John Oliver to help educate Donald Trump
John Oliver is now in the advertising business.
On the Season 4 premiere of Last Week Tonight on Sunday, he revealed a series of TV spots that will run when he believes Donald Trump will be watching: during morning news shows on MSNBC, Fox News and CNN.
The commercials are designed to educate the president, Oliver said, and they feature an elderly cowboy saying things like, “Just because sometimes it’s cold, that don’t mean there’s no global warmin’. You’re confusing climate with weather, pardner.”
Oliver has made a habit on his HBO series of covering obscure policy issues and then pulling off clever stunts to illuminate the problems he’s addressing.
But, as he noted Sunday, he needed to move away from little-known policy for a moment so he could examine a larger, trickier topic: reality. The episode was a deep dive into the falsehoods the president and his team have propagated.
“(Trump) even lied about the weather at his inauguration,” Oliver said. “We have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day.”
The pattern Oliver has seen with Trump has been that the president “sees something that jibes with his world view, doesn’t check it, half remembers it, then passes it on.”
It all starts with the sources of the president’s information: places like Breitbart and Infowars. According to Oliver, for anyone who also gets their “news” from those places, “Trump looks like the first president ever to tell the real truth.”
So what can people actually do about the spread of bad information? He said social media users should be savvier about what they read and share on the internet — even if it’s a story that confirms their own views.
And, of course, Oliver is doing his part with his ad campaign, which was to debut Monday morning between 8:30 a.m. and 9 a.m., according to the host. The Washington Post