Samantha Bee Exposes GOP’s Fear-Based Midterm Election Strategy

Despite President Trump’s claims that America is doing “better than ever” under his leadership, Samantha Bee pointed out on this week’s Full Frontal that the Republicans up for election this November aren’t running on their “supposedly awesome tax cuts or theoretically roaring economy.”

Instead, Bee said, they are relying on the “terrifying culture wars.”

“Republicans control all three branches of government!” she exclaimed. “How do you play the victim when you’ve won everything there is to win? Well, they’ve found a way: telling people that Democrats will eat them.”

After playing a montage of scary attack ads from GOP candidates, including one that labels the left “Crazytown,” Bee said, “I wish the left were Crazytown!” She added, “By the way, you know what is actually nuts? Conflating Nancy Pelosi with a handful of masked anarchists who hate Nancy Pelosi more than any Republican.”

Bee also shared an ad from Ted Cruz that attacks his opponent Beto O’Rourke for supporting kneeling football players by highlighting a supportive tweet from Ellen DeGeneres. “Ah yes, the one thing white America fears most: Ellen,” she joked. “Watch out America, because Ellen is going to dance on your fucking graves.”

“But as much as Republicans love to fear black people, there’s another scary group that’s shooting up the charts: women,” Bee added later, demonstrating how the right is demonizing female activists who protested Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. “Screaming women?” she asked. “My ears are burning. I haven’t felt this hated for being a woman since literally every day that I’m a woman.”

“Stop making it sound like sexual-assault survivors are this vastly powerful cabal. They are not,” she continued, putting a photo of Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford on the screen. “You know how I know that? Because one of these people became a Supreme Court justice and the other can’t go back to her fucking home.”

And in response to a coordinated effort by Trump, Republican candidates and Fox News to paint liberals as a “mob,” Bee said, “If anyone would know about the mob, it’s Donald Trump.”

“It’s a little hard to take Republicans seriously on this,” she said. “The only time I’ve ever seen an unhinged mob of Democrats is when NPR runs out of totes. Plus, thanks to Trump the GOP is pretty much the party of frenzied radical mobs.” Bee added, “It is tremendously ballsy for the slow-motion rage aneurysm that is the GOP to accuse the left of being a mob.”

In the end, Bee predicted, hopefully, that this “culture wars bullshit” would not pan out as the Republicans hope it will in the midterms. “The typical American voter is looking around and seeing that their wages are stagnating, their health care’s in danger and their boss just bought another mega-yacht,” she concluded. “I tend to think that’s going to matter more than a few loud pussy hats.”