On May 30, 2025, U.S. President Donald Trump shared a clip of his 2015 appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" and implied that CBS deliberately hid the episode from online viewers.
"You are not supposed to see this video," alleged the post on Truth Social, the president's social media platform. "CBS DELETED this entire episode from their official website. You will not find these segments on YouTube either."
(Truth Social user @realDonaldTrump)
Apparent supporters of the president reposted his claim with video on X (archived) and
However, Trump's claim about CBS is misleading. It is true that the 2015 episode featuring Trump's appearance on "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" is not on CBS' official website — but that is likely because the network's website only has recent episodes available. Furthermore, CBS posted segments from Trump's interview on YouTube, and those clips remain online as of this writing. Thus, we rate this claim a mixture of truth and falsehood.
The landing page for "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" on CBS' website is here; at the time of publication, it only shows episodes from Season 10. The earliest episode available as of this writing is from May 5, 2025. The clip Trump posted is from a Sept. 22, 2015, appearance on the show; as such, it is a much older episode than the ones available on CBS' official website.
On Sept. 23, 2015, the verified "Late Show" YouTube account posted this approximately four-minute clip from the interview with Trump:
The YouTube video has over 17 million views as of this writing. One of the exchanges featured in the clip Trump posted — the audience cheering after Trump says, "we're going to build a wall" at 0:52 — is included in the segment posted on YouTube. (The "Late Show" YouTube account also published another video of Trump's 2015 appearance; that clip has over 2 million views.)
The rest of the exchanges featured in Trump's video are not included in the "Late Show" YouTube clips but are available to view on the Internet Archive. An unaffiliated YouTube user also uploaded the interview, including some of the exchanges Trump featured in his post, demonstrating that people can, in fact, find multiple segments of the 2015 "Late Show" interview with Trump available on YouTube.
The video Trump shared also appeared to frame the interview as more complimentary of the president.
For example, in one moment, host Stephen Colbert said: "I want to thank you for running for president, because I'm not going to say this stuff writes itself, but you certainly do deliver it on time every day." However, the video Trump posted cuts off before Colbert reaches the punchline — "you certainly do deliver it on time every day" — making the bit sound less like a joke and more like straightforward praise.
This is not the first time Trump has falsely claimed that CBS tried to suppress his 2015 "Late Show" interview. News outlets reported in 2018 that Trump reposted a video of the interview on X, then known as Twitter, with either the same or similar messaging and editing as his 2025 Truth Social post.
The 2018 clip Trump reposted is no longer available on the original X page because the account got suspended, but Colbert responded in an Oct. 18, 2018 post on the same platform and linked to the same YouTube videos as above:
At the time, The Associated Press reported that a spokeswoman for CBS said full episodes of "The Late Show with Stephen Colbert" are only available to stream online 30 days after the initial airing. That statement appears to align with the timeline of which episodes are available online as of this writing.
We reached out to CBS to confirm that this timeline is still in place and will update this story if they respond.