Donald Trump, the 45th and 47th president of the United States, has been the subject of segments on the HBO television series Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. They commenced during Trump's 2016 Republican primary and subsequent general election campaigns. Most are discussed in the show's opening news recap segment. The segments listed have received prominent coverage from other media, and feature Trump or his actions as part of the main segment.
Season 3 (2016) Episode 3: "Donald Trump"
"Donald Trump" was the core part of the third season's third episode, which aired for the first time on February 28, 2016. During this time, Trump was the frontrunner for the Republican Party's presidential nomination. Host John Oliver discusses Trump's 2016 presidential campaign and his career in business, outlining his campaign rhetoric, varying political positions and failed business ventures. He also says the Trump family name was changed at one point from the ancestral name "Drumpf".. The claim is taken from Gwenda Blair, The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire (2000), p. 26, where it is implied that the surname originates with one Hanns Drumpf recorded in Kallstadt in 1608. The segment popularized the term "Donald Drumpf", which Oliver said was coined with the intent to uncouple the grandeur of the last name to facilitate Trump's supporters' ability to acknowledge his political and entrepreneurial flaws. It also started a campaign urging viewers to "Make Donald Drumpf Again"—a play on Trump's own campaign slogan, "Make America Great Again".
Episode 6: "Border Wall"
In much of a subsequent segment that aired on March 20, 2016, three weeks after the original episode aired, Oliver talked about Trump's proposed border wall between the United States and Mexico, although the description of the segment uploaded to the show's official YouTube channel mentioned "Donald Drumpf's" plan to build the wall. In that episode's main segment, titled "Border Wall", Oliver explained some details of his criticism of Trump's border wall idea, examines the inconsistent estimates of the cost of the proposed wall's construction owing partly to Trump vowing to build a progressively higher wall, and criticizes Trump's proposal to have the Mexican government pay the cost of building the wall. Oliver estimated that the wall would cost $25 billion, not the $4 billion that Trump originally estimated it would cost, and that maintenance costs would exceed $25 billion within seven years of the wall's construction. He even offers a counterproposal of buying a waffle iron for every American, which would be cheaper, more pleasant, "do nearly as much to keep out immigrants and drugs" and "won't harm our relationship with our third largest trading partner."
He also examines the feasibility of the wall due to a 1970 international treaty between the two countries that prohibits structures that may obstruct water flow from being built along the Rio Grande and Colorado River basins. Oliver cites the example of an existing border fence that had to be built several miles inland on the Texas side of the border—resulting in the fence having to cross onto the grounds of a Brownsville golf course—because of the law, and legal implications stemming from the fence's construction. He also points to loopholes that may be used to enable migrants and drugs to enter the country illegally despite the wall's presence. Additionally, Oliver cites data that show that most Mexican-born migrants residing in the U.S. entered the latter country legally and that illegal immigrants committed violent crimes at lower rates than American citizens did, contradicting claims Trump made.
Episode 14: "Trump University" In part of another subsequent segment on June 5, three months after "Donald Trump" first aired, Oliver talked about Trump's business tactics at Trump University. Oliver says that the 3,500 lawsuits that Trump has been involved in would exceed the combined number of episodes of most of the attorney-centered drama series that have been produced in the history of American television. He then comments on how Trump said that Gonzalo P. Curiel (the Indiana-born presiding judge for the lawsuit centering around Trump University) should recuse himself due to his Mexican heritage. Oliver then examines the Trump University lawsuit, and the issues that culminated in the lawsuit filing (including the tactics used in recruiting students for the real estate training program).
Episode 21: "Sarcastic Trump" In part of another subsequent segment on August 14, Oliver examined remarks by Donald Trump, who during the previous week had made the suggestion that supporters of the Second Amendment could stop rival Democratic Party presidential nominee Hillary Clinton from enforcing gun control policy proposals (an open-ended remark widely considered as suggesting violence against Clinton, but downplayed by Trump and many of his Republican surrogates to suggest his supporters should take political action against her) and claimed that President Barack Obama and Clinton were "the founder[s] of ISIS," citing in the latter that Obama's decision to reduce the number of U.S. ground troops in Iraq in 2013 created a governance vacuum that led to the radical Jihadist terror group's rise (although the U.S. military reduction did play a factor in its development, ISIS traces its origins to 2004, one year after the Iraq War began under the partial guidance of Obama's predecessor George W. Bush, as an Iraq-based arm of al-Qaeda). Oliver said that in response to criticism of Trump, Trump had replied, "Obviously I'm being sarcastic ... but not that sarcastic, to be honest with you."
In calling out that Trump's attempt to clarify the remark as sarcastic and Trump's repeated walking back of that justification days later, Oliver described Trump's statement as "bullshit" and a "douchebag's apology" and stated that trying to rationalize Trump's campaign is "like watching a circus seal fold laundry". Oliver also called Trump's sarcasm "absurd", and joked about Trump's claim that Clinton was a co-founder, saying by using the show's recurring social media gag, "Hashtag #Feminism, hashtag #IsisWithHer". He also criticizes Trump's suggestion that the election would have been rigged against him if Clinton won the Electoral College and popular vote in Pennsylvania in the November 8 general election (prior to the 2016 presidential election, in which Trump carried the state in the Electoral College, no Republican presidential candidate had won Pennsylvania since 1988) and enlist his supporters to become observers to prevent electoral manipulation, arguing that it could set a dangerous precedent if his supporters question the validity of the votes and could result in intimidation tactics towards Democratic-leaning voters.
Episode 22: "Message to Donald Trump" In part of his August 21, 2016 episode, Oliver discussed Trump's ranking in the polls for the preceding week and the changes in his campaign staff, including the installation of Kellyanne Conway as his campaign manager following the resignation of Paul Manafort upon the disclosure of his ties to the government of Russia. Oliver argued that these events were either "[signals that Trump's campaign was] hitting bottom from which he will rebound to victory" or "the beginning of the end".
Oliver then examined Trump's options: losing to Hillary Clinton, whom a majority of Americans did not find trustworthy in several opinion polls at percentages almost equal to Trump, and risk ruining his own brand's image of success and wealth in part because of his rhetoric and repeated controversies during the campaign cycle; or resetting his campaign and getting elected president. Oliver argued that the latter option would be even worse for Trump than losing the election, as then he would be burdened with the responsibilities and realities of the position and be miserable about it in large part because Trump would have had to make significant changes to his extravagant and hedonistic lifestyle. Oliver then devoted the remainder of the segment by speaking directly to Trump, restating how both of these outcomes would make Trump miserable. Oliver proposed a third option for Trump, which would be to drop out and demonstrate how his whole campaign was "a satire designed to expose the flaws in the system". Oliver then pointed out how Trump had exposed four particular flaws: campaign financing in American politics, sensationalism in the media, how prominent Republicans have stood by his controversial stances at the risk of their own political careers, and how voters have embraced him for said stances regardless of their opinion of his divisive remarks and policy proposals pertaining to immigrants and Muslims.
Oliver then said that were Trump to drop out, he would be a legend and there would be a federal holiday in Trump's honor named "Guy Who Decided Not to Be President's Day". To demonstrate how this would work out, Oliver cited the 1996 Dan Gutman children's book The Kid Who Ran for President. With the assistance of Will Arnett, Oliver demonstrated that many aspects of Trump's personality and campaign resemble those of the book's title character, Judson Moon. In particular, Oliver suggested that Trump plagiarize the resignation speech given by Moon after he is haphazardly elected President of the United States in dismay that voters took his joke candidacy seriously, which Oliver would argue is a "perfect Trumpian address" and "kind of a thing for [Trump's] campaign". Oliver then invited Trump to read that speech on his show.
Episode 25: "Trump's Lewd Remarks" The election recap segment of the October 9 episode touches upon an outtake from a September 2005 Access Hollywood segment released by The Washington Post two days earlier, in which Trump inferred to then-host Billy Bush that his celebrity status gave Trump license to make inappropriate sexual advances with women (including grabbing their genitalia without permission). Recalling a comment he made in a segment from the previous week's episode about Trump's broadcast interview and social media attacks on Alicia Machado—whose claims of public fat-shaming by Trump after a weight gain that followed her 1996 crowning as Miss Universe was cited by Hillary Clinton as a key example of his negative views on women in the September 26 presidential debate—that if one were to look "above the clouds, [they would see] rock bottom," Oliver states that Trump's remarks in the Access tape had sunk the presidential campaign to the point of "breaking through the Earth's crust, where drowning in boiling magma will come a sweet, sweet relief". He also briefly blasts Bush for going along with Trump's remarks, as well as former Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski's diversionary hypothesis in a CNN phone interview that Clinton may have expressed statements identical to those Trump made in the tape in her speeches to Wall Street banking institutions (excerpts of which were leaked in a broader stream of emails purported to have been hacked from the email accounts of Clinton's campaign staff that WikiLeaks began publishing on October 7, when the tape was released).