As Last Week Tonight was on hiatus for several months, John Oliver had yet to formally address President Trump a.k.a. “two words that will never sound normal together no matter how often you same them.”
Oliver quickly caught up with the state of affairs including the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, named “Man of the Year by Wrong Side of History Magazine,” according to Oliver who guessed that most of Trump’s Cabinet picks were made sarcastically.
Oliver then noted that Trump struggles with the truth, including initially claiming that it didn’t rain during his inauguration speech, when video shows that it did. “That’s where we are currently at,” said Oliver. “We have a President capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day.”
While Oliver concedes that “all Presidents lie” to some extent, according to Oliver, “Trump’s relationship with the truth is going to be of profound importance going forward.”
He then ran down some of Trump’s so-called “alternative facts,” which Oliver believes Trump is extrapolating from news outlets like Steve Bannon’s Breitbart, Alex Jones’s InfoWars, and Fox News. Trump watches and reads those outlets and then puts his faith in their statements. “Faith and facts aren’t like Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton, when you confuse them it actually matters,” said Oliver.
For the good of the nation, Oliver wants to help Trump succeed, though. To that end, Oliver and his team created a series of educational commercials that will run on channels that Trump is known to watch, including Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC. The informative ads, which will air in the D.C. area, are filled with helpful facts that Trump might need, like the name of one of his daughters, the finer points of the Geneva Convention, and the three parts of the nuclear triad.
As Oliver said, “It’s going to be a long presidency.”
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