Stephen Colbert on Paramount’s $16m settlement with Trump: ‘Big fat bribe’ | Late-night TV roundup

Late-night hosts rebuke Paramount’s settlement with Donald Trump and mock the Maga motion infighting over the Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata.Stephen ColbertStephen Colbert returned to The Late Present on Monday after two weeks in Turkey – “I heard so many nice issues from Mayor Adams about it,” he quipped – to blast his community’s father or mother firm, Paramount, for settling with Donald Trump for $16m. “As somebody who has at all times been a proud worker of this community, I’m offended,” he stated. “And I don’t know if something will ever restore my belief on this firm. However simply taking a stab at it, I’d say $16m would assist.”The settlement ended a “nuisance lawsuit” filed by Trump, claiming that CBS Information deceptively edited their interview with then presidential candidate Kamala Harris final fall. “Paramount is aware of they might have fought it,” Colbert defined, as a result of the corporate itself known as the lawsuit “fully with out advantage”.“And take note, Paramount produced Transformers: Rise of the Beast – they know fully with out advantage,” he joked.The settlement didn’t embody an apology, although Colbert didn’t equate that with defiance. He imagined a press release for them: “It’s possible you’ll take our cash, however you’ll by no means take our dignity. It’s possible you’ll, nevertheless, buy our dignity for the low, low worth of $16m. We’d like the money.”On condition that Paramount’s homeowners are pushing the Trump administration to approve the sale of CBS to Skydance, it’s a settlement by one identify or, as Colbert put it, “a giant fats bribe” by one other.Colbert then turned his consideration to infighting within the Trump administration, after the US legal professional common, Pam Bondi, launched a press release that the Division of Justice and the FBI discovered “no incriminating shopper checklist” of financier Jeffrey Epstein’s nor “credible proof … that Epstein blackmailed outstanding people”, thus contradicting Maga conspiracists.“You possibly can’t take this away out of your base! That’s Maga’s favourite conspiracy!” Colbert laughed. “What are we going to seek out out subsequent? That immigrants aren’t consuming cats? That for those who sail to the horizon, you don’t fall off the world?”In a protracted screed on Reality Social, Trump decried the “egocentric folks” who had been “attempting to harm [Maga], throughout a man who by no means dies, Jeffrey Epstein”.“Wait, wait?! Maga, you heard your chief – Jeffrey Epstein is alive!” Colbert joked. “That may imply just one factor: zombie Epstein. He’s coming for our brains, and thank goodness, as a result of I don’t need to consider him any extra.”Jon Stewart“Maga-world, for the primary time in reminiscence, isn’t simply slavishly acquiescing to Trump’s actuality distortion subject,” stated Jon Stewart on The Each day Present, referring to the backlash in opposition to Trump by his personal base over the Epstein recordsdata his administration now claims don’t exist.“These are all individuals who work for Trump that set the expectation,” Stewart defined. “In a couple of months’ time, we went from ‘the Epstein recordsdata will expose the Democrats’ to ‘the Epstein recordsdata had been written by the Democrats and due to this fact can’t be trusted, so let’s transfer on’.”Stewart confirmed movies of Trump supporters booing the information that the Epstein recordsdata allegedly don’t exist, or burning their Maga hats.“Maga world is now in open revolt,” Stewart relished. “Clearly telling your base to simply overlook about Epstein isn’t working.”“Maga is shedding their shit proper now,” he added. “They can’t imagine what they’re seeing. Trump is mendacity? Dismissing cheap issues as bad-faith whining? Attacking anybody who disagrees?”“As a resident of blue America, can I simply say proper now to my crimson colleagues that my pronouns are ‘how does’ and ‘my ass style’,” he continued. “The Trump that you just’re simply experiencing now, to your deep disappointment and dismay, is the dude we’ve been coping with the entire fucking time. You simply didn’t notice it as a result of he’s been good to you.”Seth MeyersAnd on Late Night time, Seth Meyers additionally mocked the Maga infighting over Epstein, which is “a monster of their very own making”, he stated. “They made the Epstein conspiracy the middle of their worldview, although Trump and Epstein had been photographed collectively and partied collectively, and Trump known as Epstein a ‘terrific man’ and Epstein known as Trump his “closest good friend for 10 years’. Maga ignored all that, and hyper-fixated on the Epstein story.”Meyers performed clips of outstanding Trump supporters together with JD Vance, conspiracy podcast host turned deputy FBI director Dan Bongino and even Donald Trump Jr calling for the discharge of the so-called “Epstein tapes”.And but the Division of Justice no claims there is no such thing as a checklist, which immediately contradicts what Bondi stated in an interview with Fox Information in February: that the checklist was “sitting on my desk proper now to assessment”. Bondi now claims that it was merely the file on her desk, which didn’t comprise a listing. “Are we actually going to imagine that anybody on the earth would have the Epstein file on their desk and never instantly take a peek?” Meyers puzzled. “I imply, who has that sort of restraint?”“Maga completed nothing, as a result of they imagine in nothing,” he concluded of the mess. “The one two issues that held them collectively had been a cult-like devotion to Trump and their conspiracy theories. And now that these are butting up in opposition to one another, they’re imploding.