Bluesky

On Monday, late-night host Stephen Colbert attempted to interview Texas Senate hopeful James Talarico. Instead of this being a routine nothing-to-write-home-about few minutes chat with a little-known Texas state representative, Colbert ran into a legal wall: CBS’s attorneys told the broadcaster to pull the interview after Trump’s FCC argued that late-night-show interviews of political candidates from one party but not the other violate federal regulations. The network allegedly advised the host that he shouldn’t even discuss on-air that it had put the kibosh on the interview.

Colbert wasn’t amused. Not only did he proceed to talk about it on the air; he interviewed Talarico and posted it on YouTube, where, within two days, the clip had garnered some 7.8 million views.

A week ago, polls showed Representative Jasmine Crockett leading Talarico by eight points. If Talarico ends up winning his primary in Texas and then goes on to win the general election against the front-runner to be the GOP’s nominee, Texas’s far-right attorney general, Ken Paxton—who avoided a likely conviction for securities fraud two years ago by taking a plea bargain and agreeing to do community service—he will have Trump’s anti–First Amendment FCC to thank for his meteoric rise to national prominence.

Polling conducted before the Colbert interview of a hypothetical Talarico-Paxton matchup shows the race to be a toss-up. And now CBS’s pandering to the Trump administration over the Colbert interview has given the Democrat a crucial publicity boost just as early voting in the March 3 primaries gets underway. Indeed, many of the more than 65,000 commenters on the YouTube video specifically thanked the FCC for bringing the interview, and the candidate, to their attention.

“A threat to any of our First Amendment rights is a threat to all of our First Amendment rights,” Talarico explained to Colbert, in reacting to the attempts to censor him. The audience roared its approval. For the next 14 minutes, Talarico hit rhetorical home run after home run, denouncing the hypocrisies of Christian Nationalism—“people baptizing their partisanship and calling that Christianity”—attacking the xenophobia of the MAGA movement, and explaining how the real fight in America is “not left versus right; it’s top versus bottom.” That’s as succinct a summary of the problem of oligarchy as any I have heard.

Over the last few weeks, there has been something remarkably ham-handed and asinine about the authoritarianism that Trump 2.0 is serving up. The ambition remains. The administration is still trying to curtail free speech, chill political participation, and take over election processes in the run-up to the November vote, but some of the enthusiasm and efficiency of the administration that we saw last year seems to have at least temporarily dissipated.

Since the Department of Homeland Security announced that the ICE surge in Minneapolis was ending, Stephen Miller, the most outspoken proponent of Trump’s might-is-right worldview, has been remarkably silent. Greg Bovino, the Gestapo-trenchcoat-wearing public face of ICE, has largely vanished from view. (Bovino was last seen with some drinking buddies being unceremoniously kicked out of a bar on the Las Vegas strip.)

Kristi Noem also went largely silent, though in her case she couldn’t quite go a whole week without doing something blitheringly stupid, entirely offensive, cruel, or patently unconstitutional. At a press conference, she announced that the blizzard of federal investigations into alleged voter fraud were intended to “make sure we have the right people voting, electing the right leaders to lead this country.” Someone apparently forgot to give her the memo that you don’t say the really undemocratic stuff out loud. And later in the week, the Department of Homeland Security sent out a memo announcing that refugees in the United States who hadn’t gotten their green card within one year of arrival would be subject to arrest and detention. As for Trump’s lapdog attorney general, Pam Bondi, after the debacle of her congressional hearing, she has apparently decided to hide under the tranche of Epstein documents that, drip by drip, leak by leak, are corroding what remains of the integrity of the Department of Justice.

Even Trump’s social media presence has become tired and formulaic. When Winter Olympics athlete Hunter Hess said that representing Trump’s United States “brings up mixed emotions,” the narcissist in chief took time out from his busy day to post on Truth Social, “U.S. Olympic Skier, Hunter Hess, a real Loser, says he doesn’t represent his Country in the current Winter Olympics. If that’s the case, he shouldn’t have tried out for the Team, and it’s too bad he’s on it. Very hard to root for someone like this. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

The post was so boring that Hess didn’t even mention Trump in his reply. “There is so much that is great about America, but there are always things that could be better,” the athlete wrote. “One of the many things that makes this country so amazing is that we have the right and the freedom to point that out.” Apparently, in between his training sessions on the mountains of the Pacific Northwest, Hess attended the high school civics lesson on the First Amendment that the Trump team all skipped out on.

Of course, by next week the sundowning authoritarian may have pushed the United States into an avoidable forever war with the Iranians, and with the help of GOP governors in key states such as Texas and Florida, he may have escalated his efforts to sabotage the midterm elections. In fact, if I were a betting man, I’d say the odds were pretty high on both of those fronts. But given the horrors we are living through, I’ll take small graces where I can. For now, at least some of the air seems to have gone out of Trump—and when push comes to shove, a deflated, tired Trump, despite all the military hardware at his fingertips, is simply a nasty, trash-talking, increasingly addled old man.