Season 4 of HBO's Last Week Tonight is underway and its poor writers are already swamped with more mockable Trump content to sift through than ever before. In the second episode of the season, John Oliver addresses Trump's press conference on Last Week Tonight and he basically let reporters' responses speak for themselves: wow.
The event in question took place on Thursday, Feb. 16 and many were expecting it to be notable, considering that it was Donald Trump's first solo press conference as president. But as Oliver pointed out, he came off as mostly unhinged in a 75-minute-long, freewheeling Q&A, which involved ranting about how terrible the press is and some bafflingly insensitive and silencing exchanges with reporters in the press corps.
First, Oliver addressed Trump's exchange with April Ryan, the correspondent who asked the president if he had any plans to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. Initially, Trump didn't seem to know what the acronym CBC stood for, but he then asked Ryan if they were friends of hers and whether she would set up the meeting.
Oliver said, after calling the press conference "batsh*t crazy":
The man is incredible, because what hits you first, there, is the racism of assuming that all black people are friends, and then it's not until later that you really appreciate the sexism of thinking all women are there to perform secretarial tasks for you. The guy packs so much into so little.
He then followed up with a smash cut of anchors across several different cable news outlets (including Fox News) all reacting to the presser with the same single-word response: a dull wow. Oliver added:
A presidential press conference elicited the same reaction you get from people who just watched someone shoot fireworks out of his ass, which when you think about it, is actually fitting, because whenever Trump speaks, what is it, essentially, other than just random sparks and flames sputtering noisily out of a damaged a**hole?
Though Oliver left it at that in an actually pretty restrained segment on the press conference, he couldn't resist throwing one more Trump-related smash cut at his audience. He ran an "And Now, This" segment, entitled "Fox & Friends Is Painfully Aware Of Who Is Watching Them," featuring a collection of clips from the Fox News morning show in which its hosts acknowledge the president right on the air because, as we all know by now, Trump is obsessed with spending his presidency closely watching cable news coverage of himself.
It was totally cringe-worthy and awkward, but also, I guess this is just how we do TV now? With full and unflinching acknowledgement that the president is always watching? Luckily, John Oliver goes more or less ignored by Trump, so these jokes can continue to feel like our little secret.
