Transcript of Colbert’s Timeslot Literally Sold & How The Republican Party Unified | 5.21.26

Democrats are expecting a blue wave in November, but their new slate of far-left primary winners will test the party's strength with moderate voters.

If you are a Zionist, meaning that you believe that you are just entitled to land, I think that you're a danger to humanity and belong in prison.

I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire Executive Editor John Bickley. It's Thursday, May 21st, and this is Morning Wire.

Despite some high-profile schisms, Republican voters continue to consolidate behind Trump. Looking at the results from tonight, I think it's clear to me and clear to a lot of people in the political world that President Trump still holds an enormous amount of influence and sway in these Republican parties.

And it's the end of an era.

Do not compare ICE or Border Patrol agents to the Nazis. That's an unfair comparison. Nazis were willing to show their faces.

The hyper-political Late Show with Stephen Colbert comes to an end, and its replacement could signal a big cultural shift.

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Democrats came into the year heavily favored to win the House, but some controversial left-wing candidates have Republicans hoping they still have a shot in November.

Joining us now is Katie Pavlich, host of Katie Pavlich Tonight. Katie, great to have you back on.

Great to be back. Thanks so much for having me.

So we've had another round of primary elections this week, and more are on the horizon. Every week we're starting to see each party really starting to shape up here. Who are some of the key players on the Democratic side heading into November that we now know will be important to watch?

What I think is interesting is you're seeing the shift of the far left of the party now taking over. There was a race in a congressional district in Philadelphia, and the candidate that is the AOC Democratic Socialist endorsed candidate is the one who came out on top in that race. While Republicans are the ones who are not going so far to the right, they're going more towards a regular Make America Great Again posture with the president being still in charge of the Republican Party. We saw Keisha Lance Bottoms, who is the former mayor of Atlanta, become the candidate in the primary for governor in that state, which I think will be a formative a position for her. I think Republicans will have a tough time taking her on. She does have the infrastructure in Georgia to do that. But more broadly across the country, you're definitely seeing Democrats still shift to the left, whereas President Trump and his candidates were victorious. He had no losses in terms of the primary candidates that he endorsed.

I wanted to specifically ask you about a highly controversial House candidate in Texas that's all over the interwebs right now, Maureen Galindo. She said some seriously jaw-dropping things. Democrats claim this is a Republican op. What in the world is going on there?

Well, Democrats are accusing, as you said, Republicans of pushing this candidate to try and, you know, win this race in Texas. But she posted a post on the internet saying that she was going to imprison American Zionists should she be elected. She's going to put legislation on the table to do that, basically put American Jews and Americans who support the state of Israel's right to exist into prison camps. One thing, one big takeaway from the primaries is that Democratic primaries went the way of continuing this kind of hatred and rhetoric, whereas Republicans' primaries went away from that. Thomas Massie hasn't said that he wants to put American Zionists in camps, but he certainly during his concession speech said that he couldn't call his opponent Mr. Gell-Rein because he couldn't find his number in Tel Aviv. So Republican Party is moving away from that kind of conspiracy and rhetoric, whereas the Democratic Party is embracing it. You did see some condemnation of her statements, but generally they've been tolerating this. And then of course in Maine, their Senate candidate Grant Plattner, who has a Nazi tattoo, that is someone who they are fully getting behind. And big hitters like Elizabeth Warren continue to stand by.

Big picture, Democrats are expected to win pretty big come November. Yeah, that's what you usually see, um, in these off-elections. So what do you expect to see? Do we still see a Democratic wave, or do you think it's, uh, maybe smaller than people projected earlier in the year?

Yeah, you know, history shows that the party in the White House gets taken out in the midterms. President Obama talked about that when he lost the 2010 midterms. He said he got shellacked. Um, but I actually think that it could be different this time. Democrats thought that they could win this redistricting war to get a few more seats ahead of the midterms. They are losing fight after fight on that, the most recent one coming in Virginia. And also, when you look at the polling, although there is some concern among Republicans about not being able to hold the House, Americans are still kind of in this PTSD situation where they remember what the Democrats did under Joe Biden, and they do not trust them with major issues like border security and the economy, especially when they're still campaigning on things like eliminating ICE, not funding Border Patrol, allowing criminals to run free, and especially if you're an illegal alien here, allowing you out of jail specifically because, uh, you deserve to be out. So I actually don't think that it's a guarantee that Democrats are going to win the midterms. History would say that they will, but there's a There's a lot of strategy going on at the White House.

James Blair, who's the former deputy chief of staff, of course, is leaving the White House to run the president's political operation. He's been very successful so far. Again, the primaries were a good example of that. So the president's political team knows what they're doing and they're very, very strategic and they have wins on the board already. There's still a lot of work to do for Republicans, but it's not a guarantee that Democrats will win.

And no, it's not. Still some time left to make some major moves.

Indeed. Eternity.

Thank you so much for joining us, Katie.

Thanks for having me.

Good to see you. You too.

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With primary season underway, a surprisingly united Republican Party is emerging. The party is hoping that unity and recent redistricting wins will be enough to buck the overwhelming odds in favor of Democrats.

Joining us now is Daily Wire opinion editor and host of The Big Ben Show, Ben Domenech. Great to have you back on.

Great to be with you as always.

So a big week for Republicans in a lot of different ways. Uh, we had these primaries, and let's start there. What is the state of play for Republicans at this point?

Republicans headed into the midterms obviously face significant headwinds, but there were all of these statewide wins for Donald Trump and his political team They had chosen various candidates, uh, you know, across the country, including in Georgia, including in Kentucky, who were at odds with what you might consider to be the establishment Republican or the legacy Republican Party in terms of, uh, their perspective loyalists to Donald Trump. Uh, and they all prevailed when it came to, uh, winning and coming in first place. Uh, you know, in the case of, of, uh, Kentucky, you saw, uh, the handpicked person who was supposed to inherit the job from Mitch McConnell go go down in having the opposition of someone who Donald Trump had backed. And then in Georgia, you saw the governor's race there, uh, play out in a similar fashion where you had establishment party backing, uh, various people who didn't even make it to the runoff. Now, what does this all say? It says that after this cycle, Trump and his political team are far more effective than they were during his first presidency at getting rid of the people who they just don't like or view as insufficiently loyal to him.

And that, to me, is reshaping this Republican Party into one that it really looks like a referendum on Trump one way or the other when it comes to the midterms. For some Republicans, that might be a defect, but from the White House's perspective, it's exactly what they want.

I would think Republicans would be very excited about having a unified front here, right?

They're definitely excited about that. And the truth is that if you look at the two different parties, the Republican Party is actually far more unified now, having gotten rid of people who were thorns in the president's side, like Bill Cassidy, the incumbent in Louisiana. With this type of remaking of the Republican Party, Trump has put his stamp on everything that is going on within the GOP. The truth is the Democratic Party has a bigger split than the Republican Party at this point, but they are unified simply by virtue of the fact that they loathe Donald Trump.

Yeah, we just talked to Katie Pavlich about that, and she really lays out the case. These controversial candidates really could weigh the Democrats down in ways that might surprise people. Obviously, Republicans, like you said, look, they've got a lot of headwinds coming into a midterm. So it's going to be a major lift for them to not lose the numbers game. But speaking of the numbers game, the Black Congressional Caucus, which is all Democrats, have said they might lose as many as 20 different seats from their caucus alone. This is all about this redistricting effort. How much do we think this redistricting effort from the Republicans after the Supreme Court ruling is going to really change the game in November.

I think you've changed the map and you've done so in a way that was both unexpected, given the Supreme Court's decision, and one that is pretty revolutionary. Democrats had counted on these districts for a very long time, and that sort of thing is now, you know, being swept away. And it's giving the states an opportunity to go in and to redistrict according to their own priorities. And for a lot of red states, that means, you know, having districts that are more representative of the state as a whole. I think that this is a map that is now much more beneficial to Republicans than it looked like it would be a year ago. Problem though, of course, is that those things are always, uh, kind of unexpected. In Texas, for instance, uh, you know, President Trump just endorsed Ken Paxton, uh, the controversial attorney general there who's taking on, uh, Senator John Cornyn in the runoff. Paxton will probably win that runoff, but if he does, there's a lot of concerns among Texas politicos that some of the new districts they've carved out have a little bit too much margin of error in terms of Democrats being able to hold on to them, given that they were drawn as Republican districts, but only by a couple of points.

And that's something that I think is of concern because you don't exactly have the ability to predict how these new districts will go in every case.

Yeah, you never really know. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.

Great to be with you.

Stephen Colbert's Late Show will air its final episode on CBS tonight after 11 seasons. Media mogul Byron Allen is taking over Colbert's slot, and he says his show will take a very different approach to politics.

Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham is here now with more. So Megan, Colbert leaving late night feels like a major cultural shift, and he also made it clear this wasn't his choice to leave. What happened?

Yeah, well, you know, one thing I'd point out, Georgia, is that this is actually bigger than Colbert because this isn't just the last episode of his show, it's also the last episode of The Late Show, which started under David Letterman and has run for 33 years. So this really does feel like the end of an era, and I think there's a couple of factors that we really need to look at here. And of course, the big one is politics. So like Jimmy Kimmel, Colbert's show evolved into something I would say much closer to nightly political commentary than to the traditional kind of late-night entertainment that we expected from people like Johnny Carson and Jay Leno. So starting under the first Trump administration, left-wing and anti-Trump monologs kind of became Colbert's stock in trade. And just a couple of examples I could give you, uh, from what you would expect on an ordinary night of his show.

Mr. Trump, your presidency— I love your presidency. I call it Disgrace the Nation. You attract more skinheads than free Rogaine. You have more people marching against you than cancer. You talk like a sign language gorilla who got hit in the head. In fact, the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin's holster.

Now, that approach did work in terms of beating his competitors. Colbert frequently led the ratings among the late-night broadcast hosts. Hosts, but overall viewership has really been drying up over the last few years. His audience had shrunk by about 40% from his high in 2018, and then his show has also been losing an estimated $40 to $50 million a year. So maybe not surprising that CBS made this decision.

Now, has CBS indicated that the partisan politics were part of the viewership problem?

No, you know, they're very much trying to frame this as purely a financial decision, but I think it's really impossible to separate the politics from the economics Networks have been looking at declining ad revenue and shrinking audiences as so many younger viewers have migrated over to places like YouTube and TikTok and all of those streaming services. So all of late night, including Jimmy Kimmel and Seth Meyers and, um, Jimmy Fallon, all of them have been facing that same kind of audience erosion. But these shows are also very expensive to produce, and I think that's why alienating half of the potential audience was never a good long-term approach. And other late night hosts are making it clear that they also think that this was about politics. And then you also have the fact that Colbert is being replaced by a comedian who is explicitly saying he's not going to get political. So it's really hard to miss that messaging.

Hmm. So let's talk about Byron Allen. Who is he and what does he say his plans are for that time slot?

Byron Allen is a really interesting figure, and his new deal with CBS is a pretty intriguing model. So he started out as a comedian, but he built a roughly $5 billion media empire by buying up undervalued properties. So what CBS is doing here is essentially leasing the hour to Allen through what's called a time-by arrangement. So Allen's company will pay for the slot, and he then supplies the programming, and that dramatically lowers CBS's costs and risk. But Allen's messaging has been that he's going to be a corrective to what late night has become. He's repeatedly said that he wants viewers to laugh rather than feel lectured, and in an interview with CNN, he agreed that he wants to employ that old Michael Jordan model of saying, hey, I want to sell sneakers to Republicans too.

I don't care who you vote for. I don't care. I'm here to make people laugh. You're going to vote who you're going to vote for no matter what I say. It doesn't matter. It's not my business. Not my business.

Do what you do.

So I'm here to make you laugh.

So long story short here, Allen is an extremely savvy businessman. And he thinks there's still money to be made in late night if it's not political.

Well, if audiences respond well to non-political content, I have to imagine other networks are going to take notice. Yeah, so Megan, thanks for reporting.

Yep, my pleasure.

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