If there’s anybody on US television at the moment who is guaranteed to talk sense, it’s John Oliver. His show Last Week Tonight is a constant source of bullshit detecting, and it’s found no better target for that in the last year than one Donald Trump.
Like he never went away, Oliver returned to TV screens last night – his first show since Trump took office – to give both barrels to the new US President. Wasting no time going after Trump’s inability to see, as well as tell, the truth, the British host nicely outlines a number of lies, including his ridiculous, instantly-disprovable lie about the weather, before thankfully coming up with his own ingenious solution.
Oliver deduces that Trump gets most of his information from cable outlets, such as Fox News, and subsequently employs the rather fantastic technique of creating his own presidential service announcements in the hope the president will see them.
To put it simply, he’s bought a number of ad slots during shows he knows Trump watches, and created his own little visual nuggets of very important info, designed to stop the president spewing ill-informed and dangerous nonsense across the stratosphere, and disguised them as promos for, well, in the first instance, catheters. It's also given a friendly, ‘All-American’ face in the form of an elderly cowboy who’s been “cowboy-ing for 25 years”.
Oliver has vowed to run the ads until his HBO show is shut down: “We are prepared to educate Donald Trump one by one on topics we’re pretty sure he doesn’t know about.” Props to him, it just might work. Stranger things have happened – you know, like Trump becoming president in the first place.
Watch the entire segment below:
[Images: Rex]
