John Oliver’s wife may be a Republican—and a decorated Iraq War veteran—but the comedian and host of HBO’s Emmy-winning Last Week Tonight is no fan of Donald Trump. In the past, Oliver has compared the former reality-TV show host turned Republican presidential candidate to a “dictator” and recently dragged the entire GOP for enabling the self-described sexual predator.
On Sunday’s edition of his program, Oliver did his best to recap Donald “Grab Them by the Pussy” Trump’s truly unhinged behavior (even by his standards) of late in the wake of a series of sexual-assault allegations that have all but transformed him into the new Bill Cosby.
“This has frankly been a week of upsetting allegations regarding Trump. And I’m not going to make you sit through all of them again, because all you really need to know about the man is that this was his response to one of his accusers,” said Oliver.
The satirist then threw to a clip of Trump at a recent rally talking about Jessica Leeds, a woman who claimed to The New York Times that Trump had molested her while the two were seated next to each other in first class during a flight in the 1970s.“Believe me: She would not be my first choice,” announced Trump. “That I can tell you. You don’t know. That would not be my first choice.”
Revolting—or as Oliver put it, “we are in a coffin and we are buried alive in the horror that is this election.” Of course, Trump’s ugly remarks don’t come as much of a surprise given this recent boast:
“Yes, the shackles are off—which is actually an apt metaphor, as it calls to mind Frankenstein’s monster and a rabid dog,” Oliver quipped. “Here is what he has said as of now: First, he burned bridges with his own party, calling Paul Ryan ‘weak and ineffective,’ and then at campaign rallies dialed the knob up to full-on conspiracy theorist.”
Yep. At a rally in West Palm Beach, Florida, Trump whined, “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”
“Holy shit! That is not the kind of thing that a presidential candidate says!” exclaimed Oliver. “It’s the kind of thing that a man in a tinfoil hat screams inside his concrete bunker because he thinks his soup cans have been bugged by the lizard people in the White House.”“But perhaps most ominously of all,” Oliver later added, “Trump took a theme that has been dancing around all this campaign and made it explicitly and frighteningly direct”—that is, that the election is “rigged” (it’s not) despite his terrible poll numbers, numerous sexual-assault allegations against him, and record unlikability rating for a POTUS candidate.
“OK. Telling your supporters the election is being rigged is legitimately dangerous because faith in fair elections and in peaceful transfer of power are essential foundations for a democracy, and undermining them is like asking why one of those giant eagles didn’t just fly Frodo all the way to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings: If enough people start thinking that way, the whole thing kind of falls apart,” shouted a fired-up Oliver.He continued: “So just to recap: This week, Trump has declared war on his political opponents, the media, his own party, his own campaign, and the concept of democracy itself. It all paints a picture of a man who’s increasingly positioning himself as the only source of truth and goodness in America.”
Cut to Trump who, at a recent rally, proclaimed: “I never knew it would be this vile, that it would be this bad, that it would be this vicious. Nevertheless, I take all of these slings and arrows gladly—for you… And many political experts warned me that this campaign would be ‘a journey to hell.’ They said that. But they’re wrong. It will be a journey to heaven.”“You heard right. He sees himself as a lone, persecuted savior who started out in construction, is suffering on behalf of his followers, and will one day take them to heaven,” said Oliver. “We have known for a while that Donald Trump thinks he is the second coming of Christ, but it turns out he might mean that literally. The only real difference being, with Christ we think, ‘What would Jesus do?’ and with Trump it’s more, ‘Jesus, what the fuck did you just do!?’”
