John Oliver mocked — who else? — President Donald Trump in the opening segment of Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, specially criticizing his plan to place at least 10 percent tariffs on good from every country that trades with the U.S.
Oliver showed a video clip of Trump saying, “This will be indeed the golden age of America. It’s coming back.”
Oliver’s response: “If you mean ‘golden age,’ the way we tend to describe the last decade before an old person dies, then yes, it feels like we are very much in the golden age of America right now. Thank you.”
The HBO host then went on to show video of Trump holding up a small chart as his visual aid (which was mocked in the cold open of NBC’s Saturday Night Live over the weekend). Trump noted the small size of the chart, saying he had a bigger one to bring but the wind made it challenging and it “had no chance of standing.”
Mused Oliver: “That is smart, and it shows they really thought of everything that might go wrong while announcing their plan to shoot the economy in the dick. Although, I will point out, if wind was a problem there, and we checked with experts on this, the White House does have an ‘inside part.’”
Oliver went on to note that there has been some criticism of the chart and how the administration arrived at some of its data.
“Unfortunately, that chart is ridiculous for a number of reasons,” he said. “For one thing, it features an estimate of tariffs charged to the USA by other countries that no one could figure out until a financial journalist realized it was just how much we export to that country minus how much we import from them, divided by how much we import, which is just stunningly dumb because those things have nothing to do with tariffs. It it’d be like trying to figure out the square footage of your home by dividing your phone number by your dog’s age, or taking your temperature by measuring your head’s distance to the sun. It’s not gonna get you the answer that you’re looking for.”
He went on to note that the White House released a “more complicated-looking equation they said they’d used, but people quickly pointed out that one symbol meant exports, one meant imports, and the other two numbers were variables set at 4 and 1/4, so they canceled each other out, meaning it’s the same stupid equation everyone said it was in the first place.”
But the whole tariffs plan “gets even dumber,” Oliver said, noting that among the countries facing tariffs are the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are remote islands near Antarctica that contain a healthy penguin population but no humans.
Said Oliver “Oh my God. Imagine going back to 2015 and telling your younger self, ‘President Trump will enter a trade war with a remote island of penguins.’ You’d have a lot of understandable questions like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
Meanwhile, after Trump announced the tariffs, the stock market took a dive. He played audio of a Restoration Hardware earnings call, in which chairman and CEO Gary Friedman was learning of what was happening to his own company’s stock price in real time.
“What’s our stock now?” Friedman said during the call. “I mean, I guess, you know, the stock went down, you know, based on some of the numbers we reported, and then it got killed because of, uh, um, oh really? Oh shit. OK.”
Joked Oliver: “Yeah, that sums it up pretty well. In fact, I’m not sure there’s a better encapsulation of what it feels like to live through this Trump presidency than those five words. ‘Oh really? Oh shit. OK.’”
Later in the show, Oliver acknowledged another HBO show, The White Lotus, which aired its season finale earlier Sunday, by joking that HBO is the “incest network,” referring to one of the show’s biggest story lines this season (not to mention story lines in two other HBO series, Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon).
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