“It’s true. That happened.”
Last Week Tonight host John Oliver is still processing the fact that Donald Trump will become the next president of the United States. Among other things, that means Trump will potentially shape the Supreme Court for decades. “That is one of those phrases you never thought you would hear — like ‘Vanilla Ice is picking up his Nobel Prize in physics,’” Oliver said.
The late-night host tried to come to grips with what comes next. His big concern: The media and Americans will now normalize Trump — through, among other things, hopes for Trump to succeed so the country, too, can succeed.
While Oliver agreed “in the broadest sense” that it would typically be good to hope for the president’s success, this is not a normal situation.
“Optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you’ve got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump — and he’s not normal,” Oliver said. “He’s abnormal. He’s a human ‘What Is Wrong with This Picture?’ He sticks out like a sore thumb, and frankly he even looks like a sore thumb. So giving him a chance, in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies that he’s proposed, is dangerous. Because some of them are alarming.”
Oliver then listed some of Trump’s campaign proposals, from his promise to deport millions of undocumented immigrants to banning Muslims from entering the US. It’s “the to-do list on Satan’s refrigerator, which of course Satan no longer needs now that hell has frozen over,” Oliver said.
And Oliver didn’t find comfort in the idea that Trump just didn’t mean his policy proposals. “That leaves us with two devastating options,” he said. “Either we just elected a president who didn’t mean a single word he said or we elected one who did.”
So Oliver put a plea out to his viewers and the media: “Keep reminding yourself this is not normal,” Oliver said. “A Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address. And that is not normal. It is fucked up.”
