The owners of media empires and those who work with and for their influential networks believe they are masters of the universe. And indeed, in many respects they are. Until they are not.
They make and break presidents and influence economic markets and the careers of journalists, academics and commentators – and the world itself.
Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is a personal amplifier and virtual locker room for millions who shadow-box their inner algorithmic demons. Convicted criminal and US President Donald Trump has his own aisle in which to throw tantrums, Truth Social.
But there is a potent disinfectant that these men fear more than power and the truth itself – laughter. Over in Trumpistan, the punchlines just kept coming last week.
The thing is, you have to mock and cajole the truth to life. Heading this endeavour is the fool, the comedian, the satirist, the cartoonist, who is armed only with the gift of the guffaw, which is used to dig the ignoble grave of ridicule.
What Paramount-owned CBS, on which The Late Show aired for three decades, learnt last week is that you can cancel the show but you cannot cancel the gift of impish comic insight. We are not talking about the kind of laughter that mocks and relies on a mind that’s like a pair of crusty underpants – Trump’s brand of single-sex, boarding-school, phallic bully-boy taunting being a prime example.
No, this is humour that cuts like a knife, stabs like an icicle in the heart, slashes like a panga through a ripe and ready cane field.
Humour that takes prisoners. And The Late Show host Stephen Colbert has not held back. Touch a comedian on their studio, never mind their divinely inspired, lucid belligerence, madness and courage, and you will feel the wrath of the comedy gods.
Pivotal moment
Shortly after the announcement that Colbert and The Late Show were both being canned, the makers of the legendary and award-winning South Park launched an epic scorched-earth, jaw-dropping episode. It depicted Trump with a talking mushroom penis (as testified to by call girl Stormy Daniels), and excoriated Paramount for its cowardice in sliding into Trump’s already crowded rectum.
South Park airs on Paramount-owned Comedy Central and this was a spectacular provocation aimed at humiliating the corporation for sucking up and paying a $16-million “bribe” to prevent Trump’s threatened legal action over an episode of 60 Minutes, rather than standing up to him. Paramount would have won, but it needed federal approval for an upcoming $8-billion merger. So it paid a “bribe”, Colbert pointed out.
Boom! And in an instant Colbert made cancelling cool in a different way.
/file/dailymaverick/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/P29-ThammRID.jpg "Character cutouts of South Park; US First Lady Melania Trump; Stephen Colbert; Rupert Murdoch. (Photos: Jon Kopaloff / Luke Hales / Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images)")
A $1.5-billion contract between Paramount and South Park’s genius creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, to stream the show for the next five years had just been signed when the strategic retaliation dropped.
This is a pivotal moment for corporate television that might just sink it in the end. Gazillions already rely on independent media sources and experts streaming on YouTube.
Making and unmaking the monster
Rupert Murdoch, the geriatric Australian American who truthwashed Trump as “presidential material” and also launched the political careers of Fox Maga hosts, has turned on his creation.
Like a burst condom, the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is leaking all the receipts in well-connected “financier” Jeffrey Epstein’s sordid world. The crude cards, the letters, the photographs.
Trump likes fresh meat, so he took Murdoch’s shark chum and is now suing the mogul. He later denied this, saying it was fake news, but the circus just kept rolling on.
Epstein’s accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of British media mogul Robert Maxwell, is currently negotiating who knows what with one of Trump’s former personal lawyers.
What none of these men with their power and wealth so fabulous it could feed multitudes and bring about world peace (thus eliminating the need for global beauty pageants) can do is smother the truth in a blizzard of “whataboutism”.
No one who is lucid does not know that Trump features prominently in Epstein’s treasure trove. Trump has made no secret of how he likes to grab pussy and barge into the changing rooms of teenage participants in beauty pageants.
These were traps to lure prepubescent girls – raised on a diet of beauty-pageants-are-aspirational propaganda – into the predators’ den. Trump engineered them alongside others like the creepy John Casablancas of Elite Model Management, who was frank about his preference for girls “just legal”.
First Lady Melania Trump was a model who was given an “Einstein visa” for rare skills needed in the US. Melania and Donald met at the Kit Kat Klub in New York City, where desperate Eastern European girls worked as “hostesses”.
Hopefully, Melania has multiple passports and enough hush money to flee the ruins of her husband’s regime and country and take their son, Barron, into exile. At least she has options. DM
This story first appeared in our weekly Daily Maverick 168 newspaper, which is available countrywide for R35.
