After a brief hiatus punctuated by an Emmy win and an entertaining sparring match with entertainment reporters, Last Week Tonight is back on the air with host John Oliver. This is fantastic news for everyone, for while the HBO show’s previous deep dive on charter schools was a fantastic piece on a pressing issue, the first of three televised presidential debates airs Monday night. Sure, The Daily Show‘s live post-debate broadcasts are still happening, and the rest of late night is bound to pick up the pieces on Tuesday night’s episodes, but an Oliver-led primer on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s biggest (and latest) scandals? Yes, please.
To Last Week Tonight‘s credit, plenty of detailed attention is paid to both presidential candidates’ worst failings as previously reported by the news media. Yet it’s all too obvious which orange-haired White House hopeful Oliver and company think is the worse choice for American voters, even while he’s discussing Clinton’s more questionable moments:
“I do know that even talking about [Clinton’s] scandals will irritate some of you, given that her opponent is an unambiguously racist scarecrow stuffed with scrunched-up copies of Juggs magazine. And that’s fair! That is a fair point, but not being as bad as Donald Trump is a low bar to clear. And if you focus on nothing but him, you fail to vet a woman who might be president. And if you believe the Internet, she’s guilty of everything.”
Hence why he addresses the former Secretary of State’s array of controversies first, albeit by somewhat deceptive means. The emails and the Clinton Foundation top Oliver’s to-do list for the first half of the segment, but not before the host quickly reviews the Whitewater scandal, Benghazi and… what the hell is the “Swiss file transfer”?
“The fact is, the ‘Swiss file transfer’ is something I just made up right now. But the very fact that for a second you kind of remembered it says something about the tone of coverage surrounding Clinton.”
As recently demonstrated by Clinton’s pneumonia scare and the media’s treatment of it, the first female nominee for President of the United States often encounters more intense scrutiny than her male Republican counterpart. It’s an important distinction to remember, but since this is a deep dive into scandals, Oliver jumps right into Clinton’s problematic misuse of a private email server and her family’s charitable foundation’s questionable financial decisions.
Though far more time is dedicated to Trump’s glaring issues, especially the recently maligned Trump Foundation and the New York real estate mogul’s incessant refusal to release his tax returns. Complicated scandals both that, as Oliver reminds his audience, should make them even angrier than Clinton’s do: “You can be irritated by some of Hillary’s. That is understandable. But you should then be f*cking outraged by Trump’s.”
