Nearly a month after their last segment on Donald Trump, “Last Week Tonight” attempted to take Trump’s candidacy seriously on Sunday night.
“The border wall is one of the few policy proposals Trump has talked about in detail,” host John Oliver said. “So instead of mocking or dismissing it out of hand, tonight let’s take a serious proposal by a serious presidential candidate seriously.”
What will it be made of? Who will pay for it? Where will it go? Oliver gets to the bottom of it all—and comes back to the xenophobia.
Here’s the segment, from HBO:
Satire doesn’t work for me anymore. The issues are so deadly for so many innocent people that I find it hard to laugh.
Oliver doesn’t do satire. He injects humor into straight reporting. You may remember straight reporting, unless you are youngish.
You remember satire, unless you are youngish.
I’ll agree that my enjoyment of this particular bit was tempered somewhat by the knowledge that tens of millions of Americans really, really think that the fence is a good idea. That’s pretty sad.
One more gift of the Gingrich “revolution,” one more gift of the 8-year-long collective nightmare of the non-reality-based community: so-called “professional journalists” so bitch-slapped into subservience out of fear of being accused of “bias” that the most informative, most important reporting in America today is done by comedians.