As much fun as late night comedians have had over the last year and a half poking fun at Donald Trump, they’re really regretting giving the President-elect all that attention.
“It’s true. That happened,” John Oliver said on his HBO show Last Week Tonight.
Oliver, of all people, is regretting baiting Trump to run for president in 2013 saying he would personally write him a campaign check if he ran.
On Oliver’s show the Sunday before the election, he ate some serious crow, saying, “In my defense, I have no defense for that and was hoping to think of one before finishing this sentence and, oh, s**t, it’s over.”
Now, Trump is president, and Oliver dedicated his entire 30 minute program to illustrating why Trump as president is a terrifying reality. He’s afraid that the mainstream media and Americans, in general, are now going to normalize Trump, something we should be wary of.
“Optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you’ve got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump — and he’s not normal,” Oliver explained. “He’s abnormal. He’s a human ‘What Is Wrong with This Picture?’ He sticks out like a sore thumb, and frankly he even looks like a sore thumb. So giving him a chance, in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies that he’s proposed, is dangerous. Because some of them are alarming.”
Oliver then went on to list some of his campaign promises, including mass deportation, building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border, banning Muslims from terrorist-compromised countries from entering the U.S., repealing and replacing Obamacare, and appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
In a 60 Minutes interview with Lesley Stahl that aired Sunday night, he walked some of those policy proposals back with respect to Obamacare, Hillary Clinton, and even same-sex marriage.
While many critics of President-elect Trump are giving him a chance to prove them wrong, it’s clear that this liberal British comedian hasn’t yet come around. It’ll be just more doom and gloom for ratings.
Watch the post-election episode of Last Week Tonight below:
