John Oliver delivered his first “Last Week Tonight” episode since Donald Trump took office with a bleak assessment of how things are going so far: “This is all bonkers, terrifying and darkly absurd.”
“The next four years are going to feel incredibly shit,” the comic predicted at the end of his show’s Season 12 premiere on Sunday. “The potential for pain is devastating, as is the sheer amount of it that’s already been doled out.”
He continued:
“We see wealthy, powerful men use the levers of government for their personal advantage as well as their personal grievances, and we’re being governed by people who think good public policy consists of: ‘cut off funding to anyone who isn’t me,’ ‘make it illegal to mention people who are different from me,’ and ‘fuck it, let’s steal Canada while we’re at it.’”
Oliver used his monologue to unpack some of the most shocking developments over the past four weeks from the Trump administration: freezing billions of dollars in federal assistance, citing the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency’s mission to slash wasteful spending; threatening to punish federal workers who fail to report any diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives taking place in their departments; and rankling the country’s two biggest trade partners with tariff threats.
Trump has also floated annexing Canada, attempted to begin mass deportation efforts, and sought to restrict gender-affirming health care amid a flurry of executive orders targeting trans people.
“It is worse than we thought, and we thought about it a lot,” Oliver said. “To put it mildly, things aren’t looking great right now, but defeat is a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
He called on viewers to show solidarity with federal workers, pointing to an op-ed written recently by a former federal prosecutor, Brendan Ballou, who recalled how protests and public outrage in 2017 against Trump’s controversial travel ban “gave us courage and the knowledge that we were, in fact, working in the public interest” when Ballou and his colleagues worked to limit the scope of the order targeting Muslim-majority countries.
“Advocacy on the outside made advocacy on the inside possible,” Ballou wrote.
Oliver said that insight highlighted how support and solidarity “really matter.”
“Now is absolutely not the time to be looking away and saying, ‘This is what you fuckers voted for’ and turning your backs, especially when there are many good people doing important work out there who you can both join and support,” Oliver said.
The years ahead will be exhausting, the comic added, “and to get through this, we’re going to have to find a balance between acknowledging the hell of what is going on and finding the joy that can sustain us.”
Watch the episode below.
