On Sunday's Last Week Tonight season finale, host John Oliver focused entirely on Election 2016 and the various terrible things that took place over the course of a year that's not even over yet.
He started the show off by reminding everyone of Donald Trump's win last week. "It's true, that happened," he said. "It turns out instead of showing our daughters that they could someday be president, America proved that no grandpa is too racist to become leader of the free world." As shocked as he feels, Oliver said there are people happy about Trump's victory (namely Russian President Vladimir Putin and Charles in Charge's Scott Baio), and respecting democracy means accepting the election's results — but that doesn't mean you have to give Trump a chance.
"Optimism is nice if you can swing it, but you've got to be careful, because it can feed into the normalization of Donald Trump," Oliver said. "He's not normal. He's abnormal. He's a human 'what is wrong with this picture?' He sticks out like a sore thumb, and frankly he even looks like a sore thumb. So giving him a chance in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies that he's proposed is dangerous, because some of them are alarming."
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Oliver believes that misleading election forecasts, a flawed candidate in Hillary Clinton, and deep racism and indifference to it are all behind Trump's win, and the media failed the public by not bringing him to task. Too many people are receiving their news from biased sources or "echo chambers that validate their views," and Trump often shared false information, including crime statistics, on his Twitter. Oliver wouldn't let the audience forget that a "Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address," but that's just the cherry on top of an "uncommonly" awful year, filled with the crisis in Syria, the Zika virus, high profile celebrity deaths, and "Ryan Lochte being a douche." Watch the expletive-filled video below to see Oliver's tribute to a "truly terrible year." Catherine Garcia
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