John Oliver is back. After three months of leaving us to our own devices, the Last Week Tonight host finally hit us with nearly 30 straight minutes of Trump-centered shit-calling. The Apprentice presidency, Oliver explained Sunday, is built upon an unsettling diet of TV news.
Oliver began by promising that Last Week Tonight would return to its signature deep-dives in the months ahead, but not without first addressing the concept of reality itself. "Trump has made it clear that reality is not important to him," Oliver explained, running down a long list of examples of the reality TV personality's post-election attempts at bending reality in his favor. "So that is where we are currently at. We have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day."
Trump's "relationship with the truth" will be crucial moving forward, Oliver added. "Any policy discussion has to begin with a shared sense of reality, and Trump's reality can change within a single sentence," he said. To cope with the looming sense of post-truth depression, Oliver suggests we all work to answer the following questions:
- "How did we get a pathological liar in the White House?"
- "Where are his lies coming from?"
- "Why do so many people believe him?"
- "What can we possibly do about it?"
In an effort to prevent Trump's "well-documented 40-year history of bullshit" from continuing, Oliver and the Last Week Tonight team is taking out ads in the DC area on MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News. "As we now know, [Trump] watches morning cable news for information," Oliver said. "So we've actually created a series of commercials in an attempt to bring him up to speed on information he may lack." Those commercials will start airing Monday morning.
