With this year’s presidential election, comedian John Oliver has little trouble finding material for his weekly half-hour roast of all things ridiculous in the political realm. On Sunday’s episode of Last Week Tonight, the snarky Brit once again lambasted Donald Trump for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee’s refusal to release his tax returns and for creating a fictional publicist in the ’90s.
But one of Oliver’s most memorable lines from the show came when he tore into the Republican Party’s slow but inevitable embrace of Trump as the GOP’s nominee.
Now that Trump has decided not to self-fund the rest of his campaign, he’ll need the support of members of the party’s establishment—which explains why he met with House Speaker Paul Ryan last week, despite Ryan’s previous statements that he would never throw his support behind the brash billionaire.
“Trump and the Republican establishment are like a teenage Christian couple who have made an abstinence pledge. They are going to have sex—it’s just a matter of time. But they need to make a big show of resisting it for anyone who might be paying attention,” Oliver said.
Oliver also criticized Trump for not releasing his tax returns. When Good Morning America‘s George Stephanopoulos pointed out to Trump that all presidential nominees have released their tax returns since 1976, Trump came back with, “Before 1976, most people didn’t do it.”
“Sure, but there were a lot of things we did before 1976 that seem crazy now, like smoking on airplanes and thinking Elliott Gould was a major sex symbol. The point is, times have changed,” Oliver said.
But the weirdest Trump news of the week has to be the release of tapes from the 1990s that suggest Trump created a fictional publicist for himself named John Miller, and pretended to be Miller on the phone.
On the tape, a former People reporter asks the publicist where he came from, to which “John Miller” responds, “I worked for a couple of different firms, and I’m somebody that he knows, and I think somebody that he trusts and likes.” The voice on the tape is undoubtedly Trump’s own.
“That is so perfectly Donald Trump. Even his imaginary alter ego reflectively brags about himself!” Oliver says.
Miller even claimed on the tape that Madonna had called to inquire if the mogul would go out with her. On Friday, Trump said on Today that he knows nothing of the tape and that the voice is not his own, despite having admitted in the ’90s that it was him.
So, John Miller, if you’re out there, will you take Oliver up on his offer to appear on Last Week Tonight?
