John Oliver took another informative dive into this week’s pandemic news, bringing humor to the Trump administration’s incompetence in dealing with the crisis.
“I’m shooting this at home, alone, with no one else in the room,” Oliver began. “So you won’t hear any laughter tonight. Please don’t feel that’s at all awkward—it certainly isn’t for me, though I started comedy doing stand-up in England, so I am more than used to doing jokes to silence.”
Diving in, Oliver laid out the situation: “COVID-19 continues to rip around the globe … and the president has only recently seemed to realize the gravity of the situation. … As recently as a month ago, he was saying we have it ‘very much under control,’ adding, ‘Stock market starting to look very good to me!’ before abruptly shifting gears to claim that he ‘felt it was a pandemic’ long before it was called one.”
“On Tuesday, our ‘wartime president’ seemed to already be considering giving up the fight and encouraging everyone to go back to work,” added Oliver, highlighting the social distancing guideline date, which Trump has since changed from Easter to April 30. “The date he’s setting is just two weeks from now, which is objectively way too soon. Although if you are going to pick a holiday to break a quarantine, you could do a lot worse than one honoring the time that Jesus was supposed to stay inside, and didn’t.”
“It’s worth taking a moment to appreciate just how irresponsible that attitude is. Because we wasted so much time that we could have spent preparing, the virus is now widespread,” Oliver continued. “And thanks to how we have massively botched the rollout of testing the virus, we still don’t know exactly how bad things are. So strict social-distancing measures are our best shot at slowing this outbreak.”
Oliver then took a look at political figures who have said that many older people would sacrifice their lives for the U.S. economy: “I’m in no way minimizing the economic suffering caused by the shutdown. But the idea that people should sacrifice themselves for the economy is absurd. And yet, it actually gained traction this week.”
Added Oliver of radio host Glenn Beck and Lt. Governor of Texas Dan Patrick: “You get that the coronavirus is not The Hunger Games, right? You can’t volunteer yourself as tribute. And what you’re doing is actually much darker: You’re actively volunteering others, including people of all ages with health conditions, to die. And even if these guys are okay with letting the coronavirus kill as many people as it feels like so that the economy’s protected — which, again: really?!? — there are — and I cannot believe I have to say this — significant drawbacks to hundreds of thousands of people dying.”
Then Oliver was back to Trump: “This was always going to be hard. But it actually didn’t need to be this hard. And that is why it’s so profoundly disheartening that we’re being led through this crisis by a man who may be less equipped to deal with this historical moment than anybody in recorded history.”
Oliver also blasted Trump for making it a political issue, and cut to a clip of the president saying, “I think there are certain people who would like it not to open so quickly. I think there are certain people who would like it to do poorly financially, because they think that would be very good as far as defeating me at the polls. I don’t know if that’s so, but I think it’s so that people in your profession that would like that to happen.”
“Oh, for f**k’s sake! No one is thinking about you,” Oliver hissed. “These guidelines did not revolve around you.For once, something has come along that is more toxic and more threatening than this president, and somehow, he’s got f—ing stage envy. And look, I know this isn’t exactly the first time that I’ve criticized Donald Trump, but I can’t tell you how much I was rooting for him to do this better.”
