MS NOW Host Nicolle Wallace has some insight into why the president is constantly attacking late-night television.
Wallace, 54, shared her thoughts on President Donald Trump with late-night host Seth Meyers, 52, during an appearance on his NBC show Tuesday night. The journalist and former political advisor said she believes Trump is overtly “sensitive” to criticism from famous people.
“I think Donald Trump listens to Robert De Niro. I think he listens to you,” Wallace told Meyers. “I think he’s still very, very sensitive about what men and women who are more famous than him say.”
During Trump’s second term in office, late-night shows have been something of an obsession for the president. He has routinely attacked late-night TV anchors, including Meyers and his fellow hosts Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Kimmel. The consequences have been varied but significant.
Kimmel became the subject of MAGA ire in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, leading to ABC pulling the show off the air for five days in September 2025.
Colbert, meanwhile, is ending his run as the host of The Late Show after over a decade. The show’s cancellation was “purely a financial decision,” according to CBS, which is owned by parent company Paramount and helmed by a MAGA-friendly media family. But the decision came just days after Colbert took aim at CBS’s settlement with Trump, deeming the handout a “big, fat bribe.”
The president’s battle with talk shows has led to tangible threats from FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has invoked the “equal time” rule and implied that legacy TV networks are “motivated by purely partisan political purposes.”
Following Carr’s threats, CBS censored Colbert’s interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico. The FCC also launched an investigation into daytime show The View for featuring Talarico, a “rising Democrat” who defeated U.S. Representative Jasmine Crockett in the Texas primary earlier this month.
As a result, the future of late-night TV has been called into question. Veteran host Conan O’Brien has predicted that “these shows are going away and will become something else.”
Wallace and Meyers also touched upon the president’s less-than-gracious treatment of his critics. They discussed Wallace’s viral, politically charged interview with Hollywood legend Robert De Niro, an outspoken critic of Trump. In the conversation, De Niro, 82, called Trump “an idiot,” telling Wallace, “He’s gonna ruin the country. Everything that this country has worked for and represents.”
Just days later, De Niro delivered his own rebuttal to Trump’s State of the Union address, urging people to “stop” the president from causing further harm to the country.
Trump, in turn, launched a furious rant against the actor, threatening to deport him. He deemed De Niro’s remarks “seriously CRIMINAL!” in an unhinged, 237-word Truth Social.
Wallace told Meyers that De Niro’s remarks about the president were “too true.”
Trump has also attacked Wallace, another vocal critic of his, writing on Truth Social last August, “She is a loser, with bad ratings, who was already thrown off of The View. She will be fired soon! MSNBC IS DEAD!”
