President Donald Trump may have tried to force the media to move on to his Supreme Court nomination with Tuesday night’s reality-TV-style announcement from the White House’s East Room. But Samantha Bee was not going to let this week go by without laying into what can reasonably be described at this point as Trump’s “Muslim ban.”
“Nice misdirection, Criss Angel, but you can’t just shake your keys and distract us from this giant mess you made,” Bee said at the top of Full Frontal on Wednesday night. “We’re not cable news. We’re Americans. And we would like a word.”
Noting that Trump signed his possibly illegal executive order at a “quarter to Shabbos” on Friday night, “when the government always rolls out the best ideas that it’s most proud of,” Bee cut to a montage of the “chaos” at airports over the weekend and some of the best responses from lawmakers, including House Speaker Paul Ryan, who called the ban “confusing.”
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“Confusing? Give Trump’s ban some credit,” Bee said. “It was the HealthCare.gov of Islamophobia, the Ford Pinto of intolerance, a big fat cocktail of New Coke and Zima poured onto a Microsoft Zune playing an endless loop of the Star Wars prequel Jar-Jar Binks scene.”
What the “fake news failed to mention,” Bee reported, are all the terrorists Trump’s ban will stop from entering the country. According to a Cato Institute study, there have been exactly zero deaths of Americans committed by refugees from the seven countries on the president’s list. ‘Whatever, everyone knows you can’t trust numbers,” Bee said. “Especially Arabic numbers.”
“Look, we learned years ago that using national origin as a basis for exclusion didn’t work and it pissed off our allies,” she continued. “Hey! You know what does work to prevent terrorist attacks? When presidents pay attention in their security briefings!”
Moving on to the debate over what to call the executive order, Bee said, “Lawyers call it unconstitutional, but what’s in a name?” She added, “The other important thing to remember about the ‘not-a-Muslim ban’ is that Muslim President Barack Obama was the first to ban Muslims. He is a Muslim but he did ban the Muslims first and Republicans simply want to continue the good work of President Hussein Obama, the founder of ISIS.”
Defending Obama, whom Trump spokespeople have tried to blame for starting this whole mess, Bee said he didn’t “ban” anyone, he just slowed down the visa process. “It’s the difference between going to the DMV on a busy day and going to the post office on Sunday,” she said.
And then there was Trump allegation that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was shedding “fake tears” over the refugees’ plight.
“What a refreshing rejection of political correctness,” Bee joked. “The president of the United States calling the Senate minority leader a lying sissy boy. I’m sorry. Who’s the bigger sissy? The Holocaust victim’s great-grandson who teared up over families being torn apart? Or the guy who’s afraid to walk down stairs?”
For those “keeping score at home,” Bee summed up the story this way. “When a Rite-Aid cashier says ‘Happy Holidays’ to you instead of ‘Merry Christmas,’ that is religious oppression. But when you’re a legally approved green card holder who’s refused entry into the United States, forced to surrender her green card, sent to Ethiopia even though you’re from Yemen, and left in Tom Hanks-limbo at the Addis Ababa airport, that’s an ‘inconvenience.’”
