S4 E1: Trump vs. Truth & Trump Cabinet Picks: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

[Music] welcome welcome welcome it's a Last Week Tonight Andel Oliva thank you so so much for joining us we're back and look a lot has happened a lot has happened since we last saw you so so we need to we need to address the big elephant in the room straight away how about the young Pope huh pretty crazy right there's a kangaroo in the Vatican I can't can't think of anything more shocking to have happened in the last few months oh do you know what I guess there was that one thing and so now the United States has a new president the 45th president of the United States there he is Donald J Trump that's right we now live under President Trump two words that will never sound normal together no matter how many times you say them like Panda mustard or mom's orgasm now the last few weeks have been frantic Trump's nominated to Supreme Court Justice uh and issued 24 executive orders and memoranda one of which the notorious travel ban has been Smackdown repeatedly in court to which he tweeted nonsensically see you in court he also somehow failed to mention Jews in the Holocaust remembrance statement used the National Prayer Breakfast to make fun of Arnold SWAT andega ratings on the Celebrity Apprentice and Twitter bullied the Mexican president into canceling his visit to the us and that is just the tip of the Burg it has been so busy it's gotten to the point where the most terrifying sound is your phone buzzing with a news alert I hate to say this but I actually found myself at one point saying oh thank God it's just that Mary Tyler Mo dead oh that is a massive relief we've been living in a world where if someone says good morning to you the only acceptable response is no no it isn't what is wrong with you and even if you try to avoid the news inevitably someone will come up to you and say hey did you hear the new Secretary of Labor is a giant jar of wasps now I'm kidding about that the actual nominee is Andrew puer who is opposed raising the minimum wage and who currently heads Hardies and cars junr the chains famous for tasteful ads like this introducing a classic Patty M with a spicy [Applause] [Music] twist I like that is truly the perfect ad to prepare you for the actual interior of a Carl's Junior restaurant which is undeniably so hot but before you can be horrified by puzer you remember Trump's attorney general is Jeff sessions recently named Man of the Year by wrongs side of History magazine in fact all Trump's nominees seem to have been chosen sarcastically the Secretary of Education hates our public education system the nominee to head the EPA hates the EPA and the future Secretary of Energy is this guy [Applause] cool now rig Perry wants proposed eliminating the department that he will soon head although to be fair he later recanted saying after being briefed on so many of the vital functions of the Department of energy I regret recommending its elimination I could only imagine he thought it protected our reserves of Monster energy drinks come on y'all you can't have monsters getting energy why are we even giving them drinks this department to be shut down Cha Cha Cha with the pace of chaos raining down upon us it is important to find something to Center yourself now personally I've been using this framed photograph of Eddie the dog from the TV show frasia I I look at this whenever I want to feel better and I'll tell you why because Eddie is the perfect example of something that has absolutely no idea what's going on in the world right now he's a dog he's fictional and he's almost certainly dead and at various times these past few weeks I have been genuinely jealous of all three of those things this is going to be a long presidency and perhaps nothing encapsulated the way many of us feel right now better than Japanese prime minister Shinzo AR on Friday he met with our new president for what was a comically long and Marathon likee handshake but just watch his expression at the end I feel you I feel you that is the prime minister of a country known for awkwardly long formal displays of respect and even he is going oh this and now this and now Donald Trump can't shake hands right thank you thank you very much [Music] moving on now our main story tonight is going to be a little different normally uh we like to focus this part of the show on complex depressing policy issues something fun like uh CO2 emissions from Hees or space poverty or the proliferation of special purpose taxing districts a topic so boring you didn't even realize we literally already did that exact story last year and we want to keep doing those kind of things but unfortunately we can't until we address something even bigger the concept of reality itself and that is because of this guy now since taking office around 412 years ago Trump has made it clear that reality is not important to him think about it uh he's exaggerated the size of his inauguration crowd he said the election was marred by mass voter fraud with no real proof of that uh he also falsely claims that uh that compared to Muslims it was almost impossible for Christian refugees from Syria to get into the US he even lied about the weather during his inauguration it was almost raining the rain should have scared him away but God looked down and he said we're not going to let it rain on your speech no he didn't first it did rain while you were speaking that's why your wife was holding up an umbrella and people behind you were wearing ponchos and second if God did look down his only thought would have been wait the Mormon Tabernacle Choir come on I'm sick of them and I'm God could you not book silence or was silence somehow boycotting this thing too so so that is where we are currently at we have a president capable of standing in the rain and saying it was a sunny day and before we go any further Donald Trump lies is clearly not a fresh observation Liberals are probably thinking wow hot take there Johnny uh next you're going to tell me that Obama is aloof Dick Cheney is evil and Paul Ryan doesn't climax until he checks his Fitbit to see how many calories he's burned from and and you know what if you're on the other side if you're on the right you're probably thinking oh great another blizzard of snowflakes from last cuck tonight with Johnny trigger warning and and yes I know all other presidents have lied PolitiFact found that just over a quarter of President Obama's statements that they evaluated were some degree or false but with Trump that number is currently over two3 perhaps that is why one reporter who's been covering Trump found himself saying this this this is what makes it covering Donald Trump so very difficult what does he mean when he says [Applause] words wow what does he mean when he says words we are talking about the president like a Tinder match we've been on four dates with uh I asked him if we were could hang out this Friday and he said pry dot dot dot I'm starving bicycle emoji poop emoji what the does that mean what does he mean when he says words Trump's relationship with the truth is going to be of profound importance going forward because any policy discussion has to begin with a shared sense of reality and Trump's reality can change within a single sentence when you hear 4.9 and 5% unemployment the number is probably 28 29 as high is 35 in fact I even heard recently 42% well well which one is it then because a 4.9% rate might result in a cautiously constructive monetary policy whereas a 42% rate might result in The Purge so so tonight we thought it would be useful to try and answer four basic questions how did we get a pathological liar in the white house where are his lies coming from why do so many people believe him and what can we possibly do about it and to that first question Trump's lying is obviously nothing new he has a well documented 40-year history of uh he lied about being invited on this show and about the ratings for the Celebrity Apprentice he pretended to be his own publicist even his building Trump Tower is not as big as he says it is he inflated the floor numbers his 58-story building became a 68 story building it made a lot of sense in his mind because if you're renting a room you'd rather be on the 14th floor than on the sixth floor just spare a thought for confused firefighters turning up to that building the smoke alarms going off in Penthouse B on the 68th floor which is apparently an alov Studio on the 58th quick it's an emergency but lies like that are almost Charming what is less harmless is when he started lying about the president's birth certificate and then as a presidential candidate started making troubling statements like these the murder rate in the United States it's the worst highest it's been in 45 years our president wants to take in 250,000 from Syria our gross domestic product a sign of strength right but not for us it was below zero who ever heard of this okay okay just just just real quick on those no it isn't no he didn't and no one's ever heard of a GDP below zero because that is impossible now any one of those falsehoods could have disqualified him for office but but we were so accustomed to Trump's nonsense people could just shrug it off as Donald being Donald even his own advisers like Peter teal argued that people shouldn't worry about his statements because he didn't really mean them I think a lot of the voters who vote for Trump um take Trump seriously but not literally and so when they hear things like the Muslim comment or the wall comment or things like that it's not uh the question is not you know are you going to build a wall like the Great Wall of China or you know how how exactly are you going to force these these tests what they hear is uh we're going to have we're going to have a serer more sensible immigration policy oh yeah that is definitely the sense I got from watching those Trump rallies yes while we are all furiously chanting Build That Wall we all understand in this context wall is a clever use of uh or a figure of speech in which one word wall in this example is used as a standing for a SAA more sensible immigration policy now if you will let's unpack Trump the and and yet the travel ban literally happened and as for the wall the wall is getting designed right now a lot of people say oh oh Trump was only kidding with the wall I wasn't Kidd I don't kid exactly when he says he's going to build a wall he means it now it might be 30 feet high and labeled 156 stories but assume that it's coming so it was worth taking him seriously Trump was telling the truth about his solutions to the problems he was lying about and he is now making real policy based on fake facts which brings us to our second question where is his information coming from now Trump himself has admitted he gets a lot of it from TV which may explain why he speaks so confidently about cable news Staples like crime and terrorism but when it comes to the nuts and bolts aspects of government like the nuclear Triad he struggles now he famously flubbed a question on the Triad during an early debate in an exchange that ended like this the three legs of the Triad though do you have a priority because I want to go to Senator Rubi after that I think to me luk nuclear is just the power the devastation is very important to me now that is terrifying the components of that Triad are important it is unacceptable not to be able to name every single one of them they are nuclear weapons not your children what is her name Donald what is her name I'll give you a hint it's starts with t and it's not the other one and you would hope that as president he'd now be getting information from primary sources and briefings but Trump still watches a phenomenal amount of cable news his tweets frequently Echo things that just aired on TV just two weeks ago he tweeted ungrateful traitor Chelsea Manning who should never have been released from prison is now calling President Obama a weak leader terrible which is interesting because Chelsea Manning never used the words weak leader but that phrase was used on Fox News just 15 minutes before he tweeted in a segment which also called Manning an ungrateful traitor so the president seems to tweet about whatever information he just saw on on cable news if someone changed the channel to the Sprout Network he tweets Caillou's life is boring even for a cancer kid sad now to give you a sense of just how much he watches cable news a few hours later he was on Air Force One and you could actually hear the commercials from Fox News blaring in the background going good thank you how was your first flight sir that's real that is the Empire Carpet jingle playing at full blast Trump just made the interior of Air Force One sound like the living room of an old person who died three days ago and who nobody's found yet he watches so much cable TV he presumably also gets daily briefings from this guy I'm a professional cowboy and I use catheters been cowboying for 25 years I've broken 14 bones had two concussions and a punctured lung I know pain and I don't want any more of it especially when I cath okay stop I have so many questions is cath a real verb if you've only been cowboying for 25 years what did you do before you were cowboying and why are you in a library and one that doesn't want to overdo it with the books you fascinate me but Trump doesn't just watch cable news he also takes information in from frighteningly unrel reliable sources such as Breitbart the organization which gave us Steve Bannon Steve Bannon now Trump's Chief strategist Breitbart has published such pullit eligible stories as birth control makes women unattractive and crazy racist pro-nazi roots of Planned Parenthood revealed and hoist it high and proud the Confederate flag proclaims a glorious Heritage you know the kind of the kind of headlines you see your old high school friends share on Facebook and think oh that's a shame I guess Greg sucks now now but but Trump's trust in Breitbart actually goes way back a few years ago Trump was challenged by Bill O'Reilly who correctly pointed out that his claimed that thousands of Muslims were seen celebrating in New Jersey on 9/11 was based on no evidence whatsoever and this is how Trump responded well I don't know that I'm wrong bill you know this just came out from Breitbart I mean literally it just came out Trump Vindicated 100% Vindicated me if there were thousands I would have been reported um but this article says they were swarming bill this article says they were swarming all over the place so I don't know what that means but it means a lot of people wait holding up a Breitbart article does not make you seem more credible you might as well have gone oh hold on a second Bill hello okay thanks sources are saying I'm right Bill my sources talk to them talk to my sources William and and Trump sources get even worse because he also cited an article to support his Muslims on 911 claim from Infowars a website run by this guy Hillary and Obama want to make you poor and pathetic we have all their white papers they hate you they hate Prosperity they hate God they hate children and godamn them to hell that man that man is Alex Jones and that is actually him at his most presentable that is Alex Jones at a job interview that's Alex Jones meeting his girlfriend's parents for the first time now in his more outspoken moments Jones has argued that the government has the ability to control tornadoes that the Boston Marathon bombing was a false flag attack and that tapwater is a gay bomb and that they are putting chemicals in the water that turn the Fring frogs gay and then there is the Sandy Hook school shooting yeah so Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors in my view manufactured I couldn't believe it at first I knew they had actors there clearly but I thought they killed some real kids and it just shows how bold they are that they clearly used actors now that is not just offensive it's stupid if the government had actually hired child actors there is no way their stage parents would have stopped talking about it well he didn't get the Tide commercial but he did book a leading role in a government sponsored false flag attack it's the same director who did the moonlanding we're very excited Trump is apparently such a fan that Alex Jones himself has said it is surreal to talk about issues here on air and then word for word hear Trump say it two days later and I would be skeptical of that if Trump hadn't gone on Jones's show and said this I just want to finish by saying your reputation's amazing I will not let you down you will be very very uh impressed I hope and I think we'll be speaking Al loud you know what I I I guess it makes sense that Donald Trump wants to impress Alex Jones why would you want to drain the swamp if not to eradicate all those gay frogs you stay there you too stay where you are this is really dangerous though because there is a pattern here Trump sees something that jibes with his worldview doesn't check it half remembers it and then passes it on at which point it takes on a life of its own and appears to validate itself let me try and show you that machine in action Trump's constant claim that millions of people voted illegally originated as far as anyone can tell from some duded on Twitter who claimed in November while providing no evidence we have verified more than 3 million votes cast by non-citizens the next day Infowars picked that up and it spread like jet fuel among the right-wing sites now it was quickly debunked by multiple Outlets but despite that Days Later president-elect Trump started tweeting about millions of illegal votes and serious voter fraud in States like California and by early December people were on TV expressing similar concerns voting is a privilege in this country and you need to be legal not like California where 3 million illegals voted where are you getting your information from the media and that right there actually answers our third question of why so many people believe Trump because if you get your news from similar sources to him as as many many many people do he doesn't look like a crank he looks like the first president ever to tell you the real truth but rumors can be really tenacious and I'll prove it what rumor do you think of when you hear the name Richard Gear well here's the thing there is no proof that he did that if you think about it it's ridiculous have you ever held one of those things there's no way it was possible but if the president went on TV and told you it was true you'd go I knew knew it thank you I knew it finally someone said it but that Loop gets much more dangerous when you're not talking about something as silly as Geral Trump validated his supporters beliefs about voter fraud and in turn they validated his because even when he was directly confronted with the lack of evidence this is how he responded you know what's important millions of people agree with me when I say that if you would have looked on one of the other networks and all of the people that were calling in they're saying we agree with Mr Trump we agree they're very smart people right but just because they believe you and you believe them doesn't make it true this isn't like Peter Pan where believing in fairies will keep Tinkerbell alive this isn't a magic thing Peter she has luk Eric's disease and maybe instead of clapping you should have done the ice bucket challenge then she'd still be alive I'm sorry Peter but she's dying Tinker Bell's dying the point is even if you take the kindest approach here and assume Trump made an honest innocent mistake and passed along a news story without checking it when he was presented with a lack of evidence he disregarded that fact at which point he is lying and it seems no one in the white house has a problem with that because when asked to justify the president's views this is what Shan Spicer did I think the president has believed that for a while a long-standing belief that he's maintained it's a belief he maintains it's belief that he's maintained for a while as I've noted several times now he's believed this for a long time it was a comment that he made on a long-standing belief I've asked an answer this question twice he believes what he believes based on the information he's provided if he does believe that what does that mean for democracy it means that I've answered your question no you haven't Melissa no you haven't because this isn't about belief it can't be the incidence of voter fraud is a verifiable fact and faith and facts aren't like Bill Pullman and Bill Paxton when you confuse them it actually matters real people get hurt when you make policy based on false information billions will get spent on a wall that won't work to prevent a crime wave that isn't happening while refugees sit in dangerous situations to prevent Bowling Green style massacres that never took place so what are we going to do well the press is going to be a key element in helping us sort out fact from fiction and they are under attack this Administration has seized on small Corrections in news coverage to paint critical Outlets as fake news attempting to delegitimize all of them and this is only going to get worse Steve Bannon has already labeled the media the opposition party although there does seem to be one exception news report said the only seat that was reserved for the media at Trump's news conference Wednesday was in the front row and it was for Breitbart News oh that some blatant favoritism you are Snow White introducing the dwarf saying meet grumpy sleepy Sneezy awesome big dick cool dwarf and the three others and and if you are thinking that Breitbart went out of their way to ask a challenging question think again decision to public fake uh publish fake news and all the problems that we've seen throughout the media over the course of the election what reforms do you recommend for this industry here and I actually have two follow-up questions questions does this feel good and will you let me know when you're going to come Ju Just just tap my head tap tap my head look the end game here is obvious with a completely delegitimized press you're only going to have one source to get your news from as one Congressman happily pointed out better to get your news directly from the president in fact it might be the only way to get the unvarnished truth getting your news directly from the leader is basically the philosophy of North Korea and and the notion that our leaders should be able to pass on mistruths with impunity should be alarming to absolutely everybody regardless of politics Republicans should badly want our sense of objective reality to remain intact just in case the Democrats ever find their own appealing reality star to win back the White House rup Paul for instance make America Fierce again # make America Fierce again so so we all need to commit to defending the reality of facts but it's going to take work as we've already seen uh protests calls to legislators and lawsuits are effective ways to try and drag the administration back to reality but this needs to go down to a personal level as well we should make extra effort on social media to try and verify stories before passing them on especially if they confirm our pre-existing biases uh ask questions of yourself like is this a source I know and recognize has anyone fact checked this does it link to primary s sources and do those sources match what the story says and if you see an outlet repeatedly getting things wrong and never correcting it maybe stop trusting it whether that outlet is some idiot's blog or the White House and and because I know our president will not follow any of those suggestions partly because rightfully he does not watch this show there is there is one small way we wanted to try and sneak some useful facts into his media diet as we now know he watches morning cable news for information so we actually created a series of commercials in an attempt to bring him up to speed on some information he may lack we're going to run them on shows that we know he watches every day take a look attention catheter patience I'm a professional cowboy and I use catheters been cowboying for 25 years and there's two things I know I don't like pain when I Cal and the nuclear Triad consists of landbased missiles submarine launch missiles and aerial bombers this increases our ability to Strike Back in the event one of those is destroyed and deters an attack on us or our allies so that's the nuclear Triad in case you're the kind of person who might really need to know that that ad will Air tomorrow morning between 8:30 and 9 on all these channels in the DC area and until we're shut down we are prepared to educate Donald Trump one by one on topics we're pretty sure he doesn't know about here's just a taste it might seem like a show of strength to kill the families of terrorists but according to the Geneva conventions it's actually a war crime not all black people live in the inner cities and not all people in the inner cities are black well there's something we may not know appetizer Fork entree Fork now I know it can sometimes feel as if you are the only person in the world but as you can see here there are actually many nonu people we call those other people just because sometimes it's cold that don't mean there's no global warming you're confusing climate with weather partner Gabon is a country on the west coast of Africa Tiffany Tiffy Tiffany the unemployment rate is a carefully calculated measure derived from a monthly survey conducted by two federal agencies and has been the agreed upon standard since 1948 and that little fell there is what we call the platurus just remember Donald if you don't know it's okay to ask see you tomorrow that's our show thank you so much for watching we'll see you next week good night e