After a month-long break, John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight and immediately confronted the most absurd news of the week: Sharpiegate, wherein President Donald Trump “spent seemingly the entire week desperately trying to prove he was in the right when he claimed last Sunday Alabama was one of the states most likely to be hit by Hurricane Dorian—an effort that included 10 tweets and this incredible moment.”
Yes, Trump presented a map of the storm path to the press that had clearly been altered with a black Sharpie to convey that Alabama was in its path. And, when Trump was pressed on the alteration during a presser, he not-so-convincingly responded, “I don’t know… I don’t know… I don’t know…”
“Really? You don’t know? Are you sure about that? You don’t think that you might have done it?!” asked Oliver. “I gotta say, for someone who lies so constantly, it’s genuinely astounding how bad he is at it. There is a non-zero chance that, if he loses every state next year, he’ll claim he’s won by standing in front of a fully blue map with the word ‘RED’ written on it and Sharpie stains on his fingers.”
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As a White House aide confessed to The Washington Post, it was Trump who tweaked the map because “no one else writes like that on a map with a black Sharpie.”
“Of course they don’t! Trump is notorious for using Sharpies to fix things he doesn’t like,” said Oliver, before throwing to a printed-out Vanity Fair article by Juli Weiner, a current writer on Last Week Tonight, that had been marked up like mad in a Sharpie by none other than Trump.
“This is my favorite part: circling her name and writing next to it ‘bad writer,’” offered Oliver, before joking, “And look, to be fair to him, I’ve been saying the same thing to her for six years but I don’t do it in Sharpie, I do it by ruthlessly demanding endless rewrites and being generally withholding of praise—like a professional!”
