John Oliver: The dangerous thing about Donald Trump’s presidency is that soon it will seem normal

Heather Saul
Monday 14 November 2016 11:31 GMT
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John-Oliver
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It may seem surreal now that a former reality TV star with a penchant for repetition, making obscene, disturbing comments about women and promising to use water-boarding as a method of so-called enhanced interrogation because he “likes it a lot” is the President-elect of the US, but that could become normal sooner than people think, John Oliver has warned.

President Obama once roasted Mr Trump while he was sat stony-faced in an audience about his plans to run for President in 2011, a once comedic moment in time he has since lived to regret. Now, he says he is “rooting for his success”. Ms Clinton, facing the tide of aggression Mr Trump unleashed against her during this election, asked the US to give him a chance.

While democracy means accepting the will of the people, Oliver says this optimistic sentiment takes it a bit too far.

“It can feed into the normalisation of Donald Trump, " he said in a 30-minute segment about Mr Trump's presidency. "And he’s not normal. He’s abnormal. […] He sticks out like a sore thumb - and frankly, he even looks like a sore thumb. Giving him a chance in the sense of not speaking out immediately against policies he’s proposed is dangerous because some of them are alarming.

“It is going to be too easy for things to start feeling normal - especially if you are someone who is not directly impacted by his actions. Keep reminding yourself: this is not normal.

“Write it on a Post-it note and stick it on your refrigerator, hire a skywriter once a month, tattoo it on your ass, because a Klan-backed misogynist internet troll is going to be delivering the next State of the Union address, and that is not normal. It is f**ked up.”

It has been five days since his election victory and we are already catching glimpses of the America Mr Trump hopes to foster. That’s an America where same-sex marriage is still legal, but only because it's already “settled” into law, women’s abortion rights are threatened and three million ‘criminals’ are deported en masse.

Trump: Wall between US and Mexico will be fencing

Mr Trump, now assuming a firmly pro-life stance after once taking three different stances on abortion in five days, in his first televised interview suggested women could just travel to other states if they need a termination should the pro-life Supreme Court judge he plans to instate help overturn Roe Vs Wade.

Steve Bannon, the far right Breitbart executive chairman who has been accused of racism and anti-Semitism, has been announced as Mr Trump’s chief strategist, a very senior role.

The wall between Mexico and the US is still very much in the pipeline, although Mr Trump now says part of it could actually be a fence. His enthusiastic use of social media to disseminate some of his most hardline messages appears set to continue. "It’s a great form of communication. Now, do I say I’ll give it up entirely and throw out, that’s a tremendous form— I pick up— I’m picking up now, I think I picked up yesterday 100,000 people. I’m not saying I love it, but it does get the word out. When you give me a bad story or when you give me an inaccurate story or when somebody other than you and another network, or whatever, ‘cause of course, CBS would never do a thing like that right? I have a method of fighting back."

Mr Trump also demonstrated a reassuring new way of properly dealing with hate crimes in the same CBS interview: by looking directly at the camera and demanding perpetrators ‘stop it’. “I say, ‘Stop it.’ If it — if it helps, I will say this, and I will say it right to the cameras: ‘Stop it.’”

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