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As you may have already learned, last week the Columbia Broadcasting System, CBS, announced that it was ending The Late Show with Stephen Colbert effective May 2026. The Late Show began in 1993 with David Letterman hosting the series, who handed the program off to Colbert in 2015. CBS, a division of Paramount, in its announcement of the show’s termination took pains to make clear that the decision was “purely a financial decision.”

CBS’s explanation has been met with considerable skepticism, with many believing that the network, under direction from its parent corporation, made the move to placate President Donald Trump due to Colbert’s continual and savage criticism of the president. The truth is that without someone bringing forward documented evidence, we can’t know if that was the reason or if the shifting nature of late-night television and the aging of the audience out of the demographic desired by advertisers played the deciding factor in ending the long-running program.

What I think we can say is that Paramount burned all of its benefit of the doubt over this decision in a 16-million-dollar bonfire.

Trump, a petty and vindictive man, launched a lawsuit seeking damages against CBS for the manner in which it edited an interview with Kamala Harris in last year’s presidential contest. It was a lawsuit without any legal merit at all. There was simply no theory of the case by which one could come to any reasonable conclusion that the interview had harmed Trump in any fashion. He still won the election; it was not his words that had been edited. All he had in his claim was that he suffered “emotional distress.” The big man behind the “fuck your feelings” crowd had had his feelings hurt.

But Paramount, seeking federal approval of its sale to Skydance, understood the Mafia-like mentality of this man and settled for 16 million dollars. In effect, not a bribe but a shakedown: “That’s a nice sale you got there, Redstone. It’d be a shame if anything happened to it.”

Everyone in the industry understood precisely what had transpired when Paramount/CBS agreed to give 16 million dollars to Trump for his hurt little feelings. So, naturally, everyone views this decision with an ocean’s worth of salt. Trump crowing on social media over the cancellation only elevates the idea that this was a move to further placate the man. After all, if the 16 million is a shakedown, Paramount has no way to enforce it. Trump can take the money for his Presidential Library—yeah right—and still have his administration kill the deal in “the public interest.” Paramount has to keep him happy until it is done, and if that was the real motivation for the move, then it will not be the last.