Disagreeing With Readers About Colbert, Trump, and Obama

Plus, a question for you!

Last week I broke from my habit of penning a weekly Q&A column to share my thoughts on the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s Late Show. That piece, along with yesterday’s Next Move editorial on Trump musing about political arrests, generated significant debate—with some more pro-MAGA commenters joining the fray.

To them I say, welcome! I read all of your comments, and the diversity of thought in the reply threads makes The Next Move stronger. So thank you for your contribution, and let’s dive into it:

Is there an innocent explanation for Stephen Colbert’s cancellation?

Let’s start with your comments on Stephen Colbert. I encourage you to read my full column, but I’ll summarize here.

I suggested that Stephen Colbert’s cancellation was yet another stopover on the way to a chilling of free speech in America. Recall that Colbert’s employers recently reached a $16 million settlement with President Trump over a lawsuit that the network itself deemed baseless. Colbert (accurately) labeled the settlement a bribe and his Late Show gets the axe just days later.

The crux of my argument was that this sort of attack on independent media is harder to spot because the president didn’t force Paramount and CBS to drop Colbert, but Trump’s actions made it so that dropping him was certainly the path of least resistance.

Colbert may land on his feet with some other platform, but it’s clear to an increasing number of companies across different industries that the cost of doing business in America is personally appeasing the leader.

Several of you have brought up the claim that there were legitimate reasons for canceling The Late Show, and that Colbert’s program was unprofitable, poorly rated, or both.

Ronald Weick writes:

Colbert is being canceled for the only reason that matters to network executives: his ratings are low. Colbert is a talentless shill for the Democrat Party. His relentless assaults on President Trump insult more than half the nation.

Over in The Next Move’s subscriber chat, another reader, SJA, highlighted some arguments around The Late Show’s profitability, for example, this, from the Manhattan Institute’s Jessica Reidl:

The Colbert cancellation is simple. His show cost $100 million/yr to bring in an audience 1/6 the size of Johnny Carson's (adjusted for population growth). Viewers watching in bored want to unwind & chuckle after a long day, not get wound up by stale & predictable partisan rants.

To Ronald’s point—this is flatly untrue. Colbert’s show topped ratings in its time slot once again just days before CBS announced they were dropping both host and program.

As to the argument on profitability—this one is a bit more complicated, but it’s telling that the person making this case can’t help but comment on Colbert’s politics. Whether you agree or disagree with everything Colbert says—and I certainly don’t always agree with him—he is not the most partisan actor in the current media landscape nor the most left-wing. Yet it’s his show that’s being dropped, and on a suspicious timeline. So which is problematic: Colbert’s business model or his politics? The critics can’t seem to decide.

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Why is it wrong for Trump to openly fantasize about arresting Obama when Trump himself was arrested?

Yesterday, I wrote about the president’s AI-generated fantasies about throwing his opponents in prison. It’s all fun and games until Trump has Obama arrested.

Predictably, several seemingly Trump-friendly commenters pointed out that the 45th and 47th president was himself arrested—in their eyes, the victim of political persecution.

Ronald B. Howard lays out this argument, adding that President Obama and his associates are legitimate targets for arrest because they supposedly tried to delegitimize Trump’s 2016 victory. Ronald quips:

So it’s okay to arrest and try Trump for bullshit made up charges but when there is an actual criminal conspiracy to fraudulently claim an election as illegitimate due to foreign interference and subvert to electoral will of the American people by lefties like Obama, then it’s authoritarian to arrest and try him for this actual crime. Okay got it. Right is bad and Left is good, no matter what.

I could dismiss this question with a very brief response, but I’ll say a little more. The most relevant point is that Trump is credibly accused of committing crimes and Obama is not.

You can try to wave away the criminal charges against Trump as “made up” but they are not. Nor was the evidence of Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Investigating the Russian influence operation is not a crime. It is the government doing the bare minimum to uphold its responsibility to protect the public.

On the question of Russian interference: The case was never that Trump wasn’t the duly elected leader of the United States, but that a hostile foreign power had inserted itself into the democratic process. Putin did not seek to disrupt the US election out of any personal affinity for Trump. He did it for disruption’s sake, because the Russian dictator is a merchant of chaos. When the American political system is exposed to bad actors from overseas, everyone loses, regardless of their politics. And, after all, it was a Kremlin ally—the Islamic Republic of Iran—which ultimately tried to assassinate Donald Trump.

In a healthier democracy, Russian election interference would have been concerning to Americans of all political stripes, who would recognize this as a national security threat. Any responsible administration, Republican or Democratic, would have treated it as such. And, initially, the investigation into Russian interference carried over into Trump’s first term. But because we live in the stupidest possible timeline, this somehow became a partisan question.

So, no, the point of the investigating Russian meddling in 2016 was not to subvert the will of the American people after they chose Trump as their president. It was to reassert and defend American sovereignty. If you want to look at this from a political angle, the Democrats and their supporters actually wanted Trump to run in 2016, 2020, and even 2024—because each time (twice mistakenly) they thought of him as their most convenient foil, so obviously bad that people would have to vote against him. Sure, it would help if Trump were compromised, but they did not seriously try to dispute his candidacy. There was a strong argument to disqualify Trump for inciting an insurrection and the Democrats never pushed it in earnest.

The administration has no grounds to arrest President Obama or any of his advisors on this issue, no matter what Tulsi Gabbard says. If you want to talk about a president who could be held criminally responsible for undermining the will of the people, start with the one who explicitly asked to cook up some votes in Georgia. That’s the basis for a legitimate case against a criminal who was either too stupid or too cocky (or both) to hide what he was doing.

A question for you, the readers!

After all of this, I have some questions for you—the readers—especially those more sympathetic to the MAGA narrative.

Do you earnestly believe that what Trump is doing when it comes to investigating Comey and Brennan is not partisan? That the Obama arrest video isn’t inappropriate? Or do you believe that the threat from the far-left is so great that the ends justify the means?

I don’t intend this as a trap. I genuinely would like to understand the gap in our respective reads on the situation.

If you don’t think there’s any personal politics at play here, then we might just inhabit completely different universes. But if you’re concerned about the far-left (and as someone who grew up under Soviet communism, let me say that I’m no fan) and think this is a bold leader pushing the limits to do what has to be done—then we can talk—and our conversation might even illuminate some issues in American democracy that traditional media misses.

So I invite you to respond—I’ll be eagerly awaiting your comments.

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