• by Joe Mandese , February 20, 2026

For the second time in as many weeks, I'm using this column to publish a counterpoint to one raised by "TVBlog"'s Adam Buckman.

In today's edition, Buckman raises a great question in the aftermath of the media and political brouhaha following CBS' decision to pull an interview with a rising political star on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert." Buckman's question: "What Are These Politicians Doing On 'Colbert' Anyway?"

My answer: because politicians have been guests on late-night TV talk shows since the inception of the genre.

In fact, my earliest impressions and awareness of political figures came from watching their appearances on late-night talk shows hosted by Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, Tom Snyder and others.

Some of them -- like Ronald Reagan -- made appearances frequently, and many of them used the appearances as part of their campaigning for office.

So rising political star James Talarico's interview on "Colbert" wasn't anything new, except that he didn't actually "air" on "Colbert, although he did stream to a considerable audience on YouTube.

That said, Buckman's column did what his columns usually do: it made me think. And conduct some research on my own to see if I could answer his question.

In fairness, the analyses represented in the charts I'm publishing here should be taken with a grain of salt, because the stats were compiled by a series of prompts across the major LLMs I use. But if you ask me I think they are directionally representative, if not the gospel truth.

In the chart above, I asked how many times politicians appeared on guests on the major late-night talk shows over time, and it does reveal an interesting trend: political guests increasingly are a trend.

The analysis also confirms that "Colbert" way over-indexes in terms of political guests, although I'm not sure why that's a problem in and of itself.

Politicians can be interesting subjects, especially when interviewed by a deft talk-show host using humor to humanize them and make them more accessible to viewers (ie. voters).

That's not something that was lost on the Richard Nixon Foundation, which has made the then presidential candidate's 1967 interview with Johnny Carson available on YouTube (see below).

Of more recently, when Jimmy Fallon helped humanize then aspiring presidential candidate Donald Trump by tussling his hair on air.

The truth is that political guests are far from something new on late-night talk shows -- and they have been growing increasingly frequent.

What is new is explicitly political programming posing as late-night entertainment talk shows, including Fox News Channel's "Gutfeld!" and Fox News Channel's/Trinity Broadcasting Network's "Huckabee."

Since "Gutfeld!"'s April 5, 2021 debut as a late-night show on Fox News Channel, it has had 170 appearances by politicians, which is about half the number that have appeared on "Colbert" and "Huckabee."

But the reality is that we now have a new genre of late-night TV programming that is just a more explicit form of something late-night TV has been doing all along.