Before John Oliver dove into his thoughts about Mike Bloomberg’s presidential run and everything wrong with it on Last Week Tonight, he had to talk about Donald Trump and how he criticized Parasite’s win at the Academy Awards at one of his rallies.
At one point in his rant, Trump said that he wants the days of Gone With the Wind back to which Oliver said, “Of course Trump likes Gone With the Wind! He likes his movies like he likes his rallies: excruciatingly long, incredibly racist and centered around a rich creep who leaves a woman crying in a mansion.”
Oliver shifted his focus to the news coming out of the Democratic Primary. Sure, he could discuss Bernie Sanders’ major Nevada win, but he points out that it’s Bloomberg, not Sanders, taking all the headlines. He then showed a collection of clips of reporters talking about Bloomberg including one where a correspondent compared Bloomberg to the guy you would want to take you to prom — mainly because of his money.
“That is such a creepy thing to say,” said Oliver. “No one is hoping Mike Bloomberg will take them to the prom.” He then backpedaled and said that maybe the comparison is valid considering he, like many prom attendees, is painfully awkward, looks uncomfortable in a suit and has “big virgin energy”.
Oliver said that even if Bloomberg doesn’t become the candidate, he will not go away. He spent over $400 million on mostly ads in the last few months. Google and Facebook have served up 2 billion Bloomberg ads which, when broken down, works out to 30,000 a minute.
“They are absolutely everywhere,” Oliver said before swatting away a pop-up Bloomberg ad during his report.
He then unpacked more about Bloomberg pointing out that as many things there are to like about him, there is much more to dislike. He says he is “truly charisma-impaired” and takes some jabs at a really awkward and robotic ad of him eating Big Gay Ice Cream. He also addresses his attempt at reaching voters via social media platforms with sponsored content memes — which often play out as desperate.
Oliver then gets into Bloomberg’s wildly “appalling” history of stop-and-frisk during his time as Mayor of New York. The policy empowered police officers to stop and frisk anyone they thought were suspicious of criminal activity. When Bloomberg was mayor, there were 5 million stops and in 2011 alone there were 70,000 — and that is in a city of over 8 million people. Of course, this affected certain communities the most.
“People of color have been dealing with that shit like that forever and frankly don’t need their experience validated by somebody like me who is so white he looks like a ghost of a stork that died over a milk overdose while listening to ‘Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me’,” joked Oliver.
He then pointed out, “This policy was appalling and fell disproportionately on Black and Latino New Yorkers.” They were the target of over 80% of the stops at its peak. Oliver then showed a radio interview where Bloomberg had no regret for these stats and claimed that cops stopped whites too much and minorities too little.
Despite him claiming the policy made the city safer, crime dropped even after the policy was curtailed, proving that “Stop-and-Frisk” was harmful and unnecessary.
He only recently apologized for the harm it has done — and that was just days before he launched his presidential campaign. “As soon as he had something to gain for apologizing, he did it like a man… begrudgingly and once.”
Oliver added, “It is amazing that Bloomberg thinks that his money can make people forget about this, but hopefully the more people talk about him now, the more they’ll discover how unpalatable he is.”