Last Week Tonight With John Oliver (2014) s11e15 Episode Script
Trump's Second Term
Welcome to "Last Week Tonight."
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It has been a busy week.
Hunter Biden was found guilty
on gun charges,
Macron called
a snap election in France,
and in Michigan, this conservative
congressional candidate
posted a campaign TikTok with
an AI-generated voice that is bold.
I have another dream!
Yes, it is me, Martin Luther King.
I came back from the dead
to say something.
As I was saying,
I have another dream,
that Anthony Hudson will be Michigan
8th district's next congressman.
Yes, I have a dream, again.
Okay, now I am going back
to where I came from. Goodbye.
My name is Anthony Hudson,
and I approve this message.
Okay, my god, okay.
Let's just dive in.
It is hard to pick the wildest part.
The opening scream?
The casual "as I was saying"?
The fact that MLK reassures audience
he has another dream three times,
as if that's going to be the main
thing someone takes issue with?
But honestly, I think it might be
the four-second pause before
"Okay, now I am going back
to where I came from, goodbye",
making him sound
like a middle-aged dad
who doesn't know
how to end a phone call.
I've got so many questions
about that,
and none of them
are about Anthony Hudson
and where to vote for him.
Hudson initially put out a statement
saying the video
was posted without his knowledge,
and that it was
"stupid and disrespectful",
only to then reverse
that position, saying,
"If MLK were alive today,
I do believe he would endorse me
and my vision
for a better Michigan."
And first, no he would not,
Anthony, for so many reasons.
But second, you had it right
before you doubled down.
The only acceptable response
to that ad is to issue an apology,
drop the whole thing,
and then, if I may quote something
Martin Luther King never said,
announce "I am going back
to where I came from, goodbye."
But we're gonna dive straight
in with our main story tonight,
which concerns
the presidential election.
The thing you're actively ignoring
so you can devote all your
brain power to "MILF Manor."
If you're not watching,
real quick,
this season, not only are the MILFs
dating hot younger men,
they're also, and this is true,
dating the young guys' dads as well,
and it is exactly as awkward
for everyone as you'd think.
Today, you're going to be exploring
a tantric yoga class.
God. Like, no way. No.
There's some things that you don't
do with your son or with your father.
- Are you traumatized?
- A little bit.
Yeah, I bet!
Although, not to victim-blame here,
but you did sign up to bag MILFs
in a televised sex contest.
So, no brain was ever leaving
that manor unscarred.
The election
is in full swing right now,
and it's pretty much
your usual campaign,
candidates offering
policy proposals, trading barbs,
and occasionally getting convicted
of 34 felonies
and complaining about the judge.
You saw what happened to some
of the witnesses that were on our side.
They were literally crucified
by this man
who looks like an angel,
but he's really a devil.
Trump definitely doesn't know
what the word "literally" means,
but given his inability
to talk about the Bible,
it is possible that he doesn't know
what "crucified" means either.
Though I could be wrong!
Maybe Jesus got nailed to planks
because of his hush payments
to a porn star.
I don't know!
I don't have the personal relationship
that Trump has with the Bible,
which for the record
is sourly holding it up
like he's showing off the bug
he just squashed with it.
But as massively flawed
as Trump is, as a candidate,
husband, boss, father,
and human being,
he is currently slightly
ahead of Biden in the polls.
There is a pretty good chance he could
be back in the White House next year.
Given that, it's worth talking about
what he plans to do if he gets there.
Because Trump does have
a second-term platform.
You can go on his website and see it
all laid out and it is pretty alarming.
For instance, here he is talking
about his plans regarding trans rights.
I will ask Congress
to pass a bill establishing
that the only genders recognized
by the United States government
are male and female,
and they are assigned at birth.
No serious country
should be telling its children
that they were born
with the wrong gender,
a concept that was never heard of.
In all of human history, nobody's ever
heard of this, what's happening today.
It was all when the radical left
invented it just a few years ago.
That is really the Trump experience
in a nutshell right there.
Hateful ideology, a promise
to make life harder for minorities,
all wrapped up in a non-sequitur
so stupid it is inconveniently funny.
The radical left invented
trans people a few years ago?
I'm sorry, what?
Did they put it on "Shark Tank"
and I somehow missed it?
That is another classic line read
from one of humanity's worst brains.
Trump's also promising
mass deportations in his next term.
Here is Stephen Miller, his former
advisor and first-draft Pixar villain,
talking in depth about the logistics.
So, you grab illegal immigrants,
and then you move them
to the staging grounds,
and that's where the planes
are waiting
for federal law enforcement
to then move those illegals home.
You deputize the National Guard
to carry out immigration enforcement,
and then you also deploy
the military to the southern border.
The military has the right to establish
a fortress position on the border
and to say no one
can cross here at all.
Those are some strong words
from Miller there,
only slightly undercut
by his tendency to look, at all times,
like a condom full of soup.
But that is still
just the beginning.
Trump plans to require local
law enforcement agencies
to use measures
like stop-and-frisk,
"cut funding for any school
that has a vaccine or mask mandate",
and impose a universal tariff
of "at least 10% on all imports".
And notably, he's promising
to get revenge on his enemies.
At rallies, he's told supporters
that "I am your retribution",
which sounds more like something
you'd hear out of the mouth of Megatron
than a major presidential candidate.
He's been specific about who will be on
the receiving end of that retribution.
We will root out the communist,
Marxist, fascist,
and the radical left thugs
that live like vermin
within the confines of our country,
that lie and steal
and cheat on elections,
and will do anything possible,
they'll do anything,
whether legally or illegally,
to destroy America
and to destroy the American dream.
First, was he falling asleep
at the end there?
But second,
it's not usually a great sign
when a politician starts
referring to groups as "vermin",
unless of course
they're running for mayor of Zootopia
and they're gunning
for the Little Rodentia vote.
Then, it's actually
pretty savvy politics.
And if you're thinking
"Trump's making big scary promises,"
"but he did that in 2016, too,
and he broke a lot of them,"
that is true.
Although he did also
go on to do a lot of damage.
He blew up
the Iran nuclear deal,
withdrew us from the Paris
climate agreement,
slashed access to food stamps, and
gave a huge tax cut to corporations.
He separated children
from their families at the border,
suggested curing Covid
with bleach or a bright light,
summoned an insurrection,
and put in three Supreme Court justices
who helped overturn Roe v. Wade
and seem to have no intentions
of stopping there.
But it is true that a lot
of his other major policy goals,
from ending
the Affordable Care Act,
to getting Mexico
to pay for his border wall,
remained out of reach.
Trump as president was sort of like
a hamster in an attack helicopter.
Sure, he wants to bathe the world
in blood and terror,
he wants it with his whole
rotten hamster heart.
But luckily,
he doesn't know what buttons to press
and his brain's the size of a peanut,
so that puts some hard limits
on the damage he's actually able to do.
This time, though,
Trump'll have a lot more help,
not only are the courts
more conservative,
and the Republican Party
more firmly aligned with him,
but a group of conservatives
has come up with a plan of action
to ensure that he can hit
the ground running,
and even if he does meet resistance
from Congress or the courts,
he will now have ways
to go around them.
That is why,
while Trump's first term was bad,
his second could be
much, much worse.
So, tonight,
let's talk about Trump's second term:
who's making those plans for him,
what they entail,
and how much damage they could do.
And the main insight
we have into all of this
comes from something called
Project 2025.
Which I know sounds
like a sexy CW sci-fi drama
starring Ashanti, Chad Michael Murray,
and Turtle from "Entourage",
but incredibly,
it's even worse than that.
Basically, Project 2025 aims to do
for Trump's whole presidency
what the Federalist Society
did for his judicial picks,
give him a step-by-step game plan
that he simply has to execute
and then take credit for.
They've even made
a promotional video for it.
- Seems like an eternity.
- It's not.
Because the left has engineered
The 2025
and restore American prosperity.
More than 100
conservative organizations
have come together
to work on this.
And they're all there.
You've got the Heritage Foundation,
Liberty University, the NRA,
Turning Point USA,
Rodeo Clowns for Trump,
The Center for Ruining Thanksgiving,
The Marriage Is Between
a Man and His Property Institute,
Arm the Unborn,
The Union of Twitter Guys
with Goatees and Wraparound Shades,
Captain Planet Villains
for a Brighter Tomorrow,
and of course, Americans for How Zoos
Should Let You Fuck the Bald Eagles.
They are all here.
They've even produced a 900-page
handbook on their goals,
which are sweeping.
It proposes dismantling NOAA,
the agency that tracks hurricanes
and protects marine life,
because it's "One of the main drivers
of the climate change alarm industry."
It also proposes eliminating
the Head Start program,
installing a pro-life task force
to replace Biden's
reproductive healthcare one,
outlines plans to defund the DOJ,
dismantle the FBI,
and eliminate the Departments
of Education and Commerce,
and states that "pornography
should be outlawed",
and "the people who produce and
distribute it should be imprisoned".
And these proposals are extreme,
because the people
who wrote them are extreme.
And they've been laying
all of this out in plain view,
mostly on conservative podcasts.
One of the major architects
of Project 2025 is Russell Vought,
who served in the White House
during Trump's first term.
He's a self-described
Christian nationalist,
and here he is making
a targeted pitch
for one funding cut
that Trump could make.
I am opposed
to the Department of Education,
'cause I think it's the department
of critical race theory.
You have grant after grant
of culturally responsive learning,
where you're funding, essentially,
a cultural revolution,
not just with teachers,
but with the students.
That's what
all this wokeism's about.
Apparently the Department of Education
is funding a "cultural revolution".
I presume that is why
every kindergarten classroom
now has the new edition of "Brown Bear,
Brown Bear, What Do You See?"
where he responds "A parasitic
member of the bourgeoisie."
But Vought and the rest
of the Project 2025 team
aren't just devising policy,
they're making sure
they'll have the right people
in place to implement it.
One of the reasons Trump got off
to a slow start last time is that,
because nobody expected him to win,
there wasn't a plan in place
for what to do once he did.
Jared, famously,
toured the Obama White House
not long after the election, and asked
"how many of the individuals there
would remain
into the next administration,"
to which someone
presumably had to tell him
"Not many, you fucking idiot!
You have to hire people yourself.
That is what you just won!"
But that confusion won't happen
this time, because Project 2025
is assembling
a database of prospective hires,
not just for the White House,
but across the entire
federal government,
that they've likened
to "a conservative LinkedIn."
Here's one of the leaders
of that effort, John McEntee,
making his pitch
for people to sign up.
If you want make a difference,
you can go to Project-2025-dot-org.
You can apply.
You can take the training.
You can learn about being a political
appointee and how to be effective,
which is so important.
Okay, you got the job.
Now what do you do?
How do you take on the bureaucracy?
How do you do all of these things.
That's where
we're trying to help
give the president
a little leg up on staffing.
It's essentially an open audition
for people who might want a new job
because they lost their old one
on January the 6th for some reason.
And their goal here is clear:
to assemble
"an army of vetted, trained staff"
who can "begin dismantling the
administrative state from day one".
Which is a little weird,
if you think about it,
they're assembling an army
of future government bureaucrats
who hate the government.
If you were interviewing for a job
at Cheerios, and the interviewer said
"Why do you want to work here?"
and you replied, "Because I hate
Cheerios and want to destroy it,"
you'd be immediately grabbed
by security and never seen again.
You think Cheerios fucks around?
You think you rule the cereal aisle
for 80-plus years
without burying some bodies?
Fuck around with Cheerios
and I promise you'll find out.
And once Project 2025's
wrecking crew is in place,
they've outlined
a number of strategies
that can be used to make sure
Trump can do as much as possible
without needing Congress.
A lot of them derive from the
so-called "unitary executive theory,"
which was developed
during the Reagan years,
its supporters argue
that "Article 2 of the Constitution
gives the president complete
control of the executive branch".
As one person who's read
that manifesto puts it,
it "turns the separation of powers
among the three branches
into a game of rock, paper, scissors,
except rock beats everything."
Here is one example. There used
to be a thing called "impoundment",
where a president
could stop or redirect money
that Congress had already
appropriated for something.
Congress actually
made that illegal in 1974,
after some abuses
during the Nixon administration.
It may ring a bell for you
because it came up during Trump's
first impeachment hearings,
when he held up aid to Ukraine
to try and get them to look
for dirt on the Biden family.
But Trump's team now wants
to bring impoundment back,
to thwart anything liberal
that comes out of Capitol Hill.
Just listen to Larry Kudlow,
one of Trump's top economic advisors
in his first term,
get very excited
when talking about it.
So, let's get back to, you know,
How about giving the power
of impoundment to the president?
Impound their tuchuses off.
Impound their rear ends off.
That's what you do
and leave all this legislative BS.
Just impound, impound, impound.
He is getting fired up there.
Also, "impound their rear ends off"
sounds less like a statement
about presidential power
and more like a slogan from
a Pride event in the "Cars" universe.
But it goes
well beyond impoundment.
It's one of the most boring-sounding
parts of Project 2025
that could actually end up
being the most insidious,
because it could make achieving all
Trump's other goals so much easier.
It's called Schedule F.
And to explain it,
I'm afraid I'm going to have to briefly
talk about government HR procedures.
So just sit tight,
and when we're done, I promise,
I'll play you another clip
from "MILF Manor" as a reward.
Very basically, there are
two kinds of federal employees.
The first group are merit-based,
career positions.
These jobs tend to be experts,
administrators,
and support staff
that do the important work
of keeping the government running.
It could be an engineer at NASA,
a nurse at the VA,
or a railroad safety inspector
at the Department of Transportation.
Workers like that have robust
employee protections,
meaning they can't be fired
for political reasons,
because their jobs aren't political.
That way, they can work
over many administrations,
gaining the kind
of extensive experience
that the government
needs to function.
The second group consists
of political appointees,
like cabinet secretaries
and those under them.
They are hired by a new administration
to ensure the campaign promises
of the new president
are being worked on,
and they tend to leave
when that administration does.
There are about two million
career federal employees,
and only about
4,000 political ones,
who change depending
on who is in charge.
Those are the ones the new
administrations do have to hire in,
Jared, you fucking idiot.
That is essentially
all the background you need to know
about federal personnel management.
If you're bored, it's over,
and if you're hard, welcome home.
And either way, here is that promised
clip from "MILF Manor."
I am conflicted kissing Joey,
and it is so weird,
'cause my son's name is Joey
and they kind of look alike.
My god!
I will say this. I know
that is gross and incestuous,
but you all liked that shit
when it was on "Game of Thrones".
You lapped it right up!
If that clip had had a dragon in it,
would that make it any better for you?
Anyway, during Trump's first term,
he got frustrated
by the fact so many of the career
government employees
seemed to be undermining him,
by telling him things that he wanted
to do were illegal,
or that things he said were wrong,
or, you know,
testifying publicly
about the laws they'd seen him break.
But Schedule F
would fix all of that.
Basically, it's a new designation
that would reclassify
around 50,000 career civil servants
as political appointees,
meaning they wouldn't have civil
service protections from getting fired,
and whoever replaces them could
be hired on loyalty, not on merit.
Here is Russell Vought explaining
the plan to Don Jr.'s fiance.
We have a number of ideas,
most notably Schedule F,
which allows us to reclassify.
If you work on policy, you have
the opportunity to be reclassified
and turn into
an at-will employment.
That doesn't mean
you're going to get fired tomorrow,
but that does mean that you are working
for the president of the United States,
you're not working
for your own institution
or your own institutional benefits.
You don't work for the institution,
you work for the president.
So, if, for example,
you're a government weather forecaster
using your expertise
to predict the path of a hurricane,
and, hypothetically,
a president assembles the press,
only for it to become clear that
he's extended your map in black Sharpie
for some fucking reason,
your job isn't to correct him,
it's to say "Right, Mr. President.
You truly are the best at weather."
Except the truth is, Trump wouldn't
even need a Sharpie to do it next time,
because whatever map exists
in his head
would already be the official position
of the National Weather Service.
In that interview,
Vought goes on to lay out
exactly what Schedule F would do,
and it is worth listening to him,
because it's very important,
even if Kimberly Guilfoyle
is clearly not listening to him at all.
The whole notion of independence,
Kimberly,
there's this view for 100 years
that agencies should be
independent of the president,
and some of them are really
independent under statute,
and some of them just want
to call themselves independent.
- Sure.
- All of it's unconstitutional.
And all of it is designed so that
a president of the United States
can't call these individuals up
and say
"You guys work for me.
This is my policy agenda.
This is what I want you to do."
I will say, that dead-eyed "sure"
is absolutely the level
of conversational buy-in
I'd expect from someone
in a relationship with Don Jr.
There are Tibetan monks
who aren't that good
at mentally transporting
themselves somewhere else.
Now, interestingly,
Trump signed an executive order
enacting this Schedule F plan
back in October of 2020,
but barely anyone noticed,
because the whole thing
had been developed in strict secrecy
and issued only two weeks
before the election.
Anyone with a role "developing policy"
could be reclassified.
But they basically decided that almost
any role could be "policy-related."
In fact, Vought,
who was serving as Trump's director
of the Office of Management
and Budget at the time,
drew up a list of potential employees
that could be reclassified
that amounted to 68%
of his department's workforce.
Thankfully, Biden undid Schedule F
immediately upon taking office.
Trump says he plans to reinstate it
on day one of his second term.
And to understand just how
consequential that could be,
it is worth going back to that guy
you saw earlier, John McEntee.
He is a big proponent
of Schedule F.
He happened to work as the director
of the White House Personnel Office
for the last year
of Trump's first term,
a job that he got
at the age of just 29,
after starting out as the guy
who literally carried Trump's bags.
Here is McEntee telling the fun story
of how he got his big promotion.
I was walking with the president
on the Colonnade in the White House.
He said
"What's on the schedule today?
I was reading through,
9:00 AM this, 10:00 AM, that."
I said
"You have your PPO meeting."
He said, "PPO?" I said
"The Personnel Office is coming by."
He said, "I've always had
so many problems with that office.
And then he just looked at me
and said
"Do you think
you could run that office?"
And for some reason,
I said, "Yes, I could run that office."
That is an amazing story.
Although I don't know how good
it makes you look, to be honest.
"So, there I was, holding
the president's purse, when he says
'Hey, you, you're alive
and in my field of vision.
Do you want to do some
shit so I don't have to?'
He really saw
my value in that moment."
By all accounts,
McEntee used his sudden power
to purge anyone even suspected
of disloyalty to the president.
His team pulled
in even fairly low-level employees
to make sure that they toed
the Trump party line,
for instance
"an office assistant at the DOJ
was asked to explain
why she'd voted
in a local Democratic primary
a few years earlier."
And employees
were expected to endorse policies
that had nothing to do
with their work.
Officials at the EPA and HUD
were apparently asked
"Do you support
the president's plan
to withdraw all U.S. troops
from Afghanistan?"
And pity the random
plant biologist at the EPA
who had to be like, "I dunno,
how will it affect ferns?"
Incidentally, since leaving
the White House,
McEntee has kept busy,
not only working on Project 2025,
but also starting this terrible
conservative dating app
called The Right Stuff.
I've got to tell you about something
I am so excited to announce:
a dating app
for all of us conservatives.
You'll start off by building
your perfect profile,
no pronouns necessary.
We want you to put
your best foot forward,
which includes
your favorite photos of yourself
doing what you love
or being with the people you love.
Our prompts
give you the opportunity
to let people
know various sides of you.
So, remember,
be authentic and creative.
Okay, a few things.
You don't need a new dating app
to find conservatives online.
Just go onto any existing app
and filter for people
who describe their views
as "moderate".
Any single woman in a big city
can tell you "moderate" just means
"I'm a right-wing nutjob,
but I'd like to get laid, please."
And there is so much in that ad,
from the image of Trump himself
in one of the profile photos,
to the fact
that some of those fun prompts
include naming
your "favorite liberal lie."
If you go on the app, you'll find
another prompt for you to fill in
and what is the right answer
when a dating app
asks you to rate an insurrection?
"January 6th was a total turn on,
get over here and shatter my asshole
like it's a Capitol window?"
McEntee also created a TikTok
account for the site,
where every video
seems to be a POV shot
of what it's like to be
on a date with him,
which seems to be
an absolute nightmare.
I was watching TV yesterday,
which I usually don't do,
and I noticed something
with the commercials.
When did everyone in America
become Black and gay?
Do you really think handing over
your gun ends gun violence?
That's like chopping off your own dick
to stop rape.
If you say Palestinians
deserve a homeland for themselves,
you're woke,
but if you say white people deserve
a homeland just for themselves,
you're racist?
It's funny how New York
went from trying to ban Big Gulps
to people openly shitting
in the street.
Okay. You clearly
have some questions there,
and I can see your food
is getting cold, so real quick:
one, everyone in America
isn't Black and gay,
though some people are,
and sometimes
they do appear in commercials.
Two, to be clear,
I think you just made yourself
the rapist in your own
hypothetical there.
Three, is wanting a homeland
just for white people racist?
Yes, it is, thanks for asking.
Finally, people in New York have
been shitting openly in the street
long before Big Gulps
were even invented.
And it's an odd thing
to bring up seconds
before inserting
an entire hamburger into your face.
And while I know those TikToks
are very, very dumb,
one of them is actually
a pretty good reminder
of McEntee's entire philosophy
when it comes to government staffing.
So, Elon Musk cut 90% of Twitter's
staff and it's still working fine.
Should we try that
with government next?
Yeah, is that
the best comparison, though?
Because I'm not sure
Twitter is "working fine"
so much as it's "a ruined castle slowly
sinking into the bog of irrelevance."
But I guess there are
a lot more Nazis on there now,
which does seem to track
with your plans for government.
And look, I am not saying
there aren't lots of ways
to make the government
more efficient.
There are!
But this isn't the way to do it.
Because there is clearly a problem with
making large chunks of the government
subordinate to the whims
of the chief executive
and his adviser-slash-amateur
food comedian-slash-founder
of trad-wife eHarmony,
especially when this particular
chief executive
famously values loyalty
over all else.
Listen to this head of a government
worker union point out the obvious.
Do you want people
doing scientific research
at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
who don't have the qualifications
to perform that kind of work?
Their only qualification
is an allegiance to the Trump agenda.
It's very disheartening
and it's scary.
I think that there will be
a massive exodus of competence.
Right. When you fire everyone
who knows what they're doing
and only hire people who will say
yes to the rich guy in charge,
that's not a recipe for good government
it's a recipe for the Titan submersible.
I don't want scientific research
about nuclear power
being done
by people without experience.
I don't want my latte being made
by someone without experience.
"It's your first day?
I'm sorry, step aside, please.
Give me the barista
with a full sleeve of techno-botanical
stick-and-poke tattoos
and a septum piercing
who's worked here for five years
and who hates everybody here.
Experience matters."
There are agencies where you obviously
don't want a president interfering
for political advantage, like the
Department of Justice, or the EPA.
But across the whole government,
with Schedule F,
a president could exert a lot of power
and enact a lot more policy,
simply by telling his loyalists
what to do. For instance,
Trump wouldn't need Congress to vote
on a nationwide ban on abortion drugs,
when he could simply have his FDA
declare them unsafe instead,
that plan incidentally is specifically
spelled out in Project 2025's handbook,
which suggests
the president have the FDA
"reverse its approval
of chemical abortion drugs",
something that is a pet project
for Vought himself,
who has said, among other things
"The families of the West
are not having enough
babies for their societies to endure."
In fact, for all Trump's talk
of wanting to get rid of the deep state,
Schedule F isn't eliminating it,
it is creating
a deep state that is loyal to him,
and driving good people
out of government.
People across the political spectrum
have been raising alarms about this.
Robert Shea, a senior official
under George W. Bush,
and a self-described "hugely
conservative, loyal Republican,"
has said, "hiring people based
on personal political loyalties
would produce
an army of suck-ups,"
adding, "I can't overstate
my level of concern
about the damage this would do to the
institution of the federal government.
You would have things formerly
considered illegal or unconstitutional
popping up all across the government
like whack-a-mole.
And the ability to fight them
would be inhibited."
But that's probably the point here.
And I do get that "Trump Unraveling
Civil Service Protections!"
isn't the sexiest headline,
but it's also the action
that could unlock his ability
to do all the incredibly
damaging things
that he and those involved
in Project 2025 have been planning.
So, what do we do here?
The simple thing is,
don't vote for Donald Trump.
I don't know if you
were planning on doing that,
but I think it should be clear by now
that the official position of this show
is that you should not vote
for Donald Trump.
Not for president,
not for winner of "The Masked Singer."
Basically, not for anything.
And while I have
a lot of problems with Biden,
he is clearly
the better of the two options,
which I recognize
is a very low bar.
Being better than Donald Trump
cannot be the standard,
because Trump himself
is the very absence of a standard.
But the truth is, even if Trump loses,
that won't be the end of this.
The people who cooked up Project 2025
will move onto Project 2029 instead,
because for them,
this is about so much more
than just one election,
or indeed, one candidate.
Project 2025 is born
from an impulse as old as America.
It's an impulse that says one class
of Americans is entitled to lead,
and the rest of us are lucky
to be allowed to serve.
That thinks there should be
a limited government
when it comes to rules
they have to live by,
but also a unitary executive
to keep the rest of us in line.
These are old, old ideas that
have been shouted from podiums
by the likes of George Wallace
and Pat Buchanan
but have now been placed
into a new handbook
for an only-too-willing president
to use on day one.
And in a perfect world, I would love
if we had an opposing party
better able to articulate
a strong defense of our country's ideals,
and that also consistently
lived up to them.
People are entitled to hope
for more from the next four years
than someone
just "not being Trump",
and for at least two
Supreme Court justices to die.
I'm not saying which ones
I would prefer,
but I think
we all have our top two.
And for anyone tempted to think
"We survived Trump's first term,"
first, not everyone did.
And as should hopefully
be clear by now,
a second Trump term really
does promise to be far, far worse.
Because if Trump's first
term was defined by chaos,
his second could be defined
by ruthless efficiency.
And that should be troubling
to absolutely everyone.
Because Project 2025
is a movement whose members joke
about wanting a white homeland,
and insist women
have to have more babies
to uphold Western society,
and its work could be about
to be funneled through
a man who happily calls
his fellow Americans "vermin."
It is not subtle, it's hard to miss,
and once you see it,
you cannot unsee it.
And I know that's bleak,
so let me leave you
with something to which
that exact same description
can actually apply, your third
and final clip from "MILF Manor."
My god,
the dads are hotter than the sons.
- Even the one on the crutch.
- I want the one on the crutches!
Yeah, definitely, the dads
are giving me coochie tingles.
I would've never thought
I'd see my son
in this situation
with all these older women.
I just never thought
you'd like older women.
Yeah, no, I do.
I wanna call them Mommy.
We need to be better than this.
We need to be better than all of this.
And now, this!
And Now:
There's Nothing
Celebrities Like More
Than Telling Architectural Digest
About Their Fucking Fireplaces.
I love fireplaces. Even though
I live in California, I hate heaters.
So, when it gets a little bit chilly
in the winter, I prefer the fireplace.
I have a fireplace here,
which I re-did into gold.
The fireplace used to be mirrored
and kind of foggy,
and I immediately was like
"We need to fix this fireplace."
Such a luxury to be able
to have a wood-burning fireplace.
Living in the U.K., I had two
wood-burning fireplaces in the kitchen.
Got a little fireplace here
to burn some logs.
I really wanted the fireplace
to be a statement.
I think it's important that we
acknowledge the fireplace.
- This is my double-sided fireplace.
- This is a fireplace.
From the moment I wake up,
I turn on that fireplace.
I like to do a lot of phone calls here,
turn the fireplace on.
I have the ability
to turn on my fireplace,
so if I'm home,
the fireplace is definitely on.
I love having the fireplaces on.
I love this room. It is a place that I
love to go and hang out, light a fire.
This used to actually have a classic,
regular fireplace mantel,
and we've put our own
bespoke fireplace up.
This is another working fireplace.
It's really nice to have a fireplace.
This is another
wood fireplace insert.
To be able to close the door
to a fireplace
and still see a beautiful fire,
but it's safe, you know.
This used to actually be
a full wall with a fireplace,
and we didn't like it,
and we put this beautiful,
based on Chrissy's idea,
put this beautiful art installation.
I did ketamine.
Moving on.
Before we go, a quick update.
Two weeks ago,
we bought the contents
of this shuttered Red Lobster
and rebuilt it inside this studio.
Unfortunately, it turned out
this nearby bakery was disappointed,
because they'd put a note
on the door of that Red Lobster,
asking for two pieces
of their kitchen equipment.
Which I maintain
is still the strangest way
to communicate a desire
to purchase something.
It's like ordering lunch
by writing what you want
and tying it
to the leg of a carrier pigeon.
You're not getting
your Sweetgreen salad.
At best, it's coming back
with a rat on its back
and a single AirPod in its mouth.
Nevertheless, we offered to send this
brand-new equipment to that bakery,
with one condition.
Because we'd noticed
they make cake bears,
and I wanted a cake bear
with my face on it,
as would anyone in my position,
because life is short,
TV is fun, and cake is bear.
I especially wanted one
because, as you can see,
each bear
has an absolute dumptruck ass,
and simply put, me gusta.
Last Sunday night, we reached out
to them in their favorite way,
by attaching this note
to their door.
And it turns out, one of the bakery's
owners got the message.
We were so presently surprised
to come in this morning
with this lovely note on our door and
then I was like, wow, what is that,
and I checked John Oliver's show,
and I watched the whole show
while I was working this morning.
And we're just so grateful
that we got to be part of the show
and that he's gonna donate
this kitchen equipment to us,
and here's his cupcakes.
Yes! I love everything
about that cake bear.
Its wide-open eyes, pleading
"Munch a bite out of my ass now!"
I love the little paws,
the little nose,
and that each bear looks
like it's wearing a John Oliver mask.
And they made those bears so fast.
That guy apparently woke up to texts
about our show at 3:00 in the morning,
a nightmare I wouldn't wish
on my worst enemy,
and by 10:00 AM,
the bears were already on sale.
And they even honored my request
that they be given an enormous ass,
as their Facebook post
announcing them said
"They have DONK", all caps.
And just like that,
Facebook is good again.
Sorry for everything
I said about you, Zuckerberg,
you really are a boy genius.
And the good news is, those bears
have been selling surprisingly well.
The first batch
of about 80 John Oliver cake bears
sold out in under an hour.
It was unbelievable. I was like,
I can't believe it went viral,
and the amount of emails
and messages on social media
that we're getting
and people want them shipped
to the Philippines and Australia.
I was a little shocked.
"I can't believe this is real life."
This large cake bear
is going straight to Oliver,
Deising selling the smaller ones
for eight bucks each
and sending all the proceeds to
People's Place food pantry in Kingston.
Again, that is excellent.
Not only are they currently donating
all the proceeds to the local food bank
he's eating that bear in the manner
I'd suggested they were best enjoyed,
ass first.
And can I just say, respectfully, sir,
that is a lot of eye contact there.
I don't mean to make this weird,
but my only question is,
so what are we?
And the donation to that food bank
could end up being considerable,
given, at times, they were apparently
selling around 100 bears an hour.
And it seems
the cakes do have fans.
One customer took their cake bear
to visit the shuttered Red Lobster
that started all of this,
while another made
this superlative TikTok.
As a 47-year-old
who looks like a 67-year-old,
I clearly don't understand TikTok.
But I do know perfect filmmaking
when I see it,
and that right there
is perfect filmmaking.
This has all been a lot of fun.
And fair is fair.
We sent Deising's new kitchen
equipment up to them on Thursday.
On top of which, I'm happy to say,
we'll be making our own $10,000
donation to that local food bank.
And now, there is really
only one thing left to reveal.
Because it turns out, Deising's
didn't just make that large cake bear
they also made another,
featuring my actual likeness,
and it is the single funniest
possible rendering of me as a bear.
Would you like to see it?
Please, come with me!
And behold
this absolute masterpiece!
Look at its eyes, look at its skin,
look at its mouth.
Look how much of a problem
its mouth is.
I am humbled, shocked,
and as this cake bear suggests,
slightly terrified.
But I'm also impressed.
Because Deising's,
you clearly heard my challenge
and sent us something that looks
somehow both like me,
and a version of Arthur the aardvark
that's been through 14 divorces.
It even includes an edible note,
reading "Don't be a monster!
Have some class and eat it ass first,
from the Deising family and staff."
Which is just perfect.
So, thank you so much
to Deising's bakery,
who rose to the challenge
of producing a product, on zero notice,
that didn't exist and yet had somehow
been advertised on national TV.
And thank you to everyone
who bought the bears.
I can really only think
of one way to end this,
and that is to eat this bear,
that I love so very much,
in the only
universally acceptable manner,
and that is by taking a bite
out of its sumptuous ass.
Here we go.
We did it!
That is our show,
thank you so much for watching.
We'll see you next week,
good night!
We did it!
I'm John Oliver.
Thank you so much for joining us.
It has been a busy week.
Hunter Biden was found guilty
on gun charges,
Macron called
a snap election in France,
and in Michigan, this conservative
congressional candidate
posted a campaign TikTok with
an AI-generated voice that is bold.
I have another dream!
Yes, it is me, Martin Luther King.
I came back from the dead
to say something.
As I was saying,
I have another dream,
that Anthony Hudson will be Michigan
8th district's next congressman.
Yes, I have a dream, again.
Okay, now I am going back
to where I came from. Goodbye.
My name is Anthony Hudson,
and I approve this message.
Okay, my god, okay.
Let's just dive in.
It is hard to pick the wildest part.
The opening scream?
The casual "as I was saying"?
The fact that MLK reassures audience
he has another dream three times,
as if that's going to be the main
thing someone takes issue with?
But honestly, I think it might be
the four-second pause before
"Okay, now I am going back
to where I came from, goodbye",
making him sound
like a middle-aged dad
who doesn't know
how to end a phone call.
I've got so many questions
about that,
and none of them
are about Anthony Hudson
and where to vote for him.
Hudson initially put out a statement
saying the video
was posted without his knowledge,
and that it was
"stupid and disrespectful",
only to then reverse
that position, saying,
"If MLK were alive today,
I do believe he would endorse me
and my vision
for a better Michigan."
And first, no he would not,
Anthony, for so many reasons.
But second, you had it right
before you doubled down.
The only acceptable response
to that ad is to issue an apology,
drop the whole thing,
and then, if I may quote something
Martin Luther King never said,
announce "I am going back
to where I came from, goodbye."
But we're gonna dive straight
in with our main story tonight,
which concerns
the presidential election.
The thing you're actively ignoring
so you can devote all your
brain power to "MILF Manor."
If you're not watching,
real quick,
this season, not only are the MILFs
dating hot younger men,
they're also, and this is true,
dating the young guys' dads as well,
and it is exactly as awkward
for everyone as you'd think.
Today, you're going to be exploring
a tantric yoga class.
God. Like, no way. No.
There's some things that you don't
do with your son or with your father.
- Are you traumatized?
- A little bit.
Yeah, I bet!
Although, not to victim-blame here,
but you did sign up to bag MILFs
in a televised sex contest.
So, no brain was ever leaving
that manor unscarred.
The election
is in full swing right now,
and it's pretty much
your usual campaign,
candidates offering
policy proposals, trading barbs,
and occasionally getting convicted
of 34 felonies
and complaining about the judge.
You saw what happened to some
of the witnesses that were on our side.
They were literally crucified
by this man
who looks like an angel,
but he's really a devil.
Trump definitely doesn't know
what the word "literally" means,
but given his inability
to talk about the Bible,
it is possible that he doesn't know
what "crucified" means either.
Though I could be wrong!
Maybe Jesus got nailed to planks
because of his hush payments
to a porn star.
I don't know!
I don't have the personal relationship
that Trump has with the Bible,
which for the record
is sourly holding it up
like he's showing off the bug
he just squashed with it.
But as massively flawed
as Trump is, as a candidate,
husband, boss, father,
and human being,
he is currently slightly
ahead of Biden in the polls.
There is a pretty good chance he could
be back in the White House next year.
Given that, it's worth talking about
what he plans to do if he gets there.
Because Trump does have
a second-term platform.
You can go on his website and see it
all laid out and it is pretty alarming.
For instance, here he is talking
about his plans regarding trans rights.
I will ask Congress
to pass a bill establishing
that the only genders recognized
by the United States government
are male and female,
and they are assigned at birth.
No serious country
should be telling its children
that they were born
with the wrong gender,
a concept that was never heard of.
In all of human history, nobody's ever
heard of this, what's happening today.
It was all when the radical left
invented it just a few years ago.
That is really the Trump experience
in a nutshell right there.
Hateful ideology, a promise
to make life harder for minorities,
all wrapped up in a non-sequitur
so stupid it is inconveniently funny.
The radical left invented
trans people a few years ago?
I'm sorry, what?
Did they put it on "Shark Tank"
and I somehow missed it?
That is another classic line read
from one of humanity's worst brains.
Trump's also promising
mass deportations in his next term.
Here is Stephen Miller, his former
advisor and first-draft Pixar villain,
talking in depth about the logistics.
So, you grab illegal immigrants,
and then you move them
to the staging grounds,
and that's where the planes
are waiting
for federal law enforcement
to then move those illegals home.
You deputize the National Guard
to carry out immigration enforcement,
and then you also deploy
the military to the southern border.
The military has the right to establish
a fortress position on the border
and to say no one
can cross here at all.
Those are some strong words
from Miller there,
only slightly undercut
by his tendency to look, at all times,
like a condom full of soup.
But that is still
just the beginning.
Trump plans to require local
law enforcement agencies
to use measures
like stop-and-frisk,
"cut funding for any school
that has a vaccine or mask mandate",
and impose a universal tariff
of "at least 10% on all imports".
And notably, he's promising
to get revenge on his enemies.
At rallies, he's told supporters
that "I am your retribution",
which sounds more like something
you'd hear out of the mouth of Megatron
than a major presidential candidate.
He's been specific about who will be on
the receiving end of that retribution.
We will root out the communist,
Marxist, fascist,
and the radical left thugs
that live like vermin
within the confines of our country,
that lie and steal
and cheat on elections,
and will do anything possible,
they'll do anything,
whether legally or illegally,
to destroy America
and to destroy the American dream.
First, was he falling asleep
at the end there?
But second,
it's not usually a great sign
when a politician starts
referring to groups as "vermin",
unless of course
they're running for mayor of Zootopia
and they're gunning
for the Little Rodentia vote.
Then, it's actually
pretty savvy politics.
And if you're thinking
"Trump's making big scary promises,"
"but he did that in 2016, too,
and he broke a lot of them,"
that is true.
Although he did also
go on to do a lot of damage.
He blew up
the Iran nuclear deal,
withdrew us from the Paris
climate agreement,
slashed access to food stamps, and
gave a huge tax cut to corporations.
He separated children
from their families at the border,
suggested curing Covid
with bleach or a bright light,
summoned an insurrection,
and put in three Supreme Court justices
who helped overturn Roe v. Wade
and seem to have no intentions
of stopping there.
But it is true that a lot
of his other major policy goals,
from ending
the Affordable Care Act,
to getting Mexico
to pay for his border wall,
remained out of reach.
Trump as president was sort of like
a hamster in an attack helicopter.
Sure, he wants to bathe the world
in blood and terror,
he wants it with his whole
rotten hamster heart.
But luckily,
he doesn't know what buttons to press
and his brain's the size of a peanut,
so that puts some hard limits
on the damage he's actually able to do.
This time, though,
Trump'll have a lot more help,
not only are the courts
more conservative,
and the Republican Party
more firmly aligned with him,
but a group of conservatives
has come up with a plan of action
to ensure that he can hit
the ground running,
and even if he does meet resistance
from Congress or the courts,
he will now have ways
to go around them.
That is why,
while Trump's first term was bad,
his second could be
much, much worse.
So, tonight,
let's talk about Trump's second term:
who's making those plans for him,
what they entail,
and how much damage they could do.
And the main insight
we have into all of this
comes from something called
Project 2025.
Which I know sounds
like a sexy CW sci-fi drama
starring Ashanti, Chad Michael Murray,
and Turtle from "Entourage",
but incredibly,
it's even worse than that.
Basically, Project 2025 aims to do
for Trump's whole presidency
what the Federalist Society
did for his judicial picks,
give him a step-by-step game plan
that he simply has to execute
and then take credit for.
They've even made
a promotional video for it.
- Seems like an eternity.
- It's not.
Because the left has engineered
The 2025
and restore American prosperity.
More than 100
conservative organizations
have come together
to work on this.
And they're all there.
You've got the Heritage Foundation,
Liberty University, the NRA,
Turning Point USA,
Rodeo Clowns for Trump,
The Center for Ruining Thanksgiving,
The Marriage Is Between
a Man and His Property Institute,
Arm the Unborn,
The Union of Twitter Guys
with Goatees and Wraparound Shades,
Captain Planet Villains
for a Brighter Tomorrow,
and of course, Americans for How Zoos
Should Let You Fuck the Bald Eagles.
They are all here.
They've even produced a 900-page
handbook on their goals,
which are sweeping.
It proposes dismantling NOAA,
the agency that tracks hurricanes
and protects marine life,
because it's "One of the main drivers
of the climate change alarm industry."
It also proposes eliminating
the Head Start program,
installing a pro-life task force
to replace Biden's
reproductive healthcare one,
outlines plans to defund the DOJ,
dismantle the FBI,
and eliminate the Departments
of Education and Commerce,
and states that "pornography
should be outlawed",
and "the people who produce and
distribute it should be imprisoned".
And these proposals are extreme,
because the people
who wrote them are extreme.
And they've been laying
all of this out in plain view,
mostly on conservative podcasts.
One of the major architects
of Project 2025 is Russell Vought,
who served in the White House
during Trump's first term.
He's a self-described
Christian nationalist,
and here he is making
a targeted pitch
for one funding cut
that Trump could make.
I am opposed
to the Department of Education,
'cause I think it's the department
of critical race theory.
You have grant after grant
of culturally responsive learning,
where you're funding, essentially,
a cultural revolution,
not just with teachers,
but with the students.
That's what
all this wokeism's about.
Apparently the Department of Education
is funding a "cultural revolution".
I presume that is why
every kindergarten classroom
now has the new edition of "Brown Bear,
Brown Bear, What Do You See?"
where he responds "A parasitic
member of the bourgeoisie."
But Vought and the rest
of the Project 2025 team
aren't just devising policy,
they're making sure
they'll have the right people
in place to implement it.
One of the reasons Trump got off
to a slow start last time is that,
because nobody expected him to win,
there wasn't a plan in place
for what to do once he did.
Jared, famously,
toured the Obama White House
not long after the election, and asked
"how many of the individuals there
would remain
into the next administration,"
to which someone
presumably had to tell him
"Not many, you fucking idiot!
You have to hire people yourself.
That is what you just won!"
But that confusion won't happen
this time, because Project 2025
is assembling
a database of prospective hires,
not just for the White House,
but across the entire
federal government,
that they've likened
to "a conservative LinkedIn."
Here's one of the leaders
of that effort, John McEntee,
making his pitch
for people to sign up.
If you want make a difference,
you can go to Project-2025-dot-org.
You can apply.
You can take the training.
You can learn about being a political
appointee and how to be effective,
which is so important.
Okay, you got the job.
Now what do you do?
How do you take on the bureaucracy?
How do you do all of these things.
That's where
we're trying to help
give the president
a little leg up on staffing.
It's essentially an open audition
for people who might want a new job
because they lost their old one
on January the 6th for some reason.
And their goal here is clear:
to assemble
"an army of vetted, trained staff"
who can "begin dismantling the
administrative state from day one".
Which is a little weird,
if you think about it,
they're assembling an army
of future government bureaucrats
who hate the government.
If you were interviewing for a job
at Cheerios, and the interviewer said
"Why do you want to work here?"
and you replied, "Because I hate
Cheerios and want to destroy it,"
you'd be immediately grabbed
by security and never seen again.
You think Cheerios fucks around?
You think you rule the cereal aisle
for 80-plus years
without burying some bodies?
Fuck around with Cheerios
and I promise you'll find out.
And once Project 2025's
wrecking crew is in place,
they've outlined
a number of strategies
that can be used to make sure
Trump can do as much as possible
without needing Congress.
A lot of them derive from the
so-called "unitary executive theory,"
which was developed
during the Reagan years,
its supporters argue
that "Article 2 of the Constitution
gives the president complete
control of the executive branch".
As one person who's read
that manifesto puts it,
it "turns the separation of powers
among the three branches
into a game of rock, paper, scissors,
except rock beats everything."
Here is one example. There used
to be a thing called "impoundment",
where a president
could stop or redirect money
that Congress had already
appropriated for something.
Congress actually
made that illegal in 1974,
after some abuses
during the Nixon administration.
It may ring a bell for you
because it came up during Trump's
first impeachment hearings,
when he held up aid to Ukraine
to try and get them to look
for dirt on the Biden family.
But Trump's team now wants
to bring impoundment back,
to thwart anything liberal
that comes out of Capitol Hill.
Just listen to Larry Kudlow,
one of Trump's top economic advisors
in his first term,
get very excited
when talking about it.
So, let's get back to, you know,
How about giving the power
of impoundment to the president?
Impound their tuchuses off.
Impound their rear ends off.
That's what you do
and leave all this legislative BS.
Just impound, impound, impound.
He is getting fired up there.
Also, "impound their rear ends off"
sounds less like a statement
about presidential power
and more like a slogan from
a Pride event in the "Cars" universe.
But it goes
well beyond impoundment.
It's one of the most boring-sounding
parts of Project 2025
that could actually end up
being the most insidious,
because it could make achieving all
Trump's other goals so much easier.
It's called Schedule F.
And to explain it,
I'm afraid I'm going to have to briefly
talk about government HR procedures.
So just sit tight,
and when we're done, I promise,
I'll play you another clip
from "MILF Manor" as a reward.
Very basically, there are
two kinds of federal employees.
The first group are merit-based,
career positions.
These jobs tend to be experts,
administrators,
and support staff
that do the important work
of keeping the government running.
It could be an engineer at NASA,
a nurse at the VA,
or a railroad safety inspector
at the Department of Transportation.
Workers like that have robust
employee protections,
meaning they can't be fired
for political reasons,
because their jobs aren't political.
That way, they can work
over many administrations,
gaining the kind
of extensive experience
that the government
needs to function.
The second group consists
of political appointees,
like cabinet secretaries
and those under them.
They are hired by a new administration
to ensure the campaign promises
of the new president
are being worked on,
and they tend to leave
when that administration does.
There are about two million
career federal employees,
and only about
4,000 political ones,
who change depending
on who is in charge.
Those are the ones the new
administrations do have to hire in,
Jared, you fucking idiot.
That is essentially
all the background you need to know
about federal personnel management.
If you're bored, it's over,
and if you're hard, welcome home.
And either way, here is that promised
clip from "MILF Manor."
I am conflicted kissing Joey,
and it is so weird,
'cause my son's name is Joey
and they kind of look alike.
My god!
I will say this. I know
that is gross and incestuous,
but you all liked that shit
when it was on "Game of Thrones".
You lapped it right up!
If that clip had had a dragon in it,
would that make it any better for you?
Anyway, during Trump's first term,
he got frustrated
by the fact so many of the career
government employees
seemed to be undermining him,
by telling him things that he wanted
to do were illegal,
or that things he said were wrong,
or, you know,
testifying publicly
about the laws they'd seen him break.
But Schedule F
would fix all of that.
Basically, it's a new designation
that would reclassify
around 50,000 career civil servants
as political appointees,
meaning they wouldn't have civil
service protections from getting fired,
and whoever replaces them could
be hired on loyalty, not on merit.
Here is Russell Vought explaining
the plan to Don Jr.'s fiance.
We have a number of ideas,
most notably Schedule F,
which allows us to reclassify.
If you work on policy, you have
the opportunity to be reclassified
and turn into
an at-will employment.
That doesn't mean
you're going to get fired tomorrow,
but that does mean that you are working
for the president of the United States,
you're not working
for your own institution
or your own institutional benefits.
You don't work for the institution,
you work for the president.
So, if, for example,
you're a government weather forecaster
using your expertise
to predict the path of a hurricane,
and, hypothetically,
a president assembles the press,
only for it to become clear that
he's extended your map in black Sharpie
for some fucking reason,
your job isn't to correct him,
it's to say "Right, Mr. President.
You truly are the best at weather."
Except the truth is, Trump wouldn't
even need a Sharpie to do it next time,
because whatever map exists
in his head
would already be the official position
of the National Weather Service.
In that interview,
Vought goes on to lay out
exactly what Schedule F would do,
and it is worth listening to him,
because it's very important,
even if Kimberly Guilfoyle
is clearly not listening to him at all.
The whole notion of independence,
Kimberly,
there's this view for 100 years
that agencies should be
independent of the president,
and some of them are really
independent under statute,
and some of them just want
to call themselves independent.
- Sure.
- All of it's unconstitutional.
And all of it is designed so that
a president of the United States
can't call these individuals up
and say
"You guys work for me.
This is my policy agenda.
This is what I want you to do."
I will say, that dead-eyed "sure"
is absolutely the level
of conversational buy-in
I'd expect from someone
in a relationship with Don Jr.
There are Tibetan monks
who aren't that good
at mentally transporting
themselves somewhere else.
Now, interestingly,
Trump signed an executive order
enacting this Schedule F plan
back in October of 2020,
but barely anyone noticed,
because the whole thing
had been developed in strict secrecy
and issued only two weeks
before the election.
Anyone with a role "developing policy"
could be reclassified.
But they basically decided that almost
any role could be "policy-related."
In fact, Vought,
who was serving as Trump's director
of the Office of Management
and Budget at the time,
drew up a list of potential employees
that could be reclassified
that amounted to 68%
of his department's workforce.
Thankfully, Biden undid Schedule F
immediately upon taking office.
Trump says he plans to reinstate it
on day one of his second term.
And to understand just how
consequential that could be,
it is worth going back to that guy
you saw earlier, John McEntee.
He is a big proponent
of Schedule F.
He happened to work as the director
of the White House Personnel Office
for the last year
of Trump's first term,
a job that he got
at the age of just 29,
after starting out as the guy
who literally carried Trump's bags.
Here is McEntee telling the fun story
of how he got his big promotion.
I was walking with the president
on the Colonnade in the White House.
He said
"What's on the schedule today?
I was reading through,
9:00 AM this, 10:00 AM, that."
I said
"You have your PPO meeting."
He said, "PPO?" I said
"The Personnel Office is coming by."
He said, "I've always had
so many problems with that office.
And then he just looked at me
and said
"Do you think
you could run that office?"
And for some reason,
I said, "Yes, I could run that office."
That is an amazing story.
Although I don't know how good
it makes you look, to be honest.
"So, there I was, holding
the president's purse, when he says
'Hey, you, you're alive
and in my field of vision.
Do you want to do some
shit so I don't have to?'
He really saw
my value in that moment."
By all accounts,
McEntee used his sudden power
to purge anyone even suspected
of disloyalty to the president.
His team pulled
in even fairly low-level employees
to make sure that they toed
the Trump party line,
for instance
"an office assistant at the DOJ
was asked to explain
why she'd voted
in a local Democratic primary
a few years earlier."
And employees
were expected to endorse policies
that had nothing to do
with their work.
Officials at the EPA and HUD
were apparently asked
"Do you support
the president's plan
to withdraw all U.S. troops
from Afghanistan?"
And pity the random
plant biologist at the EPA
who had to be like, "I dunno,
how will it affect ferns?"
Incidentally, since leaving
the White House,
McEntee has kept busy,
not only working on Project 2025,
but also starting this terrible
conservative dating app
called The Right Stuff.
I've got to tell you about something
I am so excited to announce:
a dating app
for all of us conservatives.
You'll start off by building
your perfect profile,
no pronouns necessary.
We want you to put
your best foot forward,
which includes
your favorite photos of yourself
doing what you love
or being with the people you love.
Our prompts
give you the opportunity
to let people
know various sides of you.
So, remember,
be authentic and creative.
Okay, a few things.
You don't need a new dating app
to find conservatives online.
Just go onto any existing app
and filter for people
who describe their views
as "moderate".
Any single woman in a big city
can tell you "moderate" just means
"I'm a right-wing nutjob,
but I'd like to get laid, please."
And there is so much in that ad,
from the image of Trump himself
in one of the profile photos,
to the fact
that some of those fun prompts
include naming
your "favorite liberal lie."
If you go on the app, you'll find
another prompt for you to fill in
and what is the right answer
when a dating app
asks you to rate an insurrection?
"January 6th was a total turn on,
get over here and shatter my asshole
like it's a Capitol window?"
McEntee also created a TikTok
account for the site,
where every video
seems to be a POV shot
of what it's like to be
on a date with him,
which seems to be
an absolute nightmare.
I was watching TV yesterday,
which I usually don't do,
and I noticed something
with the commercials.
When did everyone in America
become Black and gay?
Do you really think handing over
your gun ends gun violence?
That's like chopping off your own dick
to stop rape.
If you say Palestinians
deserve a homeland for themselves,
you're woke,
but if you say white people deserve
a homeland just for themselves,
you're racist?
It's funny how New York
went from trying to ban Big Gulps
to people openly shitting
in the street.
Okay. You clearly
have some questions there,
and I can see your food
is getting cold, so real quick:
one, everyone in America
isn't Black and gay,
though some people are,
and sometimes
they do appear in commercials.
Two, to be clear,
I think you just made yourself
the rapist in your own
hypothetical there.
Three, is wanting a homeland
just for white people racist?
Yes, it is, thanks for asking.
Finally, people in New York have
been shitting openly in the street
long before Big Gulps
were even invented.
And it's an odd thing
to bring up seconds
before inserting
an entire hamburger into your face.
And while I know those TikToks
are very, very dumb,
one of them is actually
a pretty good reminder
of McEntee's entire philosophy
when it comes to government staffing.
So, Elon Musk cut 90% of Twitter's
staff and it's still working fine.
Should we try that
with government next?
Yeah, is that
the best comparison, though?
Because I'm not sure
Twitter is "working fine"
so much as it's "a ruined castle slowly
sinking into the bog of irrelevance."
But I guess there are
a lot more Nazis on there now,
which does seem to track
with your plans for government.
And look, I am not saying
there aren't lots of ways
to make the government
more efficient.
There are!
But this isn't the way to do it.
Because there is clearly a problem with
making large chunks of the government
subordinate to the whims
of the chief executive
and his adviser-slash-amateur
food comedian-slash-founder
of trad-wife eHarmony,
especially when this particular
chief executive
famously values loyalty
over all else.
Listen to this head of a government
worker union point out the obvious.
Do you want people
doing scientific research
at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
who don't have the qualifications
to perform that kind of work?
Their only qualification
is an allegiance to the Trump agenda.
It's very disheartening
and it's scary.
I think that there will be
a massive exodus of competence.
Right. When you fire everyone
who knows what they're doing
and only hire people who will say
yes to the rich guy in charge,
that's not a recipe for good government
it's a recipe for the Titan submersible.
I don't want scientific research
about nuclear power
being done
by people without experience.
I don't want my latte being made
by someone without experience.
"It's your first day?
I'm sorry, step aside, please.
Give me the barista
with a full sleeve of techno-botanical
stick-and-poke tattoos
and a septum piercing
who's worked here for five years
and who hates everybody here.
Experience matters."
There are agencies where you obviously
don't want a president interfering
for political advantage, like the
Department of Justice, or the EPA.
But across the whole government,
with Schedule F,
a president could exert a lot of power
and enact a lot more policy,
simply by telling his loyalists
what to do. For instance,
Trump wouldn't need Congress to vote
on a nationwide ban on abortion drugs,
when he could simply have his FDA
declare them unsafe instead,
that plan incidentally is specifically
spelled out in Project 2025's handbook,
which suggests
the president have the FDA
"reverse its approval
of chemical abortion drugs",
something that is a pet project
for Vought himself,
who has said, among other things
"The families of the West
are not having enough
babies for their societies to endure."
In fact, for all Trump's talk
of wanting to get rid of the deep state,
Schedule F isn't eliminating it,
it is creating
a deep state that is loyal to him,
and driving good people
out of government.
People across the political spectrum
have been raising alarms about this.
Robert Shea, a senior official
under George W. Bush,
and a self-described "hugely
conservative, loyal Republican,"
has said, "hiring people based
on personal political loyalties
would produce
an army of suck-ups,"
adding, "I can't overstate
my level of concern
about the damage this would do to the
institution of the federal government.
You would have things formerly
considered illegal or unconstitutional
popping up all across the government
like whack-a-mole.
And the ability to fight them
would be inhibited."
But that's probably the point here.
And I do get that "Trump Unraveling
Civil Service Protections!"
isn't the sexiest headline,
but it's also the action
that could unlock his ability
to do all the incredibly
damaging things
that he and those involved
in Project 2025 have been planning.
So, what do we do here?
The simple thing is,
don't vote for Donald Trump.
I don't know if you
were planning on doing that,
but I think it should be clear by now
that the official position of this show
is that you should not vote
for Donald Trump.
Not for president,
not for winner of "The Masked Singer."
Basically, not for anything.
And while I have
a lot of problems with Biden,
he is clearly
the better of the two options,
which I recognize
is a very low bar.
Being better than Donald Trump
cannot be the standard,
because Trump himself
is the very absence of a standard.
But the truth is, even if Trump loses,
that won't be the end of this.
The people who cooked up Project 2025
will move onto Project 2029 instead,
because for them,
this is about so much more
than just one election,
or indeed, one candidate.
Project 2025 is born
from an impulse as old as America.
It's an impulse that says one class
of Americans is entitled to lead,
and the rest of us are lucky
to be allowed to serve.
That thinks there should be
a limited government
when it comes to rules
they have to live by,
but also a unitary executive
to keep the rest of us in line.
These are old, old ideas that
have been shouted from podiums
by the likes of George Wallace
and Pat Buchanan
but have now been placed
into a new handbook
for an only-too-willing president
to use on day one.
And in a perfect world, I would love
if we had an opposing party
better able to articulate
a strong defense of our country's ideals,
and that also consistently
lived up to them.
People are entitled to hope
for more from the next four years
than someone
just "not being Trump",
and for at least two
Supreme Court justices to die.
I'm not saying which ones
I would prefer,
but I think
we all have our top two.
And for anyone tempted to think
"We survived Trump's first term,"
first, not everyone did.
And as should hopefully
be clear by now,
a second Trump term really
does promise to be far, far worse.
Because if Trump's first
term was defined by chaos,
his second could be defined
by ruthless efficiency.
And that should be troubling
to absolutely everyone.
Because Project 2025
is a movement whose members joke
about wanting a white homeland,
and insist women
have to have more babies
to uphold Western society,
and its work could be about
to be funneled through
a man who happily calls
his fellow Americans "vermin."
It is not subtle, it's hard to miss,
and once you see it,
you cannot unsee it.
And I know that's bleak,
so let me leave you
with something to which
that exact same description
can actually apply, your third
and final clip from "MILF Manor."
My god,
the dads are hotter than the sons.
- Even the one on the crutch.
- I want the one on the crutches!
Yeah, definitely, the dads
are giving me coochie tingles.
I would've never thought
I'd see my son
in this situation
with all these older women.
I just never thought
you'd like older women.
Yeah, no, I do.
I wanna call them Mommy.
We need to be better than this.
We need to be better than all of this.
And now, this!
And Now:
There's Nothing
Celebrities Like More
Than Telling Architectural Digest
About Their Fucking Fireplaces.
I love fireplaces. Even though
I live in California, I hate heaters.
So, when it gets a little bit chilly
in the winter, I prefer the fireplace.
I have a fireplace here,
which I re-did into gold.
The fireplace used to be mirrored
and kind of foggy,
and I immediately was like
"We need to fix this fireplace."
Such a luxury to be able
to have a wood-burning fireplace.
Living in the U.K., I had two
wood-burning fireplaces in the kitchen.
Got a little fireplace here
to burn some logs.
I really wanted the fireplace
to be a statement.
I think it's important that we
acknowledge the fireplace.
- This is my double-sided fireplace.
- This is a fireplace.
From the moment I wake up,
I turn on that fireplace.
I like to do a lot of phone calls here,
turn the fireplace on.
I have the ability
to turn on my fireplace,
so if I'm home,
the fireplace is definitely on.
I love having the fireplaces on.
I love this room. It is a place that I
love to go and hang out, light a fire.
This used to actually have a classic,
regular fireplace mantel,
and we've put our own
bespoke fireplace up.
This is another working fireplace.
It's really nice to have a fireplace.
This is another
wood fireplace insert.
To be able to close the door
to a fireplace
and still see a beautiful fire,
but it's safe, you know.
This used to actually be
a full wall with a fireplace,
and we didn't like it,
and we put this beautiful,
based on Chrissy's idea,
put this beautiful art installation.
I did ketamine.
Moving on.
Before we go, a quick update.
Two weeks ago,
we bought the contents
of this shuttered Red Lobster
and rebuilt it inside this studio.
Unfortunately, it turned out
this nearby bakery was disappointed,
because they'd put a note
on the door of that Red Lobster,
asking for two pieces
of their kitchen equipment.
Which I maintain
is still the strangest way
to communicate a desire
to purchase something.
It's like ordering lunch
by writing what you want
and tying it
to the leg of a carrier pigeon.
You're not getting
your Sweetgreen salad.
At best, it's coming back
with a rat on its back
and a single AirPod in its mouth.
Nevertheless, we offered to send this
brand-new equipment to that bakery,
with one condition.
Because we'd noticed
they make cake bears,
and I wanted a cake bear
with my face on it,
as would anyone in my position,
because life is short,
TV is fun, and cake is bear.
I especially wanted one
because, as you can see,
each bear
has an absolute dumptruck ass,
and simply put, me gusta.
Last Sunday night, we reached out
to them in their favorite way,
by attaching this note
to their door.
And it turns out, one of the bakery's
owners got the message.
We were so presently surprised
to come in this morning
with this lovely note on our door and
then I was like, wow, what is that,
and I checked John Oliver's show,
and I watched the whole show
while I was working this morning.
And we're just so grateful
that we got to be part of the show
and that he's gonna donate
this kitchen equipment to us,
and here's his cupcakes.
Yes! I love everything
about that cake bear.
Its wide-open eyes, pleading
"Munch a bite out of my ass now!"
I love the little paws,
the little nose,
and that each bear looks
like it's wearing a John Oliver mask.
And they made those bears so fast.
That guy apparently woke up to texts
about our show at 3:00 in the morning,
a nightmare I wouldn't wish
on my worst enemy,
and by 10:00 AM,
the bears were already on sale.
And they even honored my request
that they be given an enormous ass,
as their Facebook post
announcing them said
"They have DONK", all caps.
And just like that,
Facebook is good again.
Sorry for everything
I said about you, Zuckerberg,
you really are a boy genius.
And the good news is, those bears
have been selling surprisingly well.
The first batch
of about 80 John Oliver cake bears
sold out in under an hour.
It was unbelievable. I was like,
I can't believe it went viral,
and the amount of emails
and messages on social media
that we're getting
and people want them shipped
to the Philippines and Australia.
I was a little shocked.
"I can't believe this is real life."
This large cake bear
is going straight to Oliver,
Deising selling the smaller ones
for eight bucks each
and sending all the proceeds to
People's Place food pantry in Kingston.
Again, that is excellent.
Not only are they currently donating
all the proceeds to the local food bank
he's eating that bear in the manner
I'd suggested they were best enjoyed,
ass first.
And can I just say, respectfully, sir,
that is a lot of eye contact there.
I don't mean to make this weird,
but my only question is,
so what are we?
And the donation to that food bank
could end up being considerable,
given, at times, they were apparently
selling around 100 bears an hour.
And it seems
the cakes do have fans.
One customer took their cake bear
to visit the shuttered Red Lobster
that started all of this,
while another made
this superlative TikTok.
As a 47-year-old
who looks like a 67-year-old,
I clearly don't understand TikTok.
But I do know perfect filmmaking
when I see it,
and that right there
is perfect filmmaking.
This has all been a lot of fun.
And fair is fair.
We sent Deising's new kitchen
equipment up to them on Thursday.
On top of which, I'm happy to say,
we'll be making our own $10,000
donation to that local food bank.
And now, there is really
only one thing left to reveal.
Because it turns out, Deising's
didn't just make that large cake bear
they also made another,
featuring my actual likeness,
and it is the single funniest
possible rendering of me as a bear.
Would you like to see it?
Please, come with me!
And behold
this absolute masterpiece!
Look at its eyes, look at its skin,
look at its mouth.
Look how much of a problem
its mouth is.
I am humbled, shocked,
and as this cake bear suggests,
slightly terrified.
But I'm also impressed.
Because Deising's,
you clearly heard my challenge
and sent us something that looks
somehow both like me,
and a version of Arthur the aardvark
that's been through 14 divorces.
It even includes an edible note,
reading "Don't be a monster!
Have some class and eat it ass first,
from the Deising family and staff."
Which is just perfect.
So, thank you so much
to Deising's bakery,
who rose to the challenge
of producing a product, on zero notice,
that didn't exist and yet had somehow
been advertised on national TV.
And thank you to everyone
who bought the bears.
I can really only think
of one way to end this,
and that is to eat this bear,
that I love so very much,
in the only
universally acceptable manner,
and that is by taking a bite
out of its sumptuous ass.
Here we go.
We did it!
That is our show,
thank you so much for watching.
We'll see you next week,
good night!
We did it!