John Oliver Schools Trump by Trolling Sean Hannity in the Most Brilliant Way Imaginable
When it comes to highbrow trolling, John Oliver continues to reign supreme.
Riding on the success of his escapades with Marlon Bundo, the Last Week Tonight host focused his April 22 episode on the Iranian Nuclear Deal, an international effort to halt the Middle Eastern country's potential to build weapons of mass destruction by way of lifting sanctions. The deal was made in 2015 with President Barack Obama leading the push to make the diplomatic effort a reality.
Today, President Donald Trump is seeking to end the deal despite widespread international belief that everything should be kept as is. If America withdraws from the deal, Iran could leverage that the US violated the contract — forcing America to bitterly cooperate or, more frighteningly, driving Iran to wholly abandon the agreement and ramp up its nuclear program. It's a tricky situation that explains why both French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are due in Washington this week: to convince Trump to keep the deal.
This is where Oliver comes in: he recently embarked on an attempt to make change in his own way, taking out advertisements during Sean Hannity's eponymous Fox show — Trump's favorite nightly show — in the hopes of explaining the importance of keeping the Iran Nuclear Deal to the president. As Trump is being urged by to-be Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, war-friendly National Security Adviser John Bolton, and Hannity himself to abandon the deal, Oliver's commercial uses the "Catheter Cowboy" — an actor resembling the cowboy star of catheter commercials that frequently air on Fox — to explain that abandoning the deal could spark Iran to create bombs immediately.
"Don't do it, Donald," the Catheter Cowboy emphasizes before the commercial literally explodes, closing with the statement, "Don't blow up the Iran Deal."
This isn't the first time Oliver has infiltrated the Fox airwaves: Oliver has repeatedly used the Catheter Cowboy to educate Trump on subjects like coal, Frederick Douglas, nuclear triads, race, climate change, and much, much more. But in some ways, this commercial is the most specific (and certainly the most urgent), as this isn't a sort of problem fixed by contacting representatives or rallying public outcry. "We could be in serious trouble," Oliver explained in the episode before showing the commercials, which air in Washington DC during Hannity.
"I'm not saying that it's going to change anything," Oliver emphasized. "But at least we will know that we tried."