John Oliver spent a chunk of his Sunday night Last Week Tonight broadcast puzzling over a noise that came out of President Donald Trump’s mouth at a South Carolina rally, and jabbed that it wasn’t produced by a human.
The HBO host walked through some of the stranger moments from Trump’s midterm campaign swing before zeroing in on an Oct. 21 appearance in Pendleton, South Carolina, where the 80-year-old president was stumping for Republican Sen. Darline Graham.
Mid-sentence, while explaining why he had elevated then-Gov. Nikki Haley to the United Nations post during his first term, Trump was interrupted by a strange noise: “I’d say 90 percent of the reason I took the governor—urrpp.”
Oliver asked his audience, “What was that noise?!” according to The Daily Beast.
“Yeah, whatever happened there wasn’t good,” Oliver continued. “It feels like a real you need to unplug him and then plug him back in situation ‘cuz that’s not a human sound.”
The comedian then offered a cruder verdict, likening it to a noise from Eeyore that’s too graphic to print.
Oliver joined other late-night hosts and commentators flagging the moment. Jimmy Fallon called the sound “a burp, a hiccup, and a dry-heave all in one,” quipping that Trump has been in so many MRI machines that he “now sounds like” one.
The New Republic wrote that the president had gone “post-verbal” at the rally. After 20 campaign rallies in two months, it said, the “evidently exhausted” Trump “has started to insert wild sound effects into his already incoherent rants.”
Sarah Matthews, who served as deputy press secretary in Trump’s first-term White House before publicly breaking with him over Jan. 6, weighed in after Trump made an involuntary noise at a Sioux City, Iowa, rally the next day.
“Another uncontrolled noise,” she wrote. “Seems like we’re watching his cognitive decline in real time.”
Journalist Laura Bassett wrote on X that “the uncontrolled noises are happening more often,” adding that it was “wild to watch him mentally deteriorate on stage in real time.”
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar, whose clips of the rallies have fueled much of the online conversation, flagged Trump’s remarks to reporters on Saturday before he traveled to Georgia for a rally. “Trump could barely speak, but what he said was nutso,” Rupar wrote to his more than 1.1 million followers.
