“I have the best words,” is something a poorly programmed android might say, or a person waking from a cerebral event, or Dougie Jones. But it’s also, famously, how Donald Trump once described his particular brand of—let’s call it communication? On last night’s Full Frontal, Samantha Bee struggled mightily against not only Trump’s perpetual word-salad, but also the swirling language-vortex whipped up by Trump and his flacks, spokespeople, spin artists, and “fifth-rate entourage of lackeys and lickspittles” every time pesky, incontrovertible truth trips up his agenda or exposes yet another example of mendacity or hypocrisy. Or, you know, both.
With the studio transformed to an appropriately glitch-laden, monochromatic wasteland (complete with unitarded, monotone, three-person chorus for nihilistic spookiness), Bee battled valiantly to retain her sanity against the assembled clips of the Trump camp mangling, misusing, and deliberately torturing the English language in a concentrated attempt to make otherwise sensible news types (not to mention the poor saps doomed to watch this shitshow play out at home) crumble in the face of their anti-logic. Bee’s montage of the circumlocution deployed to avoid calling Donald Trump a big pathological goddamned liar is a rapid-fire cavalcade of gibberish where the word “lie” is never spoken, with convoluted phrases like “intentional falsehoods,” “misstatements of a factual nature,” and the Orwellian “alternative facts” holding sway. Talking heads like Don Lemon, Wolf Blitzer, and Chris Wallace, faced with dead-eyed Trump surrogates spouting nonsensical buzzwords like “fake news,” can only flail in vain, their human reason dashed against the stony, thuggish “alt-logic” of their tormentors. Bee, body writhing to mirror her embattled mind, and crying out at Ivanka Trump live-redefining the word “complicit,” can only bellow a mighty, anguished “Bullshit!,” her barbaric yawp of strangled common sense finally drowned out in the yowl of Trump-ian doublespeak.