In a world where Jon Stewart has retired and Stephen Colbert has shed his alter ego to play it straight as a late night host, the gap in roasting the Trump administration for its policies has fallen mostly to Samantha Bee. The former correspondent for The Daily Show has used her weekly program Full Frontal to lambast Trump in the past, but in light of first two weeks of his ascension to the White House on the scaffolding built from the corpse the electoral college, the gloves came off. Audiences did have some warning that it was about to go down if they checked Twitter the night before the show aired.https://twitter.com/FullFrontalSamB/status/826938919824551938
The entire episode is worth your time, but the highlight finds Bee taking umbrage with Trump’s administration turning away refugees. After explaining the difference between an immigrant and a refugee since no one in the current administration seemed to be paying attention in their high school civics class*, Bee goes on to explain the United States’ preference for taking in refugees is to house women and children, “as if the sole criteria for getting in is that your hand can’t be larger than the President’s.” Thus the U.S. Department of State’s Refugee Processing Center statistics support that this preference is being upheld with 7428 of the 15479 Syrian refugees admitted to the US in 2016 being under the age of 14. Of those over 14, 3804 were women.
Perhaps the most salient point Samantha Bee bee makes is that this ban, which affects seven countries from which no terrorist has ever committed an action on American soil, is one of cowardice. America’s fear of Jewish trojan horses led to President Franklin D. Roosevelt turning away a boat of refugees, many of whom were later killed during the Final Solution. Our country was wrong to turn Jewish refugees away in 1939, and we’re wrong to turn Syrian refugees away in 2017. Or, as Samantha Bee to elegantly put is it, “I won’t mention that this refugee ban is immoral, embarrassing, and inhuman. I’ll just point out that it is the act of a giant pussy.”