On Sunday’s Last Week Tonight, John Oliver wasted no time jumping right into his main topic: the “bizarro-world version of civil rights” that he says Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is persuing.
“In normal times, the DOJ does some incredibly important work. But sadly under Donald Trump, while political prosecutions have risen, other genuinely important one have either been messed up or just tossed aside,” said Oliver. “For all the headlines about bullsh*t cases like the reflecting pool and the ‘sandwich murderer’ [the man who famously threw a sandwich at ICE officers], the real decay at the department has unfortunately gotten much less attention. Which isn’t good, because after [Pam] Bondi took over, the agency began shutting down more than 23,000 investigations into things like terrorism, white collar crime, drugs and other offenses.”
Oliver went on to point out that the new head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, recently said the biggest social justice issues facing Americans in 2026 are the following: “They have to lie every day about pronouns. They have to lie about the person in the cubicle next to them being qualified. They have to laugh at certain kinds of jokes [from] late-night comedians, even when they don’t agree with them.”
Oliver took particular umbrage at that last one, but called all Dhillon’s assertions “a bizarro-world version of civil rights where the only ones that matter are those of conservatives.” He cited as an example the the Civil Rights Division’s investigations into potential voting fraud. “Notably,” said the host, “their record in those cases is 21 straight losses.”
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