John Oliver claimed on Last Week Tonight that Donald Trump’s profanity-filled rant against Barack Obama will backfire.
The 80-year-old president resorted to using a slur against the former president while speaking at the G7 Summit, last week’s gathering of world leaders. While speaking alongside Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, Trump compared his Iran deal to Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed by Tehran in 2015.
“Nobody could have made this deal,” Trump boasted of his 14-point memorandum with Iran. “I mean, the JCPOA, done by Obama. He gave them $1.7 billion in cash, green cash from banks, into a Boeing 757 and flew it into Iran.”
“They tried to bribe their way out of it, and you know what the Iranians did? They laughed at Obama, and they said he’s a stupid son of a b---h,” the octagenarian president said, before abruptly ending the press conference.
Oliver suggested that Trump shouldn’t be too happy with his deal, which includes a commitment that Iran will receive at least $300 billion in reconstruction aid.
“If Iran called Obama a stupid son of a b---h for letting them get $1.7 billion, I think we’re about to find out what the Persian word is for someone 300 times dumber than that,” joked the HBO host.
Oliver explained that Trump’s deal is “less a comprehensive peace deal and more a plan to eventually have one, with some pretty big holes in it.”
The memorandum has been criticized by those in Trump’s own party, as Oliver pointed out, saying that the agreement “doesn’t even address Iran’s nuclear program—supposedly the whole point of this war in the first place.”
“Nevertheless,” Oliver said, “Trump took a full victory lap, claiming his new deal with Iran was far better than the one that Obama made in 2015, and which Trump tore up in his first term.”
Trump has been pitting himself against Obama, 64, a longtime rival of the current president, when it comes to their respective agreements with Iran.
Despite Trump’s insistence on the comparison, several experts and publications have pointed out how differently each president handled the situation. Most significantly, Obama’s agreement was a finalized one to limit the country’s nuclear program. The Trump administration has yet to ink a nuclear deal.
Obama issued a response of his own in an interview with NBC News that aired Friday. “We’ve now fought a war, spent billions and billions of dollars, you know, put enormous strain on our military, a lot of people have died, and it feels like we’re back where we were before we started the war,” Obama said. “Except maybe a little bit worse.”
