John Oliver looked like he was on the verge of tears at the end of last week’s episode of Last Week Tonight when he implored viewers to vote President Donald Trump out of office. What a difference seven days can make: On Sunday’s episode of Oliver’s HBO show, the host expressed unabashed joy over Trump’s loss to Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the presidential election.
“Yeah, that definitely happened,” Oliver said after showing a clip of CNN finally calling the race. “Donald Trump isn’t going to be president anymore.”
In cities around the country on Saturday afternoon, thousands of people flooded the streets to celebrate Trump’s defeat.
“It was like that all day here in New York,” Oliver said. “There was a mood here that can only be described as a reverse 9/11, because it combined complete euphoria, an abiding disgust for Rudy Giuliani, and this time, people actually were dancing on the rooftops in New Jersey.”
“It was a really good day,” he added. “Never forget.”
Saturday’s projection of Biden as the election winner capped four days of uncertainty about the result—time during which Trump and his Republican allies continually pushed lies about voter fraud in an attempt to subvert democracy.
“This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said falsely on Wednesday morning, rhetoric he parroted throughout the week with increasing desperation. He added on Wednesday, “We are going to the Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list, okay?”
“Uh, no, it’s not okay. It’s not okay at all,” Oliver said in response. “For a start, you can’t just threaten to go to the Supreme Court when things aren’t going your way. It’s the highest court in the land, not the middle school principal’s office. And second, they weren’t finding ballots—they were counting them. And counting and finding are just not the same things. That’s why the movie Finding Nemo wasn’t called Counting Nemo. Because that would have been a very different and much shorter movie. One Nemo, the end.”
But that speech set the tone for Trump’s response, Oliver noted. On Wednesday afternoon, in one of his many tweets flagged by Twitter as misinformation over the last week, Trump wrote that he “hereby” claimed a victory in Michigan, a state in which Biden is the projected winner.
“Calling dibs on states is not how we elect presidents,” Oliver said. “We use the Electoral College, which is at least 3 percent less stupid than that.”
Trump has refused to accept the election results, and he’s received support in his crusade to overturn the democratic process from Republican senators such as Lindsay Graham, as well as his numerous supporters. But despite that sound and fury, in addition to a number of lawsuits that are expected to fail, the country will have a new president starting January 20 of next year.
“The fact is: Trump lost this election. He lost. All that bullshit that we’ve grown accustomed to seeing work did not work this time,” Oliver said with relief in his voice on Sunday. “And it’s not like Trump and his family are going to stop. They’re going to carry on grifting and lying like they’ve always done. But once he’s out of the White House, it’s just not going to have the same effect anymore. It’s not going to directly impact every American’s life. And that alone is fucking fantastic.”
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