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Bruce Springsteen was among a stacked list of names on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show this week, where repeated jibes were thrown in the White House’s direction.
The CBS studio lights are set to go dark on Thursday, with the guest list for Colbert’s final instalment still under wraps.
But for Wednesday night’s penultimate episode, The Boss was on hand to perform his protest song Streets of Minneapolis.
But before he got started, Springsteen told the Colbert audience that he was there to support the host, adding a barb in Donald Trump’s direction: ‘You are the first guy in America who lost his show because we got a president who can’t take a joke.’
He continued: ‘And because Larry and David Ellison [the owners of CBS parent company, Paramount] feel they need to kiss his ass to get what they want. Stephen, these are small-minded people.
‘They got no idea what the freedoms of this beautiful country are supposed to be about.’
The Boss then performed his anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) ballad, which he wrote in the wake of Renée Good and Alex Pretti’s deaths at the hands of ICE.
Their tragic final moments were captured on camera in January and prompted an outcry in the US.
Springsteen has vowed to donate all the proceeds from the track to the families of Good and Pretti, in perpetuity.
Why is The Late Show With Stephen Colbert ending?
In July last year, The Late Show host confirmed that the iconic series, which was originally hosted by David Letterman from 1993 to 2015, had been cancelled.
‘It’s not just the end of our show, but it’s the end of The Late Show on CBS,’ Stephen Colbert told a stunned studio crowd.
‘I’m not being replaced. This is all just going away.’
Broadcaster CBS has said that the iconic franchise is being put out to pasture due to budgetary pressures.
But there has been another theory swirling: that the show has been cancelled due to Colbert’s criticism of the powers that be in Washington.
Days before the axe announcement, Colbert had lambasted the decision of CBS parent company Paramount to pay Trump $16million (£13.5m) to settle a legal dispute.
Trump’s lawsuit claimed that a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris during the 2024 election had been deceptively edited to ‘tip the scales in favour of the Democratic party’, despite the fact he went on to win.
It was clear Colbert dug through his contacts for his final week in the job, with Aubrey Plaza, Martha Stewart and Robert De Niro all in the studio for his penultimate episode.
The format was slightly switched up, with the stars interviewing Colbert this time around, with a range of slightly inane Hinge-prompt type questions (what’s your favourite movie, etc).
For De Niro, who has been a vocal critic of Donald Trump for years now, he seized the chance to weave in a dig at the President, all while asking what number Colbert was thinking of.
Colbert said that he usually switches his answer, even when the celebs have guessed correctly (which Meryl Streep and Ethan Hawke previously did).
De Niro replied: ‘Okay, because I thought it would have been two million point five, or two and a half million.
‘That’s the number of Epstein files Trump still hasn’t released,’ which was met with raucous applause from the crowd and Colbert.
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