What John Oliver said about Donald Trump is so important
Not that anyone needed a reminder of precisely how terrible 2016 has been to us (srsly, what did we do to deserve this flood of fuckery?), but what John Oliver said about Donald Trump will certainly drive home that point. Last night, Oliver used the final Last Week With Tonight of the year to address Trump winning the presidential election, offering us a sobering statement about why we shouldn’t be passive in the face of a Trump presidency.
Despite the fact that Oliver once jokingly begged Trump to run for president (something for which the talk show host has since expressed regret), his words on not embracing the president-elect without keeping Trump’s problematic policies and ideologies at the forefront are serious and extremely important.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-rSDUsMwakI?feature=oembed
"Optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you've got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump, and he’s not normal," Oliver said of journalists who are encouraging others to give Trump a chance. "He's abnormal. He's a human What Is Wrong With This Picture… So giving him a chance, in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies he has proposed, is dangerous. Because some of them are alarming."
He added:
“Some argue he might not have meant all those things,” Oliver said. “That leaves us with two bad options: Either we just elected a president who didn’t mean a single word he said, or we elected one who did.”
These realizations are what make it increasingly difficult to find comfort after the election, but while Oliver’s words make us wince at the painful reality, they are a necessary and helpful reminder to maintain awareness and to remain uncomfortable with a president who promotes racism, sexism and the revocation of women’s rights, among other horrifying things.
Oliver finalized his point against normalizing what a Trump presidency represents, adding, “a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll will deliver the next State of the Union Address, and that is not normal.”
