John Oliver ripped into Donald Trump’s disastrous tariffs on Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, starting with the president’s claim that “this will be indeed the golden age of America.”
“If you mean ‘golden age’, the way we tend to describe the last decade before an old person dies, then yes, it feels like we are very much in the golden age of America right now,” Oliver responded.
Oliver also mocked Trump’s chart of “reciprocal tariffs” used to announce the move, which sent the stock market tumbling. “It shows they really thought of everything that might go wrong while announcing their plan to shoot the economy in the dick,” he joked.
“Unfortunately, that chart is ridiculous for a number of reasons,” he added. “For one thing, it features an estimate of tariffs charged to the USA by other countries that no one could figure out,” until a financial journalist pointed out that it was just US exports to that country minus imports, divided by imports, “which is just stunningly dumb, because those things have nothing to do with tariffs”, said Oliver. “It’d be like trying to figure out the square footage of your home by dividing your phone number by your dog’s age, or taking your temperature by measuring your head’s distance to the sun. It’s not gonna get you the answer that you’re looking for.”
And those bogus calculations were applied indiscriminately, including to a territory in the Indian Ocean populated only by penguins. “Imagine going back to 2015 and telling your younger self: ‘President Trump will enter a trade war with a remote island of penguins,’” Oliver fumed. “You’d have a lot of understandable questions like, ‘What are you talking about?’”
And yet, “even as the market crashed in the wake of Trump’s tariffs, Fox News spent a lot of time” on the issue of transgender athletes in women’s sports, which has become “very important to conservatives in general and Donald Trump in particular”.
For instance, Trump issued an executive order prompting the NCAA to ban trans athletes from participating in women’s sports and tried to pull $175m in funding from the University of Pennsylvania for allowing one trans athlete to compete three years ago. When Maine indicated that it would resist his ban, he threatened to pull all its federal funding, despite the state only having two trans girl athletes competing in sports.
“This issue is an obsession for Republicans,” who last year spent $116m on TV ads featuring trans athletes. “The relentless focus on this over the years has had a meaningful impact,” said Oliver, citing one poll that six in 10 US adults think trans girls and women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports, including high school and youth levels. Twenty-five states have passed bans on trans girls participating in school sports.
“For trans kids impacted by these bans who just want to play sports with their friends, it’s been hard,” said Oliver, before several testimonials from kids. The host went out of his way to acknowledge good-faith arguments about competition in sports, but noted that there was a dearth of research on trans athletes, and that such conversations require nuance and subtlety. He noted that there were already rules mandating that trans athletes prove that they have been undergoing hormone therapy for extended periods before competition, and quoted one trans sports researcher who debunked the myth that people are transitioning to win medals. As Oliver put it: “No one says, ‘I’m going to transition just for the sake of sports,’ the same way no one says, ‘Could you please send me more messages about two-factor authentication.’”
Oliver showed how conservatives pivoted to trans athletes after their hyper-focus on gay marriage failed, and are now spending millions on ads and championing supposed fairness issues while ignoring the systemic inequalities long plaguing women’s sports.
He homed in on a Republican state legislator in Kentucky who repeatedly tried to push through a ban on trans athletes in schools – despite there being just a single trans athlete in the state – while pulling a bill that would make it more difficult for predatory coaches to switch school districts, because legislators were late for dinner. “So it seems this is how the Kentucky statehouse works,” Oliver mocked. “When there’s one kid who wants to play field hockey, it’s Pearl Harbor. But when there’s a longstanding pattern of sexual abuse, it’s, ‘Sorry, we’ve got a 6pm reservation at the Cheesecake Factory.’”
Furthermore, conservatives have harassed teenage athletes on social media. Florida lawmakers produced a 500-page report in which they asked elementary-age children if they had ever seen a trans teammate changing. Still others have cast suspicion on cisgender athletes for not looking “female” enough. Oliver concluded that the fixation was not really about fairness in girls’ and women’s sports, but an attempt to erase trans people and legitimize anti-trans bigotry. “You can basically say anything you want about trans people, as long as you tag on ‘in sports’ after it,” he said.
Oliver concluded that it was a very scary and toxic environment for trans youth in the US, though he was “heartened” by the fact that a Republican-led effort to pass a nationwide ban on trans participation in sports failed in the Senate, and the number of cis youth athletes supporting their trans teammates.
“For the final time, I will concede there are degrees to which this issue is meaningfully complicated,” he continued. “But I’d also argue that those complications are at the elite levels of specific sports. And we can have conversations about what ‘elite’ means and where exactly to draw that line. We can get into good-faith debates about policies that actually balance competition and inclusion.
“But it is ironic that at the highest levels, some women’s sporting associations are still being thoughtful and deliberate about this, even as we are passing blanket bans for elementary schoolers,” he added. “Which is brutal, because you see how much sports mean to the kids who play them. Taking that away is not a harmless act.”
Oliver concluded by asking that would-be good-faith debaters “recognize the ugliness with how this issue gets discussed, and how it’s been cynically used by some to advance the eradication of trans people generally”.
