John Oliver Says the Afghanistan Withdrawal is 'A Stain on Biden's Legacy'

For the second time this month, Last Week Tonight host John Oliver took aim at President Biden's effort to withdraw from Afghanistan, a failure he insisted represents "a stain on Biden's legacy."

Oliver's breakdown of the crisis in Afghanistan took up the bulk of Sunday's episode, and while he did devote a few minutes to Fox News' anti-refugee rhetoric and the flawed arguments for invading the country in the first place, he reserved his harshest criticism for the president. "Biden's failure to plan here is astonishing," he said, after describing the "chaos" at the Kabul airport. "If Biden wants to argue for isolationism going forward he is welcome to do that, but what he can't do is use that as a justification to dismiss the fates of people in a country we have already disastrously intervened, because we have a non-zero duty at this point to do everything we can to help them, and that means getting as many people out as we can."

The HBO host concluded by noting that while the Afghanistan withdrawal is "a stain" on the president's legacy, the ball is still in Biden's court: "The only question is: How big does he want that stain to be? And that is really up to him."

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver airs Sundays at 11:00 PM ET on HBO.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.