President Donald Trump has intensified his attacks on late-night television hosts in recent weeks, with his latest targets including Seth Meyers, who has been mocking Trump’s Venezuela military operation and other administration policies.
Meyers joined Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Jimmy Kimmel in skewering Trump over the January 3, 2026, U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. The hosts questioned Trump’s motives, with multiple late-night programs highlighting Trump’s repeated mentions of Venezuela’s oil reserves as the real reason behind the intervention.
On Monday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers,” the host cited a New York Times report suggesting that Maduro’s “regular public dancing and other displays of nonchalance” helped persuade Trump’s team that the Venezuelan president was mocking them. “We invaded Iraq because of WMDs, and now we invaded Venezuela because of WDMs — wicked dance moves!” Meyers joked.
Meyers also ran montages showing Trump and his administration officials repeatedly discussing Venezuela’s oil reserves. “Damn it, I just wish there were clues,” the host said sarcastically, highlighting how Trump “just undercuts everyone around him and confesses the truth” by obsessing over Venezuelan oil while his allies claim the intervention was about drugs or human rights.
Meyers addressed Trump’s latest comments suggesting he might cancel future elections, reassuring the president that “if you cancel the elections, it won’t be fake news” calling him a dictator. “At that point, the dictionary will,” Meyers said during his monologue.
Trump’s longstanding feud with late-night hosts has escalated throughout his second term. In November 2025, Trump posted on Truth Social that Meyers was “suffering from an incurable case of Trump Derangement Syndrome” and called for NBC to fire him “IMMEDIATELY.” The 79-year-old president wrote, “NO TALENT, NO RATINGS, 100% ANTI TRUMP, WHICH IS PROBABLY ILLEGAL!!!”
The comment came after Meyers ran a segment called “Seth Translates Trump to English,” mocking a speech Trump gave to U.S. Navy troops in which the president discussed preferring steam-powered catapults over electric ones for aircraft carriers. Meyers quipped: “Guy spends more time thinking about catapults than Wile E. Coyote.”
Stephen Colbert also weighed in on the Venezuela operation, joking about the timing coinciding with the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files. “Do you know what this means? Those Epstein files must be crazy,” Colbert said, miming Trump in a panic: “Bomb something! Bomb anything!” Kimmel echoed the sentiment, quipping that “if you were wondering how bad these Epstein files are, turns out they’re ‘invade Venezuela’ bad.”
Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” expressed disbelief at Trump’s frank discussions about seizing Venezuelan oil. “Oil — a precious commodity, certainly — but not the reason a country formed 250 years ago on the ideas of liberty and self-determination would go into a country and snatch a man at night,” Stewart said. “Look, this is all exhausting.”
Even typically apolitical Jimmy Fallon joined in, joking: “When I heard there was an operation to extract a president, I just assumed Trump got stuck in his tanning bed.”
Trump’s attacks on late-night television extend beyond Meyers. Between September and November 2025, Trump stepped up public criticism of multiple late-night hosts. A prominent flashpoint came in mid-September when ABC temporarily suspended Jimmy Kimmel’s show following his monologue criticizing conservative responses to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kimmel said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”
On September 18, Trump lauded the suspension, calling Kimmel “not a talented person; he had very bad ratings.” He went further to suggest that networks whose coverage of him was overwhelmingly negative “should maybe” have their broadcast licences revoked—claiming “97 percent” of stories about him were bad. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, appointed by Trump, even shared the president’s posts attacking Meyers and had previously announced investigations into ABC over Kimmel’s Charlie Kirk comments.
Trump also celebrated the announcement that Stephen Colbert’s “The Late Show” would end in May 2026, stating he “absolutely love[s] that Colbert got fired. His talent was even less than his ratings.” Colbert and other hosts have accused the Trump administration of authoritarian tactics, with Colbert calling Kimmel’s suspension “blatant censorship” and Stewart describing the environment as dictatorship-style.
The escalating tension between Trump and late-night television has raised concerns about freedom of speech and political pressure on entertainment media. Kimmel returned to the air after his suspension and has continued his criticism, recently winning the Critics’ Choice Award for best talk show—which he attributed partly to Trump.
Trump continues to frame mockery by these hosts not as harmless satire but as part of what he sees as systemic bias against him in mainstream media, repeatedly calling for their firing and threatening broadcast licenses of networks that air critical content.
