We last left John Oliver on Nov. 18 of last year, when the Last Week Tonight host addressed the president’s outrageous comments on the sex life of Maureen Scalia, the widow of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. There were also flashy cameos from Gilbert Gottfried (reading portions of the draft Brexit agreement), Armie Hammer, and Oliver’s nemesis Russell Crowe.
So, after three months off, Oliver returned for the sixth season of his Emmy-winning HBO program and kicked things off by addressing President Trump’s national emergency declaration over his pet project, the border wall.
“The major drama since we left has been President Trump’s repeated attempts to get Congress to fund his border wall—including shutting the government down for nearly a month,” Oliver explained, before cutting to the national emergency news. “Yes, according to Trump, the border suddenly constitutes a ‘national emergency…and to be clear, there is zero actual emergency at the border right now. Illegal crossings have been declining for 20 years, and as we’ve talked about before on this show, a wall would be expensive and completely ineffective.”
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“But putting those aside, declaring a national emergency is a big step. Emergency declarations are meant to temporarily enhance the president’s power during a legitimate crisis, so Trump needed to sell this as a real emergency, and yet, within minutes of declaring it, he said this.”
With that, Oliver cut to a clip of Trump announcing during a White House lawn press conference, “I could do the wall over a longer period of time. I didn’t need to do this. But I’d rather do it much faster.”
“Well it’s not an emergency then, is it!” exclaimed Oliver. “Also, for the record, there is no way that’s the first time this week that Trump has claimed, ‘I could do this over a longer period of time, I’d just rather do it much faster,’” Oliver joked, before throwing to a doctored image of Trump and Melania in bed post-coitus over Valentine’s Day, with the president giving a shrug.
And of course, there was the matter of this photo of Trump, his self-tanner patchily applied, at his golf club in Palm Beach, Florida, over the weekend:
Cue Oliver: “As if that weren’t bad enough, he then responded to this newly-declared emergency by just hours later flying off to Florida for the weekend, where he’s apparently been photographed waiting at an omelette bar—you know, the kind of thing you do when America is in crisis.”
Call it “eggsecutive time.”
