Trump Officially Killed the Beloved Late-Night Rivalry

Late-night show hosts being in bitter competition with each other is a time-honored tradition in this country. Remember Letterman and Leno? That level of petty hatred was an important part of late-night DNA. Divas fighting it out for an audience during the same time slot, on different networks. But, in 2025, we can’t have anything nice, not when President Donald Trump is running around the country like a bull in a china shop, smashing everything cherished in service of his own endless power grab. 

Instead, late-night television has become a political battleground. The president routinely targets Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert and Seth Meyers on his ad-riddled social media platform, Truth Social. Some of his threats have resulted in real-world censorship, including Kimmel’s mafia-style removal from television for a week after the Federal Communications Commission threatened Disney. 

And while there’s been camaraderie between this newest era of hosts for a long time, they’re now having to stand together as a fortified front in the face of an authoritarian overlord. There’s no room for ratings competitions because that would seem crass when the entire institution of late-night television is under attack. How can you throw a fellow talk show host under the bus when they’re already under the full weight of Trump’s swollen ankles? 

Instead, we’re being treated to a pretty ridiculous level of solidarity. Kimmel is going on Colbert. Colbert is going on Kimmel. Even before this, when it was Colbert first finding out his show was canceled, we got the entire gamut of hosts making special guest appearances on the show: Jon Stewart, John Oliver, Fallon, Kimmel, Meyers.

It can be rousing to see this now: Comedians taking a stand against facism, using their platform to speak truth to power (except, of course, Fallon), trying to empower or at least inspire a country beaten down by exceptional viciousness wrapped in unpredictable idiocy. But it’s also annoying that our late-night talk show hosts — men who historically have had to make admissions about their drinking problems, their adultery problems, their racist joke problems — now have to be our leading gentlemen in the total absence of decorum in the White House. 

It makes me yearn for the version of Kimmel that Kimmel played on Hacks. A total queen who’d bite another host’s head off over a parking spot. Not a guy who has to do a U.N.-style summit for the nation’s jokesters. 

Let’s get our country back, so our late-night show hosts can focus their time on behaving poorly and feuding.