John Oliver would like to welcome you to another week of the Trump administration by reminding you just what the last one was like. The past seven days have been so crazy, Oliver explained on Sunday night, that his show Last Week Tonight is finally living up to its name: Oliver dedicated the show’s main segment, which usually delves into some more obscure topic, to the Trump-Russia scandal, a saga he has labelled Stupid Watergate, “a scandal with all the potential ramifications of Watergate but where everyone involved is stupid and bad at everything.”
With so much information to digest, Oliver saw fit to boil everything down to just four questions:
“What the fuck is going on?” Last week started off with Trump sharing classified information with the Russians, something you shouldn’t even share with your closest friends, “which in Trump’s case would be the golf caddy he calls Steve even though his name is Doug, a bucket of KFC chicken, and the ghost of Roger Ailes.” But of course, that was just Monday: Since then, we learned that Trump reportedly asked now-fired FBI director James Comey to end the investigation into former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, the Justice Department has appointed a special counsel to investigate the Trump campaign’s connections to Russia, and the investigation has now identified a current White House official as a person of interest in the Russia probe.
“How big a deal is this?” While Fox News commentators may be dismissing the allegations as overblown or not sexy enough, Oliver points out that what we’re seeing is literally the plot of a popular TV show. John McCain went as far as to compare it to Watergate, and the impeachment talk has already started, with Republicans even squabbling over who was the first to consider it as an option. “Although, to be fair,” said Oliver, “The very first person to think, Oh god, he should not be president is probably some unnamed nurse in Queens in the year 1946.”
“Where do we go from here?” The White House’s lawyers have already started researching impeachment, but Oliver questions what that procedure would even look like. “I imagine at least part of it would involve thousands of Muslims celebrating in New Jersey,” quipped Oliver. Mike Pence, a self-described “Christian, conservative, and Republican” who has opposed women’s and gay rights, is next in the line of succession, and even if Pence goes down with the ship, that would make Paul Ryan president. And if Ryan was for some reason unable to assume that responsibility, we’d wind up with President Orrin Hatch. Seriously.
“Is this real life?” Trump is reportedly unhappy and surprised that being president is harder than his old job, which as Oliver points out, just makes him more relatable to most Americans. “I now actually have something in common with Donald Trump because I too preferred my previous life, before he became president.”
