After taking more than a month off to both prepare for and recover from her epic Not the White House Correspondents’ Dinner event, Samantha Bee returned to her usual Wednesday night time slot with a vengeance this week, diving directly into what has arguably become the biggest story of Donald Trump’s presidency to date.
“What a fun time to be alive!” Bee exclaimed at the top of Full Frontal, introducing the “shockwave bombshell earthquake” that is the firing of FBI Director James Comey. “This brings us to our recurring segment, ‘Our Weekly Constitutional Crisis: What the Fuck Is It This Time?’”
From there, Bee examined the “slow-motion clusterfuck of impulsiveness and ineptitude that this White House is famous for,” including Trump’s letter to Comey that contained the “totally normal digression about how the president didn’t collude with Russia.”
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“By 7:30, and I am not making this up, the staff of Nixon’s official library were trying to wash the Donald Trump taint off Richard Nixon with the hashtag #notnixonian,” Bee added of the unexpected tweet. “Which is fair. At least Nixon wasn’t at war with late-night comedy,” she said, playing the clip of Nixon on Laugh-In.
And in response to Vladimir Putin, who said Trump was “only acting in accordance with his competence,” Bee said, “His only competence is firing people, and he’s too dumb to understand why this time his ratings didn’t go up.”
“Newsflash! Most of us love our democratic norms more than we hate the other team, President Dingdong,” she continued. “This isn’t partisan. I don’t like James Comey, nobody does! You either think he lost Hillary the election or you think he’s the reason she’s not locked up. Comey’s a bit of a turd. But at least he’s an independent turd.” Whoever Trump replaces him with, she added, will “know that if they look too hard at Trump’s Russia connections, they will be out.”
And despite what Jeffrey Toobin spent Tuesday night screaming about on CNN, Bee told her viewers, “This has become normal. This president has wiped his ass with the Constitution so many times the National Archives started leaving passive-aggressive notes asking him to chip in for toilet paper.”
“When POTUS shot off an insulting infantile tweet during Hannity’s show, as usual, we were just relieved it wasn’t a whole tweetstorm,” she added. “Just one tweet? Gosh, that’s practically presidential. That’s where we are. The president is meeting with a war criminal, Putin is playing space hockey and the press secretary is hiding in some shrubbery.”
