“The Late Show” host Stephen Colbert insists in a new interview that he’s more conservative than the “lefty figure” people perceive him to be.
Speaking to GQ’s Zach Baron in an interview published Monday, Colbert talked about his work on the show and its recent cancellation last summer.
Though Colbert has frequently attacked President Donald Trump and Republicans, he told Baron that the audience demographics for his show were split evenly among Republicans, Democrats and Independents.
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“People perceive me as this sort of lefty figure; I think I’m more conservative than people think,” Colbert told GQ. “I just happen to be talking about a government in extremis. And so what I’m giving you is my reaction video to the day. And my reaction video is like ‘The Scream,’ in a way, but with jokes.”
He continued, “So that makes me perceived as more left necessarily than I am, because I’m not sure what other reaction would be an honest one. It’s hard to have a balanced reaction to the idea of troops on streets of a city that actually is not undergoing an invasion.”
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Colbert said that he did not intend “The Late Show” to be a show to “save the republic” as people claimed, but he was later motivated by the 2016 election to warn audiences about Trump.
Colbert has even helped raise money for the Democratic Party and was an open supporter of Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, as well as Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign.
“I literally did the first six months of the show going: What should we do tonight? What’s my attitude tonight? What’s my point of view tonight? And it really wasn’t until the political campaign of 2016 really started cooking that I realized again that you cannot do these shows unless you’re talking about something you really care about, that’s in the daily conversation,” Colbert said.
Elsewhere in the interview, Colbert commented about CBS and its parent company Paramount’s decision to end his show after reaching a $16 million lawsuit settlement with Trump. CBS has said the decision was purely financial regarding Colbert’s program.
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Colbert suggested it was “reasonable” for people to believe the decision was politically motivated.
“I can understand why people would have that reaction because CBS or the parent corporation — I’m not going to say who made that decision, because I don’t know; no one’s ever going to tell us — decided to cut a check for $16 million to the President of the United States over a lawsuit that their own lawyers, Paramount’s own lawyers, said is completely without merit. And it is self-evident that that is damaging to the reputation of the network, the corporation, and the news division,” Colbert said.
The final episode of “The Late Show” will air next May.
