John Oliver on Trump's wiretapping claims: 'Stupid Watergate'

The comic takes aim at the president’s baseless claims against Obama and questions his unreliable media diet

John Oliver has criticized Donald Trump over his latest baseless claims that Obama secretly recorded him, referring to the situation as “Stupid Watergate”.

On Last Week Tonight, the comic expanded upon this idea, calling it “a potential scandal with all the intrigue of Watergate except everyone involved is really bad at everything”.

He went on to say: “The relevant question isn’t so much ‘what did the president know and when did he know it?’ as it is ‘is the president physically capable of knowing things at all?’”

He then referenced Trump’s series of tweets at the weekend, including the fact that he misspelled “tap”. “We are now at a point where the president is so busy hurling destabilizing conspiracy theories around, we can’t even pause to enjoy the fact he misspelled the word tap,” he said.

Oliver also questioned the source of Trump’s claim and linked it to an article on the conservative news site Breitbart that was focused on the ramblings of a conspiracy theorist.

“I think we can now officially declare that Trump has a worse media diet than the Son of Sam killer – and he got all his news from a talking dog who told him to murder,” he joked.

Oliver then played footage of a White House spokesperson discussing Trump’s baseless claims, clumsily mentioning that his belief was based around conjecture.

“I guess this is just how things are going to work now, then,” he said “The president once saw a banana with a bruise that looked like a picture in an article he read in a dream and that is why we’re at fucking war.”

Guardian staff

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