Whenever John Oliver and Stephen Colbert team up, people take notice. So last night, when Oliver appeared on Colbert’s “The Late Show,” it was no different.
Oliver’s incomparable wit and ability to distill big problems into pointed political commentary showed through again as the comedian-turned-political-guru took on President Donald Trump’s executive order on immigration and refugee resettlement.
Though Oliver is a legal permanent resident with an American wife and American son, he said he doesn’t feel fully secure in his ability to remain in the country during a Trump presidency.
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“Having a green card used to be enough, and yet what we saw with that executive order on immigration — that debacle — things are not what they were supposed to be,” he said.
Oliver turned then to the travel ban, which has been roundly criticized on both sides of the political aisle.
“We held up Afghan and Iraqi translators at the border, who have bled for a country they have never visited, have sacrificed family members for this country,” he said. “This president has done neither of those things.”
Given this hypocrisy, Oliver said, “It’s a little hard to swallow him telling people whether they should be a benefit to America or not.”
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Oliver wasn’t the only person to throw shade at the Trump administration yesterday.
Trevor Noah, speaking to TIME magazine, considered the negative impact that the new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos could have on American students.
“America seems to be going back to a place where your wealth will determine how much knowledge you can attain,” Noah told TIME. “I think it’s a scary time.”
DeVos, who is a proponent of charter schools and giving low-income students vouchers for private school education, was confirmed by the Senate yesterday in a 51-50 vote, with the tiebreaking vote cast by Vice President Mike Pence.
Noah, in assessing the future of public education in the US under DeVos, alluded to a well-known proverb from the Bible: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”
Perhaps this was Noah’s attempt to frame the problem in terms that DeVos, who is a devout Christian, would understand.
“Now it looks like in America,” Noah said, the question becomes, “‘Can the person afford to be taught how to fish?’ …. And we get further and further away from people being able to feed themselves.”