John Oliver began last night’s Last Week Tonight with the roller coaster of events surrounding the White House last week — events which merely contributed yet another ride to the tawdry political theme park of the last few months. On Tuesday, President Trump (per Oliver: “two words that still simply do not belong together, like baby pubes or haunted horse”) delivered his first speech to Congress; despite it beginning with a warning against hate and then launching into a xenophobic (but “Presidential!”) rant whose essential thesis was “immigrants are murderers,” pundits were so taken by the superficial tonal shift (from mentally unstable narcissistic bigot to person-reading-things-a-mentally-unstable-narcissistic-bigot-might-say-but-calmly-off-a-teleprompter) as to declare it a success.
But then came the news of Jeff Sessions’ conversations with Sergey Kislyak — which could be unsuspicious, if he hadn’t declared under oath during his Senate confirmation hearing that he hadn’t had any such conversations. Oliver first delivers one of the best-yet Sessions descriptions, deeming him “the result of a House Elf’s one night stand with a Confederate Flag,” then continues to note how during the hearing, Sessions hadn’t even directly been asked whether he’d been in communication with Russians when he emphasized that he hadn’t. “If you ask someone how their weekend was, and they say, ‘Well, I definitely wasn’t masturbating into the slurp machine at the 7/11,'” says Oliver, “you check the fucking security cameras at the 7/11, and you don’t act surprised.”
The late night host then moves on to focus on the facial expressions and turns of phrase of other Trump affiliates — not to mention Trump’s own seeming deflection via an inflammatory wire-tapping accusation against Obama — as they likewise deny Russian ties; he calls this whole ordeal “Stupid Watergate — a potential scandal with all the intrigue of Watergate, except everyone involved is really bad at everything.”
Watch a segment of the episode: