The start of a new week means waking up to the latest slice of subversion from John Oliver, who has spent the better part of 2016 offering brief moments of clarity on Last Week Tonight. But this week is no ordinary week. With the nation's morale still in a tailspin following last Tuesday's Electoral College tragedy, Oliver spent the entirety of this week's episode coming to terms with the reality in which this sort of President-elect is possible. The most important thing? Let's cool it with the all the "Give him a chance!" nonsense.
"Let us begin with our first and only story, the 2016 election," Oliver said at the top of Sunday's episode, "or as you may know it, I Thought I Wanted It to Be Over But Now That It's Over I Wish It Was Still Going On Because It Turns Out the Ending Is Even Worse Twenty-Fucking-Sixteen. The results on Tuesday were a little different than what just over half the voters wanted." After Oliver reminded us of Tuesday's paralyzing turn of events with clips of various talking heads saying the results aloud, he dubbed the election a maddening victory for racists.
"It's true," Oliver said. "That happened. It turns out instead of showing our daughters that they could someday become president, America proved that no grandpa is too racist to become leader of the free world." In addition to the obvious fears surrounding his campaign trail rhetoric, Oliver is worried about the President-elect getting "normalized" by a perplexingly supportive media.
"Our President-elect has at various times said he'd bomb civilians, loot oil, and waterboard, which isn't a military strategy so much as the series of words that Donald Rumsfeld mutters so he can stay hard while he's masturbating," Oliver reminded viewers. Though he understands the sentiment behind urging Americans to give the President-elect "a chance," Oliver argued that chance may not have been earned.
"Optimism is nice if you can swing it," Oliver said. "But you've got to be careful because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump. And he's not normal. He's abnormal." As Oliver, Larry David, Amy Schumer, and others then explained, the message here is simple: Fuck 2016.
