Why Did ‘The Tonight Show’ Book Greg Gutfeld?

After CBS announced it’s canceling The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last month, there was widespread speculation that the decision was politically motivated. The thinking was that CBS fired one of President Donald Trump’s most vocal critics so that his administration would push through Paramount’s (CBS’s parent company) merger with Skydance. (Trump has claimed partial credit, writing on Truth Social that he is not “solely responsible” for CBS’s decision.) Others claimed the move was financial, arguing that late-night TV’s liberal-leaning material is the cause of the genre’s declining ratings. In either case, if the future of late-night television is in any way contingent on kissing the rings of conservatives, the world got a glimpse of what that might look like on August 7’s episode of The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Greg Gutfeld, host of Fox News’s wildly popular late-night show Gutfeld!, was featured on the show as guest, yukking it up with Fallon like the pair were old pals.

To some, Gutfeld! proves the theory that late-night TV would be more successful if it catered more to conservatives. The show, geared toward a MAGA audience, consistently outperforms all its competitors in linear ratings. Despite his success, Gutfeld’s appearance on The Tonight Show is the first time he’s been invited onto any of the big-network late-night shows since his own show debuted in 2021. It’s hard to view this booking as anything other than a ploy on the part of NBC to court his audience. The benefits, the network evidently calculated, outweigh any potential backlash stemming from Gutfeld’s history of controversial jokes and remarks. (Just last month, he made headlines by joking that conservatives should proudly reclaim the word “Nazi” like Black people have reclaimed the N-word.) Gutfeld himself referred to the booking as a “risk.”

Fallon, for his part, plays his usual role of affable if vacuous host. He lets Gutfeld tell a not particularly flattering story about their first meeting years earlier, when Fallon drunkenly tackled his future guest without provocation. He gives Gutfeld an opportunity to pay tribute to his late mom. And he helps promote Gutfeld’s new Fox Nation game show, What Did I Miss?, a MrBeast-style experiment where he sequesters people in a house without access to the outside world for 100 days, then asks them questions about news events. Gutfeld brags about how little he has to pay the contestants, while Fallon laughs along and gently pushes back by suggesting a higher compensation. Fallon is a professional. If he has any reservations about interviewing Gutfeld, they’re not apparent.

After Fallon’s now-infamous Tonight Show interview with Donald Trump leading up to the 2016 election, many criticized him for humanizing Trump by asking him softball questions and tousling his hair. A year after that interview, Fallon himself acknowledged to the New York Times that people “have a right to be mad.” The incident led to a decrease in ratings for his show, and following Trump’s eventual victory, he fell further on the late-night ratings leaderboard as angry audiences gravitated more toward sharper Trump critics like Colbert and Kimmel.

But the landscape has changed drastically in the intervening nine years. Audiences’ capacity for outrage has been spread thin, and the notion of platforming and humanizing controversial figures like Trump has been normalized on podcasts like Flagrant and This Past Weekend With Theo Von. These are outlets The Tonight Show now has to compete with for attention and eyeballs. Gutfeld is not Trump. He’s technically an entertainer — a member of Fallon’s cohort — but he projects many of the same values Trump does to an overlapping demographic. The Tonight Show can’t afford to pivot 180 degrees without losing some of its existing viewership, but it also needs to meet its prospective audience halfway. Enter Gutfeld: walking plausible deniability.