John Oliver made some digs at Paramount during an episode that covered the many problems involved with presidential libraries.
On Last Week Tonight, the comedian said that the libraries would be “voted number one nice little activity by retired dads quarterly” and have been in the news of late because of a “flurry” of donations.
Recent lawsuits involving Trump have been settled with Paramount for $16m, Meta for $25m and ABC for $15m with money going toward the president’s library in the future.
Oliver said that this has become the “preferred vehicle for what I’m apparently legally not allowed to call shakedowns or extortion attempts” but Trump is “merely laying bare a system that’s actually been problematic all along”.
He said that calling them libraries is a “bit of a misnomer” as instead they are part archives part museum.
They started after the 32nd president, Franklin D Roosevelt, wanted a place to house gifts and documents as before then much of this was destroyed.
They are controlled by the National Archives and Records Administration and the buildings aren’t publicly funded, which means the presidents need to raise money themselves. “It’s one of the many quirks of being a president alongside the fact that if the first lady dies in office, you have to remarry the White House Easter Bunny,” he added.
After presidents create private foundations, the federal government pays to run the libraries which can cost about $100m a year. He called it a “weird public-private partnership” which means that “the line between shrine and official archive can get unhelpfully blurry”.
It means that the “exhibits can be extremely one-sided” with Ronald Reagan’s library being known as “Graceland for conservatives”. He joked: “What if Planet Hollywood but more Gorbachev?”
For example, in Reagan’s there is no mention of the Iran-Contra affair while at Clinton’s there are “significant editorial choices made” such as minimising the impeachment scandal and at Nixon’s, Watergate is described as a coup organised by the media and Democratic elites.
The libraries “tend to evolve over time” allowing for a more balanced view of certain controversies such as FDR and the Holocaust and Truman and the atomic bomb.
But even on the archival side, the presidents have a “surprising amount of control there” allowing them to “heavily thumb the scale of history”.
The libraries cost a lot of money and have been getting more and more expensive, with FDR costing $5m with inflation, Bush’s costing $327m and most recently Obama’s costing $830m.
There are basically no rules around fundraising which “throws the door wide open for corruption” as presidents can solicit unlimited donations and they are incentivised to fundraise while in office.
Accusations of bribery have been an issue for decades with certain presidential pardons hinging on donations. Obama chose to voluntarily disclose contributions “but he didn’t have to do that and that is kind of the problem here”.
Oliver said that Trump had managed to “amplify every single problem that I’ve described so far” and that the libraries are “almost designed to exploit his every personal failing” such as the ability to obfuscate wrongdoing and build expensive monuments to himself.
He then spoke about recent questionable donations to Trump’s library and asked what kind of company would be willing to stoop that low. “What soulless, ethically bankrupt ass-kissing corporation would even think of doing something like that” he asked while a Paramount logo showed behind him.
He joked about the recent rumours that Skydance, who recently purchased Paramount, will buy Warner Bros Discovery next. “You are not my real business daddy and never will be,” he said.
The most controversial donation during Trump’s second presidency has been the $400m plane from Qatar which was “legally permissable” as it will end up in his library. “We all know what is going to happen here,” he said joking that Trump will have “library-related business to do all over the world”.
Oliver said it was time to “let go of the idea that these giant shrines are remotely necessary or that they’re accurate representations of history and try to decouple their celebratory function from their archival one”.
He added that any donations are “at best a personal gift and at worse an active bribe”.
