Samantha Bee hopped a golf cart for some “rage air” and to go undercover as a “day-drunk white woman” on Wednesday’s Full Frontal, getting out of the studio to talk to some people with a bone to pick against Donald Trump. And while Bee could have pointed her cart in literally any direction and found someone fitting that description before the battery had time to fully engage, she steamed right for a country club, which makes sense. Sure, she could have talked to guests of one of Trump’s “bedbugged golf slums,” but Bee was looking for people with more of a grievance than ketchup on steak or suspect score cards, and found four former Trump employees who are among those filing a class-action lawsuit against their immigrant-smearing, kid-caging former employer—for running his economically suspect real-estate empire on the back of the very undocumented immigrants he uses as boogeymen to rile up his bigot-base.
Sitting down with four such former Trump workers (after exposing more of Trump’s golf-club grifting earlier in the episode), Bee listened to the sort of infuriatingly supervillainous hypocrisy and illegality that would scuttle any presidency in a functioning democracy, but have just become the Trump administration’s daily news dump. Hired with assurances that they didn’t need legal papers, then given the money and know-how to purchase fake documents once Trump was elected, the workers told further tales of how their supervisors held their undocumented status over them in order to keep them in line, including not complaining about being routinely overworked, insulted, and demeaned (and even struck) by Trump Organization supervisors, who threatened them with deportation at every turn. Noting that Trump only started firing his undocumented workers once The New York Times printed an exposé about Trump’s reliance on underpaid, mistreated undocumented employees, one woman—who worked as a housekeeper providing “personal care” (as Bee stressed, suppressing a gag) to the Trumps—said that she was shunted out of Don’s house while still having to clean up after Trump Org. heads Ivanka and Eric, once the Times shined a light on the situation.
Finding an immigration lawyer handling the workers’ case (luckily, Bee was on a golf course), Bee asked just what crimes Trump and his brood could be on the hook for, this time suppressing glee at the attorney’s list which included “forced labor, coercion, and trafficking” and which, he says, are punishable by 20 years in prison. And the workers aren’t playing, telling Bee that they have payroll and tax documentation to back up what they (and the Times) say was the Trump Organization’s mind-numbingly hypocritical labor practices. “We don’t only talk,” said one woman in Spanish, “We speak with proof” of a situation Bee summed up as a “very well-documented undocumented clusterfuck.” They also have harsh and, under the circumstances, fearless words for their former employer (a wronged Spanish-speaker calling a rich old white crook “mentiroso” is always especially satisfying), including hitting Trump where they know it’ll hurt the most. As that one woman called Trump a hypocrite, liar, and racist, Bee chimed in, “And, he cheats at golf.” “Sí,” said the former employee confidently, uttering the one accusation that actually seems to get under Donald Trump’s skin.