British comedian John Oliver went off on his home country on Sunday’s edition of “Last Week Tonight” on HBO, blasting the main players in the Leave movement and warning the U.S. not to take elections lightly.
He began by describing the United Kingdom post-Brexit as “a place whose very name after this week’s events is beginning to sound a bit sarcastic.”
Oliver, who was openly pro-Remain, summed up his feelings about the vote for the U.K. to separate from the European Union by comparing it to another nasty surprise, saying he felt awful “in a ‘those Ikea meatballs you love contain horse’ kind of way.”
The vote left him so angry that he could not even enjoy British Prime Minister David Cameron’s resignation, he said.
“It’s like catching an ice cream cone out of the air because a child was hit by the car,” he said.
He then pivoted to Donald Trump, who happened to be in Scotland at one of his resorts the morning after Brexit. He praised the vote during a press conference.
“Your people have taken your country back,” the presumptive GOP nominee said.
Oliver played back that snippet from his press conference, and then quipped, “He just said absolutely nothing. If he had simply breathed audibly into the microphone, the same amount of information would’ve been conveyed.”
He then displayed Trump’s tweet about Brexit from that morning, in which the billionaire mogul equated the feelings surrounding the vote with similar ones in the U.S. that have allowed Trump to rise to political prominence.
The segment ended with Oliver comparing Trump to former London Mayor Boris Johnson (who looks and dresses similarly to Trump) and pleading with the U.S. to not make the same mistake he feels the U.K. made.
“You might think that that’s not going to happen to us in America. We’re not going to listen to some ridiculously-haired buffoon peddling lies and nativism in the hopes of riding a protest vote into power,” he said. “Well, let Britain tell you, it can happen, and when it does, there are no f—-ing do-overs.”
