Ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, John Oliver went deep on Republican candidates who are locked and loaded to pull all kinds of shenanigans to subvert the results. While there’s always the usual tactics of voter suppression through ID laws and intimidation tactics, Oliver is more concerned with the new spate of aggressive tactics that have been sparked by Donald Trump‘s attempt to overturn the 2020 election up to and including the January 6 attack.
Oliver’s election concerns brought him to Kari Lake, the gubernatorial candidate for Arizona and Meghan McCain nemesis. Like Trump before her, Lake is already casting doubts on the election results in her state before voting has even started. She’s even attempting to subvert the media with a very MAGA statement in her new campaign ad.
“If you’re watching this ad right now, it means you’re in the middle of watching a fake news program,” Lake says in the new TV spot, which Oliver found hilarious and the perfect opportunity for a self-deprecating joke for his own show. Via Deadline:
“If you just saw that ad for the first time on this show, you’re clearly not watching it on a fake news program. You’re watching it because you left the TV on after The White Lotus. That is what is happening right now,” he joked.
Jokes aside, Oliver ended the segment by emphasizing this worrying new post-Trump trend of rejecting the results of a democratic election.
“Everything that we’ve talked about tonight has the capacity to overwhelm our system, making it harder to certify elections quickly, leading to confusion, which sows doubt in the process, and in turn causes absolute chaos,” Oliver said via Rolling Stone. “Which is very worrying given that we’ve all seen what confused but motivated people are capable of doing when they think the process is broken.”
(Via Deadline & Rolling Stone)