This week, Stephen Colbert announced that CBS is canceling his late-night show, days after he spoke out against the network’s owner for settling a lawsuit with President Trump for $16 million — a lawsuit it would probably have won. The Colbert news was yet another dark moment for an American media company seemingly bowing and scraping to Mr. Trump, obeying in advance, hoping to make a deal. (For its part, CBS released a statement saying that the cancellation was “purely a financial decision.”)

Barry Diller explained the willingness to settle to Maureen Dowd as needing to “bend the knee if there’s a guillotine at your head.” Of course, the “guillotine” was maybe not being able to do the corporate deal you wanted — Paramount, CBS’s parent company, is in the midst of closing a merger with Skydance that requires approval from the Trump administration — which is not the same as having your head cut off. But maybe to a billionaire, not getting your money is the same as being decapitated. This is not the first time Paramount and its chairwoman, Shari Redstone, have been accused of going along to get along. A “60 Minutes” correspondent, Scott Pelley, noted the company’s desire “to supervise our content in new ways” as the reason for the resignation of Bill Owens, the show’s executive producer.

Stephen Colbert went to CBS in a more innocent era, in 2015, before Donald Trump won the presidency the first time. He’d gotten the gig, to replace the not particularly political ironist David Letterman, after spending nine years doing “The Colbert Report,” a show in which he parodied a Fox News host — playing a character largely based on Bill O’Reilly, with all of his huffy bluster. In taking the bigger stage at the Ed Sullivan Theater, Colbert toned his politics down at first, but it wasn’t until he became a full-throated critic of the new administration that he found his footing. People liked his mostly gentle truth-telling, night after night. They still do; his is the No. 1 show on an admittedly contracting late-night schedule.

Viewers still want political content, but they are not provided with it as they were in Mr. Trump’s first term. #Resistance was good business. The “Trump bump” was real, shoring up legacy newspapers and cable news, and seeding an entire universe of progressive news sites and influencers. Did it make a difference? In 2024, not enough, since Mr. Trump was still re-elected. And this time around, as he has done with everything else that once stood in his way, from Harvard to fancy law firms to the Federal Reserve, he is determined to crush any dissent using any tools he has available. So just the mere possibility of a holdup on a media deal, which could undermine the vast wealth of a media heiress, seems like it could be enough to end an impertinent TV show.

This has happened before. Growing up in the 1980s, I’d often sleep over at my grandfather’s white saltbox house in Greenwich, Conn. Sometimes between episodes of “Murder, She Wrote” and small squares of my grandmother’s excellent homemade carrot cake, which was disappointingly unfrosted, my grandfather Howard Fast would recount his misadventures as an enemy of the state. He wrote screenplays and at least 60 novels, the most famous of which were “April Morning” and “Spartacus.” He wrote political columns for newspapers and magazines.

He refused to name names to the government during Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Red Scare. He and other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee declined to give records of their organization to the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1947 were convicted of contempt of Congress. Like Mr. McCarthy, Mr. Trump is not a fan of antifascism.