Watching the reaction to Colbert’s cancellation, I can’t help thinking that Donald Trump has given everyone reason or permission to speak more coarsely, to throw decorum out the window, to stoop to his low level of discourse and verbiage.

Go f*** yourself! is the new mantra for the time being, voiced by Colbert, along with Jon Stewart and a choir and the whole audience at The Daily Show. It’s directed at Trump in hopes of… what? That it will somehow have an effect on him, that he will suddenly be rattled? Trump is the master of guttural, harsh, unoriginal language. He lives for evoking reactions to his own idiocy.

I can’t see how this is anything but cathartic to us who despise him, yet only amusing to him.

Trump has always had boundary issues. It’s followed him to the presidency, the latest example being the need to dictate a return to the original team names for the D.C. NFL team and the Cleveland baseball team.

Give it a rest, Donald. Stop being such a predictable idiot when it comes to sticking your nose where it doesn’t belong. Or is this part of the Project 2025 mantra as well—just trample on respect and sensitivity and bludgeon your way through history?

What is the purpose of battle reenactments– beyond the pageantry and spectacle and chance for civilians to get their fix of playing soldier? Is it so we remember the costs and try not to do it again?

How’s that been working out for us, as a nation and a species?

Maybe Colbert will just start tearing people new ones. What has he got to lose? I didn’t think he’d be the first one to get the ax, though conditions were ripe for him to be made an example, all the ingredients were in place.

Trump might be elated at the moment, but he has to realize that Colbert and Kimmel and the rest aren’t likely to go away. They’re just gonna find more receptive landing spots, new perches, from which they will show no mercy. The media landscape is so diverse that Trump will find himself playing a constant game of whack-a-mole with the army of detractors arrayed against him. The only tool in his stupid arsenal, besides litigation, would be to threaten prison time in Alligator Alcatraz, or just pull the plug on the internet. I suppose that’s not beyond the realm of possibility.

How did we get here? How did we get to a place where previously normal governance—even with all its vaguaries and insufficiencies and share of shady, incompetent characters—has given way to nothing more than a daily, bad soap opera featuring an unhealthy, empty-souled, power-hungry megalomaniac who doesn’t give a shit about America, who lies like most of us breathe, who’s always trying to keep his head above water and fighting fires of his own setting?

To keep paying lip service to this 79-year-old child is a grave disservice to children everywhere. Even the MAGA faithful deserve better.

I’m gonna go with the audience’s visceral groan when Stephen Colbert broke the news that The Late Show is finished in May of next year. No replacement host. The show will just not exist anymore.

If anyone is left who thinks this is just a business decision by a network trying to keep its head above water, then you’ve been sitting in the sun for too long.

And The Daily Show, too? Apparently, the new Dark Ages are upon us. I wonder if Colbert will even make it to May 2026. If he does, I hope he goes out with a bang. And Stewart, too.

Hopefully, there will be a network somewhere who will dare welcome them to the fold, if they still have the fire in ’em.