John Oliver mocks Donald Trump for 'begging strangers for money' in hostage-like campaign video

Shania Russell
·3 min read

"This year more than ever, everything Trump does is going to be a cash grab,” the "Last Week Tonight" host said.

John Oliver has some snarky thoughts about Donald Trump’s latest fundraising efforts.

On Sunday night, the Last Week Tonight host kicked off his episode with a segment on the precarious financial state of the Republican presidential candidate. After sharing a somewhat grainy video of Trump asking supporters for money, Oliver took a few shots at the “cash grab” attempt.

“That is a man who talks nonstop about how he’s one of the richest men on Earth, begging strangers for money in a hostage video that looks like it was filmed in a house haunted by the world’s tackiest ghosts,” Oliver joked.

As the late night host put it, Trump has "had a rough run in the courts lately. Between the E. Jean Carroll defamation judgment and New York State’s fraud case, he’s on the hook for over half a billion dollars, but even that doesn’t capture the full extent of the financial damage.”

Citing a New York Times report, Oliver said Trump has apparently spent “more than $100 million on legal bills alone, which averages more than $90,000 a day, none of it paid for with his own money. In fact, a lot has come from his supporters because he’s repeatedly used his legal troubles as a pretext to ask for donations.”

In the video in question, Trump tells the camera, “We’re fighting. We’re winning. You see what’s going on. So whatever you can do to help financially would be fantastic, because we have to beat it if it’s $5 or $10 or $100, whatever you can do.”

<p>Rich Fury/Getty; James Devaney/GC Images</p> John Oliver and Donald Trump

Rich Fury/Getty; James Devaney/GC Images

John Oliver and Donald Trump

Oliver later notes that “pleading for cash” is not Trump’s only fundraising tactic. Looking to the Republican’s official website, he ran down a list of new products being sold to supporters. The late-night host made fun of the various merch options, including a Trump-branded Bible and Trump-branded cologne. Of a mini speaker that bears Trump's likeness, Oliver quipped, “I assume [it] is way too loud and never dies.”

As for the gold Trump-branded earbud case, he said, “You know how you can never tell which Airpods are yours and which are your friends, because all the cases look the same? Well, if you get these, you lose all your friends instantly — problem solved.”

Oliver then concluded that these products will not get Trump “near the half a billion he needs,” pointing instead to the Republican’s social media website, Truth Social.

The company, which Oliver joked was “created to basically be a right-wing version of Twitter before Twitter essentially became that itself,” became publicly traded this past week as DJT. On its first day of trading, the stock surged 56 percent to $78 and ended the day at $57.99. It is currently valued around $8 billion.

Oliver likened DJT to meme stock examples such as GameStop and AMC Theatres, which rose based on the same principle.

“If enough investors buy shares, they can drive the price up and everyone can somehow get out before the bubble bursts,” Oliver said. “But the GameStop movement was at least nominally about wresting financial power away from s----y rich arseholes and restoring it to the little guy, whereas this movement is about funneling the little guy’s money directly to the s---tiest rich arsehole there is.”

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