Oliver: Trump Admin Battle Plan for Coronavirus is 'For Him to Live While Letting a Lot of Us Die'

As he trashed the Trump administration's response to Coronavirus, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver seized on the fact that the Guns N' Roses cover of the song "Live and Let Die" played in the background while President Trump toured a Honeywell factory. Oliver described that song as "about as on-the-nose a soundtrack choice as you can possibly get without playing the Dead Kennedys' Kill the Poor" before praising Guns N' Roses lead singer Axl Rose's "incredible" Twitter exchange with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin. Oliver proceeded to argue that letting stay-at-home orders expire "will almost certainly put American lives at risk" and slammed Trump for his "new tactic" to "frame that as a positive." After playing a clip of Trump referring to the American people as warriors," Oliver continued to make the case that he was causing the deaths of Americans: "we don't actually have to be warriors here. And to the extent that we are, you don't need to be throwing us into battle unarmed...You can't just call everyone warriors and make their deaths not count." According to Oliver, "all this talk about Americans being brave warriors seems designed to make us accept deaths that we should be trying to prevent." Oliver concluded his rant by declaring "Our wartime President has decided the only way to win this war is to draft every one of us, hide our battle plans, and hope that we're all brave enough not to notice that we've already surrendered. Or to put it much more succinctly...his plan to steer us through this pandemic is for him to live while letting a lot of us die."