One can imagine that John Oliver keeps hoping for high more Jeopardy! drama, but fortunately, he had a backup drama to cover this week: GOP Senator Mitt Romney’s bizarre decision to dress up as terminal good-guy Ted Lasso (and hand cookies biscuits to Villain Senator Kyrsten Sinema) for Halloween. This decision didn’t sit well with Seth Meyers or (apparently) Ted Lasso star Jason Sudeikis, so it’s no surprise that Oliver felt the need to slam Romney’s stunt, too. It wasn’t lost on Oliver that Romney also dropped a caption — “If you believe in yourself, and have clear eyes and full hearts — you can’t lose” — that only proved that he was “quoting Friday Night Lights for no clear reason.” In addition, the Last Week Tonight host felt that Romney and Sinema performed “a move that felt very ‘homeroom teachers dressed as the most popular kids in school.’”
Yet ultimately, Oliver tied “Mitt Lasso” to Romney’s accompanying stunt last week, which was to pop onto Fox News to talk about what an undoable idea it is to raise billionaire taxes. Romney’s rationale is that, if this would happen, billionaires would choose to buy ranches and art and stop creating jobs for people or investing in the stock market, which led Oliver to make an excellent quip about Mitch’s boot-licking skills:
“Not to sound too much like Mitt’s hero, Ted Lasso, but Mitt must be made of wood and yapping on the hour because that man is cuckoo like a clock. Is he Dora the Explorer on an acid trip because just can’t stop licking Boots. And at the risk of stating the obvious here, billionaires already buy ranches and paintings and dinosaur bones they have no use for. Why? Because they have too much f*cking money. There literally aren’t enough things on this planet for them to buy. That is why they’re all racing to space.”
And that’s when Oliver called out Romney for hypocritically cosplaying as a nice guy while totally acting like a not-so-nice guy:
“And it does seem many politicians would rather prioritize the hypothetical threat to a billionaire’s bank account above all else because that’s basically how our world works. Politicians tweet about cosplaying as TV’s nicest guy while opposing problems that could fundamentally change people’s lives… the scariest trick this Halloween might be that some people keep f*cking falling for it.”
Yup, Romney as Lasso doesn’t jibe. And poor Boots.