On Sunday, John Oliver dedicated the top of Last Week Tonight to the primary elections happening across the country.
“On Tuesday, all of these states held their primaries resulting in, among other things, Madison Cawthorn losing his—meaning he has now officially set a record for shortest term to ever be served by a little bitch,” joked the late-night host.
Yes, after the junior congressman was taken down by his own party via a series of leaked photos and a bizarre sex tape—after he’d spun a tall tale about being invited to cocaine orgies by members of his own party—Cawthorn was sent packing. Now he has plenty of time to explore his Hitler fetish.
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But Oliver said “the most consequential news” came out of Pennsylvania, where in the race for governor, Doug Mastriano, a Trump favorite who promoted the lie that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election due to widespread election fraud and took part in the Capitol insurrection of Jan. 6 won the GOP nomination.
“Yeah. He marched on the Capitol on Jan. 6—something that’s become a weird point of pride for Republicans,” said Oliver. “It’s like hearing someone brag that they were on the boat the night Natalie Wood died. I don’t know what’s more troubling there: that you think that makes you sound good, or that some people might actually agree with you.”
As a state senator, Mastriano held hearings on nonexistent 2020 election fraud—featuring the president’s unhinged consigliere Rudy Giuliani—and in late March bragged about how he could manipulate election results.
“I could decertify every machine in the state with the stroke of a pen via my secretary of state,” Mastriano bragged on The Bombeck Show. “I already have the secretary of state picked out. It’s a world-class person that knows voting integrity better than anyone else in the nation, I think, and I already have a team that’s gonna be built around that individual.”
“Wow. That is ominous, because I don’t know who he’s got in mind, but I do know there is no way that they’re a world-class person because 1) anyone Mastriano likes is immediately suspicious; and 2) the only truly world-class people on the planet are Dolly Parton and… end of list.”
Mastriano is also a gun nut who supports a “total ban on abortions” with no exceptions, including rape, incest, or cases where the mother might die. Oh, and he participated in a conference featuring prominent QAnon crazies—where he was presented onstage with a shiny sword.
