It’s Been a Busy Week
It’s telling when John Oliver breaks format. Kicking off tonight’s first post-election Last Week Tonight, Oliver stated, “It has been very much a week.” Yeah, uh oh.
As Oliver noted when addressing certain friends’ Instagram feeds in the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory (and oh will he get there), the more people feel the pressing need to post inspirational poems over an evocative nature background, the more well and truly screwed we all are. Also, knock it off with the poems—you’re social media looks like a Hobby Lobby and nobody needs that.
Oliver did mementarily distract us from what was to inevitably come by mentioning those brave and clever lab monkeys—rhesus macaques, to be precise—currently on the loose in North Carolina, quoting the head of the not remotely sinister-sounding Alpha Genesis facility there as speculating that the monkeys were having a “great adventure.” And while I think that’s a sentiment we can all share (the Pixar movie writes itself), the fact that said macaques had been undergoing “research on progressive brain disorders” is fairly ominous to anybody who’s seen the modern Planet of the Apes franchise.
Then again, as Oliver dutifully moved on to the night’s main story with visible reluctance, maybe it’s time to give the monkeys a chance .
And Now This…
Remember what I said about breaking the format? Yeah, this segment simply did not happen, which is the first time in recent memory that’s been the case, and which should sort of freak viewers out a little.
Our Main Story Tonight
Well, that happened.
As John Oliver noted, he, you, and everybody who imagined in their poor, deluded, blessedly dumb little hearts that America would not reelect Donald f**king Trump simply can’t believe that we have to deal with all this again. Oliver even showed a clip from Trump’s victory speech in which the candidate himself fumbled like an unprepared best man, asking “Look what happened… is this crazy?” Yes. Yes it is. As Oliver noted, Trump’s tone seemed one addled step away from asking, “You guys saw what I did, right?”
Well, America saw—and it said, “That’s our guy. Again.” After [Oliver checks notes] 34 felony convictions for fraud related to falsifying business practices, legal findings that he defamed a woman he sexually assaulted, the whole “trying to overthrow democracy in a violent insurrection” thing, committing around a million involuntary manslaughters by bungling the pandemic, and running a campaign even more bigoted, hateful, and divisive than the first time. And that’s not even mentioning his alarming and obvious mental decline as the 78-year-old Trump recently did everything at his dwindling rallies from taking about a golfer’s big old dick to miming fellatio onstage, to standing and weaving in place for 40 minutes to “Ave Maria.”
But, as Oliver and the rest of his late-night comic colleagues (and viewers) have discovered once again, no amount of cleverly worded, impeccably researched, hilariously delivered takedowns can actually take down a reality show clown whose message to white people is, its entirety, “Eggs too expensive, brown people scary, transgender [unintelligible], booga-booga-booga!!”
Indeed, in joining the chorus of disbelief attempting to pick apart Trump’s beyond-depressing victory, Oliver speculated that the sundowning Trump’s overflowing storm drain of toxic, often contradictory nonsense is part of his appeal to voters. As Oliver notes, when one of your two choices for leader is a babbling fountain of pandering, demonization, resentment, and easy to digest catchphrases, voters are able to “pick and choose what he actually believes and create a version that suits you.” How that translates to voters being attracted to the version of Trump Oliver showed losing his train of hate mid-thought to get all dreamy about undocumented immigrants’ being “the whole package” with their “muscle content” and so forth, is a matter for the psychologists said Trump voters desperately need but soon will no longer be able to afford.
As ever, and despite his own format-breaking, Oliver stuck to his usual plan while assessing this enormous sh*tshow, asking how this happened, what happens next, and what we can do about it. He did note, thoughtfully, that those viewers constitutionally incapable at this point in time of dealing with any of this have his permission to simply turn off their TVs and join him in “drinking my lights out and housing some grief mac and cheese.” As Oliver put it sympathetically, “It is understandable not to have another guy in a suit doom-squawking at you.” Self-care has never been more important, people. YouTube clips are (eventually) always there for you when you’re up to them.
For the how, Oliver was careful not to leap into the 24-hour news cycle scrum of recrimination and panic that’s gripped the talking head brigade. He was especially critical of those like reelected New York Democratic Representative Tom Suozzi and Massachusetts’ Seth Moulton, who immediately and tellingly blamed the Harris campaign’s acceptance of transgender Americans for the loss. First, as Oliver noted, the Dems have hardly been at the forefront of trans rights (zero trans speakers at the DNC, for example). And second, Trump and the GOP spent a sickening $215 million on anti-trans advertising , a figure which translated in Oliver’s human math to $134 for every single trans person in the country. Good thing those those fiscally sound conservative priorities are as sound and not at all bullsh*t as ever.
(Oliver was also quick to debunk critic/bigots’ whole “I’m just concerned with girls in sports” excuse by noting that the real threat to women in athletics isn ‘t the “vanishingly small” number of trans athletes but creepy coaches and gym teachers preying on underage girls. But that perhaps hits too close to home for the demographic of male voters thinking way too much about girls’ locker rooms.)
With one of his signature targeted montages, Oliver showed how pundits are blaming Harris for being: too far-left, too centrist, not going on Joe Rogan’s sh*tty podcast, being too aligned with Joe Biden, backstabbing Joe Biden, and daring to be a woman. (That last one might have just been implied.) As Oliver put it when watching MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough blame Hispanic voters’ supposed anti-Black racism for Trump’s support in that community, “Scapegoating another demographic’s behavior in a way that you’re juuust able to pass of as news? Congratulations to you, Scoldilocks—you must feel amazing right now.”
As for Trump voters falling for the “eggs are too expensive” message (one propped up by literally hundreds of millions in GOP advertising that did not trickle down), Oliver scoffed as only he can, showing that Trump is inheriting a post-Trump 1.0 economic recovery even the stuffily conservative Wall Street Journal calls “remarkable.” Messaging for the lowest, dumbest common denominator is easier than, as Oliver suggests with one mocked-up Democratic yard sign, “Okay yes, milk is too expensive but we’re working on it, and also it’s not that expensive when you take a macroeconomic view of America’s recovery in contrast to other Western economies, plus you’ll get used to it.”
Making the sort of historical parallel Republican school boards are trying to erase from history books, Oliver compared Trump’s pitch to Bill Clinton’s “It’s the economy, stupid,” but with the addendum, “also by the way, I happen to be good friends with Jeffrey Epstein.” He also choked back “for legal reasons,” his honest feelings about Trump’s pal Elon Musk’s message that Americans would have to “live within our means,” and “endure temporary hardship” in Trump’s economy. Maybe Oliver’s barely repressed, legally actionable rage might have something to do with the world’s richest man, who just reaped billions more thanks to his support of Donald Trump, scolding regular Americans about fiscal responsibility and sacrifice. Just a guess.
All this leads to just who the hell would ever leap at the chance to serve under a Donald Trump even more unbound by legal guardrails and more patently unstable than the first time around. And hoo boy, is it a list, as Oliver showed in one handy chart he described as “a choose your fighter screen where the only thing they’re fighting is the arc of the moral universe,” “an advent calendar where every circle opens up to a tiny piece of literal sh*t,” and “a game board for ‘Guess Who? Oops, All Assh*les.'”
Yeah, it’s that bleak, with Oliver singling out proposed CIA head Kash Patel, a sycophantic wild-eyed loon so dangerously unqualified for the position that even corrupt former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr said “over his dead body,” but who now promises to go after Trump critics in the government and media while wearing his branded line of Punisher-meets-Trump hoodies. Also on the board is perennially under-indictment Texas AG Ken Paxton, notable for being one of the only Attorneys General not to sign onto a pledge to support the peaceful transfer of power when it looked like his boy might lose. As Oliver opined, Trump’s roster of potential cabinet members represents a “deep bench of idiots, freaks, and wannabe tough guys eager to get into the White House and start breaking things.”
So [deep breath unsuccessfully seeking to restore the will to go on] what’s to be done to counter said clown car of racists, loons, Apartheid-reminiscing oligarchs, outright white supremacist lizard-people (Stephen Miller, looking your way), and others attracted to Donald Trump’s winning message of division, hate, lies, and cheap beachfront properties in an ethnically cleansed Gaza? Well, John Oliver doesn’t sugarcoat. At least if his initial message, “I’m not going to say it’s going to be okay—it isn’t” is any indication.
Still, Last Week Tonight, uniquely in the current TV landscape of anti-Trump zingers and glib one-liners, dares look beyond the cathartic but (as we’ve seen) unproductive simple mockery to clear-eyed further action. On the macro level, Oliver urged Democrats to—in the words of noted celebrity something Kim Kardashian—”Get your f**kin’ ass up and work.” Among the lame-duck measures Oliver touted were President Biden extending temporary protected status to vulnerable immigrants about to be rounded up by Trump and hench-thing Miller’s appallingly racist deportation squads and granting life in prison status to federal death row prisoners under risk of another Trump-ian “kill ’em all” execution spree. He also told Biden to get up off his ass (KK’s words) and fill vital slots at the NSA and IRS, two oversight agencies that Donald Trump and his shifty allies would very much like to not look too closely into their affairs.
Congress should buck any idea of packing up and cowering over the next few months and instead buckle down to confirm the outstanding Biden judicial appointments before Trump can further tip the scales of justice right into his greedy, felonious lap. The Senate should also pass the House-approved PRESS Act, which would protect journalists from having to reveal confidential sources—even if, and we’re just spitballing here, someone has information about a certain political figure being astoundingly, nakedly corrupt and threatening to jail reporters who dare tell anybody.
But that’s all in the hands of the Democratic Party which—let’s be honest here—has never been exactly gung-ho about heroically rising to the occasion in defeat. (Still, call your reps and light a fire under their asses.) On the local front, Oliver noted how seven states on Election Day either enshrined abortion rights in their state constitutions or overturned repressive state abortion laws. (And that Florida is so GOP-screwed that the 57% of Floridians who similarly voted for reproductive rights only lost because of that legislature rigging the game.)
Oliver also showed how, despite the GOP’s full-on, massively funded anti-trans hate blitz, some 35 openly trans candidates won their races around the country, including Delaware’s Sarah McBride, America’s first openly transgender member of Congress. He also quoted newly elected—in deep-red Kentucky—Lexington-Fayette Urban County Council member Emma Curtis, who stated, “You can succeed because of who you are, not for what discriminatory politicians tell you have to be.” “F*ck yeah it does,” Oliver responded to Curtis’ asserting, “This city belongs to you, too.”
But for those viewers who aren’t especially comforted by these genuine but overshadowed victories for human decency and democracy, Oliver gets it. “I know that focusing on the good news this week feels like finding 20 dollars in your pocket in the middle of a bear attack,” Oliver noted sympathetically, adding, “But it is important to take your silver linings where you can find them.”
Noting how literally everything from the environment, to human rights, to Ukraine, Gaza, SCOTUS, and “right-wing dips*ts” like literal Nazi and Trump pal Nick Fuentes leading his incel army to screech “Your body my choice” at women has him ready to hurl his phone into the sea, Oliver urged everyone to feel their feelings. Grief has stages, and if part of John Oliver’s process is to scream himself red-faced on national TV at the prospect of yahoos asking him if he’s grateful for four more Trump years’ worth of material, then that’s his process.
Once we’ve all screamed, drunk, ate, punched, coma-slept, or otherwise vented our fury at this fraction of a man and his cadre of simpleton bigots’ crowing victory, however, Oliver quoted that sage of sages, Mr. Rogers. “Find the helpers” might be advice for kids, but it’s also a great way to actually make a difference, as Oliver pitched for viewers to support organizations in their area actively looking out for LGBTQ people, immigrants, women, and others directly targeted for abuse and/or persecution by a second Trump administration.
But first—and Oliver wanted to stress this again—you have to take care of yourself. Because resistance is hard, and this promises to be a long and grueling road. But Oliver once more quotes Emma Curtis in saying, “Your city belongs to you too.” And if everybody out there is, as Oliver put it in obvious empathy, “exhausted, confused, scared, and running on f**king fumes,” he also counseled, “You might actually be surprised just how far you can get, even on fumes.”
Buckle in everybody.
Cardus Endus
Quincy Jones’ time as musician, producer, discoverer and nurturer of talent, political activist, and all around coolest guy in the world ended on November 3, when he died at 91. Jones’ legacy is cemented in all of American culture, although perhaps most relevantly at this juncture in his assessment of one Donald Trump, of whom the 28-time Grammy winner said, “I used to hang out with him. He’s a crazy motherf**ker. Limited mentally. A megalomaniac, narcissistic. I can’t stand him.”
And just because, Jones continued, “A symphony conductor knows more about how to lead than most businesspeople —more than Trump does. He doesn’t know sh*t. Someone who knows about real leadership wouldn’t have as many people against him as he does. He’s a f**king idiot.”
Rest in peace, king.
Last Lines Tonight
“Im not sure how you reach out to moderate Republicans more than appearing with Liz Cheney multiple times unless you literally dig up Henry Kissinger’s corpse and prop it up at a rally in Michigan as Katy Perry sings ‘Rolling in the Deep.'”
refuting the “Harris should have gone right” crowd
“Look, it has been a rough week. and if you’re anything like me, first, my deepest sympathies.”
and here we go
“You know what, just leave it. I’ve been becoming more birdlike with every passing year.”
Oliver, after his crew put up the same turkey-head filter pranksters put over former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen’s ill-fated aMA
“You are right that you can’t take away your dignity but only because you just surrendered it willingly there.”
On katy perry’s ill-considered attempt to sing whitney houston at a harris rally
“Which I guess is yet another thing Trump will now inherit without actually having to work for it.”
On Trump preparing to take credit for the Biden-era booming economy
“He’s really stretching ‘respectfully’ there to breaking point. ‘With all due respect, that’s a dumb idea for babies. Meaning no offense, what ding-dong dreamt up this five-alarm f**kfest?”
on former Treasury secretary Larry Summers mocking Elon Musk’s promise to slash $2 trillion from the budget
