Another Monday morning, another round of headlines about how John Oliver “destroyed” something. However, that word is especially prescient on this particular Monday, as last night Oliver’s main segment was a detailed deconstruction that put a series of pins into one of “serious presidential candidate” Donald Trump’s favorite hot-air balloons: A proposed really great, really really effective border wall between the U.S. and Mexico.
Not only does Oliver cite studies saying the wall will cost twice as much as Trump admits it will (not to mention the high costs of maintenance), he also dismantles Trump’s claim that Mexico is going to cough up the funds to keep its people from migrating north. (Former Mexican president Vicente Fox perhaps puts it best, saying, “I’m not going to pay for that fucking wall.”) He also reminds Americans of the disastrous history of earlier attempts to build a U.S.-Mexico border wall, including the fact that the walls are more disruptive to Native American burial sites than the cast of the Maze Runner movies.
Not only that, but the damn thing wouldn’t even work, leaving “the wall” as a simple exercise in xenophobic fear-mongering whose funds would be better spent on waffle irons. Oliver doesn’t even get into the fact that, as of November 2015, more Mexican citizens are leaving the U.S. than are coming in, because he doesn’t have to. The wall already came tumbling down.