While many Republicans who have already endorsed Trump have been publicly denouncing his “grab [women] by the p*ssy” comments, John Oliver is not letting them off the hook so easy.
In a pre-taped segment before the second presidential debate, Oliver unpacked the situation surrounding the leaked footage of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.
Oliver pointed out Trump’s apology was far from adequate given the breadth of the accusations against him.
“First, he claims he’s never said he’s a perfect person—which, of course, is a lie,” Oliver says, then continuing, “Then he said he never pretended to be someone he’s not right before claiming ‘these words don’t reflect who I am’—which is absolutely absurd. They could not capture his essence more if they were spoken by a spray-tanned Furby eating KFC and screaming at a Gold Star family.”
Oliver also noted that Republicans have been coming out of the woodwork to distance themselves from Trump’s comments, but their reasoning for doing so leaves much to be desired.
Many Republicans, such as Paul Ryan and Ted Cruz, reason that their mothers, wives and daughters are the reason why Donald Trump’s comments are wrong, rather than giving expressions of equal rights.
“As the son of a mother and a husband of a wife — what the f*ck does that have to do with anything? You’re going through an elaborate six-degrees-of-separation exercise to arrive at someone with a Y-chromosome that you can feel sorry for,” Oliver said.
Sen. John McCain even said that “[Trump] alone bears the the burden of his conduct and alone should suffer the consequences,” in reaction to the footage.
However, to Oliver (and to many voters), the Republican distancing comes a little too late.
“Except no, he alone does not bear the burden of his conduct, because he alone did not make himself your party’s nominee,” he said.
“All of you still thought he should be president. So the only way you get to be shocked and outraged now is if you were cryogenically frozen until Friday afternoon and that Access Hollywood tape was the first thing you saw upon being reanimated. Anything less than that, and this is on you too,” Oliver added.
Only one month left in the election to go.
