TV funnyman John Oliver may be willing to start his own church and down a Bud Light Lime for a good cause, but he has no intentions of having a one-on-one chat with Donald Trump.
“I’ve got nothing to say to him,” Oliver said Friday on “CBS This Morning.” “He’s said everything he wants to say. He has no internal monologue, that man. It’s not like you’re going to find that secret nugget he’s holding back. He’s an open book, and that book doesn’t have many interesting words in it.”
The “Last Week Tonight” host scoffed when co-host Gayle King joked that Oliver had endorsed Trump, who currently is second in the Washington Examiner‘s presidential power rankings.
King also asked Oliver, a native Brit, about his thoughts on the American political process.
“It’s undeniably long. Nobody can say that the American democratic process is not too long, indeed too long,” he said. “There’s a lot of balloons involved. American democracy looks like a four-year-old’s birthday party. A lot of debates. A lot of talking without a great deal being said.”
“It’s very frustrating to me, the amount of coverage of the election years before it happens,” he said.
He did stress, however, that his coverage of American politics was not an attempt to catch someone saying something unfortunate, but rather an attempt to milk the reactions to those comments for all they’re worth.
“We tend to start with a story, and then look at people’s reactions to it,” he said. “Our entry is rarely someone saying something stupid. It’s someone saying something interesting, and the people saying something stupidly comes soon afterward.”
To that end, Oliver does not like being labeled “disruptive” or a “journalist,” saying, “Obviously I’m a comedian.”
But he could not deny the power of what has been described as the “John Oliver effect,” like when his segment on net neutrality riled up the public so much, they crashed the FCC’s website.
“That is generally what we look toward: things that have not been covered too much, but are inherently ridiculous,” he said.
