Samantha Bee kicked off her first new show of the year by recapping a week that was the “perfect storm of events designed to piss off our president.”
“It began with something he hates: bad press,” she said, referring to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, “and ended with something he hates more: women who don’t tolerate sexual assault” at the Golden Globe awards. “But the year’s best piece of entertainment wasn’t on Sunday night. It was on Sunday morning, when journalist and research-team panty-wetter Jake Tapper interviewed Trump’s senior adviser and human-like casing filled with wriggly squid tentacles, Stephen Miller.”
As the Full Frontal host explained, the reason Miller had to go on TV and fight with Tapper was because Wolff’s book has caused a full-on meltdown at the White House. But as “fun” as the book is, Bee said, it’s also “riddled with inaccuracies, thinly sourced, and full of typos.”
“Fire and Fury is basically the book-length version of a Trump tweet,” Bee said. “Only vaguely truth-adjacent but incredibly distracting, which is too bad. Because while everyone on cable news was fixated on Michael Wolff’s shoddy ninth-generation Xerox copy of Game Change, there were actual things happening. Like news and stuff or whatever, I don’t know, mostly to brown people.”
For one example, Bee tried to draw her viewers’ attention to the Justice Department’s attempts to add a citizenship question to the 2020 Census, a move she called a “real win-win for racists: Either they get a list of undocumented immigrants or Hispanic people avoid answering the Census and lose congressional representatives and funding.”
“2018 is going to be a really important year, guys, and we need to keep our eye on the ball,” Bee implored. “We can’t count on pundits to help. They’re going to keep getting distracted by the nonsense of the day, like fruitless speculation about Trump’s mental health.” From there, she showed a slew of cable-news hosts asking whether Trump is fit to serve.
“Is President Trump OK?” she asked. “Fuck no! He thinks his microwave is listening to him and that everything is poisoned but cheeseburgers. But crazy is what the American people chose!”
“Yes, Trump is easily distracted, doesn’t care about the truth, and focuses on whatever shiny thing is in front of him,” Bee declared, as a photo of Americans furiously reading Fire and Fury appeared in the screen behind her, “but if that’s enough to get you declared mentally incompetent, they’re going to need to build a bigger asylum.”