Samantha Bee calls Trump a "thin-skinned idiot," concedes Late Show was "hemorrhaging money"

"When the President of the United States has to give his sign off on a corporate merger, the thing you can’t do is make jokes about him," Bee said.

By Emma Keates | July 30, 2025 | 9:51am

Screenshot: The Late Show With Stephen Colbert/YouTube

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Ever since Stephen Colbert’s Late Show was canceled earlier this month, the industry has been locked in an existential debate about whether CBS’ decision had to do with politics or was purely financial, as the network itself claimed. To Colbert’s former Daily Show colleague Samantha Bee, it’s a little from column A, a little from column B.

“I think both things are just true and real,” Bee said in a recent appearance on the Breaking Bread With Tom Papa podcast when asked to weigh in on either side (via TheWrap). “Like it definitely was hemorrhaging money,” she continued. “You know, these legacy shows, they are hemorrhaging their money with no real end to that.” In her view, this state of affairs is due in part to the fact that “people are literally on their phones all the time… so they actually don’t necessarily need a recap of the day’s events.” She’s not wrong; we recently saw the impact of this with the cancellation of E! News‘ broadcast show. The brand will now only produce content for social media.

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At the same time, however, Bee continued that it’s “also true that when the President of the United States has to give his sign off on a corporate merger, the thing you can’t do is make jokes about him. He’s a thin skinned idiot, and we know he’s like a pernicious cancer, and he cares about that stuff.”

Bee herself has experience with pressure from the business side of things from her time hosting Full Frontal on TBS, which underwent multiple mergers during the show’s run. “Nobody wants to cause trouble,” she said. “You can’t, business trumps everything. It doesn’t matter what your values are. It doesn’t matter how important you think legacy media is, none of that fucking matters. You’re talking about people, hundreds of millionaires and billionaires, literally making their business transactions. Everything you think that is important is absolutely impotent, not even a consideration.”

Bee does give Paramount Global execs some credit, saying that the conversations about The Late Show‘s financial issues (before its settlement with Trump, at least) were likely “agonizing.” The execs probably had “many agonizing conversations about what they were going to do to turn the ship around, what they were going to do to make the show profitable again. And that’s true probably of all the shows, you know, how do we make this profitable?” she explained. “But the extra element of it is that it’s so much easier for them to cut it loose with this merger coming down the pike. It makes the decision such a no brainer. And probably the most agonizing decisions they were having were about, ‘How do we float this? Like, how do we not get a lot of blowback?’ Sure they knew it was happening a long time ago, right? And the considerations were, like, ‘How can we position it so that the story can be not as bad as it could be?”

Whether or not they accomplished that last one is certainly up for debate. Bee herself thinks it’s “awful… I know so many people who work there. I love Stephen. I consider him to be a friend. I think he’s amazing. So I’m shocked, not surprised.”