It’s a good thing Full Frontal with Samantha Bee didn’t air at its normal time and date this week (Mondays at 10:30), as we would’ve had to wait an extra week for her commentary on the debate. Instead, the show aired last night, giving Bee and her writing team enough time to sift through the storm of orange turds launched from a certain candidate and find the best ones to smoosh.
Bee, like John Oliver, has the immense skill of being able to weave vividly crass insults that also effectively dismantle political hypocrisies. During the primary election, her sometimes unquestioned support for Hillary — at a time where that unquestioned support didn’t seem as necessary as it does now — could plaster over some of Hillary’s own shortcomings. But now that Hillary’s fighting someone with such a bouquet of repulsing qualities as Donald Trump — and now that she’s taken on and really stuck to a campaign that speaks far more to the desires of the left than her more centrist 2008 campaign — Bee’s eviscerations are a vital weapon against Trumpian destruction. She probably won’t sway any Trump supporters, but she might help get the lazier/more uninspired democrats out to vote.
At the start of last night’s episode, Bee describes the first presidential debate between Clinton and Trump on Monday as a case of watching “American democracy playing Russian roulette.” Bee notes how Trump denied having said so many of the absurd things Clinton alleged he said — and that the problem with saying absurd things on, say, Twitter (like the comment about climate change being a Chinese fabrication), is that people can simply go back and screencap the absurd Tweet you denied saying, as Bee does.
Bee continues to recap some of the most ridiculous (as in, temporally impossible) accusations from Trump, like his claim that Hillary’s been fighting ISIS, which was founded in 2004, her “entire adult life” — which results in Bee sharing this *totally unmodified* photo:
Bee also speaks of the two white candidates’ takes on race, lightly jabbing Hillary’s own careful approach to discussing Black Lives Matter while then focusing on the incomparably awful speech Trump gave on the issue, in which the pre-tyrant simply repeated that we need “law and order” ad nauseum.
Watch the clip: