John Oliver opened Last Week Tonight on Sunday by assailing officials in the Trump administration for Signalgate and its handling of mass deportations, labeling them “ deeply unserious people doing deeply stupid things with massively serious consequences.”
”It’s true, they put a journalist in their group chat,” Oliver said, “something [Jeffrey] Goldberg revealed in the article headlined, ‘The Trump administration Accidentally Texted Me Their War Plans,’ one of the greatest headlines I read this week, alongside ‘Monkeys Chase British Tourists out of Hotel Pool in Thailand.’”
Oliver also described the glib tone of the Signal chat itself as “grotesque” in light of the civilian casualties from the attack on Yemen. “‘Prayer hands. Muscle. Flag. Flag,’” he said. “ Those clearly aren’t the right emojis to send after a bombing because the right emojis are no emojis. It’s basically like asking which Minion meme is right to send after Dylan’s ex-wife died in a car accident.”
He then took on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem‘s use of deportees in an El Salvadoran prison as a backdrop for a threatening video. “The visual alone there is deeply disturbing,” he said. “Using caged prisoners with shaved heads as a backdrop is a bold choice given, you know, history. And it’s now the most appalling use of a front-facing video from anyone in his administration, even surpassing the time Cheryl Hines-hawked body cream in front of a nude RFK Jr. showing off his wet armpits. And I do not say that lightly.”
“The past couple of months,” he concluded, “have seen this administration operate with incompetence and cruelty interspersed with the occasional Nazi-adjacent visuals. The good news is they’re facing major pushback from federal courts over their mass deportations. The bad news is they’ve already done a ton of damage. But if they think they can brush off illegally detaining and imprisoning 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. Or to put it in the language that they seem to prefer, ‘Go fuck yourselves, assholes. Love, America.’”
From Rolling Stone US
