John Oliver spent the opening segment of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight talking about President Donald Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress last week and the Democrats’ response to it.
The HBO host began by noting House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) had said before the speech that he wanted to “frame it in gilded gold.”
Oliver’s response: “This isn’t important, but gilding is a technique where you cover things that are not gold in a thin layer of gold to make them look like gold. So you wouldn’t gild gold because gold is gold already. It’d be like [Vice President] J.D. Vance wearing a T-shirt that says ‘unbearable bitch’ on it. It is simply redundant.”
The Last Week Tonight host noted that some Democrats didn’t show up for the speech, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.).
“In hindsight, no-showing might have been the right move because Democrats in the room didn’t seem to have a coordinated plan to respond,” Oliver said. “Some dressed up in matching outfits while others held up signs on paddles,” which had messages like “Musk steals,” “Save Medicaid” and “Protect veterans.”
Oliver then noted that Rep. Al Green’s (D-Texas) outburst during the speech, which prompted 10 Democrats voting to censure Green for his actions “despite similar protests during Biden’s term, triggering no such repercussions. That move was in keeping with centrist Democrats’ current insistence on bending over backwards to cater to conservatives,” Oliver opined.
He said that sentiment was included in Elissa Slotkin’s (D-Mich.) official rebuttal to the president in which she criticized Trump’s behavior during his recent meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
“Reagan must be rolling in his grave,” she said. “We all want an end to the war in Ukraine, but Reagan understood that true strength required America to combine our military and economic might with moral clarity. … As a Cold War kid, I’m thankful it was Reagan and not Trump in office in the 1980s. Trump would have lost us the Cold War.”
Quipped Oliver: “Yeah, she criticized Trump by praising Reagan, and I will admit there are some positive things you can say about Reagan, like he was our only president to make a movie with a chimp, or — he’s dead. But his moral clarity might come as a surprise to any gay people who lived through the 1980s. I’m just saying, if you brought Reagan back from the dead and told him all the racist shit Trump’s managed to do in less than two months, he’d come so hard he’d die again.”
Oliver then went on to note that Trump’s approval rating is the “lowest on record of any president at this point in their term — with the sole exception of himself eight years ago.”
That’s why, he continued, it was “refreshing” to see Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for pushing back by calling out Trump for his administration’s recent announcement that it will enact tariffs on imports from countries including Canada.
“Canadians are hurt. Canadians are angry,” Trudeau said in his response. “We’re going to choose to not go on vacation in Florida or Old Orchard Beach [Maine] or wherever. We’re going to choose to try to buy Canadian products and forego bourbon and other classic American products. And yeah, we’re probably going to keep booing the American anthem.”
Quipped Oliver: “So there’s a lot to unpack there, starting with the fact that it really seemed like Trudeau just forgot anything America makes other than bourbon. Canadians will forego bourbon and, um, what’s that beer that tastes like a lime shit itself? Bud Light, that’s right. We won’t have any of that either.”
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