John Oliver's 'Trump vs. Truth' Brilliantly Explains Why President Trump's Greatest Opponent Is Reality Itself
"Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver began his new season reminiscing about a time before President Trump's lies dominated mainstream media.
"Normally we'd like to focus this part of the show on complex, depressing policy issues; something fun like CO2 emissions from hearses or space poverty or the proliferation of special-purpose taxing districts," Oliver began.
"We want to keep doing those kind of things, but unfortunately we can't until we address something even bigger: the concept of reality itself. And that is because of this guy," he explained, pointing to a photo of Donald Trump.
President Trump's inauguration was just three weeks ago; yet, it seems like he's been in office for centuries. And while it's still unclear how any of his grandiose proposals will be carried out, one thing is evident...
"Trump has made it clear that reality is not important to him," Oliver pointed out, "He's exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd, he said the election was marred by mass voter fraud with no real proof of that, he also falsely claimed that, compared to Muslims, it was almost impossible for Christian refugees from Syria to get into the U.S.; he even lied about the weather during his inauguration," Oliver rattled off.
"It was almost raining," Trump recalled the following day from the CIA Headquarters. "The rain should have scared them away, but God looked down and he said 'we're not going to let it rain on your speech.'"
"No, he didn't," Oliver exclaimed. Then, as if speaking directly to the president, the host broke down just why the seemingly innocuous statement was just so wrong.
"First, it did rain while you were speaking. That's why your wife was holding up an umbrella and people behind you were wearing ponchos. And second, if God did look down, his only thought would have been, 'Wait, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir? Come on, I'm sick of them and I'm God; could you not book silence, or was silence somehow boycotting this thing too?'" Oliver joked, before getting serious.
"We have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day," Oliver announced dryly.
As if that statement wasn't terrifying enough, Oliver went on to note that while Trump's lying is "clearly not a fresh observation," and that all presidents before him have lied, the sheer amount of falsehoods have left many prominent journalists in a state of perpetual confusion.
"PolitiFact found that just over a quarter of President Obama's statements they evaluated were some degree of false, but with Trump, that number is currently over two-thirds," Oliver explained.
And with a president using a bevy of “frighteningly unreliable sources” ranging from Breitbart News to Alex Jones’ InfoWars, Americans can be sure Trump is "making real policy out of fake facts,” Oliver stated.
Let's at least hope Trump is watching "Last Week Tonight."
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