HBO’s John Oliver kicked off the 2025 season of Last Week Tonight on Sunday by recapping the first four weeks of Donald Trump’s return to the White House that included a bit on Elon Musk and DOGE. Oliver would label Musk as “one of the worst white guys South Africa has ever produced” while ignoring questions about whether South Africa really needs or deserves aid. On Monday, Oliver joined CBS’s Stephen Colbert on The Late Show to urge people to keep protesting because, according to him, even a message of “[bleep] this [bleep]” can help.
After playing a news clip of a South African woman explaining she was turned away from a clinic due to the funding freeze, Oliver declared, “Yeah, it's awful. And it's somehow made even worse by the ‘We value you’ message on the shuttered window, which they should probably now change to ‘We value you, but unfortunately we can't help you, thanks to one of the worst white guys South Africa has ever produced, parentheses, which is really saying something.’”
Oliver continued, “Now, after blowback to all this, the Trump Administration announced that they'd given limited waivers for some lifesaving programs, but unfortunately, thanks to the sheer confusion over who is even eligible, the waivers have not resulted in the resumption of many vital programs, and that is what they don't seem to get about shutting down work like this.”
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