📰 NEWS FLASH: Every attempt Trump makes to silence late-night voices is only fueling their boldest commentary yet ⚡.NH

In 2025, the most influential figure in late-night television isn’t a host, a network executive, or a writer—it’s the President who can’t stop supplying material for the monologues aimed at him.

Donald Trump has, inadvertently—almost surely unconsciously—become the straight man for Jimmy Kimmel and many of late night’s other hosts. Trump supplies the setups; Kimmel and company are smacking the punchlines home.

When the President recently did some punching of his own—down, of course—insulting a female White House correspondent for Bloomberg News by snapping “Quiet, Piggy” as she attempted to ask a question, it became the latest example of Trump metaphorically sticking a “Kick Me!” sign on his own back.

Kimmel knew exactly what to do with that provocation. He capped a raucous Trump-bashing monologue by promising to “ride off into the sunset” with the President. “But until then,” he said, “if I may borrow a phrase from you: Quiet, Piggy.”

Cue the extra-big laugh.

That line is the textbook definition of a zinger—a joke so perfectly composed, timed, and delivered it lands like a drone hitting a speeding boat in the Caribbean.

Ka-boom. All gone.

You didn’t have to be watching Kimmel that night to see the moment. Nor did you need to dive into Kimmel’s YouTube channel. It went deliriously viral.

Even Newsmax, Trump’s most ardently supportive network, devoted a segment to the latest contretemps between Trump and his personal Joker nemesis in Hollywood. Kimmel gleefully rolled the clip.

For Kimmel, the extra benefit of Trump’s latest eruption was the evident proof—cited on the air—that the President had taken time that same day to threaten the late-night host (for the second time in three months) with sudden removal from the air, and had done so minutes after apparently watching the show’s broadcast.

“Hi, Mr. President,” Kimmel said, waving toward Washington. “Thanks for watching us on TV instead of on YouTube. We appreciate that, and I’ll tell you: It’s viewers like you who keep us on the air.”

That got a big laugh, but the point wasn’t a joke. If there is one viewer more than any other who has kept late-night shows not only on the air in 2025 but more buzzy, more relevant, and more talked-about than almost anything else in our massively siloed media world, it is the gentleman up late, armed with the day’s last Diet Coke, rage-watching and composing tweet-rants somewhere in the gold-festooned bowels of the White House.

The result: in the face of all the doom-saying, late-night TV is having something of a late-life renaissance—not necessarily must-watched, but very much followed across the media universe.

For Donald Trump—who has attacked most of the late-night hosts by name; who has openly called for the firings, in effect the silencings, of the comics who kick him around nightly; who has again reached out to what he calls the “TV syndicates,” aka large local station groups, to do the dirty work of violating the First Amendment by yanking these “no talent” critics off the air—there is a bit of hoisting with his own petard going on.

You might say Trump is feeding the mouths that are biting him.

Certainly, the head-on effort in September to force Kimmel off the stage seems to have accomplished the opposite. After years of uncertainty about how much longer he would host his ABC show, Kimmel suggested last week that he and Trump make a deal: “I’ll go when you go.”

Would Jon Stewart have come back to late night last year—and extended his potent homecoming run on The Daily Show—if the righteously mockable outrages of Trump’s second coming had not demanded it?

For that matter, would The Daily Show even be surviving, let alone thriving, if Stewart hadn’t decided that what was happening was too provocative to ignore?

Would Stephen Colbert have been canceled by a network eager to placate an unhappy President with a history of playing favorites in regulatory decisions, only to spark a backlash over a perceived injustice—one that ultimately led to the show’s first Emmy statuette?

Would Seth Meyers be raising his profile many-fold in the blast radius of Trump’s personal attacks on him?

Would viewers be tuning in to Saturday Night Live each week in anticipation of the inevitable parody of that week’s did-that-really-happen Trump moment?

Would the hosts of all these shows be met with soaring, full-throated applause every time they walk on stage?

One of the greatest things about late night has always been the urge to check in with your favorite host to hear what he or she has to say about the day’s preposterous occurrence. Trump stokes that urge by supplying more preposterous, comedy-rich occurrences than perhaps any other single human in history. (To be fair, Caligula and Nero faced limited media scrutiny.)

He can’t help himself from helping out his tormentors.

He could help himself by genuinely not caring—or simply ignoring it all.

But he can’t manage that either.

Given his insatiable need to be the center of attention for everything, Trump is probably better off continuing to erupt volcanically, though ineffectually, from the cheap—though gold—seats.

Late night can take the heat. Lately, it’s thriving on it.