Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

LastWeekTonight

This video has been trending in Luxembourg

John Oliver begins by reminding viewers that during the campaign—and again as soon as he got to the White House—Donald Trump promised he would pass “one big, beautiful bill” that would, in a single stroke, take care of weighty issues such as health-care reform, tax cuts, immigration and even infrastructure. With video clips to prove it, Oliver underlines how grandiose and fuzzy these statements were: Trump keeps saying he’ll have “the best plan,” “cheaper,” “bigger,” yet never supplies concrete details, apart from the assurance that everything will be done “easily” because he is “a great negotiator.”

The host then dismantles the plausibility of that promise. He walks viewers through how Congress really works: committee mark-ups, CBO scoring, separate votes in the House and then the Senate, a 60-vote threshold to get around the filibuster, and so on. Every step, he stresses, makes it impossible to cram multiple subjects into a single colossal bill. Oliver illustrates this complexity with the American Health Care Act: billed as a classy repeal-and-replace of Obamacare, the proposal wound up squeezed between moderates and the Freedom Caucus, jettisoned its pledge of universal coverage and was torpedoed after a CBO estimate projected millions of newly uninsured Americans.

Throughout the segment, Trump is shown flip-flopping on Senate procedure (“let’s scrap the 60-vote rule,” then “no, keep it”), insisting the border wall will be “paid for by Mexico” before asking for federal money, and praising the “transparency” of his negotiations while conducting talks behind closed doors. Oliver uses these moments to spotlight the rhetorical strategy at play: promise a miracle fix, then blame some outside force—media, Democrats, Senate rules—when reality proves more complicated.

The comedian wraps up by noting that the very idea of “one big, beautiful bill” is a marketing slogan, not a legislative pathway. Major reforms demand painstaking compromise, serious analysis and, above all, multiple separate pieces of legislation. Oliver therefore urges viewers to reject such shortcuts, demand real, detailed plans and push their representatives to prioritise transparency and rigour over a promise as vague as it is unrealistic

Share Video

¿Do you like Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)? Share it with your people...

Playlist