By going live the night of Trump’s address in late February, Colbert was the only host able to rebut the president in something approximating real time—a full 24 hours before the rest of late night inevitably weighed in. Colbert seemed to grasp all this on Tuesday night in the minutes before air—and luckily, everything appeared to go off without a hitch.

“Technically, this was not a State of the Union,” Colbert said during his opening monologue, “because I think in this timeline, the Confederacy won.” From there, he pummeled Trump with barb after barb for 12 straight minutes.

“As we come to the end of tonight’s address to Congress, I think we can agree on one thing,” Colbert said. His next three words came with no shortage of acid: “One down, seven to go.”

John Oliver with Dan Gutman’s The Kid Who Ran for President on August 21, 2016. Courtesy of HBO.

Trump’s presidency has been like a news firehose, a challenge that’s vexing even the most seasoned White House reporters. But its rhythms have presented a unique equation for late night, where a 10 P.M. tweet might render an episode filmed in the early evening at least partially obsolete by the time it airs. The current, robust late-night lineup with seven hosts across five networks putting on nightly shows also means that writers rooms from 30 Rock to Fairfax have little choice but to cook with the same basic ingredients each night.

“There is not much else to talk about,” John Oliver said at a press breakfast at HBO’s New York offices in February as journalists sat around him, recorders, notebooks, and laptops at the ready as they munched on light breakfasts. “It’s rammed down people’s faces so constantly, and so aggressively, that I think it’s going to make [nightly shows] have cosmetic similarities in content. They’re going to get pushed into doing that thing, even if they don’t want to, because otherwise it seems like you’re not talking about the three things that people think of when they think of the day that just happened.”

Seth Meyers, whose Late Night with Seth Meyers celebrates its third anniversary this year, was willing to concede that there is one silver lining to Trump’s rise: “There used to be a feeling of dread as to what you were going to talk about every day,” Meyers said during a phone interview with Vanity Fair in February. “That is no longer a problem.”

On the other hand, as Daily Show executive producer Jen Flanz put it, “Being able to plan ahead has become virtually impossible.”

When Trump first announced his candidacy back in the summer of 2015, the late-night landscape looked very different. Jon Stewart was still hosting The Daily Show, as the series prepared for Trevor Noah to take the chair later in the fall. Colbert was off the air entirely, waiting to take over Late Show, which had just said good-bye to David Letterman. (Larry Wilmore’s Nightly Show was also still airing on Comedy Central, in Colbert’s old time slot.) Oliver was on his second season at HBO, and Samantha Bee’s Full Frontal was not yet on air. Even Meyers was still relatively new to Late Night—and was still delivering his monologues standing up. Jimmy Fallon’s ratings looked impenetrably strong.

And for a while, things didn’t change. Despite Colbert’s efforts on CBS, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel largely held his own in second place behind Fallon on NBC; Colbert, Noah, and Meyers didn’t ignore politics, but their politically charged segments didn’t feel instantly vital and viral. In making the move from Comedy Central to CBS, Colbert was committed to broadening his appeal beyond his old cable audience, which had thrilled to the faux–right wing pundit he played for years on The Colbert Report. But when Colbert interviewed Trump during his premiere week back in 2015, many viewers found the exchange, in which he apologized to Trump for past jabs, too gentle.

Donald Trump, left, and Stephen Colbert, right, on The Night Show with Stephen Colbert on September 22, 2015. From CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images.

Ultimately, Colbert agreed with them. “I tried being gracious and pointed at the same time, and got almost nothing out of him,” he told The New York Times last September. “It was actually boring, because he wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Being nice to a guy who isn’t nice to other people, it doesn’t serve you that much.”