John Oliver, like his fellow late-night hosts before him, is ringing the alarm on president Donald Trump‘s authoritarianism.
The Last Week Tonight host wasted no time getting down to brass tacks, addressing the Los Angeles protests that were spurred by the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller-led escalation of ICE raids, with agents targeting a Home Depot parking lot occupied by day laborers to meet increased deportation quotas last week.
Referring to a clip of Trump’s Fort Bragg speech, where POTUS claimed the City of Angels would be “on fire” akin to the devastating Palisades and Eaton blazes earlier this year if he hadn’t mobilized thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines, Oliver remarked: “I know I’m not saying anything new right now, but he is such a dick. There is just no reason to bring up the traumatic fires that are still very much on people’s minds in L.A., for the same reason you shouldn’t open a toast at a retirement party with, ‘Wow, only milestone left after this is death.’ Yeah, everyone knows that, and we’re all trying not to think about it.”
Noting that 1965 was the last time the National Guard was deployed without approval of the corresponding state’s governor, the political comic said that “despite a lot of sensationalist news coverage,” the protests were confined to a small area in downtown L.A. While some Waymos were set on fire and the occasional rock was thrown, Oliver remarked the behavior was “not at all representative of the protests as a whole.”
He continued, “Setting a driverless car on fire is not the same thing as assaulting someone, unless we’re somehow living in the Pixar Cars universe, where burning one is murder, and you’d be condemned to hell by the Car Pope — a real character from Cars 2, by the way — implying there’s car Catholicism, car Jesus and, presumably, a decades-long car coverup of car sexual abuse.” (Indeed, Pope Pinion IV is the leader of the Cartholic Church.)
With an estimated $134 million cost to taxpayers, Oliver quipped, “Usually, when that much is spent on something completely pointless, we at least get to see one of the Avengers in it,” flashing images of the slew of MCU films made in recent years.
Adding that the “supposed peacekeepers” were indeed the ones largely spreading violence — with journalists shot by authorities and the handcuffing/tackling of Sen. Alex Padilla (D-CA) — Oliver said he was uncertain what else might go down between the lag time of taping on Saturday for the Sunday show’s airing.
However, he could say one thing with surety: “When everyone was warning about a slippery slope to authoritarianism under Trump, this is it — because masked government agents grabbing people off the street and deporting them without due process is authoritarianism; sending in the military to crack down on protests against those actions is authoritarianism.”
Despite this, Oliver said he felt hopeful, with the No Kings rallies drawing 5 million attendees nationally, even in Minnesota, which saw a terrifying outbreak of politically motivated violence with the assassination of a lawmaker and shooting of another, both of them Democrats.
“We’re living through a time in American history that will be remembered for acts of incredible cruelty, but I hope it will also be remembered for acts of courage and defiance,” he said.
Throwing it back to an earlier headline from the night — about a runaway zebra in Tennessee that was recently captured — Oliver concluded: “Think of this administration like a loose zebra in the suburbs; it shouldn’t be there. It makes you shout, ‘Oh, no!’ a lot. But maybe if we all work hard enough, we can contain it until the glorious day we get to watch it fly off into the f—ing sunset.”
