John Oliver celebrates Trump's defeat, recaps the 'absolute year of a week' it happened

John Oliver celebrates
(Image credit: Screenshot/YouTube/Last Week Tonight)

The 2020 election "was clearly a very long, very tense week, although thankfully, it all felt worth it due to how it ended," an uncharacteristically upbeat John Oliver said on Sunday's Last Week Tonight: Donald Trump "isn't going to be president anymore." People took to the streets to celebrate in cities across America, he noted, and in New York "there was a mood here that can only be described as reverse 9/11. Why? Because it combined complete euphoria, an abiding disgust for Rudy Giuliani, and this time people were actually dancing on the rooftops in New Jersey."

"It is genuinely hard to overstate the level of relief that has been flying around parts of this country, especially at the end of a truly draining week, and tonight we thought it might be worth mapping out exactly how we got to this point over the last seven days," Oliver said. He started with the predictably slow ballot count, Trump's "nightmarish speech from the White House" early Wednesday, and his camp's subsequent attempts to do "absolutely everything they could think of to subvert this election," including rampant "conspiracy theorizing" and a flurry of "ridiculous" lawsuits in multiple states to try to "cast a cloud over the whole process." Still, he said, "perhaps the single most pathetic part of this week is that in the moments before this race was called on Saturday morning, Trump tweeted out 'I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!'"

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Peter Weber, The Week US

Peter has worked as a news and culture writer and editor at The Week since the site's launch in 2008. He covers politics, world affairs, religion and cultural currents. His journalism career began as a copy editor at a financial newswire and has included editorial positions at The New York Times Magazine, Facts on File, and Oregon State University.