John Oliver has discussed Donald Trump’s reaction to the Russia investigation, suggesting that he’s trying to use his incompetence as a defense.

In Last Week Tonight on HBO, the British comic covered the president’s tweet in response to revelations about the men he chose to work with in his government.

Oliver said: “There are three people from the Trump campaign facing serious charges about their entanglements overseas, and in all three cases, Trump’s pushback has basically been: ‘I don’t know anything about the people I should have known those things about.’”

Oliver went on to describe what has been a recurring strategy from the president.

“He’s playing the Trump card, and what I mean by that is, he’s using his own incompetence as a defense,” he said. “It’s the same way that you might excuse the behavior of a dog or a small child. If you found your dog pissing on a rug and then your child urinating on the dog, you would think, ‘Yeah, I’m annoyed, but they’re idiots who don’t know what they’re doing so they get to walk away from this one.’ That is the Trump card.”

He went on: “We cannot accept the Trump card as his defense here because if we do, just think about what we would actually be saying there.

“We’d be saying: ‘Look, this guy is too dumb to really understand what he’s doing, so I guess we have no choice but to let him keep being president.’ Please let’s not do that.”

Last week, it was revealed that former Trump aide Paul Manafort spent much of his Russian earnings on living a lavish lifestyle. “Over $2m on rugs and clothes?” he said. “Now, I can’t speak to the quality of his rugs but how the fuck is this guy spending that much on clothing? He looks like he bought all the suits he’s going to wear for the rest of his life on one day in 1982 with a cashier’s cheque for $900.”

Oliver described Manafort as “an extra from a direct-to-DVD mobster movie who fell asleep in a tanning bed”.

“Either Trump did a background check, discovered his suspicious activity and didn’t care or he didn’t so much as Google Manafort before hiring him because everybody knows that Manafort is dodgy,” he said.