Oliver calls Trump presidency ‘exhausting’
‘ LONG WAY TO GO’
John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight may be on hiatus, but the comedian still found time to voice his thoughts on the political climate on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
“It’s exhausting,” Oliver said on Tuesday’s show, commenting on all that has happened since Donald Trump’s election. “It feels like Inauguration Day was 114 years ago. We have a long way to go, it’s going to be hard. It’s easy to be angry on adrenalin, but it’ s much, much harder when you are just tired, and this is going to be exhausting.”
Because “words don’ t mean anything anymore,” he joked that Trump could remain president for 12 years.
Addressing the travel ban, and whether, as an immigrant, he is afraid he may be “tossed out like a tea bag,” Oliver admitted, “I am slightly concerned. I have an American wife and 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.”
He continued, “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.”
Colbert then pulled up the Time Magazine cover with Trump adviser Steve Bannon on the cover, to a round of boos from the audience. Oliver labelled him “a terrifying individual,” but said at the moment, most of his fears have been directed at the confirmation of Betsy DeVos, whom he said is an “inspiration” to children in America, who can now be assured they could all one day be Secretary of Education — “In fact, not just one day, but now. They’re about as well qualified now as she is.”
“Until Inauguration Day, nothing was really happening,” he said. “It was just being tied to a train track, watching the train coming, and then, of course, Inauguration Day is the train hitting you and you’re thinking, ‘ Yup, that felt pretty much how I thought it was going to feel.’”