“Last Week Tonight” is known for its deep-dives into complex topics like infrastructure, the prison system, and tax districts, “and we want to keep doing those kids of things,” said host John Oliver in the first new episode of 2017, which aired on Sunday, February 12, “but unfortunately we can’t until we address something even bigger: the concept of reality itself. And that is because of [Donald Trump]. Since taking office around 412 years ago Trump has made it clear that reality is not important to him … We have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day.”
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This was the first new episode of “Last Week Tonight” of 2017. The HBO talk show last aired on November 13, 2016, just days after Trump was unexpectedly elected president, and it’s been a long three months since then full of questionable cabinet appointments, lies about crowd sizes and voter fraud, and public protests against executive orders. But instead of tackling any one of those issues head-on, Oliver used his first episode of the new administration to introduce the new commander-in-chief to the very concept of facts.
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“So what are we going to do?” ponders Oliver. “There is one small way we wanted to try to sneak some useful facts into his media diet. As we now know, he watches morning cable news for information, so we’ve actually created a series of commercials in an attempt to bring him up to speed on some information he may lack.” So Oliver bought ad time on cable news shows in the Washington DC area to educate him on such pertinent-to-the-president topics as the nuclear triad, world geography and the Geneva convention.
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