The Last Week Tonight host focused on the president’s unique delivery and oratory style and how – very often – he makes absolutely no sense at all

“Trump’s presidency is like one of his handshakes: it pulls you in whether you like it or not,” said John Oliver at the start of a reluctantly Trump-themed episode of Last Week Tonight.

“He’s had so many terrible moments this year you’ve probably forgot about a lot of them,” he added, before going through a laundry list of faux pas including telling Brigitte Macron she was in “good shape” and when his own golf resort was promoted on the state department’s website.

This week the comic focused on Trump’s unorthodox way of communicating with the American people and how that has influenced how they communicate themselves.

“It definitely doesn’t help that so often what Trump says is complete nonsense,” said Oliver. “We often read transcripts of Trump’s speeches, and it’s something that everyone should actually do once in a while. When you strip away his blindingly confident delivery and just read his words, it is staggering how incoherent he is.”

Oliver went on to play his audience a verbatim transcription of Trump’s comments about the Iranian nuclear agreement. “That is not a functional use of language. That is a drunk driver crashing a pickup truck full of alphabet soup.”

He added: “Trump’s actual speech patterns sound like when you write a long text by choosing only the predictive text your iPhone chooses for you.”

“An iPhone would be a more coherent president of the United States.”

Leaked Trump transcripts show his incoherent, ill-informed narcissism Read more

The host said the real issue with Trump was not the fact that he was barely understandable by traditional English language standards, but that he used that as part of three key techniques to insulate himself from criticism.

The first approach Trump uses is delegitimising the media, according to Oliver, who said: “Trump has been using the term ‘fake news’ since he called his mum ‘daddy’. She told him he was wrong, he cried ‘fake news’ and shit his pants.”

The second is “whataboutism”, AKA “changing the subject to focus on someone else’s perceived wrongdoing”. Oliver said the technique was actually an old Soviet propaganda tool and that Trump used it when he referred to the “alt-left” in Charlottesville rather than simply condemning the murder of a protester by a neo-Nazi.

“It is a depressingly effective tool,” said Oliver. “The problem with ‘whataboutism’ is that it doesn’t actually solve a problem or win an argument. The point is just to muddy the waters.

“That brings us to Trump’s third technique: trolling.” Oliver added that Trump might be the first troll to be elected president, and that he retweeted someone calling him the greatest troll on Twitter, saying it was a “great compliment”.

“It isn’t,” said Oliver. “Sometimes if you do something to make a lot of people mad, and bear with me here, it’s because you’re a dick.

“There’s nothing new about any of these techniques. They’re now coming out of the Oval Office, which not only legitimises them but risks them spreading.”