When Samantha Bee needed “real answers” about how to persist in the age of Trump, she knew “exactly who to talk to”: Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who just happens to be promoting a new book.
“It’s only been six months. I am exhausted. I am personally broken,” Bee admitted to Warren at the top of their interview. “People come up to me all the time and are like, ‘What do I do? What do I do? Help me.’ So my question to you is: What should I tell them?”
The Massachusetts Democrat could barely get out her “fight as hard as you can” refrain when Bee interrupted her. “What does that mean?” she asked. “You’re so enthusiastic. I feel like you think we’re going to come out of this better than when we started.”
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“Yes,” Warren replied. “Because we don’t have any choice.”
“You’ve spent your whole life fighting for the working class and the guy who wants to dismantle economic protections for those people actually won,” Bee said. “Do you ever feel like, you know what? Fuck those people!?”
Unsurprisingly, Warren said, no, she never feels that way. “Donald Trump lied to them, lied to their faces,” she said. “But the answer is, then point it out, hold him accountable and offer them something better.”
Just as Warren was able to get a lot of “political capital” out of the moment when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced her for reading a letter by Coretta Scott King that criticized Jeff Sessions, she tried to help Bee reclaim terms like “unfunny feminist battle axe” and “Canadian lunch lady arms” as positives. “My cynicism is not backing down from your blind optimism,” Bee told Warren.
“My optimism is not blind. I see exactly what’s going on,” Warren said, before participating in a bit where she talked Bee down from “the ledge of the death of democracy.”
And finally, while Warren would only commit to running for re-election in 2018, not the presidency in 2020, she did give some more context to her bizarre obsession with the HBO series Ballers. “It’s actually a story about hard work, it’s a story about perseverance,” she said. “It’s a story about having to reach within yourself and find something you’re not 100 percent sure is there.”
“We’re talking about Ballers?” Bee asked. But that didn’t stop her from surprising Warren with an appearance by Ballers star and her former Daily Show colleague Rob Corddry along with a cardboard cut-out of Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
