John Oliver Says Trump's Obama Tweets Reached A…

After pushing for an end to "small-thinking" and "trivial fights," President Donald Trump started a new one with former President Obama. Via Twitter, of course, he accused the former president's administration of wiretapping his phones at Trump Tower last year, something the FBI director James Comey has reportedly rejected as false (though the agency has yet to comment openly on the matter). According to John Oliver, those Obama tweets from Trump reached a whole new level of absurdity — and the reason why is completely hilarious.

Given the reverberation of any Trump tweet, it's not surprising Oliver covered the matter on Last Week Tonight. But the host pointed out the greatest reason why you can tell the true oddity of the accusations — no one even cares about the president's spelling. As Oliver says:

Let me give you some context. In 1992, Dan Quayle misspelled potato and it became one of the most famous dumb moments in political history. But we are now at a point where the president is so busy hurling destabilizing conspiracy theories around, we can't even pause to enjoy the fact that he misspelled the word "tap."

Trump wrote it with an extra "P" in one of his accusatory tweets on Saturday, and he didn't get any flack — just a casual mention in TV news stories. News reports on Quayle's flub were pretty rough back in the day. Quayle added an extra "E" on the end of the word potato, and The New York Times titled its piece on the matter, "Mr. Quayle's 'e' for Effort."

Trump? No time to focus on a misspelling when the contents of the tweet are so troubling. There's absolutely no evidence to support Trump's claims except for an article on Breitbart News in which a conspiracy theorist, Mark Levin, lays out accusations along those lines. Again, no proof.

Oliver would say that Trump needs to shake up his sources of information. "OK, I think we can now officially declare that Trump has a worse media diet than the Son of Sam killer — and he got all his news from a talking dog who told him to murder."

Oliver also noted that it's curious that Trump put everything up on Twitter as a "firm statement of fact," but then pushed for an investigation by Congress "to support that claim." Martha Raddatz on ABC's This Week pushed deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee about the issue, asking why Trump is saying it did happen. Huckabee's response was telling:

Look, I think he's going off of information that he's seen that has led him to believe that this is a very real potential.

Oliver then goes over the millions of qualifiers that Huckabee uses: "think," "believe," and "potential." "So I guess this is just how things are going to work now," Oliver says. "The president once saw a banana with a bruise that looked like a picture in an article he read in a dream, and that is why we're at f*cking war."

That's a very scary picture to paint, but something everyone needs to consider when the facts are ignored. Leave it to Oliver to terrify you and make you laugh at the same time.

Image: Last Week Tonight/HBO.