On Last Week Tonight on Sunday, John Oliver discussed Steve Bannon’s departure from the White House and Republican lawmakers’ attempts to address the president’s widely derided statements about the far-right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

“We begin tonight with the White House, still a beautiful building despite what’s currently happening inside it,” Oliver began. “On Friday, there was some big news. Yes, Steve Bannon is gone, presumably to spend more time sucking his own cock. He leaves behind a legacy defined by quasi-constitutional xenophobia, unfulfilled campaign promises and a definitive answer to the question: what would happen if Martin Sheen ate nothing besides sea salt for a thousand years?”

“And while it was shocking, Bannon is just the latest in a string of recent departures,” Oliver continued, showing a photograph from January of Donald Trump surrounded by Bannon, Reince Priebus, Mike Flynn, Sean Spicer and Mike Pence. “Wow, he is surrounded by four white nothings and Mike Pence. But the truly depressing thing about Bannon’s departure is just how utterly unsatisfying it actually is. Yes, one panderer to white nationalists has left the White House. The problem is, the one he was working for is still very much there. And on Tuesday, Trump doubled down on his remarks about the groups marching in Charlottesville last weekend.”

Oliver showed footage of the president’s press conference in which he equivocated again when asked who was to blame for the violence in Charlottesville, calling some of the participants in the white supremacist rally “very fine people”.

“No, no, they weren’t,” Oliver said. “I’ll tell you why. If you are marching with white nationalists, you are by definition not a very nice person. If Malala Yousafzai had taken part in that rally, you’d have to say, ‘OK, I guess Malala sucks now. I’m confused, I don’t know why she’s there, but Malala definitely sucks.’ That’s the only conclusion you can draw.”

Oliver then detailed the wave of condemnation that followed, with the president disbanding his business and infrastructure councils after members of both spoke out against his drawing moral equivalence between the white nationalists and the counter-protesters and left of their own accord.

“Meanwhile, commentators who are usually in Trump’s corner had a genuinely tough time defending his remarks, none tougher than Fox News’s Melissa Francis,” Oliver said, showing a clip of the broadcaster getting visibly emotional on air over being “judged” for her defense of Trump.



“If you’re getting emotionally overwhelmed at being judged for defending Trump in his Nazi sympathizer phase, stop fucking doing it,” Oliver quipped. “It’s that simple. No one is making you do it. And how did you manage to make this about you?”



Oliver also examined the responses by members of the Republican party, including the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, and the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan.

“It was also fascinating to watch Trump’s own party try desperately not to deal with what he had said,” Oliver explained, referring to a report that McConnell was “very concerned and very upset” by the president’s comments.

McConnell’s staffers denied that report. “That’s right, Mitch McConnell has the moral courage to deny anonymous sources who said he had some moral courage,” Oliver joked, imagining McConnell’s response: “I will not stand idly by while people drag my name out of the mud. Leave my name in the mud where it belongs.”

“Others tried to delicately thread the needle, condemning the Nazis without explicitly mentioning the president,” the host explained. “Take Paul Ryan, a man whose spine ran away from home 10 years ago and is now living on a spine commune in northern Vermont.”



Oliver showed Ryan’s tweet, in which he condemned white supremacy as “repulsive” but failed to mention the president or address his apparent sympathies for the white nationalist cause.

“You can mention him, he’s not Voldemort,” Oliver said. “He’s just a terrifying entity who viciously attacks his enemies and judges people based on their birthright.”

“You know what, I do hear it now,” Oliver concluded. “I take that back.”