Jimmy Kimmel Inherits Late-Night's Anti-Trump Mantle After Stephen Colbert's CBS Exit

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show cancellation opened a fight over who inherits the role of Donald Trump’s sharpest TV foil, and the audience seems to have decided.

Jimmy Kimmel, whose own show was briefly pulled by ABC in 2025 under pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, told Vulture in June he felt shaken by Colbert’s exit from CBS. The network has said The Late Show was losing significant money, but Kimmel suggested something more targeted is happening to politically pointed late night.

“I feel a little bit defeated by it,” Kimmel told the outlet after Colbert’s finale aired. “In a lot of ways, I feel like I’m looking at my own future.”

Kimmel argued that late night is not disappearing because audiences stopped caring. He pointed to online clips, where monologues and interviews often travel far beyond their linear broadcasts.

“There are far more people watching late-night TV than there ever were, if you look at the number of views me and my colleagues get online every day and add in our linear-television ratings,” he explained.

“We’re not just dying of natural causes. We’re being poisoned,” Kimmel said.

“When a major late-night host exits, the ‘opposition’ role doesn't disappear, it gets redistributed, and audiences decide the winner faster than the networks do,” said Amore Philip, founder of Apples and Oranges Public Relations.

“Behind the scenes, bookers and writers race to claim the cultural lane: more political cold opens, sharper monologue targeting, and guest lineups that signal ‘we're the new home for this conversation’,” she explained.

“What viewers notice first isn't a schedule change, it's tone,” she added. “They reattach to whoever feels most fearless and most quotable in the weeks after the exit, because in a fragmented media environment the ‘foil’ is now defined by clips and virality, not by timeslot.”

Kimmel has already lived through the pressure he is warning about. In September 2025, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! after he joked about the reaction to conservative podcaster Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting. The show returned the following week after backlash.

Kimmel later addressed the fight while accepting this year’s Peabody Award in Entertainment.

“Making jokes about the president in America shouldn’t win you a prize,” he said. “We have the right, guaranteed by the Constitution, to criticize and satirize our leaders.”

Philip said the late-night crown now belongs less to a timeslot than to a voice.

“The host who most clearly owns a point of view, and whose moments travel on social, inherits the mantle,” she said, “even if they never held the 11:30 chair.”