A week after John Oliver ripped into Donald Trump for making lewd comments about women, the HBO comedian returned on Sunday to take on the GOP nominee’s claims that the U.S. election is rigged.
“We are in a coffin and we are buried alive in the horror that is this election,” Oliver joked in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight.
Oliver looked back on the past week in which Trump dealt with a growing list of sexual assault accusations against him by doubling down on his repeated attacks on Hillary Clinton, the media, and the election process as a whole. Noting Trump said the “shackles are off,” Trump also broke with Republican leadership yet again due to diminishing support from his own party and the GOP nominee peddled conspiracy theories, such as his claim that “Hillary Clinton meets in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty.”
Oliver added, “Holy shit! That is not the kind of thing that a presidential candidate says! It’s the kind of thing that a man in a tinfoil hat screams inside his concrete bunker because he thinks his soup cans have been bugged by the lizard people in the White House.”
On the subject of Trump’s repeated claims that the election is being “rigged” in favor of his opponent, Oliver said: “Telling your supporters the election is being rigged is legitimately dangerous because faith in fair elections and in peaceful transfer of power are essential foundations for a democracy, and undermining them is like asking why one of those giant eagles didn’t just fly Frodo all the way to Mordor in The Lord of the Rings: If enough people start thinking that way, the whole thing kind of falls apart.”
Oliver also cited his annoyance at Trump’s dominance of the past week’s news cycle. The comedian argued that Trump’s latest scandals have managed to overshadow “serious issues” raised by the most recent Wikileaks releases regarding the Clinton campaign. “It is hard to focus on any of that when the man who could be our next president is just one unearthed Teen People interview away from being on a sex offender registry,” Oliver joked in reference to some of the damning evidence against Trump recently unearthed from past interviews.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UI50rK5QB4
Finally, Oliver noted that the wide range of subjects being attacked by Trump has meant the GOP candidate is “increasingly positioning himself as the only source of truth and goodness in America.”
The comedian also played a recent clip of Trump speaking about the nasty tone of this election at one of his rallies, telling supporters that he is taking “all of these slings and arrows gladly—for you.” Trump then said he’d been warned that the election would be a “‘journey to hell,'” but assured his supporters that it will actually be “a journey to heaven.”
An incredulous Oliver responded by mocking Trump for seemingly evoking a comparison between himself and Jesus Christ. “[Trump] sees himself as a lone, persecuted savior who started out in construction, is suffering on behalf of his followers, and will one day take them to heaven,” Oliver said. “We have known for a while that Donald Trump thinks he is the second coming of Christ, but it turns out he might mean that literally. The only real difference being, with Christ we think, ‘What would Jesus do?’ and with Trump it’s more, ‘Jesus, what the f–k did you just do!?'”
