John Oliver checked in on the US presidential race and the state of illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank on Sunday evening. The Last Week Tonight host ripped into JD Vance, Donald Trump’s running mate and “Great Lakes Ron DeSantis”, who is not polling well with anyone.
The Ohio senator “sucks so much”, said Oliver, that the internet ran wild with a joke tweet that he was the first VP pick to have admitted in a bestselling book to “fucking an inside-out latex glove shoved between two couch cushions, with a citation to a page number from his memoir”.
That is not in Vance’s book Hillbilly Elegy, Oliver emphasized, “but I think the reason it spread so fast might be that A, nobody read that fucking book, and B, it was incredibly easy to believe, because if you ask me to draw a man that fucks his couch, 10 times out of 10, I’m drawing this guy,” he joked. “If you ask me to play two truths and a lie with this man, before he’d even open his mouth, I’d shout, ‘The truth is he fucks his couch!’ Because I’ve never seen someone with more couch-fucker energy.”
“He looks like he watched the Tom Cruise-Oprah interview and was jealous of Tom’s shoes,” Oliver continued. “If you told me that his first celebrity crush was the plastic sofa from Everybody Loves Raymond, I’d believe you without question. If you told me the reason you find coins in between couch cushions is because JD Vance always leaves a tip, I’d be like, ‘Yeah that sounds right.’”
Oliver also referenced the Associated Press’s decision to factcheck the tweet with a headline: “No, JD Vance did not have sex with a couch.” The news site later removed the article with the explanation that the story didn’t meet its “standard editing process”.
“No shit it didn’t, because there’s an obvious problem with that original headline,” Oliver said. “And the reason I know that is we care a lot about facts and precise phrasing on this show. So I can tell you, you can’t say ‘JD Vance didn’t have sex with a couch’ definitively. You can say that he didn’t write about doing that in his book because that is provable, but that’s not the same as asserting he never fucked a couch, especially because he hasn’t officially denied it.”
Oliver’s staff, he revealed, tried to contact the Vance campaign this week; when asked by phone if he ever had sex with a couch, the spokesperson hung up, “which is, and this is critical, not a ‘no,’ is it”? Oliver laughed.
“Who knows where this is going?” he mused. “The news is moving so fast right now – the RNC was only last week, it was only two weeks ago that Trump was shot and there are so many variables between here and November. We don’t know who Kamala’s VP pick will be. We don’t know which candidate will maintain momentum. The race is impossible to predict. But … until he tells us otherwise, I’m gonna assume that JD Vance fucked a couch.”
For his main segment, Oliver pivoted to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the West Bank, which contains 3 million Palestinians, as well as holy sites for Christians, Jews and Muslims. The West Bank is “to put it mildly, a critical part of the larger struggle between Israelis and Palestinians”. said Oliver. “What’s happening there is important to understand, both because it’s inextricably linked to the fate of any possible peace process and because things there have gotten exponentially worse.”
Oliver referred in particular to decades of Israeli settlements in the West Bank on stolen Palestinian land, often subsidized by the Israeli government. “The whole settlement project has been massively encouraged by the Israeli government to such a degree that it is hard to argue that living in one is an apolitical choice. Building on stolen land is an inherently political act. It is also, for what it’s worth, copyright infringement,” he said next to a picture of the American flag.
Though there are “legal” and “illegal” settlements under Israeli law, all are illegal under international law. Israel maintains that if Palestinian land is not cultivated for three years, Israel assumes ownership. But the country also controls building permits in the West Bank, and rejects 95% of Palestinian requests. “So it’s not that Palestinians don’t want to use the land, it’s that they are frequently not allowed to, which is different,” said Oliver. “It’s the same way that, it’s not that JD Vance doesn’t want to help you move, it’s just that he’s not allowed within 50ft of a three-piece sectional.”
Oliver also touched on the “history of silence, avoidance and abetment” by the Israeli military on settler attacks on Palestinians. An Israeli civil rights group that looked at 1,600 cases of settler violence in the West Bank found that only 3% ended in a conviction. He quoted a former Israeli general who called the situation “total apartheid”.
“Human dignity has to be a prerequisite for negotiating anything,” said Oliver, quoting the former mayor of Ramallah Musa Hadid. “And Palestinians in the West Bank have their dignity challenged hundreds of times a day. From having beer bottles thrown at their heads, to being detained for kicking balls near fences, to being stopped while crossing checkpoints in ambulances, to having their homes stolen, bulldozed and far, far worse. And to be clear, dignity is the absolute beginning of this. What’s required is justice.”
Oliver invoked the oft-said, post-Holocaust slogan “Never again”, which has “always been open to two interpretations. There’s the one that means this must never again happen to the Jewish people, and the one that means this must never again happen to any people, anywhere. And in the West Bank, as in Gaza right now, it’s pretty clear which one the Israeli government has favored.”
He called on the US government to put conditions on the billions of military aid sent to Israel, stop vetoing UN security council resolutions critical of Israel, and “say what is plain for everyone to see: these settlements aren’t just illegitimate or even just illegal. They’re immoral. And not only should we say that, we should act accordingly.”