John Oliver Rips Into Trump for ‘Plan to Shoot the Economy in the Dick’ With Tariffs
John Oliver took aim at Donald Trump during the Sunday, April 6, episode of Last Week Tonight With John Oliver. The talk show host discussed the negative effects Trump’s tariffs have had on the economy, and began by mocking him for referring this era to the “golden age of America.”
“If you mean golden age, the way we tend to describe the last decade before an old person dies, then yes, it feels like we are very much in the golden age of American right now,” he joked.
He then showed a clip of the president holding up a small chart and explaining that he originally had a bigger one but couldn’t use it because of the wind. “That is smart,” Oliver noted. “And it shows they really thought of everything that might go wrong while announcing their plan to shoot the economy in the dick. Although, I will point out, if wind was a problem there, and we checked with experts on this, the White House does have an ‘inside’ part.”
He continued to address the chart adding, “Unfortunately, that chart is ridiculous for a number of reasons. For one thing, it features an estimate of tariffs charged to the USA by other countries that no one could figure out until a financial journalist realized it was just how much we export to that country, minus how much we import from them, divided by how much we import, which is just stunningly dumb because those things have nothing to do with tariffs. It it’d be like trying to figure out the square footage of your home by dividing your phone number by your dog’s age, or taking your temperature by measuring your head’s distance to the sun. It’s not gonna get you the answer that you’re looking for.”
Oliver then pointed out the “even dumber” part of Trump’s tariff plan by nothing that two of the countries facing tariffs are remote islands near Antarctica with no human life. “Imagine going back to 2015 and telling your younger self, ‘President Trump will enter a trade war with a remote island of penguins,'” he joked. “You’d have a lot of understandable questions like, ‘What are you talking about?'”
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, Sundays, 11/10c, HBO
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