Alas, I had such high hopes for this one. The problem is that Colbert already did the "feels = facts" shtick when he brought back his "Stephen Colbert" character, and he did it more succinctly and incisively. And Oliver didn't even pick the best way to attack Trump on that. I bet you could pull enough clips from any convention of either party in the last 5 election cycles and get the same array of "feels" statements. (Similarly, I'm no Fox News defender, but I think you could do the same sort of clip assault with any network.) When it comes to the crime statistics, you can call it a mischaracterization, and you wouldn't be wrong, but the truth is that Trump (and Newt for that matter) cited a surprising number of statistics in relation to Trump's convention speech. I'm not going sit here and pretend that Trump doesn't appeal to emotion over facts, but this was a weak argument to try to prove that, and it makes Oliver's attack seem like a straw man when there's legitimate substance to the point.
The only real high point of the episode was the segment on politicians using music on their campaigns without permission, but even that devolved into an awkwardly greenscreened Lonely Island leftover music video with tepid lyrics and generic music to back it. A very disappointing show after a week that offered LWT plenty of material.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParent2016-07-26T03:30:18Z
Alas, I had such high hopes for this one. The problem is that Colbert already did the "feels = facts" shtick when he brought back his "Stephen Colbert" character, and he did it more succinctly and incisively. And Oliver didn't even pick the best way to attack Trump on that. I bet you could pull enough clips from any convention of either party in the last 5 election cycles and get the same array of "feels" statements. (Similarly, I'm no Fox News defender, but I think you could do the same sort of clip assault with any network.) When it comes to the crime statistics, you can call it a mischaracterization, and you wouldn't be wrong, but the truth is that Trump (and Newt for that matter) cited a surprising number of statistics in relation to Trump's convention speech. I'm not going sit here and pretend that Trump doesn't appeal to emotion over facts, but this was a weak argument to try to prove that, and it makes Oliver's attack seem like a straw man when there's legitimate substance to the point.
The only real high point of the episode was the segment on politicians using music on their campaigns without permission, but even that devolved into an awkwardly greenscreened Lonely Island leftover music video with tepid lyrics and generic music to back it. A very disappointing show after a week that offered LWT plenty of material.