As Saturdays go, this last one was a real humdinger. AEW had a pretty great pay-per-view, I spent like five hours with my Trump-voting family without a single mention of the election, and, oh yeah, pretty much every major media outlet called the 2020 election for Joe Biden, ending the disastrous, soul-sucking Trump presidency after one term and causing spontaneous celebrations in what seemed like every city in America. Even SNL couldn’t make that Saturday suck.
I can’t wait to never write about some late night show trying to wring laughs out of Trump’s insanity again, but that’ll probably take a couple of months, as the dude has refused to concede and has most of the right-wing media apparatus supporting his claims of a fraudulent, stolen election. (Want to learn more? Fuck off to Parler, whatever the hell that is.) Still, here’s one such video worth watching. John Oliver devoted pretty much all of Last Week Tonight’s latest episode to the election and Trump’s dangerous and absolutely expected response to it. It’s a scathing indictment of Trump and his cronies’ attempt to undermine our democracy, but funny, and although it won’t be, it’d be a fitting farewell to these grifters.
Oliver doesn’t just look at the past, though. The last quarter of the video looks at how we’ll have to contend with the fact that more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, revealing that just because Trump lost doesn’t mean Trumpism is over. As Oliver points out, yes, we just elected our first Black and South Asian vice president, just 12 years after our first Black president, but in-between we elected a white supremacist. That’s what America is: a country where brilliantly organized voter outreach programs can lead to the Black vote winning states like Georgia, Pennslvania and Michigan for Biden, but where one of our two major political parties is a reactionary, racist, anti-democratic party of spite. A Biden White House isn’t a magic cure-all, but it’s a step in the right direction, and should be celebrated for now.
Watch the full clip below, and if you live in Georgia, like most of us here at Paste, keep those Senate run-offs in January on your calendar.