael Chiklis made history when he won Best Actor in a Drama. Combined with the nominations and popularity of series such as CSI and Alias which were radically different from the kind of dramas that had been airing on network TV just the previous year the kinds of shows that audiences were now part of the cultural and critical landscape were completely different then they had been the previous year.

So no The West Wing didn't suddenly become a lesser show after the attacks of September 11^th. But when the 21^st century began so effectively did the Golden Age of TV. Great TV shows were seemingly coming from everywhere and all of them were in many ways more revolutionary then The West Wing could hope to be. It was now 'only' a well written, well-acted masterpiece among many well written, well-acted masterpieces. That's hardly a flaw.

 

 

As Tristan Williams Reaches A Perfect 10 Season 42 of Jeopardy Shows That The Super-Champion Is Back In Business

 

This post-Trebek era of Jeopardy could just as easily be called the era of the super-champion. This became clear in the 2021-2022 season when no less than five Jeopardy players achieved super-champion status. Jonathan Fisher and Ryan Long, great players in any previous era, paled to the incredible achievements of Matt Amodio, Amy Schneider and Mattea Roach among the first class of Jeopardy Masters.

While each season that has followed has produced at least one super-champion and several other great ones for the next three years they didn't grow at the same rate they had in Season 38. There were mitigating factors, the endless postseason of Season 40 and the continuing postseasons of every year since.  I myself was inclined to believe that Season 38 was more of a fluke and we were unlikely to see it again.

However with Season 42 almost three quarters over, like many other Jeopardy watchers, I'm beginning to have second thoughts. Because ever since the eligibility period for the 2027 Tournament of Champions began we've witnessed no less than 3 super-champions dominate the Alex Trebek stage since we've only had 90 regular season games of eligibility in Season 42. And astonishingly nearly two thirds of them have been dominated by three players.

Much of last November was dominated by the play of Harrison Whitaker who won fourteen games and $373,999 before his run ended on December 1^st at the hands of Libby Jones. For six glorious weeks we watched the incredible play of Jamie Ding who spent a calendar month on the Alex Trebek stage finally finishing in fifth place in both games won and money won with 31 wins and $882,605.

And then less eight games after Jamie was defeated by Greg Shahade yet another super-champion has been impressing Jeopardy fans, Tristan Williams who yesterday officially reached double digits with his tenth consecutive win. This one was by far his hardest. He spent much of the Jeopardy round trailing Rose Sloan and for the first time couldn't find a single Daily Double. He didn't have a big lead going into Final Jeopardy but as his been the case when he needed to he responded correctly on the clue and managed his biggest win yet $33,401, officially putting him into super-champion status and over $200,000 with $221,902.

Unofficially super-champion status is 11. Jeopardy has had many incredible 9 game winners over its tenure, most recently TOC finalists Ben Chan and Isaac Hirsch but in a weird quirk no one has won exactly ten games. The unofficial number for a super-champion has always been 11 ever since Arthur Chu managed to set in 2014 and Jonathan Fisher tied back in 2021. So Tristan was going to make one kind of history or another on Wednesday's game: the question was what kind.

There were signs from the start of the Jeopardy round against Allegra Rosenberg and Chris D'Angelo that this was not going to be Tristan's day. Chris, who we learned in his interview was the inspiration for the Emmy winning movie Quiz Lady (he and Awkwafina don't run in the same circles, he assured Ken) took the lead early in the round. However Tristan moved into second place and found the Daily Double in BIBLE PEOPLE MENTIONED IN THE QURAN. With $2600 to risk he bet $1600:

A tafsir, or commentary, says this royal 'set forth from her country and reached Jerusalem. There was a pause. Tristan guessed: "Who is Esther?" I knew it was actually the Queen of Sheba (don't ask me how). He dropped to $1000. Tristan finished the Jeopardy round with $4400 to Chris's $8000 while Allegra trailed with $2000.

Chris and Tristan went back and forth in Double Jeopardy with correct response but Tristan could catch Chris. His best chance came when he got to the first Daily Double in WE'VE GOT YOUR BACK. He wagered $3500:

From Greek for narrowing, spinal this occurs when the space inside the backbone is to small for the nerves, and ouch.

Again a long pause. He finally guessed: "What is compression?" It was actually stenosis. He dropped to $8500. He never got close to Chris again in large part because Allegra got to the other Daily Double ahead of him even though she got it wrong.

Both Chris and Tristan managed 20 correct responses. However Tristan got 6 wrong to Chris's 3. And because two of them were Daily Doubles he finished with $9700 to Chris's $12,800 while Allegra had $1400.

It would turn out to be a moot point because of how Final Jeopardy went.  Tristan had gotten four of his first six Final Jeopardys incorrect but had gotten the last four correct. He'd always gotten it right when he needed to. Today would prove wrong.

The Final Jeopardy category was THE 20^TH CENTURY. 51 days after this event, Edward Teller said the United States had lost 'a battle more important & greater then Pearl Harbor."

Allegra's response was first. She wrote down Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That was incorrect and she dropped to $201.

Next came Tristan. He wrote down: "What is the fall of Saigon?" It was not. It cost him $3101, leaving him with $6599.

It came down to Chris. He wrote down the Tet Offense, then crossed it out and wrote down: "What is Sputnik Launch?" And that was the correct response. Chris added $6601 to his total giving him $19,401 and making him a new champion.

So Tristan has become the first ten game winner in Jeopardy history which no doubt means the super-champion mark from now own will start with Tristan rather than Arthur or Jonathan. His final total of $221,902 is impressive but it is lacking compared to some of players who won fewer games. I speak not just of Roger Craig but also Larissa Kelly, who also won more money in six games then Tristan did in 10. Indeed he won less money in ten games than Hannah Wilson did in eight $229,801 and Ben Chan did in 9 ($252,600)

However after 10 wins Tristan does compare well with  other Jeopardy players who won more games. It's actually worth a comparison with some of the more famous super-champion after 10 appearances:

 

Tristan Williams: $221,902

Ryan Long: $183,301

Adriana Harmeyer: $225,700

Mattea Roach: $227,601

Jonathan Fisher: $230,100

Seth Wilson: $231,801

Julia Collins: $220,610

 

I think that's pretty close to the kind of super-champion Tristan was during his run. He'd runaway with games but never by much; had a mixed track record with Daily Doubles and was never dominant in his appearances the way Harrison or Jamie were.  He was getting 20, maybe 22 correct responses a game and never got enormous payoffs the way that so many super-champions did (whereas many of the ones he compares favorably with did not)

I still don't know when the 2027 Tournament of Champions will occur. Tristan's defeat means that only five players have officially qualified and only two others (both 3 game winners) have unofficially done so. There are only a little more than two months left before the end of Season 42 and its hard to imagine the show getting even three or four players for the next TOC by the end of the season.

What does seem relatively certain is that the three players who are guaranteed byes into the semi-final have been locked down. With Harrison, Jamie and now Tristan each reaching super-champion status its very difficult to imagine a player managing to win eleven games in the next two months or the first three months of Season 42. But then again Adriana Harmeyer began her run in June of 2024 and Scott Riccardi dominated the last three weeks of Season 41, so again anything is possible. I didn't think we'd see a super-champion this soon after Jamie Ding lost and we just said goodbye to Tristan.

What we know is that Tristan can now lay claim to having done something no players has done in all the years since Ken Jennings set the bar. His streak was anything but a perfect 10 but its still ten impressive wins and over $22,000 a victory.

I'll be back when the next Jeopardy champion arises. Which may be next week. At this point, nothing would surprise me.

Post Trump America Decision 2026, Part 7: How The Democrats Electoral Failures In Texas In the 21st Century Have Little to Do With The GOP And How James Talarico Might Be The Best Chance to Reverse Their Fortunes

 

 

In the summer of 2025 when the Texas legislature had begun the first of a seemingly endless battle of partisan gerrymandering battles my reaction was different then so many other Americans on either side of the aisle.

"Why are Abbott and the Republicans bothering?" I thought to myself.  "Party keeps heading in this direction by 2030 they're won't be any left in Texas anyway." This opinion was based very much on my own research in the subject reminding me yet again how much my party has been its own  worst enemy in the 21^st century.

As I wrote in a separate article about the Democrats and Dixie:

"During the 1970s Republicans were now being challenged by a new generation of moderate Democrats. Democrats had a monopoly on the black vote and the more Republicans ran to the right, the more it energized the base. Typically Democrats needed little more than a third of the white vote to ensure victory. These Democratic candidates gave high-minded but measured speeches about racial progress that flattered the prejudices of southern voters about how much the South had changed and combined with the Democrat's New Deal heritage, they had easy entrée to working class whites and accused Republicans of being the country club set. Men like Fritz Hollings, Sam Nunn and in Arkansas Dale Bumpers and David Pryor would become fixtures in the Senate for years and decades to come."

This changed in the aftermath of Obama's election in 2008. The coalition he managed to build in 2008 was a variation on the one that came out for George McGovern in 1972. Obama managed to win not only an overwhelming majority of the black vote, but also a majority of the women’s vote, two-thirds of the Latino vote (McGovern did the same, but back then there were less than 5 million Latinos registered) and most of what we now would call the LGBTQ+ vote.

And in the aftermath of it Obama's DNC made two decisions which have crippled the party ever since. First they abandoned Howard Dean's 50 state strategy which had been integral to the Democrats retaking first both houses of Congress and then the White House in the aftermath of the 2004 election. Second they made it clear that on a national and state level they were going to try to build the same multiracial coalition that had worked for Obama. In other words they were abandoning two strategies that had worked for the party for nearly forty years in favor of one that had worked once.

We saw the result even before Obama's term was over: after the 2014 midterms, the GOP had the biggest margin of in Congress since 1928 and the Democrats had lost nearly every seat they had in the Senate. Much of this was based in the ridiculous moronic thinking that what played for the Democratic coalition at a national level would work in deep red states. Nowhere was this more apparent in Texas which the Democrats not carried since 1968, hadn't won a Senate seat since 1988 or the gubernatorial race since 1990.

In 2013 the Democratic Party became enamored of Wendy Davis, a Texas legislator who had filibustered in the Texas Senate floor to stop an anti-abortion bill from the state. Her courage and bravery won the hearts of so many progressives across the country – despite the fact that all she did was delay it for the next session, at which point the bill would ultimately pass. 

So the party threw its weight behind her for the governorship against Greg Abbott that fall. Davis ran a pretty nasty campaign against Abbott, calling the worst names possible in a desperation move. Davis was hailed by all the left wing journals and lost in a landslide to Abbott, losing by more than 20 points and not even managing to get a majority of female votes. It was nearly as bad a defeat as that of John Cornyn over his Democratic opponent for reelection to the Senate where he trounced the Democratic candidate David Alameel by nearly a two to one margin.

The Democratic Party knows at its core that if it is to have a future it has to win states in the South and the West. Texas which has all the characteristics of both is by far the biggest electoral prize for Republicans with 40 electoral votes as of the 2020 election. But the more the national party has gone to the left the more difficult it has been for Democrats to win not only there but any Southern State. In 2018, however, they came closer than they had in decades.

Ted Cruz is another in a seemingly endless line of Texas Republicans that Democrats loathe with a passion. When he won election to the Senate in 2012 the party wanted to make him a target early. And in order to do so they ended up going to their past.

Cruz was not particularly popular with only a 49 percent approval level. It was particularly bad with Latinos at only 29 percent. They chose to nominate Beto O'Rource three term Congressman from El Paso. O'Rourke was opposed to Obama's immigration policy. O'Rourke planned to run a positive campaign, not focused on Trump or Cruz. He spent much of his career trying to win the progressive vote, raising money for small donors. O'Rourke was compared very much to Obama's campaign for President. And though few gave him much of a chance – he trailed by 7 points as late as October 18^th – on election day he received more votes than any Democrat in Texas in the states history, over 4 million. He would lose by just 2.5 percent and give Cruz a hell of a run.

The Democratic Party, as is often the case, took the wrong lessons. Rather than argue that O'Rourke had done so well in this state because he was a white man who had gotten more of the white vote, they chose to argue that O'Rourke was a national candidate and that Texas could be won by going progressive.  Both were proven wrong very quickly: O'Rourke ran for governor against Greg Abbott in 2022 and he lost by more than percent. He got 3.5 million votes, which means in four years half a million voters chose to go back to the GOP.

There have been few signs the Democrats learned any lesson the next two times a Senate seat in Texas became available. In 2020 the party nominated MJ Hegar, who had never even held public office, having lost the run for Congress two years earlier. Cornyn would defeat her by more than a million votes, getting the largest number of votes any Republican candidate for Senate had in history and outperforming Trump by 4 percent in that state. When Cruz came up for reelection in 2024 the party chose to nominate Colin Allred, representative of the 32^nd district and an African American. While the polls would shows a close race, Cruz outperformed polling defeating Allred by nearly a million votes though he underperformed compared to Trump in that state.

Showing the party didn't seem to have learned anything in the leadup to the 2026 Jasmine Crockett, a two term Congresswoman who was one of the most progressive voices in the Black Caucus tried to form a movement to run for Senate while getting other candidates like Allred and Julian Castro to run for governor and lieutenant governor. The GOP, who had been using Crockett as one of their loudest campaign voices on cable news and social media to raise money for them, was salivating for that as a possibility. Fortunately the party's salvation came from another direction.

James Talarico is a former education who while he was in the Texas House, received a Masters of Divinity. In the summer of 2021 Democrats in the Texas House, including Talarico, organized a quorum break in an attempt to stop the passage of legislation they saw as restricting voting right. Mirroring what would happen four years later in the gerrymandering battle he and his fellow Democrats flew to DC. However Talarico broke ranks and was the first to return, acknowledging an infinite quorum break was unsustainable. He was criticized by those who remained behind but the legislation did pass. Four years later he would do so again and a law suit was filed to expel him by Ken Paxton.

One month later Talarico announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for the Senate. While Talarico is progressive on many issues that appeal to the left -legalization of marijuana, term limits, congressional reform – he has gone out of his way to woo both the liberal media and the manosphere, appearing on Joe Rogan's broadcast and Rogan was so impressed by him he actually suggested Talarico run for President.

Crockett by contrast had gone out of her way to isolate so many Texans with her incendiary and nearly offensive remarks about Governor Abbott and had been criticized for apparently using AI in a Super Bowl campaign add, something her team neither confirmed nor denied. Texas Democrats chose the more civil Talarico over the fiery Crockett by nearly six points and while it was clear on primary night she had lost, she refused to concede until the following morning.

Talarico has another advantage. While he managed to win his primary the Republican primary would go to a run-off as John Cornyn would be challenged by a figure who is nearly as much a pariah in Democratic politics as Cruz and Abbott are: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Ken Paxton has been a staunch ally of Trump even before Trump ran for President and is flawed even by the standards of so many Texas politicians. Even before the took office he was indicted on state securities fraud charges in 2015. In October of 2020 several high level assistants accused him of bribery, abuse of office and other crimes and in May of 2023 he was impeached by the Texas House of Representatives by a nearly four to one margin. The allegations included preferential treatment to a donor who bribed him, false statements against his financial interests, misapplied public resources and false statements against whistleblowers. He has constantly been sued for avoiding the use of subpoenas. He was narrowly acquitted.

In 2015 he created a human trafficking unit that in 2020 and 2021 has only managed two convictions, two of which were deferred adjudications. He has been one of the biggest arguers of voter fraud ever since he took office and has pursued it ever since 2017. He has managed very few convictions on that as well. That was always going to make him one of Trump's closes allies even before he spent 22,000 hours looking for voter fraud after the 2020 election and would sue the states of Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

While he was being investigated in February 2023 Paxton accused the House Speaker of being incapacitated. When he became only the third office holder in Texas history to be impeached, Paxton then called in a politically motivated sham and said "the RINOs in the Texas Legislature are now on the same side of Biden." One of the Texas Senators was Paxton's wife Angela and that combined with the increased support from Trump and the increasing split between the Texas Republican Party. Angela didn't vote but she announced that she was divorcing her husband after the 2024 elections.

In retrospect the real surprise is that it took until today for Donald Trump to endorse Paxton for the Republican nomination for the Senate. Considering his long history with the President, as well as the fact he pursued legal action against the Biden administration 105 times and played a vital role in both the redistricting battle as well as issuing arrest warrants for legislators like Talarico and Crockett as far back as 2021 its stunning it took him until a week before the runoff takes place for him to finally endorse him. One suspects it has much to do with the defeat of Bill Cassidy, a staunch Trump critic, in the Louisiana primary this past Saturday.

Republican Senators, by contrast, are very concerned. Susan Collins, facing her own tough reelection battle said: "(Paxton) is an ethically challenged individual." Majority leader John Thune could only say: "It's his decision" after months of lobbying Trump to back Cornyn. Senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi said nothing.

All polls were already showing a close race between Talarico and either of his Republican challengers.  The most recent series of polls show Talarico with a combined 4.3 percent margin over Paxton, where as he was only leading Cornyn by 3 percent. In addition Talarico will go into the general election with multiple advantages over his Republican opponent even if Cornyn manages to win next week.

Talarico has already had 3 months to prepare for the general and build his war chest. By contrast just to get to the runoff between Paxton and Cornyn it cost $128 million, most of it spent by Cornyn. It was estimated that it might cost as much $200 million even before the runoff took place. In either the case the Republican Party  has already spent a fortune just to get to one candidate – and the consequences for other Senate races where Democrats are already doing closer then they should be, such as Iowa and Florida, may put a party already facing an uphill battle in a deep hole going into the fall campaign – even before primary season is truly over. Considering that the President's approval ratings is already only at 35 percent with his support continuing the soften among his most die hard base that can only improve the chances of Democrats like Talarico.

There's also the fact that Talarico and whoever his challenger is will both be white men. And particularly in a state like Texas, where members of the LatinX demographic were already hugely moving to the Democrats even before one considers what a rabid anti-immigration advocate Paxton has been in his tenure as Attorney general, that gives Talarico an edge that Beto O'Rourke had but Colin Allred and MJ Hegar did not.  Considering how problematic so many of his policies have been, particularly in regards to women and the LGBTQ+ community Paxton will have a harder time winning them then Cornyn would.  And considering that Paxton's wife is divorcing him under the charge of adultery, one wonders just how much support he can get from evangelicals.

It's not inconceivable Cornyn could pull out and upset but whatever candidate gets the nomination will have to deal with the increasing fissure in the Texas Republican Party which this runoff has already laid bare. Whoever the winner is will have to spend a fair amount of time rebuilding the coalition of that party, time that Talarico, who has both the state and national party behind him already, doesn't need to spend. And considering how much time and energy the DNC has already spent trying to win Senate seats in Texas before it will no doubt be a lot easier if Paxton wins the nomination, considering they loathe him with an even greater furor then they do Cruz.

It's not yet clear if the Democrats have a chance to make inroads in the South during this cycle. Jon Ossoff is facing his first reelection campaign and he's already the heavy favorite even before the primary tonight. With Thom Tillis choosing not to run for reelection Roy Cooper, the popular former governor of North Carolina is the heavy favorite to flip the Senate in what increasingly becoming a swing state. (I'll be dealing with him later on.)

The prospects in the rest of the south remain grim as best. I remain unconvinced that Annie Andrews has anymore of a chance of defeating Lindsay Graham than Jamie Harrison did six years earlier. Mitch McConnell may be retiring but I have little faith the Democrats will have any more luck replacing him then they did in the last two cycles. And no matter how flawed the Republican challenger in Louisiana is (the runoff is not scheduled for several more weeks) I am heavily skeptical Jamie Davis has any chance of beating them.

What Talarico has in common with the incumbents above is what he doesn't have in common with challengers below: it's always been an easier for a white Democrat to win election to the Senate in the South then a woman or a person of color has been. The Democratic Party knew that for the last half of the 20^th century and had considerable success; they forgot it in the aftermath of Obama's win and it has been a disaster. If Talarico does manage to flip a Republican seat in Texas – still a big 'if' – it will be because of a lesson in identity politics they've cast aside during the 21^st century to a ridiculous detriment to the party nationally. It has been clear to me that so many progressives would rather run a minority candidate and lose by a huge margin in states they could win rather than win narrowly with a more centrist white male Democrat, who need I remind them, is still a Democrat.

I am  a pragmatist and I would like there to be a way to be the party that has  minorities among its permanent  members without being the permanent minority party. I'm increasingly beginning to think, that for far too many who call themselves Democrats, they are fine if we're the latter as long as we are exclusively the former. That the GOP has made it incredibly clear they're fine with this as long as they can be the majority makes it clear they understand politics in a way to many of the most progressive members don't.

Talarico has a much better chance of winning the Senate in Texas then Jasmine Crockett ever did.  Both the history of the party and the candidates bear that argument out.  Maybe there are still some die-hards who would rather have lost with Crockett then won with Talarico. If those same people were fine with a Republican winning, then honestly the Democrats don't need them.  I think the Senate needs more people like Talarico then they do Crockett's or Paxton's. And if that makes me a DINO in the eyes of some, well, I'm still a Democrat. Were they?

 

 

There Will Be Many Articles Mourning The End of The Late Show. This Isn't One of Them.For A Decade Stephen Colbert Fought The War on Trump. It's Time for Hollywood to Admit They Lost

 

I know that as an admirer of Hollywood and one who mourns the changes in the industry at some level I should be upset that this week The Late Show is coming to an end. I should be upset that a 33 year old institution is closing and nothing will replace.

I said I should. I'm not.

I can't bring myself to feel sympathy for the fact that a white male multimillionaire is losing his job. What I am is angry that it is because of this white male millionaire – and as we saw with no irony basically late night is made up of white male millionaires  -  an institution that has existed practically since the medium came into existence may very well go extinct by the end of the decade.  I'm angry that late night is the clearest casualty in Hollywood's ten years of unchecked warfare against Donald Trump and that despite all that, Hollywood seems to keep coming to the conclusion that none of this is their fault.  They blame the corporate interests, the GOP, the general public, really anyone but themselves.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that Stephen Colbert, who had been working on Comedy Central as far back as sketch shows like Exit 57 and Strangers With Candy, came to prominence on The Colbert Report, which was founded in the midst of America's utter fatigue with all things connected to the War on Terror. Colbert understood the flaws of the institutions and made it very clear in his first full year on the air. In 2006 he delivered a powerful satiric speech as the White House Correspondent's Dinner where he tore apart not just the Bush administration  but the media's complacency, both conservative and liberal. Then to demonstrate that he was equal opportunity that year at the Emmys he presented the award for Best Reality Competition and the first words out of his mouth were "Good evening, godless sodomites." I laughed hysterically because Colbert had managed to make it clear by that point on his Report that both sides and all institutions were fair game.

Now twenty years later in large part of Colbert's own comedy a thirty-three year old institution is about to come to an end. There is no sign Colbert understands his role in it. At the end of last year asked if he'd learned any lessons he said, with no sense of irony, "I learned never to trust billionaires." Considering Colbert is a multi-millionaire himself that is the exact comment that on the Report he would have mocked proof that he was 'kneeling before his God, Babylon'.

I'm increasingly beginning to realize that for the last decade Hollywood has been engage in a very public War on Trump that bears all the trademarks of America's involvement in the Gulf War that was raging when Colbert became a name.  They believed that America was under attack, engaged with an enemy under vague pretenses and bad intelligence, and have spent the last decade engaged in what is becoming a quagmire with no exit strategy in sight. And yet the attitude of the Colbert's of the world is not to acknowledge defeat, call those who argue with them giving aide and comfort to the enemy and continue to argue that victory is just around the corner. The damage they've done to is to their own industry and late night is just the most obvious casualty.

 

The day of the attack, as Michael Moore has made clear, was November 9^th 2016 when Donald Trump won the President in a huge upset. Hollywood took this as an assault on their way of life.

One needs to state upfront that despite the way cable news and the far right considers Hollywood an arm of the Democratic party at best it has been a wartime arrangement with Hollywood getting more out of it then the Democrats ever have. This has always been true and remained so all the way through 2016: while everyone in Hollywood and late night hated Trump with a passion that never translated as love for Hilary. Colbert himself acknowledged it with a dance number on the day she was nominated where the chorus was "You Have No Choice, You Have No Choice."  That Hilary Clinton would be the first female President should have excited Hollywood as much as the left but it basically left that cold: they no more wanted Hilary to be the first female president then they really wanted Obama to be the first black President. They judged both parties with contempt, and this was true even as they made it very clear how dangerous Trump would be if elected President.  

But it's worth noting they basically engaged in denial during that campaign saying that no serious person would vote for Trump. What they meant was, we don't take him seriously, therefore any electoral triumphs he has among the voters don't count." It's the same electoral philosophy I'm beginning to define as LDR 'liberals deny Republicans.

Hollywood, I should mention, was more upset then anybody that Trump one, I'd argued that they were more upset that Hilary. And somehow by the time Trump was sworn in they seem to have written their own Patriot Act'. In their interpretation America was now at war with an illegitimate President. That the Democrats had conceded the election and had made it clear they would work him was meaningless and in fact further reason to hold them unindicted co-conspirators. It was up to Hollywood, and Hollywood alone, to devote all of its public face to attacking the President. This was to be priority one, ahead of entertaining the masses.

Hollywood, it needs to be pointed out, has never been a branch of the government. It can't make laws, enforce them or carry them out.  Throughout the 21^st century, particularly during Trump's tenure, the biggest names in the industry began to create the narrative that Hollywood and the arts had always been there to speak 'truth to power'. This narrative was coming only from those within the industry and those who had similar alignments with it, academics and those from other countries – which meant it was as an impartial a decision as Dick Cheney when he led the search committee for W's Vice President. No one could point to any time in history where Hollywood, and Hollywood alone, had been responsible for a law being passed or a Supreme Court decision being made. Hollywood might have played some roles assisting to be sure but the real work was done by people the arena themselves.

But Hollywood went along with its publicly declared 'War on Trump'. The fighters in this war were all actors, writers and directors, who were rich and overwhelmingly part of the one percent – the very people that the right had spent the last twenty years framing as out of touch liberals that represented all Democrats.  Hollywood dealt with this problem the same way that the W. administration framed its argument that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction: they pretended it was irrelevant to the battle at hand and assumed that when those who had spent years watching Fox News learned the truth they would be greeted as liberators.

And to be clear they had no intention of winning the hearts and minds of the people who had voted for the President. Indeed I imagine many of them wished that there was a way to shock and awe Middle America into submission. But Hollywood doesn't believe violence is the answer to any problem even though are enemies don't share that opinion.

The strategy was to win hearts and minds. By which I mean the hearts and minds of people who already agreed with them.  Because Hilary had won the popular vote but lost the electoral college Hollywood made the assumption a majority of Americans believed in the left-wing dream and it was only a minority of privileged people that had blocked it. Ignoring the intelligence that told them that because Clinton had won California by 4 million votes – in an election where Hilary had won the popular vote by 3 million – they proceeded under the concept that they just had to convince the rest of America.

The only condition for victory in this war was as intangible as any goal in the Gulf War and beyond. It was to piss off Trump. In this battle an angry tweet directed against a host of late night was considered a triumph as big as taking out Osama Bin Laden. Colbert and his colleagues delighted in reading his angry remarks to their gleeful audiences and calling it comedy. That Trump was still President before and after he made those tweets was irrelevant, that he made similar tweets against anyone who he thought crossed him – which was an endless list – was also irrelevant, as was how this was supposed to convince those people who thought every word out of his mouth was gospel that they were being lied to was not even taken into consideration. Least of all was whether any of this was even funny to anyone other then the people in Hollywood.

Late night was key to this war as every single late night show engaged in nightly and weekly battles attacking the evils of Trump and Republicans. And it wasn't long before the casualty list began to show who was losing – Late Night.

Within two years half a dozen late night shows from Wyatt Cenac to Jordan Klepper to Larry Wilmore were cancelled.  Ratings began a slow but steady drop for every late night show on prime time and The Daily Show would suffer too. Conan O'Brien would leave the field in 2019. All of this was before the pandemic.

I should mention that Hollywood still felt no allegiance to the Democratic Party, as late as the fall of 2019 Seth Meyers and Desus and Mero openly thought Trump would win reelection is easily because there were no heavyweights running against him. Joe Biden had declared his candidacy by that point.  Even as America was entering a once in a generation crisis they seemed to view it with the same detachment as Trump did. Lockdown and being forced to quarantine was for them an inconvenience that was stopping them from entertaining the masses. That hundreds of thousand of people were dying and there was no apparent cure was at most, something they thought they could use as a cudgel against the incumbent President.

By 2021 Hollywood may have considered that they were the winners against the President. The problem was that for the industry in general and late night in particular the casualties had been so immense that Pyrrhus himself would say: "You guys got your ass kicked."

Hollywood might have achieved regime change as a result of their work but rather then declare victory and move on they seem to have decided that there was more work to do and engaged in a surge.  They spent the next three years attacking Trump and the GOP still in lockstep behind them with the full force of their wrath. Late night continued to suffer as the budgets became such that most shows had to go from five nights to four nights. Other shows were cancelled outright.

The canary in the coal mine late night was becoming should have been when James Corden retired in 2023. For more than twenty five years CBS had a late night host there from Tom Snyder to Craig Ferguson to Corden. Now they replaced it not with a traditional late night show but the more cost effective After Midnight.

There had been other signs as well: NBC had cancelled its 1:30 am slot which had been filled by Bob Costas and Carson Daly after Lilly Singh proved disastrous. Full Frontal with Samantha Bee was cancelled in 2022. The Daily Show spent nearly a year with no official host before they managed to get Jon Stewart to come back part time. All of this happened even before the 2024 election.

In the aftermath of Trump's reelection Hollywood yet again should have considered if they were having the desired effect. Instead they seem to have taken the argument that the ends justified the means and choice to abandon even the pretense of civility.  Every late night show (with the exception of Jimmy Fallon) thought it was their duty to attack Trump with the most vehement angry and ghastly terms. Anyone who even suggested that they were isolating half the country – as Jay Leno, who had been the number one name in late night for 20 years did in the aftermath of the cancellation of Colbert – was considered giving aid and comfort to the enemy. That by this point the enemy was a majority of the electorate was not part of the discussion: they were denying election results the same way their greatest adversary was but the Democrats hadn't.

By this point Hollywood had begun to attack its own house and this was true with late night especially. They decided that the businesses that had given them their livelihood were now untrustworthy because they were choosing profits over telling the truth. That the industry was struggling on multiple fronts and that one of them might well have been the War on Trump for the past decade was irrelevant to the talent. That they themselves were taking paychecks from their corporate companies even as they increasingly attacked them as being lapdogs to the President is just as out of touch as every time the President says that his failures are fake news. The difference is, that he's still President despite everything the Colbert's of the world  have thrown at him. Ten years in, they still deny his legitimacy in a way that makes them look as oblivious as the people on the right they still excoriate on a daily basis. If you were to tell them that despite everything the Republicans were still in charge, I guarantee you Colbert would say: "So?!"

 

Hollywood has fought the War on Trump for nearly a decade. By any metric you want to use it has been nearly as big a disaster for the industry as the War on Iraq was for everyone involved. If anything it has failed because they haven't even achieved their apparent goal which was to remove Trump as a political threat. He managed to win reelection in 2024 by a bigger margin of any of his three campaigns, the Republican party has essentially been filled with loyalists to him and as of this election they control both houses of Congress and a supermajority on the Supreme Court. How Hollywood was supposed to stop any of this from happening with speeches on red carpets or posts on social media or jokes on late night is something that you'd think a group of people who claim to be as smart as they are should have thought about before they engaged in this war. Its only slightly forgivable because their entertainers and not a branch of government.  But its because they've never been a branch of government that it was always going to end in failure.

The reason I don't mourn Colbert's departure is he'll be fine. He's a rich white guy in Hollywood: the sky's always been the limit for him. I mourn the fact that during the last decade millions of Americans needed escapism more than ever. This is a role that throughout the 20^th century when it comes up Hollywood has always been able to answer the call. This time when it did America got voicemail that told them: "We have no time to entertain you. We're too busy protecting you from yourselves." That no one but Hollywood elected themselves to this role is an irony that the Stephen Colbert of the Report would have picked up on. The Colbert who's leaving Late Night on Thursday no doubt thinks that there was a coup d'etat even though he was the only one who declared himself the authority.

I know that Jon Stewart is scheduled to be one of Colbert's last guests. I almost wonder if he will walk up to him and say with no irony as he surveys the wreckage of late night. "You did a heckuva job, Stevie."  Twenty years ago, they'd have said it ironically. If they said it today they'd mean it and be just as oblivious as the man who was once their greatest adversary said in that same context.