John Oliver returns this Sunday with the first new Last Week Tonight in months, meaning dude is practically everywhere right now. On Tuesday, Oliver joined Stephen Colbert on The Late Show for a wide-ranging discussion on all the White House fuckery he's missed out on since taking a pause last November. Oliver, a green card holder, saved the bulk of his ire for the Trump administration's recent Muslim ban chaos.
"It's pretty much just some cosmetic differences," Oliver said of what he's missed since kicking off his hiatus. "The cosmetic difference really being flames, and the fact America is in it." The day of Trump's inauguration, Oliver astutely explained, was equivalent to staring down a train that's most certainly going to run you over.
"It feels like his inauguration day was 114 years ago," Oliver told Colbert. "We have a long way to go. It's going to be hard. It's easy to be angry on adrenaline, right? But it's much, much harder when you are just tired. And this is going to be exhausting." When Colbert noted we quite possibly have four years of this to endure, Oliver corrected him. "Why not 12?" he said. "Words don't mean anything anymore. Why would numbers?"
Later during the 10-minute chat, Colbert asked Oliver if he feared deportation under the new administration. And that's when Oliver turned the Last Week Tonight-ness up to 11 and let it ride:
"The crazy thing is it's probably not going to happen, but there is a non-zero chance of it happening now. So, yeah, I am slightly concerned. I have an American wife, an American son now. But who knows what's enough? Having a green card used to be enough and yet what we saw with that executive order on immigration, that debacle, things are not what they were supposed to be. You know, we held up translators, Afghan and Iraqi translators at the border who have bled for a country they've never visited, have sacrificed family members for this country. This president has done neither of those things, so it's a little hard to swallow him telling people whether they should be a benefit to America or not."
Oliver is also the current Rolling Stone cover star, speaking with Brian Hiatt for an even more in-depth discussion on the shape of America to come. Peep that shit. Last Week Tonight returns this Sunday.
