From the white void of his pandemic-era studio, John Oliver breathed a sigh of relief on Sunday evening after a “very long, very tense week” in America that “all felt worth it, because of how it ended.” On Saturday, the day Oliver taped, media outlets and election watchers finally declared Joe Biden the winner of the 2020 presidential election, after a protracted ballot count punctuated by Donald Trump’s baseless claims of voter fraud.
The demise of Trump’s presidency was greeted with jubilation by many, especially in Trump’s hometown of New York, where people danced in the streets and cheers-ed Trump goodbye. “There was a mood here that can only be described as a reverse 9/11,” said Oliver following a montage of celebration clips, “because it combined complete euphoria, an abiding disgust for Rudy Giuliani, and this time, people were actually dancing on the rooftops in New Jersey. It was a really good day. Never forget.”
“It is genuinely hard to overstate the level of relief that has been flying around parts of this country,” he added, “especially at the end of a truly draining week,” of constant electoral map news coverage that was “basically the equivalent of watching security footage of a Best Buy for four straight days.”
It was perhaps predictable that coverage of the election, which initially cautioned for patience, would spiral into a frenzy of hot takes after polls closed. “What was also entirely predictable was how Trump was going to react as the count slowly unfolded,” Oliver said, “because long before the results were in, he took advantage of the fact that he was ahead in some states to declare a premature and completely unfounded victory.”
At 2:30am on Wednesday morning, with millions of ballots still uncounted, Trump attempted to baselessly discredit the election in a speech from the White House and threatened, without evidence or authority, to invoke the supreme court. “You can’t just threaten to go to the supreme court when things aren’t going your way – it’s the highest court in the land, not the middle school principal’s office,” Oliver fumed.
“They weren’t ‘finding’ ballots, they were counting them. And counting and finding are not the same thing – that’s why the moving Finding Nemo wasn’t called Counting Nemo, because that would’ve been a very different and much shorter movie.”
In the days following the election, the Trump campaign made “consistently inconsistent” attempts to derail the electoral process: hapless lawsuits to invalidate legal absentee ballots, sending Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani to peddle meritless claims of voter fraud in Pennsylvania, and a series of tweets by the President labeled false or misleading. “The embarrassing flimsiness of these fraud claims starts to make sense when you see just how desperately the Trump camp was trying to drum them up,” Oliver said.
But “after this absolute year of a week – the days of counting, the misinformation, the desperate, pathetic attempts to paint this process as fraudulent, the fact is Trump lost this election. He lost,” Oliver said. “All that bullshit which we’ve grown accustomed to seeing work did not work this time.”
“And it’s not like Trump and his family are going to stop. They’re going to carry on grifting and lying like they’ve always done. But once he’s out of the White House, it’s just not going to have the same effect anymore,” he added. “It’s not going to directly impact every American’s life. And that alone is fucking fantastic.”
Oliver granted himself and his audience thirty seconds of unbridled joy, then returned to a sobering reality: “The great news is that this election had record-breaking turnout, and over 74 million people chose to kick Donald Trump out of office. The less good news is that more than 70 million people voted for him and everything he said and stands for. And that is something that we are going to have to reckon with for the foreseeable future.”
Biden campaigned on the slogan that Trump’s ugliness, racism, bigotry were “not who we are,” which is a “really nice sentiment,” Oliver said, “but dividing America based on race, religion, gender and national origin has frequently been very much who we are. In fact, you could very well argue that in the history of America, the one-sentence version of Donald Trump’s presidency is, ‘he kept showing them who we are.’”
“It is going to be a long road to dig us out of the place that the last four years have put us in,” Oliver concluded. “But that is why is might be so important to remember the moments of triumph that this week has managed to provide.” And there was much to celebrate: Delaware’s Sarah McBride became America’s first openly transgender state senator. Cori Bush, a Black Lives Matter activist, became Missouri’s first black congresswoman, marijuana initiatives passed in all four states where it was on the ballot, Florida raised its minimum wage to $15 and numerous municipalities elected reform-minded prosecutors.
But “most importantly,” despite Trump’s “lies, his obstructions, and his depressingly popular racism, this guy fucking lost.”