President Donald Trump’s sudden and immediate teardown of the White House’s East Wing last week was “just the tip of Trump’s iceberg,” according to John Oliver, who claimed that the government’s ramp up of preemptive bombings on suspected drug smugglers off the coast of Venezuela was the “most shocking” of all Trump’s latest moves.
In recent months, the Trump Administration has carried out at least 10 airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, killing at least 43, and alleging all of them to be “narco-terrorists.”
That’s “even though the administration has not provided public evidence for its claims,” Oliver said on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight. “But even if they have some, I’ve watched enough JAG to know the typical approach to drug boats is to intercept them and arrest the suspects, not murder them with no due process.”
Oliver said that’s “distressing enough” until we learned that Trump has proposed striking suspected drug smugglers on land as well, without asking or getting approval from Congress, telling reporters “I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country.”
Trump said it even more plainly and bluntly: “We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.”
“You know, the kind of chilling statement you expect to hear from a serial killer or the mastermind behind Panera Bread’s Charged Lemonades, but not ideally the president of the United States,” Oliver observed.
But this all comes after seeing Trump respond to the “No Kings” rallies last weekend with an AI video of himself wearing a crown and piloting a fighter jet dumping feces on protestors, hearing Trump call for a $230 million payout from the Department of Justice, dangling a potential $20 billion to influence Argentina’s upcoming elections, and then seeing the East Wing torn down on top of all of that.
“Obviously, those images are distressing, especially when you know it’s all to build a giant ballroom in the style best described as MedSpa Versailles,” he said. “And yet, the demolition of the White House, a metaphor that if anything, is too on the nose.”
“Between tearing down the White House, trying to use the Justice Department to pay himself, and proudly sharing AI footage of him literally s–tting on Americans, the president now also appointed himself judge, jury and executioner of foreign citizens,” Oliver ultimately concluded. “And it is infuriating that neither Congress nor the courts seem to be interested in putting a stop to any of this, because we are supposed to live in a country of checks and balances.”
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