John Oliver does not give the green light to Trump's tone-deaf Great Gatsby party

The president threw his "A Little Party Never Killed Nobody"-themed event as SNAP benefits lapsed for millions of Americans.

By Emma Keates | November 3, 2025 | 9:38am

Screenshot: Last Week Tonight/YouTube

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John Oliver does not give the green light to Trump's tone-deaf Great Gatsby party

Trump spent the weekend partying it up Gatsby-style at Mar-a-Lago while vital SNAP benefits lapsed for millions, the irony of which was not lost on John Oliver. “Trump is going to have to own the consequences here, and even as he continues to blame Democrats for this shutdown, he somehow manages to make the optics even worse,” he said during his Last Week Tonight opening monologue on Sunday (per The Independent). CNN’s coverage of the Halloween event didn’t help; Oliver included a clip of the network describing The Great Gatsby as a a book “about rich people partying,” which the host pointed out must be “pretty infuriating to whatever exhausted high school freshman just wrote a 4,000-word essay about Great Gatsby as a grim meditation on the disillusionment of the American Dream.”

Somehow, those bad optics get worse. The name of the event was “A Little Party Never Killed Nobody” (presumably after Fergie, Q-Tip, and GoonRock’s song from the Baz Luhrmann movie‘s soundtrack), something which Oliver can admit is technically true. “Although, it is also true, that as we are all finding out right now, a ‘grand old party’ is capable of killing a whole lot of people, and unfortunately, they don’t seem to give a single marble and gold-encased shit about that,” he continued.

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Trump also spent his Halloween posting on Truth Social and blaming Democrats for the problems in the country, as he is wont to do. “I do NOT want Americans to go hungry just because the Radical Democrats refuse to do the right thing and REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT,” he posted in response to multiple legal challenges claiming the government might be illegally blocking SNAP funding. “If we are given the appropriate legal direction by the Court, it will BE MY HONOR to provide the funding, just like I did with Military and Law Enforcement Pay. The Democrats should quit this charade where they hurt people for their own political reasons, and immediately REOPEN THE GOVERNMENT.”