John Oliver: 'No one is better than Trump at claiming victory from defeats'

Extract from The Guardian

Culture

John Oliver recap

On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver returned form a brief hiatus to recap some of the latest controversies engulfing the Trump White House

‘We may already be entering the Mad-Libs portion of Trump’s presidency, where he just persecutes groups at random’ ... John Oliver. Photograph: YouTube

Jake Nevins

Tuesday 1 August 2017 01.52 AEST Last modified on Tuesday 1 August 2017 02.16 AEST

John Oliver returned to Last Week Tonight after a four-week hiatus to address the latest news out of the White House, including Donald Trump’s proposed ban on transgender troops, Republicans’ failure to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci’s potty mouth.
He began: “We have been away for most of July, so we have clearly missed a lot, from Kid Rock possibly running for the Senate to OJ Simpson getting parole, finally, to Jared Kushner actually speaking out loud following his testimony before a Senate committee.”
“That happened this Monday,” he continued, “and if it feels like that happened a month ago, that’s all thanks to President Trump, who seems to be bending the space-time continuum in order to fill a week with more news than it can scientifically contain.”
Oliver went on, “We may already be entering the Mad-Libs portion of Trump’s presidency, where he just persecutes groups at random: transgender people banned from the military, Pacific islanders can no longer use the postal service and Jews can no longer high-five.”

Oliver then recapped the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare after Senators Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain voted against majority leader Mitch McConnell’s healthcare legislation.

“All this drama somehow took a backseat this week to the one unfolding within the White House,” Oliver explained, “where both Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus have resigned following the appointment as communications director of Anthony Scaramucci, a former hedge-funder and Long Islander of the frickin’ month for 643 months in a row.”
“Scaramucci’s nickname is ‘the Mooch’, which already sounds like the name of a cow STD,” the host joked. He then detailed some of the media’s creative ways of covering Scaramucci’s comments in his much-publicized New Yorker interview, where the administration’s latest big hire said he was “not Steve Bannon, I’m not trying to suck my own cock”.

“Leave it to Gayle King on CBS this morning to cut right to the chase,” Oliver said, airing a clip of King wondering how that is “even physically possible” and then asking the veteran political reporter Bob Schieffer his thoughts on Scaramucci’s rant.
Oliver continued: “She’s talking to Bob Schieffer and nothing in his half-century of Edward R Murrow award-winning journalism could have prepared him for the question, ‘Does the idea of Steve Bannon sucking his own cock make you angry or sad?’
“And that is where we are six months into the Trump administration, with a president who has no major legislative accomplishments, no conception of the very basics of how his job works, and a communications director who answers the question ‘What if a tanning bed was a person?,’” Oliver said.
“And yet, frustratingly, there is no public indication from Trump that he thinks he’s doing anything wrong,” Oliver continued, showing a clip of Trump, the day after Senate Republicans failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act, saying he “turned out to be right” with regard to the law.
“You’ve got to hand it to him,” Oliver concluded. “No one is better than Trump at claiming victory from overwhelming defeats. I could honestly see him at the end of his term saying, ‘I always said I didn’t have the ability, experience, or intelligence to be a successful president. I turned out to be right.’”