John Oliver on Sunday night lauded Nickelback for filing a copyright claim on a tweet by President Donald Trump that used the band’s music, which resulted in the clip being pulled.
“It’s true: Twitter removed one of the president’s memes because Nickelback complained,” Oliver said. “That’s a sentence that somehow suggests the news is now being written by an algorithm designed to generate random shittiness.”
Oliver then took a deep dive into what he’s nicknamed “Stupid Watergate II,” or the impeachment investigation into Trump’s calls for Ukraine to probe Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son, Hunter Biden.
The host of HBO’s “Last Week Tonight” called out Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) for dismissing Trump’s public plea for help from China as well.
Rubio said Trump was just “needling” the press, but Oliver said that even if that were true, it’s not a good excuse.
“People act on his jokes,” he said. “Russia took his whole ‘help find Hillary’s email routine’ pretty seriously. And shooting his mouth off now is significantly worse because ― y’know ― he’s the president.”
Oliver said Nixon once declared that when the president does something, it’s not illegal.
But Trump’s calls to investigate his rivals should be illegal because he’s the president.
“If he was just any old Fox News-addled idiot ranting about how Biden should be investigated, that would be one thing,” Oliver said. “But he’s not. He’s the president. He has real power.”
He said that when Trump makes demands, “not every foreign government will be as brave and willing to stand up to Trump as fucking Nickelback.”
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