In lieu of mocking President Donald Trump’s embarrassing rally attendance in Tulsa or continuing his war on the “racist” Fox News troll Tucker Carlson, John Oliver kicked off the latest edition of Last Week Tonight by addressing the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the nation. The numbers are at record highs nationwide, including in red states like Arizona, Florida, and Texas that were quick to flout social-distancing rules and reopen.
“The U.S. is now setting records for daily new cases as the virus surges around the country, which makes it both startling—and frankly, infuriating—that on Friday, the vice president made this declaration,” offered Oliver.
The comic then threw to Vice President Mike Pence’s press conference, in which the man who once allowed a horrifying HIV outbreak during his stint as Indiana governor lied through his teeth. “The truth is, we did slow the spread,” he said. “We flattened the curve. We were able to stand up the resources and the capacities in our health-care system to be able to meet this coronavirus, uh, in a way that would put, um, the health of all of our country first.”
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“What?!” exclaimed Oliver. “That is just such an open and stupid lie. It’s like instead of saying, ‘Your dog is on a farm upstate,’ your dad said, ‘Your dog owns a farm upstate that has the market cornered in wholesale wheat and grain supplies for the entirety of Saratoga County.’ That’s not true—the dog is dead, and so, by the way, are over 120,000 Americans.”
“On top of that, Pence also conspicuously omitted wearing a mask from advice that he gave for slowing the spread of the virus,” the host continued. “And I will just never understand why, or how, the Republicans have made ‘not spreading disease’ into a culture-war issue. Honestly, this was a missed opportunity for them. You could have printed ‘Make America Great Again’ on a billion red masks and dropped them out of helicopters. People would have worn them! You’re not even capitalizing on a national disaster correctly, you fucking idiots!”
