Recently, liberals have been having a field day posting and reposting John Oliver’s recent takedown of Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Oliver’s show Last Week Tonight.
The intent of the segment was, of course, to discredit Trump in the same smarmy, humorless vein that Oliver’s former boss Jon Stewart mined so often on the Daily Show. However, in their zeal to celebrate any piece attacking the legitimacy of Trump, the liberals breathlessly sharing the video clip have missed several very problematic elements.
One of the popular elements of Oliver’s video was his charge that Trump was “either a racist or…pretending to be.”
He was referencing the frequent liberal claim that Trump’s initial hesitance to distance himself from the support of David Duke meant that Trump was somehow in bed with the Ku Klux Klan.
However, Trump’s actual claim was that he did not know enough about these people to truly condemn them, saying that supporters “wouldn’t want me to condemn a group that I know nothing about.” Put more directly, Trump is vowing to not jump to knee-jerk conclusions about any person or group–arguably, a very positive quality for a candidate.
The cherry on the top of the KKK connection is that Trump once DID condemn Duke as “a bigot, a racist, a problem. I mean, this is not exactly the people you want in your party.”
This is held up by Oliver and other liberals as evidence of Trump’s inconsistency. In reality, it’s just “gotcha” journalism–asking Trump a question he has already answered in hopes of spinning a newer answer into something damning.
And, as Bizpac Review points out, Oliver and the liberal media are completely silent over the effusive praise both Obama and Hillary Clinton offered after Senator Robert Byrd–himself a former klansman–passed away!
Of course, John Oliver’s ultimate coup in the eyes of liberals was his revelation that the Trump family’s original last name was “Drumpf.”
Oliver proceeded to mock the sound of the name and encouraged his fans to spread it far and wide with the hashtag #MakeDonaldDrumpfAgain. Oliver grounds this rhetorical smear by pointing out that Trump once questioned John Stewart via Twitter about why he does not go by his original family name of Leibowitz.
Oliver feels this gives his own attack a justification, but he carefully leaves out what Trump’s 2013 tweet was responding to: as Hollywood Reporter notes, Jon Stewart joked on his show that “Donald Trump’s birth name is F**kface Von Clownstick” and the comedian added that he hoped that this fake information was now all over Twitter.
There you have it: Trump’s own tweet was written in understandable anger on the very medium that Stewart was encouraging his minions to attack the mogul on.
Now, Oliver is continuing this disgusting trend, feigning that he is doing this because of Trump’s own angry tweet and completely omitting that his old boss started everything by trying to defame Trump on national television.
And while Trump’s angry tweet was not necessarily the height of maturity, it was intended as a one-off barb in response to Stewart’s on-air insults.
Oliver, however, in packaging an attack on Trump based on his heritage in a ready-made hashtag, wishes to continue this smear for the duration of Trump’s presidential candidacy and beyond.
The final irony about this is that it really encapsulates a number of things liberals claim to hate. When certain conservative corners questioned the location and specifics of President Obama’s birth certificate, liberals claimed that it was a senseless attack on someone’s heritage and an attempt to discredit a legitimate politician by dragging his name through the mud.
Years later, Oliver does literally the exact same thing, urging his own followers to discredit Trump for his heritage over something that happened years before Trump was even born: the simple changing of a family name.
Ultimately, this does little more than even further lower the tone of political discourse: even as liberals try to paint heated Republican debate as name-calling, they hide behind Oliver’s own name-calling in order to make themselves feel smug and superior even as they contribute nothing of substance to the conversation.
If you haven’t seen the video you can watch it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnpO_RTSNmQ
Article Sources:
Media attacks Trump for David Duke; ignores Obama, Clintons’ admiration for former KKK leader
http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/jon-stewart-donald-trump-throwaway-451612
