Samantha Bee opened this week’s Full Frontal with a very special birthday president for President Donald Trump: his highest disapproval numbers yet. “Happy 71st, 45,” she said. “Let us know when you get tired of winning!”
“We’ll be over here watching America’s hottest summer replacement series,” the host continued. She was of course talking about the country’s new obsession with Senate Intelligence Committee hearings, most recently starring Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
“Compared to Comey Day, Sessions-palooza was a Southern fried snoozefest,” Bee said, noting that it took an hour of “J-Beau’s folksy bullshit and selective amnesia” to get to the first “testy” exchange of the day with Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden, who accused Sessions of “stonewalling.” As Bee pointed out, Stonewall Jackson is “the one Confederate icon Jefferson Beauregard isn’t named after.”
“In his quest to run out the clock, the DOJ’s garden gnome got an assist from Arkansas Republican and Senate high-school yearbook editor Tom Cotton,” Bee added, before playing the clip of that senator’s hard-hitting question about Jason Bourne movies. “The ‘do you like movies’ question tripped you up?” Bee asked. “No wonder the collusion kids didn’t tell you they were dealing with Russia. You’re too slow to keep up.”
Like many other progressives watching on Tuesday afternoon, Bee’s favorite moment of the hearing belonged to California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris. “The folksy prevarication elf had just drawled us all into a coma when we were suddenly jolted awake by a fast-talking lady lawyer,” she said of the woman who made Sessions “nervous.”
“Aw, Senator Harris, look what you did!” Bee said. “You have to understand that about a third of Jeff’s RAM is dedicated to not saying the ‘n-word,’ which just slows the whole thing down. And that goes up to two-thirds when a smart woman of color is lobbing questions at him like a tennis ball launcher.”
“Of course, deplorable Twitter and CNN’s paid Trumpbots have a word for precise, methodical questioning,” Bee said, before playing a clip of former Trump communication staffer Jason Miller calling Harris “hysterical.”
“Oh, fuck off, you goateed tomato emoji!” Bee told Miller. “The guy whose master starts every morning rage-tweeting conspiracy slander while working a well-done steak out of his colon does not get to call anyone hysterical.”
In the end, Bee said the best way to view Sessions’ testimony is through the prism of the O.J. Simpson trial: “The same amount of backstabbing, only with fewer celebrities, but still illustrating an epic divide in the nation.” Then, putting a picture of Sen. Harris next to Marcia Clark, she added, “And of course, everyone will unfairly shit on the female prosecutor.”