John Oliver dissects Trump’s “absolutely insane” week

May 22, 2017

1 minute to read

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVFdsl29s_Q

John Oliver usually devotes the majority of Last Week Tonight to a lengthy segment on a complex issue like net neutrality or dialysis. But for Sunday’s episode, the host decided that the last seven days of the Trump presidency deserved their own show.

“For one week and one week only, the show Last Week Tonight is actually going to talk at some length about the last week, tonight,” Oliver said. “The reason we unfortunately have to do that is the last seven days have been absolutely insane.”

Oliver proceeded to run through the almost-daily controversies of Trump’s administration, starting with last Monday’s reports that the president revealed highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister and Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak. By Tuesday, those headlines had been replaced by reports that the president had asked former FBI Director James Comey to end the investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn regarding the latter’s contacts with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. and for allegedly misleading acting Attorney General Sally Yates about his contacts.

By Wednesday — “just four days ago, which is the equivalent of 150 years in 2017 time,” Oliver said — that story had been bumped by Trump’s commencement speech to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, during which he complained that “no politician has been treated worse, or more unfairly” than himself.

In response, Oliver invoked the names of past presidents Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy, who were all assassinated while in office.

“James Garfield was shot, and then, to find the bullet, Alexander Graham Bell devised a kind of metal detector, which didn’t work, so doctors tried to fish around in his guts for the bullet with unwashed fingers, which just made his infection worse, so he died in horrible pain,” Oliver said. “But yeah, Alec Baldwin sometimes does a mean impression of you on TV. So yeah, it’s basically the same, isn’t it?”