John Oliver has ripped into Mike Bloomberg’s presidential run and urged voters in the US not to support him.
Addressing the Democratic Primary on his Last Week Tonight show, Oliver pointed out that Bloomberg had been taking up headline space over Bernie Sanders, who just enjoyed a major win in the Nevada caucuses.
He then showed a collection of clips of reporters talking about Bloomberg, including one where a correspondent compared Bloomberg to someone you’d want to take you to the prom.
“That is such a creepy thing to say,” Oliver said. “No one is hoping Mike Bloomberg will take them to the prom.” He then wondered if the comparison was valid after all, because Bloomberg, like many prom attendees, is painfully awkward, looks uncomfortable in a suit and has “big virgin energy”.
Oliver then turned his attention to how much Bloomberg is spending on campaign ads (over $400m in the past few months), and how Google and Facebook have served 2bn Bloomberg ads – equivalent to 30,000 per minute.
“They are absolutely everywhere,” Oliver said, swatting a Bloomberg ad that popped up in his report.
As fellow late-night host Trevor Noah did earlier this month, Oliver then tackled Bloomberg’s “appalling” history of stop-and-frisk during his tenure as mayor of New York.
“People of colour have been dealing with that s**t forever and frankly don’t need their experience validated by somebody like me who is so white he looks like a ghost of a stork that died from a milk overdose while listening to ‘Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me’,” Oliver quipped.
He added: “This policy was appalling and fell disproportionately on Black and Latino New Yorkers.”
A radio clip then showed Bloomberg expressing zero regret for statistics that showed stop-and-frisk disproportionally targeted black and Latino communities. Bloomberg claimed that police stopped white people too much and minorities not enough.
“It is amazing that Bloomberg thinks that his money can make people forget about this, but hopefully the more people talk about him now, the more they’ll discover how unpalatable he is,” Oliver concluded.
