Just as the fictional Logan Roy once decried his children as “not serious people,” so too did John Oliver blast President Donald Trump‘s administration as woefully incompetent, especially in the wake of the Signal group chat leak, revealed by a bombshell report in The Atlantic last week.
Titled “The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans,” the host kicked off Last Week Tonight by calling it “one of the greatest headlines I read this week, alongside, ‘Monkeys Chase British Tourist Out Of Hotel Pool In Thailand: ‘Scariest Moment Of My Life‘; ‘This Octopus’s Other Car Is a Shark‘; ‘Lots of fun, good weather greets guests during Deerfield’s 24th annual — wait for it — Testicle Festival.’”
Oliver then honed in on the emojis used in the chat, called “Houthi PC Small Group,” deployed by people like National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who along with another colleague responded with the various icons: fist, American flag, muscle, flame and prayer hands.
“Those clearly aren’t the right emojis to send after a bombing because the right emojis are no emojis,” the political comic said. “It’s basically like asking which Minion meme is right to send after Dylan’s ex-wife died in a car accident. They weren’t together anymore, were they? But it feels wrong not to send something when the answer is maybe send flowers and not this actual meme of a Minion cheering in a graveyard holding a sign that says ‘Sorry about your ex wife.’ That is not the answer.”
He continued, “This is something of a motif for this administration: deeply unserious people doing deeply stupid things with massively serious consequences.”
Oliver also discussed the mass deportations of Venezuelan migrants allegedly involved in the multinational crime organization Tren de Aragua sent to El Salvador’s notorious mega-prison Cecot, with flimsy reasoning accompanying their lack of due process, including having tattoos. One person awaiting asylum who does not have any tattoos and whose government documentation was riddled with mistakes was also deported.
On Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s video in front of a cage filled with prisoners at Cecot, he said, “The visual alone there is deeply disturbing. Using caged prisoners with shaved heads as a backdrop is a bold choice given, you know, history, and is now the most appalling use of a front-facing video from anyone in this administration, even surpassing the time Cheryl Hines holds body cream in front of a nude RFK Jr. showing off his wet armpits, and I do not say that lightly.”
He added, “The past couple of months have seen this administration operate with incompetence and cruelty, interspersed with the occasional Nazi-adjacent visuals. The good news is they’re facing massive pushback over the mass deportations. The bad news is they’ve already done a ton of damage. But if they think they can brush off illegally detaining innocent people with the same flippancy they reserve for adding the wrong person to a group chat, they should know in no uncertain terms that the rest of us will push back hard.”
In concluding, he released his own set of emojis — a running man, middle finger, pointing finger, peach alongside a hole, red heart and an American flag: “Or to put it in the language they seem to prefer: ‘Go f— yourselves, a–holes, love America.’”
