Last Week Tonight: S11, E27: ‘Trump’s Deportation Plan’

It’s Been a Busy Week

In fact, it’s been so busy that, even after taking a week off, John Oliver and company barely had time to chime in on the fact that Israel bombed Iran or that Donald Trump’s favorite cosplaying site McDonald’s is in the midst of an alarming E. coli outbreak involving one of its most popular sandwiches.

And while nobody is saying that the resulting plummet in the price of McDonald’s stock is anything but the result of the fact that the rainforest-denuding mega-chain literally killed someone with its lax safety standards, the news story about a sickening bacteria infesting something millions of Americans unthinkingly stuff into their food-holes daily being inevitably paired with photos of Donald Trump working a farcical closed Mickey D’s drive-thru is, if you’ll pardon the analogy, delicious.

And Now This…

Drew Barrymore loves her some stuff. The universally adored former child star turned just plain star turned talk show host’s near-ubiquitous enthusiasm is the stuff of internet memes and Saturday Night Live sketches about internet memes alike. But Drew really loves macaroni and cheese. Like, really loves it in the way that only Drew Barrymore can love something. Shown in a Drew montage extolling the virtues of the warm and cheesy treat—which, to be honest, doesn’t even need such a high-profile endorsement, come on—to anybody who tunes into her show, Barrymore basically acts out Green Eggs and Ham in reverse.

Drew loves mac and cheese while dressed as Glinda the Good Witch. Drew Loves mac and cheese as a stress reliever. Drew loves mac and cheese on location. Drew loves mac and cheese at an in-studio cooking segment where she confesses that she even loves mac and cheese from the box. You or I have never been loved by anyone as proudly and purely as Drew Barrymore loves her macaroni and cheese. And that, perversely, now makes me want a big bowl of mac and cheese.

Our Main Story Tonight

Another reason Oliver cut his top-of-show two-week news recaps short was due to him whipping up a two-part story on immigration in the lead-up to Election Day. And while the latter part of the immigration equation involved a hilarious takedown on one particular one-hit wonder musical grifter, involving a huge twist reveal and a major celebrity cameo (oh, we’ll get there), the first part was a genuinely wrenching and terrifying exposé of the racist and potentially disastrous consequences of Donald Trump’s proposed anti-immigrant crackdown.

Now up front, Oliver wanted to make one thing clear. While his signature meticulous breakdown of the economic and logistical catastrophe Trump’s scheme to invoke flimsy legal precedent based on racist lies to round up and deport literally millions of non-white immigrants is the focus of the story, Oliver really wants everyone to know that the moral implications are a whole lot worse. While noting that even the smallest-scale version of Trump’s plan would see a million people deported at a cost of some 88 billion dollars in its first year before the construction of his proposed detention camps would spiral to a trillion dollars over a decade, Oliver stressed, “To be clear here, my biggest problem with ‘We’d spend nearly a trillion for detention camps for immigrants’ is not the trillion dollar part. I don’t want to see a headline tomorrow that says, ‘John Oliver blasts detention camps as too expensive.'” No worries on the LateNighter front, there, John.

Yet, as Oliver put it when examining just how Trump and his Republican accomplices’ overtly Hitler-ian appeals to his overwhelmingly white and bigoted voter base would play out, even Trump’s typically detail-deficient dictator’s math doesn’t add up. Oliver shows that Trump’s claim that deporting millions of workers from the building trade, agriculture, and other backbreaking industries white people literally farm out to immigrants would, shockingly, cripple those industries, leading to higher prices, worker shortages, and—countering Trump’s claim that his racist crusade would help the housing market—ensure that a whole lot fewer houses would be built. Again as Oliver stresses, none of this is to drywall over the rotting, moldy bigotry that is the true heart of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, but showing how even the mundane economic details of such a sweepingly stupid and racist scheme are complete nonsense does serve to weaken the foundation.

That foundation is, not to be a broken record, racism. Oliver played Trump’s most MAGA crowd-pleasing hits of calling immigrants murderers, pet-eaters, and rapists, calling America (the country he wants to lead) a “garbage dump” for taking those immigrants in, and bragging that he’s never read Mein Kampf even as his “poisoning the blood of our nation” rhetoric is cribbed from Hitler almost exactly, if a lot less articulately. Putting up Hitler’s original next to Trump’s knock-off, Oliver mused, “Same general idea, just a bit more coherent. I guess what I’m saying is, when it comes to rhetoric, Trump is not Hitler but, let him cook?”

Taking on the depressing polling showing a staggering 86 percent of Republicans agree with the “Mass Deportation Now” placards beaming Trump supporters keep waving at his rallies like they’re trying to get noticed at the Today show, Oliver did his best to give white Trump supporters some moral wiggle room, however squirmy. While Oliver did mock one elderly MAGA-bedecked woman as “Aunt Bedazzle Hat” for her blind assurance that her candidate knows the ins and outs of the massive financial and infrastructural undertaking that would be the detention and deportation of tens of millions of American residents, the host did go on to suggest that GOP voters might not be as evil as they are ignorant. A low bar, certainly, but let’s hear him out.

Showing that that 86 percent figure drops about 30 points once respondents are given the choice between Trump’s racist purge plot and a more considered and humane path to citizenship is a start, even if it implies that white Americans are easily swayed by empty sloganeering targeted to their innate bigotry and fear. And a clip of some white Republicans expressing dismay that a beloved immigrant restaurant owner in their community was deported by Trump the last time goes toward backing up Oliver’s “not evil, just stupid” premise. That although one man’s incredulity that a hard-working guy who came to America “with just the shirt on his back” who made something of himself not only sums up the American experience as a concept but also points out that white Americans generally only give a crap when anti-immigrant hatred deprives them of their favorite eating-out spot.

Oliver lays down the hammer with a contrasting clip, which he prefaces with a “disturbing content” warning, so you’ve been duly warned. As a little girl, her parents both detained under the first trump administration’s ICE sweep of undocumented chicken plant workers, weeps while pleading that her daddy was not a criminal with an articulate grief no little girl should have to learn, Oliver laid a blunt judgement at viewer’s feet. “Yeah, we did that,” Oliver said in one of those unflinching, unfunny moments that strip aside all his British irony for naked contempt, warning that we are now “a coin flip” from giving Donald Trump the ability to go unthinkably further.

Oliver explained how Trump’s lies about an “invasion” of violent illegal immigrants taking over the city for Aurora, Colorado (debunked as, well, racist bunk by that city’s republican mayor) are laying the groundwork for Trump’s plans to invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to grant himself sweeping, unchecked power to essentially treat every brown person in America as a foreign combatant. Oliver also showed how Trump keeps invoking Dwight Eisenhower’s use of similar racist tropes to justify a mass deportation of Mexican immigrants in the 1950’s, prefacing that part of his report by pointedly noting how he’s not going to use the official government name of the operation, containing as it did a racist slur. Not a great sign for you legacy there when your signature immigration policy was as racist as it was disastrous there, Ike.

To prevent that, Oliver wrapped up with his usual calls to tough, seemingly futile, but pressing action. Voting against Donald Trump and every down ballot Trump-suckling Republican accomplice to this atrocity in the making is the first, duh. Even there, Oliver was unsparing in criticizing the Democrats both for their own failure to implement sensible immigration reforms and to counter Trump’s bluntly effective bigoted pandering with any degree of success.

Talking to your likely Trump-voting friends and family is another. And while that prospect is about as appealing to many as a tense Thanksgiving dinner with a roomful of visiting anti-vaxxers you’re forced to sit down with once a year, Oliver suggests that that’s a lot better than Thanksgiving 2024 would be after a Trump victory. Repeating that showing Trump supporters the facts could change minds seems a little optimistic, sure, but as Oliver showed, sometimes cold hard economic facts might work where appeals to whatever spark of humanity remains is worth a shot.

Our Main Story Tonight: Part 2

As Oliver noted, his own immigrant story was difficult—and he’s rich and white. Becoming a naturalized American citizen as he did in 2019, Oliver explained how the triumphant and emotional end to his own circuitous immigration journey was sullied somewhat by one particular, mandatory singalong. No, not to “God Bless America,” or “The Star-Spangled Banner,” both of which are as bombastically bland as they are impossible to sing. But to Lee Greenwood’s lone hit, 1984’s “God Bless America,” which, as it turns out, has been forced into the ears of newly minted U.S. citizens at ceremonies for decades, especially once Greenwood’s pal and co-grifter Donald Trump came on the scene.

Now, nobody’s going to suggest that country star Lee Greenwood is a one-hit wonder who claims to be apolitically patriotic in song while spouting racist, anti-immigrant sentiments on Fox News, at NRA conventions, and at CPAC. Or that Greenwood is an money-chasing fraud whose “adopt a veteran” program at his concerts is merely a scheme to have other people pay for veterans overpriced tickets, with all the money going to Greenwood. Or that Greenwood slapped his name and some mimeographed (and selectively edited) founding documents onto a public domain religious text made for pennies in China and sold for $60 to racist MAGA rubes. Or that America-first Greenwood tried in vain to deport his nakedly opportunistic sloganeering to Canada with 1989’s “God Bless You Canada,” only for those proud Canadians to smack his carpetbagging butt back across the border.

Oh wait, John Oliver is doing all that, reserving especial ire for Greenwood simply doing a “find and replace” on his jingoistic “God Bless the USA” lyrics with Canadian place names, noting, “You can’t just pack your song in with place names like a Mad Libs and call it a day.” Oliver also noted how Greenwood’s multiple attempts to trademark the term “God bless the USA” have been swatted aside with a legal rebuke Oliver ably sums up as “Ya basic.”

He also revealed how a Last week Tonight Freedom of Information Act investigation into the murky waters of the song’s inclusion in official government ceremonies involves some predictably low-rent shenanigans, ultimately revealing that nobody’s even paying the measly $700 per year licensing fee. To that end, Oliver, himself still cringing at the spectacle of proud new citizens like himself being forced to sit through Greenwood’s interminable anthem to his own opportunistic greed while desultorily waving little American flags, had a solution. And he enlisted a high-profile friend.

Promising that he will personally pay $701 (of HBO’s dollars) per year if a newly penned and more accurate welcome-to-America anthem could be substituted for Greenwood’s, Oliver closed the show with a music video featuring a none other than a cowboy-hatted Will Ferrell. Revealed in an all-Americans diner filled with multi-ethnic patrons, Ferrel strode out into a parking lot teeming with America at its finest: spangly drum majorettes, football players getting concussed, a shirtless guy with a pet python astride his eagle-painted Cybertruck, the whole works.

As Ferrell’s lyrics promised the newly arrived new citizens, they are now among the land of medical bankruptcies, Scientology, televangelists, private prisons, school metal detectors, and Mountain Dew, concluding with the aside, “Holy sh*t, I just remembered the coup,” before promising his fellow Americans, “Now that’s your problem too.” Yes, as Oliver and Ferrel remind us all, coming to America with just the shirt on your back means taking on a whole lot of America’s baggage.

Cardus Endus

“Ellie Regina” reads the title of this week’s card, as Ellie the Elephant, the all-dancing, all-swagger, late-night host-delighting mascot of the WNBA’s New York Liberty got her crown, with the Liberty beating the Minnesota Lynx 67-62 for their first ever title. (Apologies to Prowl, the Lynx’s smokey-eyed mascot, who—no offense to Ellie—has a much cooler name.)

Last Lines Tonight

“It looks like Paddington Bear if it had multiple hemorrhoids. It looks like a Care Bear that won’t stop calling the other Care Bears gay.”

on the branded, $40 Trump teddy bear held aloft while trump’s propaganda minister Stephen Miller rails against non-white people in your neighborhood

“An E. coli outbreak was tied to McDonald’s, yet was still somehow he second-most revolting thing inside of one this week.”

cue photo of Trump handing out fries

“Look, there are things I am confident Trump can and will do. Paraphrase Hitler, emotionally abuse his children, eventually die on the toilet.”

refuting trump supporters’ assumption that their boy understands the implications of his deportation plan

“I know this isn’t the point, but I didn’t know Bill O’Reilly still had a show. I had the vague, un-interrogated sense that he died when Roger Ailes did. Either because I thought they were the same person or that seemed like a plausible murder-suicide, I don’t know.”

on J.D. Vance comparing deporting millions of people to eating a sandwich on the show disgraced sex creep O’Reilly does from his basement

“And look, I’m not an economist. Although I look like I was left on the doorstep of an auditor’s office as a baby.”

pointing out that Trump’s plans are estimated to cost America billions and lead to a second Great Recession

“Okay, even if that wasn’t total bullsh*t, J.D. Vance’s very existence is proof that supply and demand doesn’t always work. There was no demand for a business-pilled, bearded sycophant that gets routinely ignored by Trump. [Photo of Don Jr. and Eric] We already have two of those and we barely use them.”

on Vance touting mass deportation as solution to the housing crisis

“It’s one of the genuinely good decreases since then, along with the amount of Zoom family dinners and number of alive Henry Kissingers”

on FBI data debunking Trump’s claim that violent crime has risen in the last two years

“For the record, if we’re talking about someone you don’t want as your neighbor, Stephen Miller would be top of my list. Imagine getting up in the morning, looking across your yard and seeing that f**king guy standing there, looking like a Minion’s penis.”

on stephen miller, who at least did not spray-paint his head for this particular hate-rally

“How do those people even begin to apologize for that. Because I don’t think Hallmark sells cards that say, ‘Sorry we inadvertently got you deported because we assumed Trump would only be racist against Hispanics we didn’t know personally.'”

on that group of white Trump supporters complaining that Trump deported “one of the good ones”