Last Week Tonight

John Oliver Has a Message for Republicans Who Are Suddenly Offended by Donald Trump

“This is on you, too.”

With the second presidential debate completed, it’s time for America to lick its wounds and start the healing process. (After all, we’ll need our strength for the next debate on October 19.) Perhaps a little comedy will help—courtesy of Last Week Tonight’s John Oliver.

Oliver taped Sunday’s show before the debate took place, but he still had plenty of topical material to cover—namely, that now-infamous hot-mic recording of Donald Trump and Billy Bush. Oliver rolled part of the tape before hearkening back to last week’s episode, when he covered Trump’s meltdown over Alicia Machado, by telling viewers to look way up and observe rock bottom high above us all.

“Let me just remind you that last Sunday, I told you if you looked above the clouds, you would see rock bottom,” Oliver said. “But if you look up there now . . . you will see, right up in the distance, where we were this time last week. Because since then, we have sunk so low, we are breaking through the earth’s crust, where drowning in boiling magma will come as sweet, sweet relief.”

Unsurprisingly, Oliver was not impressed by Trump’s non-apology. But instead of blasting Trump, whom he’s already tackled head-on several times in the past few months, Oliver saved his ire for a different party: the G.O.P. officials who rushed to publicly display their sudden offense after the video went public Friday. To Paul Ryan, who said that “women are to be championed and revered,” Oliver had a serious question: “You do know that women are human beings and not pedigree show dogs, right?” And for the slew of Republicans who invoked their every female family member in order to express their outrage? “As the son of a mother and the husband of a wife, what the fuck does that have to do with anything? You’re going through such an elaborate six degrees of separation exercise to arrive at someone with a Y chromosome that you can feel sorry for.”

But Oliver’s sharpest scorn was reserved for John McCain, who vowed not to vote for Trump only after making an earlier, weaker statement—that “[Trump] alone bears the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences.”

“He alone does not bear the burden of his conduct, because he alone did not make himself your party’s nominee,” Oliver said. “All of you have consistently supported him through some absolutely heinous shit.”

After listing off some of said “heinous shit”—calling Mexicans rapists, proposing a temporary ban on Muslim immigrants, doubling down on calling the Central Park Five guilty despite DNA exoneration, etc.—Oliver finished with a scorching dose of reality: “All of you still thought he should be president. So the only way you get to be shocked and outraged now is if you were cryogenically frozen until Friday afternoon, and that Access Hollywood tape was the first thing you saw upon being reanimated. Anything less than that, and this is on you, too.”