Donald Trump blasted “total loser” Stephen Colbert after the Late Show host said he would never have the “boring” Trump on his NBC show.
Trump published a Truth Social post aimed at Colbert — who has been steadily losing his viewership for years — after Colbert dismissed Trump’s TV appeal in an interview with PBS NewsHour on Monday.
The former president wondered why taxpayer-funded PBS would be wasting its time interviewing Colbert.
“I briefly watched an interview of Stephen Colbert on highly government subsidized PBS, and found it fascinating for only one reason — Why would they be wasting time and the public’s money on this complete and total loser?” Trump asked in his post on Tuesday.
“He is not funny, which he gets paid far too much to be, he is not wise, he is VERY BORING, and his show is dying from a complete lack of viewers —Gutfeld, on cable, is killing him! CBS should terminate his contract and pick almost anyone, right off the street, who would do better, and for FAR LESS MONEY — Or I could recommend someone, much more talented, and smarter, who would do it for FREE! The good news for Stephen is that the two DOPES on NBC & ABC are not much better than him!”
In the PBS interview, Colbert was asked if he would have Trump on his The Late Show again in the future, but the TV host was not interested.
“I’ve had him before, and he was kind of boring, so no,” Colbert exclaimed alluding to his 2015 interview with Trump. “I don’t like to have people on the show who I don’t think are gonna be honest agents of their own ideas. Politicians always represent an idea, so if I think a politician is disingenuous– and not to point out Mr. Trump specifically because there are many politicians I wouldn’t want to talk to that I think do not honestly represent what they actually believe, but are rather just playing to a crowd. So that’s just no fun.”
From the guests he’s had in the past, it appears that Colbert thinks all politicians who are not Democrats are “boring” people who he does not want to interview. So, Trump appears to be in good company on that level.
Trump is correct about Colbert’s show “dying” on the vine. Colbert’s The Late Show has been falling in viewership in a very steady, downward trend that seems unlikely to change.
As The Hollywood Reporter recently noted, in 2019 Colbert’s show finished first with a total viewership of 3.81 million. But last year, that number had fallen to 2.6 million viewers, a decline of 32 percent over the 2018-2019 season.
Colbert is hardly alone. All the other late-night shows, including The Tonight Show and Jimmy Kimmel Live, have seen a similar collapse of viewership. Indeed, the other shows can’t even crack the two million mark.
Meanwhile, Trump’s appearance on Fox News’s Gutfeld! racked up almost five million viewers, giving host Greg Gutfeld his highest-rated show ever.
So, it would seem that the numbers tell us very clearly who viewers think is “boring” and who they find worthy of tuning in to see.
The steady and disastrous decline in viewers has spawned many navel-gazing media watchers to wonder if late-night TV is a dying genre.
Follow Warner Todd Huston on Facebook at: facebook.com/Warner.Todd.Huston, or Truth Social @WarnerToddHuston
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