Sam Bee and Full Frontal return to lay the smackdown on the Trump-McConnell shutdown
Samantha Bee’s been off since before the winter holidays, no doubt basking in the warm glow of rage at the daily assault on democracy, decency, science, women, the LGBTQI community, world peace, and proper Twitter grammar that is the Donald Trump administration. Sure, we all hope that Bee was restoring herself with a nice hot bubble bath and a really big glass of wine, but we’re pretty sure that was a rage-bath. And rage-wine. Regardless of how the Full Frontal host spent her winter vacation, she was fired up on the show’s return on Wednesday.
An unauthorized Masked Singer segment where garishly costumed federal workers from various departments could terrify everyone with voice-disguised tales of how the very important jobs they do are going undone, and leaving Americans in legitimate physical peril every day all because of Trump’s “wall boner?” Check. A righteously pissed-off segment examining how the media’s obsession with female presidential candidates’ “likability,” honed to a sexist edge during Hillary Clinton’s campaign, is already multiplying like newsroom pundit bacteria the more women than ever before have announced for 2020? Oh yeah.
But Bee’s first segment, and the one where she came out firing with accustomed, Pedro Martinez-style high heat was about the government shutdown. First, she relished how another “unlikable” woman is kicking ass, examining how it’s driving stereotypical rich, sexist asshole Trump insane that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is saying no to him. (On an invitation to give the State of the Union address, on his farcically useless, criminally wasteful, bigot-pandering Game Of Thrones wall.) Showing a clip of Pelosi shutting down reporters’ questions about “compromise” on Donnie’s medieval plan to keep brown people off his lawn, Bee translated the Speaker’s patiently repeated “I’m not for a wall,” as the clearly implied, “Ask me again if I’m for a wall and I’ll rip your spine out through your face, muthafucka!” (Mic drop.)
And speaking of shutting things down, there’s Bee’s take on the fact that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) isn’t allowing any of the many government funding bills passed by the Democratic-controlled House to come to the floor. You know, even those essentially 100 percent identical to the ones the Republican-controlled Senate approved before Donnie got a bee in his pointy white bonnet to deprive hundreds of thousands of federal employees of, at this point, two paychecks in order to shore up his shrinking base of rabidly racist monochromatic folk. Well, this Bee swarmed that nonsense with the fact that McConnell’s Republican pals are merely knuckling under to the whims of the Executive Branch instead of acting like the co-equal, public-minded branch they are. Even if—and this is a big hypothetical—Donald Trump’s word in negotiations were worth a hot damn, Bee claimed it still would be a stupid boondoggle of an idea. Apart from the concept being racist, useless, and easily tunneled-under or laddered-over, Bee compared giving $5 billion to Donald fucking Trump for a border wall in the year 2019 to investing in the Fyre Festival in 2016. “You can’t reason with this Fyre Festival of an administration,” said Bee, “If you try, you’re just gonna end up being attacked by pigs.”