“I’m so excited to not have to say the words ‘Donald Trump,’ hopefully, for at least a little while,” Samantha Bee told The Daily Beast a week ago. “That would give me a great sense of peace.”
Get ready for four more years of rage.
After making her last, best case for “Hillary Goddamn Brilliant Badass Queen Beyoncé Rodham” on Monday, Bee had to come to terms with the fact that Donald Trump had actually won.
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Wednesday night’s special post-election show opened with a celebratory montage in which Bee hugged and high-fived everyone from Fox News’s Shepard Smith and Greg Gutfeld to her former colleagues Larry Wilmore, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert to mark the end of Election 2016. It is a piece that was clearly shot ahead of Tuesday night’s results and felt entirely out of place—until Bee woke up in a cold sweat.
Wearing her sparkly blue jacket “ironically,” Bee began her show by asking, “How did everyone get this so spectacularly wrong?” She began by blaming herself. This was the first presidential election the Canadian-born comedian voted in after becoming a U.S. citizen. “And I broke America,” she said. “I am so sorry.”
But ultimately, she said it’s “pretty clear who ruined America”: white people. “I guess ruining Brooklyn was just a dry run,” she joked. “The Caucasian nation showed up in droves to vote for Trump, so I don’t want to hear a goddamn word about black voter turnout. How many times do we expect black people to build our country for us?” To those who would try to “distance themselves” from the “bad apples,” Bee said, “If Muslims have to take responsibility for every member of their community, so do we.”
And Bee reserved special ire for the majority of white women, who, “faced with the historic choice between a female president and a vial of weaponized testosterone said, ‘I'll take option B. I just don’t like her!’ Hope you got your stickers, ladies. Way to lean out.”
After playing a clip of Hillary Clinton’s moving concession speech message to young girls across the country, Bee said, “And if Ms. Rodham is not in the White House, that’s OK. One of those girls is going to be. We still have millions of nasty women who aren’t going way and as long as women over 25 are allowed on television, I’ll be here cheering them on.” Then, alluding to Trump’s authoritarian stance on satire, she added, “Although that may only be until late January.”
