John Oliver railed against Donald Trump‘s “unhinged tweets” deflecting attention from the harsh realities of his controversial travel ban on last night’s ‘Last Week Tonight‘.
“The Bachelor In Paradise of American presidents“, otherwise known as the 45th President of the United States, drew headlines around the world on Thursday for his sexist Twitter tirade against ‘Morning Joe‘ host Mika Brzezinski.
His rant was defended by White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, who said that Trump was “attacked mercilessly on personal accounts by members of that program” and had previously made it very “clear that when he gets attacked he’s gonna hit back“.
I suppose that implies we shouldn’t be surprised when Trump tries to defame a member of the media online in retaliation for some perceived slight.
In Oliver’s words: “Trump is basically a walrus wearing a T-shirt that says ‘I have diarrhoea’. He’s pretty open about how grossly shitty he can be, so we can’t really be shocked when he suddenly is.”
But the controversy around those tweets “overshadowed” some actual news from the Trump administration: that the Supreme Court have reinstated Trump’s travel ban against citizens from six Muslim-majority countries, before a full hearing on the issue in October.
The ban, which came into effect on Thursday, did feature a caveat, that travellers with “a credible claim of a bona fide relationship with a person or entity” in the US were exempt.
But, as Oliver points out, the measure of a “bona fide relationship” extends only to parents, spouses, children, adult sons or daughters, sons and daughters-in-law, and siblings. It does not extend to grandparents, aunts, uncles, nieces, nephews, cousins, or brothers or sisters-in-law.
On top of potential travellers not being able to enter the country to see their nan, legitimate refugees who were being assisted by a refugee resettlement agency for passage to the US have been deemed to not have a “bona fide relationship” that would grant them exemption.
That means “thousands of desperate people who have gone through exhaustive vetting and have been approved to come here have now been left in the lurch, which is absolutely shameful“.
Such a policy is “cruel, it’s unnecessary and it undermines our standing in the world, so you would think the president would at least be justifying its existence. Instead he keeps derailing the conversation with his barrage of bullshit“.
He cites another example of Trump cray tweets obfuscating actual issues: on ‘This Week‘ yesterday morning a Homeland Security adviser was invited onto the program to talk about the ban, only to have to spend the entire segment talking about “yet another unhinged tweet” from Trump, this time about #FakeNews and his very use of Twitter.
And then of course, this happened on Twitter later in the evening.
