John Oliver again criticized President Trump on Last Week Tonight, this time over the latter’s response to increasing protests against immigration raids across the country.
“As you undoubtedly know, last weekend, ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] conducted sweeping raids across the country as part of an escalation ordered by Stephen Miller,” the White House deputy chief of staff, Oliver said on Sunday’s edition of his show. “Miller reportedly told ICE officials to just go out there and arrest illegal aliens, suggesting they target Home Depots or 7-Eleven convenience stores. So that’s what happened, and from the start, it was a mess.”
Oliver showed a news segment featuring footage of people getting detained by Homeland Security in Los Angeles. A man who was interviewed on camera said, “My friends started yelling ICE, ICE, ICE. I thought he was joking, but he wasn’t. Then I saw all the day laborers starting to run.”
Said Oliver: “That is awful. Someone yelling ICE is almost never going to be a positive thing. Best-case scenario, you’ve somehow time traveled back to 2014 and have to do an ice bucket challenge, something, by the way, that [Trump] did because he was nominated by, this is true, Mike Tyson, Vince McMahon and Homer Simpson. It was a simpler time,” he quipped.
Oliver then mentioned the escalating protests in Los Angeles, which prompted Trump to send in thousands of National Guard troops and hundreds of Marines “to protect federal law enforcement from the attacks of a vicious and violent mob,” as Trump put it.
“And some of the radical left, they say, oh, that’s not nice,” Trump added. “Well, if we didn’t do it, there wouldn’t be a Los Angeles. It’d be burning today, just like the houses were burning a number of months ago” in the devastating fires that swept through areas of L.A. including Pacific Palisades and Altadena.
Said Oliver: “OK, 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, [the] only milestone left after this is death.’ Yeah, everyone knows that and we’re all trying not to think about it.”
Oliver then noted that Trump’s move was opposed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, among other officials.
“Why would you send troops if there is nothing for them to do?” Oliver asked. “You’re just gonna have 4,000 soldiers wandering around L.A. swinging by the Hollywood Walk of Fame and going, ‘Oh, Christian Slater. OK.’” (The actor received a star on the Walk of Fame earlier this month.)
Oliver then acknowledged that there was “sporadic vandalism and rock throwing and some Waymo cars were set on fire.”
“But those were isolated incidents not at all representative of the protest as a whole,” he continued. “And I’m not saying that those aren’t striking visuals. I’m just saying 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 cover-up of car sexual abuse.”
Oliver opined that Trump’s response to the protests “felt completely over-the-top, especially when you consider troops will apparently be there for 60 days at a cost to taxpayers of roughly $134 million. And usually when that much is spent on something completely pointless, we at least get to see one of the Avengers in it,” he joked.
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