Samantha Bee Dismantles Kellyanne Conway, Panics Over Trump

Photo: TBS
Photo: TBS

The inauguration of Donald Trump as president is right around the corner, so Samantha Bee spent her Wednesday-night edition of Full Frontal ridiculing one reason Trump got elected and contemplating the end of the world. Literally.

Bee’s opening segment was devoted to inducting Kellyanne Conway, counselor to the president-elect, into the host’s “Great Feminists in Feminism Herstory Hall of Lady Fame.” Conway is the most prominent woman in Trump’s inner circle, aside from his daughter Ivanka, and she’s been widely credited in the media as being the first woman to run a successful presidential campaign — so you’d think Bee would have to walk a fine line. After all, isn’t her show predicated on the notion that strong women are to be celebrated?

But as Bee moved through clips of Conway’s pre-Trump life — snippets of speeches in which she said things such as “femininity is replacing feminism” — Bee warmed to her task of portraying Conway as someone “who will say absolutely anything” to achieve her goal or to prop up the person she’s promoting at any given moment. Bee chose an excellent example of the way Conway, as she phrased it, “deflects questions like Supergirl deflects bullets”: It was a clip from a Good Morning America interview Conway did with George Stephanopoulos in which Conway never gave Stephanopoulos a specific answer to anything he asked, and he concluded by thanking her for coming on to answer questions. I may be particularly partial to this Full Frontal moment because Bee referred scornfully to Stephanopoulos as “a sentient pocket-square.” Bee ended by giving her screed about Conway a final, feminist twist: “Why the hell is he president and not her?”

Bee’s second segment was more unsettling — an interview with Russian journalist Masha Gessen, who has written extensively about the tyranny of Vladimir Putin and about the rise of Trump. (I recommend Gessen’s 2016 New York Review of Books piece, “Autocracy, Rules for Survival.” I will also add a fun fact: Gessen is the Russian translator for the terrific FX show The Americans.) Bee framed the interview in comic terms, taking Gessen into her safe-space sanctuary — a SoulCycle shop — but Gessen wasn’t playing along. Bee sought advice for the next four years, and the woman who fled Russia and Putin for freedom said, “Continue panicking. … Continue saying, ‘This is not normal.’” Asked by the host what her biggest fear of a Trump presidency was, Gessen replied without hesitation, “Nuclear holocaust.” The interview ended on a light note, but you got the feeling Bee was joking to keep her frustration, anger, and panic tamped down.

Full Frontal With Samantha Bee airs Wednesday nights at 10:30 p.m. on TBS.