Was Late Night’s Collective Stand Against Trump Too Late?
Last week, Jimmy Fallon joined the late night-wide assembly against Donald Trump’s increasingly hostile but very predictable attack on the media. There’s been brutal cuts to public media, threatening to end long and treasured institutions like NPR and PBS and their many local subsidiaries. The pattern of lashing out at reporters and news outlets that aren’t providing Trump favorable coverage has been consistent since his first term, if not more volatile recently. In fact, just last week, Trump’s attack on late night reached a crescendo with the news of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert’s cancellation and Trump threatening both Jimmy Kimmel and Jimmy Fallon that they’ll be “next.”It seemed like the Skydance-Paramount merger and Trump’s antics were the breaking point for the entire late-night institution. It took Fallon being singled out by name for him to take a real stance in the form of a song, but it finally happened. It took Colbert’s cancellation for Stewart to get back to his finest form, for all of late night’s current hosts to assemble in support of the show and for late-night hosts of the past to issue statements of support for Colbert and against corporate overreach. In one of Colbert’s post-cancellation monologues, the Late Show host promised that for the last 10 months of the show, “the gloves are coming off.” A unified front from the most notable voices of late-night television against the tyranny working to make the United States (and television) remarkably worse was great to see. But it was hard to really delight in it when it felt years too late. Reacting to Trump at this stage, when he’s gone beyond “vague threat” to “actively dismantling society in ways that will take a century to repair if we start today” feels weak. Most of my ire is reserved for Fallon, who has gone out of his way to depoliticize himself post-Trump hair ruffle. But everyone is guilty of waiting too long to bring their A-game. It shouldn’t take Trump making personal attacks against your friends and proving he can sue the free press to bend to its will for late-night hosts to take on the mantle of “gloves off” comedy. That was their job the entire time. Perhaps it’s giving late night too much cultural credit, but it’s a medium that’s been shaping public discussion for decades. Could Meyers, Colbert, Fallon, Kimmel and Stewart have stopped anything that’s happening right now? Probably not. But they almost certainly could have taken more risks with their comedy before it got this far.
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