Last night, on another bumped-to-Wednesday evening of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, the late night host recapped Sunday’s debacle of a debate (or as Bee puts it, “the night we gave up”), wherein anything slightly resembling policy description became overpowered by antics we’re used to seeing solely on Reality TV (clearly the U.S. wasn’t sated by said antics, and here we are, with that mode of feuding having infiltrated and overtaken the narrative of a presidential election.)
Flavorwire staffers likewise weighed in on the debate (and noted many of the same lows/very scarce highs), but Samantha Bee’s spin on it all was, of course, loaded with incomparable zingers — the likes of which will perhaps be the one thing people recall positively about this election. Unless Trump wins and gets to jail people as easily as he claimed he would on Sunday night, we’ll certainly never again be lacking in rococo comic descriptions of this man’s being to use to describe this, erm, historical moment; perhaps when he’s actually less of a threat, those descriptions will actually be funny again.
Bee began by talking about how Trump attempted to “non-consensually grab the media narrative by rounding four women who say they’ve been raped by Clinton and flying them to Saint Louis to use as a sort of rape victim human shield.”
But she also notes that perhaps Trump’s recent attempts to focus on problems the Clintons’ marriage aren’t working in his favor. “We love wronged wives,” she says. “This is the same America that’s still obsessed with Jennifer Aniston.”
Later, she calls Trump a “Crotch fondling slab of rancid meatloaf” and notes how, in his moments of rare silence, he paced around until he eventually looked like he was “fornicating with a chair” — “when you’re a star, the chairs let you do it. You can do anything.”
“While Hillary reached out to the audience with facts and sentences that followed the basic rules of grammar and syntax,” Bee says, “Trump spent 90 minutes outgassing a noxious word cloud of aggression and disjointed nonsense he found on Reddit.”
Of course, the main problem about the debate was that while Hillary may have made valiant attempts to discuss what she’d actually do for the U.S., for the environment, and for foreign policy, all of that was constantly being dominated by the fact that this was a debate of scandals more than a debate of policies.