While the next presidential debate remains up in the air, there’s at least one politician spoiling for his own sparring match.
As CT Insider reports, Connecticut State Senator Rob Sampson wants to debate John Oliver after being the subject of the host’s derision on the August 18 episode of Last Week Tonight.
While discussing the issue of hospice care, Oliver called out the Republican senator for opposing a bill to launch a study about the effects of private companies running hospice facilities.
After playing a clip of Sampson, Oliver pointed out that, in 2023, Sampson was “the lone ‘no’ vote in the state Senate on a resolution exonerating the victims of the 17th-century Connecticut witch trials. Partly because, and I quote, he ‘didn’t want to paint America as a bad place with a bad history.'”
On August 21, Sampson took to social media to call out Oliver.
“I invite John Oliver @LastWeekTonight to host me LIVE on his show for a debate on the merits of capitalism,” Sampson wrote on X/Twitter. “Here’s the full 8 min clip from which he excerpted a few sentences, attempting to make me famous[.] Thanks for that! Def. worth watching in full.”
(So far, the majority of replies to Sampson’s tweet have been critical of the senator, with some saying the full clip makes him look even worse.)
While most late-night hosts might ignore such an offer, it’s anyone’s guess as to how the Last Week Tonight host will respond. Oliver has developed a reputation for rising to challenges—as evidenced by his recent back-and-forth with a local bakery that ended with the creation of John Oliver Cake Bears and more than $25,000 in charitable donations.
Oliver has fought with the state of Connecticut before. In 2020, negative comments he made about the city of Danbury resulted in its mayor naming a sewage treatment plant after the host.
Get stories like this in your inbox: Sign up for LateNighter’s free daily newsletter.
