John Oliver has been one of the important late-night voices who have come down hard on Donald Trump's presidency. On Sunday night, the "Last Week Tonight" host examined Trump's habit of stretching the truth.
The media, and the rest of the United States, shouldn't be surprised to hear that Trump has lied, Oliver noted, considering that he's essentially lied about everything for his entire adult life, from who he was to the size of his signature Trump Tower. His political life was also punctuated by lies: from Obama's birth certificate to the murder rate to saying that the U.S. gross domestic product was "below zero."
"No one's ever heard of a GDP below zero, because that's fucking impossible," Oliver said.
But there's nothing like using the phrase "seriously but not literally" to explain moderate support of Trump without going all-in on Trump's actual policies.
"While we're all furiously chanting 'build that wall,' we all understand in this context wall is a figure of speech in which one word — wall in this example — is used as a stand-in for a sensible immigration policy," Oliver joked.
"When he says he's going to build a wall, he means it. So assume it's coming."
Oliver noted the scary part was that Trump was making "real policy based on fake facts."
But Trump's getting his sources from Fox News, which doesn't bode well for the intricacies of American policies, as noted by his Sweden snafu on Saturday.
"Trump made the interior of Air Force One sound like the living room of an old person who died three days ago and who nobody found yet."
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