John Oliver didn’t wait too long during the latest Last Week Tonight episode to turn his attention to the U.S., where he said “things have been chaotic.” Specifically, Donald Trump and Elon Musk‘s “war of words” on social media.
A feud between the president and tech boss erupted days after Musk stepped down as head of the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), and then openly criticized the Republican Party’s One Big Beautiful Bill. The two men then proceeded to battle it out on their respective social media platforms, Truth Social and X, on Thursday, sharing a flurry of digital threats and insults directed towards each other.
In one post, Trump claimed Musk had been “wearing thin, I asked him to leave,” before adding that “he just went CRAZY.” In response, Musk claimed with no evidence that the president was named in unreleased government files about the late billionaire sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. “Have a nice day, DJT!” the tech titan added.
“Setting aside that Trump being in the Epstein files is not a bombshell, it is a commonly held assumption,” Oliver quipped on Last Week Tonight about the public rift. “They’ve basically spent a full day fighting with big ‘Real Housewife energy.’”
The British comedian then brought up Andy Cohen, who tweeted on Thursday, “LET ME HOST THE REUNION,” referencing the drama-filled Real Housewives reunion specials he typically hosts.
Oliver said a reunion special “makes complete sense to me because at their core, these two men are real housewives. Both of them have hair that’s expensive and wrong. Both have sketchy business ventures I don’t fully understand. They both spend far too much time online, and if either of them isn’t the center of attention for a single second, they will die.”
“Honestly, the only thing that’s missing is a messy in-person confrontation where Andy Cohen gets one of them to read a tweet and the other throws a daiquiri in his face,” Oliver joked before asking, “Why can’t we have this?”
While Trump and Musk had grown close over the past year, with the Tesla, SpaceX and Starlink CEO donating around $300 million to Trump’s presidential campaign and Republican candidates ahead of the 2024 election, there’s now seemingly trouble in paradise.