- The video discusses the norms that Donald Trump's presidency has violated.
- Trump's speech patterns are incoherent and lack coherence.
- Trump uses three techniques to insulate himself from criticism and consequence: delegitimizing the media, whataboutism, and trolling.
- Delegitimizing the media involves attacking the press and waging war on the concept of truth.
- Whataboutism is the practice of changing the subject to someone else's perceived wrongdoing.
- Trolling involves intentionally provoking reactions and hurting others' feelings.
- These techniques have serious impacts that could outlast Trump's presidency.

- The piece discusses President Trump's trolling behavior and how it has political value for his supporters.
- It highlights instances where Trump's trolling tactics have caused controversy and confusion.
- Trump's inability to back up his claims and refusal to clarify his statements is criticized.
- The piece argues that these tactics are spreading and eroding the ability to have honest debates and hold people accountable.
- The importance of identifying these techniques and finding hope in small victories is emphasized.
- Recent examples of victories, such as the blocking of the Muslim ban and the defeat of Trump-style campaigns in Virginia, are mentioned.
- The defeat of a politician who proposed a bathroom bill and the election of Virginia's first openly transgender legislator are highlighted as positive outcomes.
- The piece concludes by urging readers to keep going and not give up, as the Trump presidency is a long and arduous journey.

- The program is considered the most powerful TV show in America, according to The New York Times
- Trump watches the show and tweets about it
- The host criticizes Trump for getting information from the show instead of reliable sources
- The show plans to sneak information to Trump through commercials during their hiatus
- The host lists some important facts that will be included in these commercials
- The host doubts that Trump is actually paying attention to the information given to him

- The video discusses the norms violated by Donald Trump's presidency, including his incoherent speech patterns.
- Trump uses techniques such as delegitimizing the media, whataboutism, and trolling to insulate himself from criticism.
- These techniques have serious impacts on honest debates and accountability.
- The importance of identifying these techniques and finding hope in small victories is emphasized.
- Recent victories and positive outcomes are mentioned.
- The program is considered the most powerful TV show in America and plans to sneak information to Trump through commercials during their hiatus.

One year after the presidential election, John Oliver discusses what we've learned so far and enlists our catheter cowboy to teach Donald Trump what he hasn't.

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-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ ♪♪ The presidency of Donald Trump.

The man voted least edible by Cannibal magazine 6 years in a row.

And I know, I honestly know that the prospect of talking about Trump yet again feels exhausting.

We're all so tired of him, every room in America should have a sign on the wall that counts the number of minutes that it's been since someone brought up his fucking name.

Trump's presidency is like 1 of his handshakes.

It pulls you in whether you like it or not.

He's had so many terrible moments this year, you probably forgot about many of them.

Remember when he creepily told the French president's wife that she was in good shape?

Or when his tacky golf resort was touted on the State Department website?

Or when he shoved the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of the way at a NATO event.

You should at least have to know that Montenegro is a country before making a move that says, -"Suck it, Montenegro." -$1.50.

And there were also quieter but no less alarming moments, like when he explained how hard he's been fighting to bring clean coal back, without appearing to understand what that actually is.

It's just been announced that a second brand new coal mine where they're going to take out clean coal.

Meaning, they're taking out coal, they're gonna clean it.

It's opening in the state of Pennsylvania.

is it possible that Trump is well-versed in and is referring to, flue gas desulfurization, fluidized bed combustion, and selective catalytic reduction.

Sure, it's possible, but let's agree it's considerably more likely that he thinks you just take a bunch of coal and scrub-a-dub it with a big old sponge.

I'm saying the president fundamentally doesn't understand what he's talking about, and you know what that means.

I thought, I thought, I thought we got it.

I thought, I thought we got it that time.

What, You think I don't hate myself, too?

Tonight, Let's pull back from the daily Trump-induced chaos and take a look at the norms that his presidency has violated.

And not the obvious ones, like the fact that he never released his tax returns, or that his own daughter and son-in-law work in the White House, although, admittedly, I am using the word work there so generously that I should be able to deduct it as a charitable donation on my taxes.

Or that instead of putting his assets into a blind trust to help reduce conflicts of interest, he simply showed America that he has many large stacks of paper, presumably containing the sentence, I can't believe I'm getting away with this, printed 750,000 times.

No, instead, we're gonna talk about Trump's assault on something even more basic.

The norms governing how our leaders engage with us, and how in turn, that affects the way that we engage with 1 another.

It's why even the notion of getting him can feel so hopelessly futile.

And let's first stipulate that it definitely doesn't help that so often what Trump says is complete nonsense.

We often read transcripts of Trump's speeches, and it's something that everyone should actually do once in a while, because when you strip away his blindly confident, entertaining delivery and just read his words, it is staggering how incoherent he is.

Here is a word-for-word reading of a speech where he talked about the Iran nuclear deal.

You look at the nuclear deal, the thing that really bothers me, it would have been so easy and it's not as important as these lives are.

My uncle explained that to me many, many years ago, the power, and that was 35 years ago.

He would explain the power of what's going to happen and he was right.

But when you look at what's going on with the 4 prisoners, now it used to be 3, now it's 4, but when it was 3, and even now, I would have said, it's all in the messenger.

Fellas, and it is fellas, because, you know, they don't, they haven't figured that the women are smarter right now than the men, so you know, it's going to take them about another 150 years, but the Persians are great negotiators, the Iranians are great negotiators, so, and they, they just killed, they just killed us.

That is not a functional use of language.

That is a drunk driver crashing a pickup truck full of alphabet soup.

Trump's actual speech patterns sound like when you write a long text by choosing only the predictive text your iPhone suggests for you.

Seriously, we wrote a message like that starting with the words, the nuclear, and here is what we got.

The nuclear test program was not opposed by the other person who knows what they want, and then the delay is not being done by any other country, and that is not the only way to make sure the world can do more things and things like that, and gentlemen, and then the other people who have been told to leave them alone with their children who are also very sad.

and potentially more sense than Trump's speech about the Iran nuclear deal, meaning an iPhone would be a more coherent president of the United States.

But with Trump, we are familiar enough with his speech patterns that you get the basic gist of what he's trying to say.

The real damage isn't in how he says things, but from 3 key techniques that he uses to insulate himself from criticism and consequence.

And if we are not extremely careful, all 3 could have serious impacts that far outlast his presidency.

And let's start with the first 1, delegitimizing the media.

Now, Trump has been attacking the press since he declared his candidacy, and in a broader sense, he's been waging war on the very concept of truth ever since he first turned to his mom and said, -"Dada." And she said, -"No, I'm Mama." And he said, -"Fake news." And shit his pants.

Now, the difference now is, he's crying fake news as President of the United States.

And he is openly proud of it to the point that he recently tried to take ownership of the term itself.

The media is, is really the word, I think 1 of the greatest of all terms I've come up with is fake.

I guess other people have used it perhaps over the years, but I've never noticed it.

ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh

♪ He just took credit for inventing the term, fake news, which for the record, he did not.

Meaning what he just said was technically fake fake news news.

And you could imagine him saying, well, I'm not the first politician to criticize the press.

And that actually brings us to Trump's second technique, something called, whataboutism.

It's the practice of changing the subject to someone else's perceived wrongdoing.

Most famously, when he was asked why he hadn't forcefully condemned the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, and this was his response.

What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, the alt-right?

What about the fact they came charging, that they came charging with clubs in their hands, swinging clubs, do they have any problem?

Well, actually, no, because a Nazi killing someone with a car is so heinous, any other issues that might be up for debate under any other circumstances kind of have to wait their turn.

You can be wearing Crocs with socks, but if you're using those socked Crocs to kick Hitler in the balls, do you know what?

I'm suddenly not so fucking focused on the footwear.

-♪ ♪ -♪ ♪ Now, this technique of saying, what about, is actually an old Soviet propaganda tool.

And the reason it is dangerous is because it implies that all actions, regardless of context, share a moral equivalency.

And since nobody is perfect, all criticism is hypocritical, and everybody should do whatever they want.

It is a depressingly effective tool, which is why on Trump's favorite network, you hear it all the time.

The mainstream media focused on the Trump campaign and allegations of collusion with the Russians.

But what about the Democrats' possible ties to Moscow?

Former National Security Advisor General Michael Flynn investigated for his private meeting with Russia, but what about Hillary Clinton?

The media wants to call into question the credibility and the trustworthiness of this administration, but what about Benghazi?

What about the blatant lies that the Obama administration told us?

What about the fact that Ben Rhodes bragged about lying to the media and the public about the Iran deal?

You know, what about the fact that Jonathan Gruber basically said the American people were stupid?

None of the errors those people may have made in the past excused the Trump administration's actions.

A defense attorney could not stand up in court and say, maybe my client did murder those people, but I ask you this, what about Jeffrey Dahmer?

What about the guy from The Silence of the Lambs?

The problem with whataboutism is it doesn't actually solve a problem or win an argument.

The point is just to muddy the waters, which can make the other side mad.

And that actually brings us to Trump's third technique, trolling.

Now, trolling itself has been around 4 years.

It's basically 80 percent of what happens on the Internet.

It's when a YouTube commenter says something willfully provocative like saying, I've aged like an apple core in a dumpster, or that I look like a fucking pickle with glasses.

Now, it doesn't matter whether they mean any of that.

The point is just to get a reaction and to hurt my feelings, which, by the way, it absolutely does.

But Trump, Trump may well be the first ever troll to be elected president.

Remember 10th president, Sprinkles Fuzz Wizard?

He assumed office after William Henry Harrison died.

And if you're thinking, hold on, Sprinkles Fuzz Wizard was not America's tenth president, really?

The point is, as a troll, Trump often does things that have no effect other than to piss off his perceived enemies.

Like when he tweeted this wrestling gif of himself body-slamming CNN, or attacked Mika Brzezinski by saying she was bleeding badly from a facelift, or as we mentioned earlier tonight, called a leader with nuclear weapons short and fat.

And Trump even once retweeted a claim that he was the most superior troll on the whole of Twitter, calling it a great compliment.

Which it is not, because sometimes, when you do something that makes a lot of people mad.

It's because, and bear with me here, you're a dick.

If you sneak into someone's house and urinate in every heating vent, and they get mad at you, you're not an epic troll sticking it to the snowflake cucks.

But the thing is, Trump's trolling is not actually without political value.

Despite Trump's few real policy accomplishments to date, he has consistently achieved 1 thing, and that is making his enemies unhappy.

And for many Trump supporters, that itself counts as a major victory.

Just listen to how Fox and Friends reacted after Trump freaked people out by standing with military leaders during rising tensions with North Korea and suggesting that it was the calm before the storm.

I think he's totally trolling the media there.

You do something like that, even the smile and the wink.

Those of us that are sick of the status quo, the forgotten men and women who voted for President Trump, want that town to freak out.

Who benefits from mass confusion about whether or not we're about to go to war?

Are there thousands of unemployed factory workers across the Midwest going, well, the plant closed down and I lost my health care, but somewhere a Washington Post reporter is scared of dying, so things are looking up.

Judging your political success on how bad you make other people feel makes just about as much sense as judging your success as a zookeeper by how many bears you fuck.

I mean, I guess it's impressive in its own way, but it's definitely not what you were supposed to be doing.

-♪ ♪ -♪ And the surest proof of trolling often comes when a troll is confronted, because that's when they have to either put up or shut up.

You may have heard about cases where people tracked down the source of something awful that was posted online, only to find some sullen 15-year-old who just shrugs and goes, I don't know why I wrote that, I just did it.

Stop asking me so many questions." Well, that is basically our president now.

Remember when Trump said that Obama had surveilled him in Trump Tower, tweeting, "'How low has President Obama gone to tap my phones?' Watch what happened

Watch what happened when he was asked to justify that.

Well, you saw what happened with surveillance, and I think that was inappropriate.

Well, the reason I ask is you said he was...

He was very nice to me with words, but...

And when I was with him, but after that, there has been no relationship.

I just, you can take it the way you want.

Okay, so, let's walk through what just happened there.

On the Internet, he claimed that his predecessor committed an extremely serious crime, but in person, he is suddenly backing down, first saying Obama was very nice to me with words, then that, I don't stand by anything.

Which is 1 of the most frighteningly nihilistic sentences a president can say.

I would honestly rather hear that from a clown holding a knife than a president.

Because at least when a clown says, I don't stand by anything, you think, yeah, that kind of makes sense.

And look, it gets worse, because that interview kept going, and Trump was explicitly given the opportunity to set the record straight for the fake news media, but he flat-out refused.

I just wanted to find out that you're the president of the United States.

You said he was sick and bad because he attacked you.

you because you don't want it to be fake news.

You're the President of the United States.

that is infuriating about that clip, but Trump going back to his desk and pretending to work hard is an objectively funny thing to do.

That's like your dog avoiding questions by pretending to do his taxes.

Look, and while there is nothing new about any of these techniques, they are now coming out of the Oval Office, which not only legitimizes them, it risks them spreading.

Last month, Congressman Paul Gosar used all 3 techniques.

First, he suggested in an interview that the march in Charlottesville may have been a false flag operation created by the left, which is pretty troll-y behavior.

And when confronted about it, he deployed the other 2 tools.

The conspiracy theory that you have put out there has been debunked.

Look at what CNN has talked about with, what's going on with the Clinton administration right now with the dossier.

Sir, everything you've said has been debunked.

Why are you continuing to put this out there?

And if there is 1 thing worse than something terrible, it's a cover band of that terrible thing.

If Trump is Nickelback, that man is Bickle-Nack.

Not as good at it as the original, and a horrible sign that the disease is spreading.

The problem is, if that becomes the level of discourse in this country, we are seriously and lastingly fucked.

And just this week, we saw some of these techniques pushed to the absolute limit by the scandal involving Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, who has denied allegations of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old when he was 32, and called them fake news.

Now, watch Sean Hannity then use whataboutism to derail a discussion about it.

This 14-year-old girl, purportedly, according to The Washington Post, told 2 of her girlfriends what happened...

Do you think Bill Clinton, in retrospect, was a predator?

But that is not what this discussion is about.

You might as well have said, here's a tough question, If you had to guess, how many lobsters are there?

But first, let's finish talking about the Senate candidate who may have made sexual advances on a child.

And look, whether Clinton engaged in predatory behavior is absolutely a legitimate question, but it shouldn't really inform what we do about Roy Moore.

And even if you believe that Democrats are guilty of a double standard, the solution is not to have no standard whatsoever.

That is why it's so important to train ourselves to identify these techniques, because their natural end point is the erosion of our ability to decide what's important, have an honest debate, and hold 1 another accountable.

And that erosion can be so gradual that it's difficult to spot.

It happens very slowly, and you might not notice until it's too late.

I cannot pretend that it isn't, which is why it is so important to take some hope from this year's small victories, like the Muslim ban being blocked by the courts after massive public protests.

Or, or the attempts to repeal Obamacare stalling thanks in part to people pressuring their lawmakers.

And just this week, just this week in Virginia, voters rejected Ed Gillespie for governor after he ran a Trump-style dog whistle campaign.

And that is encouraging, because it's nice to know that if you use Trump tactics in a Virginia gubernatorial election, you do not get to be gubernator.

Now, further down the ballot there, Tuesday also marked the defeat of Bob Marshall, who earlier this year proposed a so-called bathroom bill.

He lost to Danica Roem, who will now be Virginia's first openly transgender legislator.

And the tone that she has taken is already markedly different.

Danica, you were running against Robert Marshall, an incumbent, 13-term incumbent.

He's also a man who referred to himself as Virginia's chief homophobe.

He refused to debate you during the campaign.

Come January, Delegate Marshall will be 1 of my constituents, and I'm not gonna disrespect my own constituents.

She beat a man who openly disrespected her, but given the opportunity, she chose not to respond by tweeting, I'll fight for Bob's rights to use any bathroom he wants, but it's too late, he already shit the bed on election day.

And look, Tuesday's results should not make you complacent.

They are absolutely no guarantee that the midterms will turn out at all well.

That is why, though, you should take these moments of encouragement to help you keep going.

Because the Trump presidency is basically a marathon.

It's painful, it's pointless, and the majority of you didn't even agree to run it.

You were just signed up by your dumbest friend.

And the fact is, we're not even at mile 6 right now, or possibly even mile 3.

So there is a long way to go, and though you're exhausted, and your whole body is screaming for you to give up, and your nipples are chafing for some reason, the stakes are too high for any of us to stop.

And I do realize that I'm saying that as we're about to stop doing shows for the year.

But here's the thing, we won't actually be going away entirely.

You may remember earlier this year, we used our catheter cowboy to try and get information to the president in the ad breaks of Fox & Friends.

And we know this because The Times wrote a generally negative piece about its enormous influence on him.

And because of that, called it the most powerful TV show in America.

A sentiment that the hosts were very excited about.

This program, the program you're watching, is according to the New York Times the most powerful TV show in America.

I'm not saying that we have the best viewers.

The best audience belongs to Ellen because this is how they greet her.

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The Trump Presidency: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)