On Wednesday, days after Stephen Colbert insinuated that the top brass at CBS had censored his show amid pressure from President Trump’s Federal Communications Commission, the agency’s provocatory chair, Brendan Carr, took another twist of the knife: “Look, I get it,” he said at a press conference. “It’s tough to be Colbert. He’s had what he probably views as a long and distinguished career in the limelight. He sees that that limelight is fading, is coming to an end. That’s got to be a difficult time for him. I get it.”

The chairman’s taunt, while characteristically catty and churlish, did hint at a perhaps underappreciated subtext of this saga—and, indeed, the Trump administration’s broader war on late night, from Colbert to Kimmel. Every time the White House interferes directly or indirectly with the genre, the nation’s angst-ridden liberal commentariat asserts that America’s sacred satirical tradition is under siege. In truth, however, satire is thriving—it’s just not thriving on TV. And the reasons for that can hardly be attributed to Trump.

Before you @ me or respond to this email by telling me to go fuck off… yes, the F.C.C. pressure on late night is a bad thing for an ostensibly democratic country. Yes, it’s unsettling how quickly spineless Hollywood executives have self-censored their platforms to protect shareholder value. And, yes, the Orban-esque vibes here are… not great! All that said, any narrative that pins late night’s demise on Trump and Carr wildly misses the mark. This is a business model that’s been quietly collapsing for well over a decade, a casualty of a declining distribution platform, shifting consumer habits, and, to a lesser degree, its preoccupation with Trump himself.

If anything—as was the case with cable news—Trump kept late night on life support well past its expiration date. In his perversion of political norms, he offered comedians a sense of purpose, urgency, and moral righteousness—which also played out, for better or worse, at certain news networks. Tempted by ratings and celebrity, a generation of comedians cast themselves as the second coming of Jon Stewart. After a rickety start, Colbert found his voice as a nightly anti-Trump tribune. Kimmel discovered the virality of righteous indignation. Seth Meyers honed the “Closer Look” into a kind of MSNBC-with-jokes explainer. The defiance felt poignant, for a moment.

In retrospect, this was a bait and switch. Trump was already so baroque, absurd, and, most importantly, shameless that the glib wisecracking had started to feel inert. By the time he returned for a second term, the #Resistance vibes had fizzled, the White House itself became the meme generator, and late night’s PG-13 zings suddenly seemed like a lagging indicator of the culture. Nevertheless, late-night hosts continued to lean into politics: The monologues got more earnest, the lawmaker interviews got longer, the applause lines got more self-satisfied. And the viewing audience kept drifting elsewhere.

Late night’s battles with the F.C.C. represent the last gasp of this dynamic. Kimmel’s temporary suspension drove record-high ratings to Jimmy Kimmel Live!, which then quickly returned to Earth. The same is happening now with Colbert’s Late Show, which will shutter entirely in May. But the audience for talk-show comedy has already migrated to a younger generation of social influencers, many of whom graced the pages of Vanity Fair this very week. As that piece noted, the linear late-night shows struggle to get even a tenth of the audience of their legendary forebears. “Because who’s sitting around at 11:35 watching TV anymore,” the piece’s author, Joy Press, asked, “if you even have a TV?” Their YouTube monetization strategies haven’t moved the needle either.

But this highlights yet another underappreciated aspect of Trump’s war against the media: It’s limited to a theater that is increasingly irrelevant to the broader public. The administration is targeting these comedians and their networks in part because they’re the only ones they can target. The F.C.C.’s authority over broadcast licenses gives Trump leverage over ABC and CBS that he doesn’t have over the stars of YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and Spotify. He’s fighting yesterday’s battle, which should give the champions of free speech and political satire some solace. Anyway, all of this will be over in a few years.