\n<\/p>\n
John Oliver made some digs at Paramount during an episode that covered the many problems involved with presidential libraries.<\/p>\n
On Last Week Tonight, the comedian said that the libraries would be \u201cvoted number one nice little activity by retired dads quarterly\u201d and have been in the news of late because of a \u201cflurry\u201d of donations.<\/p>\n
Recent lawsuits involving Trump have been settled with Paramount for $16m, Meta for $25m and ABC for $15m with money going toward the president\u2019s library in the future.<\/p>\n
Oliver said that this has become the \u201cpreferred vehicle for what I\u2019m apparently legally not allowed to call shakedowns or extortion attempts\u201d but Trump is \u201cmerely laying bare a system that\u2019s actually been problematic all along\u201d.<\/p>\n
He said that calling them libraries is a \u201cbit of a misnomer\u201d as instead they are part archives part museum.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
They are controlled by the National Archives and Records Administration and the buildings aren\u2019t publicly funded, which means the presidents need to raise money themselves. \u201cIt\u2019s 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,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
After presidents create private foundations, the federal government pays to run the libraries which can cost about $100m a year. He called it a \u201cweird public-private partnership\u201d which means that \u201cthe line between shrine and official archive can get unhelpfully blurry\u201d.<\/p>\n
It means that the \u201cexhibits can be extremely one-sided\u201d with Ronald Reagan\u2019s library being known as \u201cGraceland for conservatives\u201d. He joked: \u201cWhat if Planet Hollywood but more Gorbachev?\u201d<\/p>\n
For example, in Reagan\u2019s there is no mention of the Iran-Contra affair while at Clinton\u2019s there are \u201csignificant editorial choices made\u201d such as minimising the impeachment scandal and at Nixon\u2019s, Watergate is described as a coup organised by the media and Democratic elites.<\/p>\n
The libraries \u201ctend to evolve over time\u201d allowing for a more balanced view of certain controversies such as FDR and the Holocaust and Truman and the atomic bomb.<\/p>\n
But even on the archival side, the presidents have a \u201csurprising amount of control there\u201d allowing them to \u201cheavily thumb the scale of history\u201d.<\/p>\n
The libraries cost a lot of money and have been getting more and more expensive, with FDR costing $5m with inflation, Bush\u2019s costing $327m and most recently Obama\u2019s costing $830m.<\/p>\n
There are basically no rules around fundraising which \u201cthrows the door wide open for corruption\u201d as presidents can solicit unlimited donations and they are incentivised to fundraise while in office.<\/p>\n
Accusations of bribery have been an issue for decades with certain presidential pardons hinging on donations. Obama chose to voluntarily disclose contributions \u201cbut he didn\u2019t have to do that and that is kind of the problem here\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oliver said that Trump had managed to \u201camplify every single problem that I\u2019ve described so far\u201d and that the libraries are \u201calmost designed to exploit his every personal failing\u201d such as the ability to obfuscate wrongdoing and build expensive monuments to himself.<\/p>\n
He then spoke about recent questionable donations to Trump\u2019s library and asked what kind of company would be willing to stoop that low. \u201cWhat soulless, ethically bankrupt ass-kissing corporation would even think of doing something like that\u201d he asked while a Paramount logo showed behind him.<\/p>\n
He joked about the recent rumours that Skydance, who recently purchased Paramount, will buy Warner Bros Discovery next. \u201cYou are not my real business daddy and never will be,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The most controversial donation during Trump\u2019s second presidency has been the $400m plane from Qatar which was \u201clegally permissable\u201d as it will end up in his library. \u201cWe all know what is going to happen here,\u201d he said joking that Trump will have \u201clibrary-related business to do all over the world\u201d.<\/p>\n
Oliver said it was time to \u201clet go of the idea that these giant shrines are remotely necessary or that they\u2019re accurate representations of history and try to decouple their celebratory function from their archival one\u201d.<\/p>\n
He added that any donations are \u201cat best a personal gift and at worse an active bribe\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cvoted number one nice little activity by retired dads quarterly\u201d and have been in the news of late because of a \u201cflurry\u201d of donations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":26363,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54],"tags":[15849,15848,2061,15847,262,1899,4849,15846],"class_list":{"0":"post-26362","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-asskissing","9":"tag-bankrupt","10":"tag-corporation","11":"tag-ethically","12":"tag-john","13":"tag-oliver","14":"tag-paramount","15":"tag-soulless"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26362\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/26363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}