Samantha Bee Examines the GOP’s Responsibility for Last Week’s Violence on Full Frontal

When your topical late night show only airs once a week, you don’t always get to tackle the big stories as quickly as those dudes who flit across our TV sets almost every single night. Thus the plight of Samantha Bee, whose fine TBS show Full Frontal addressed the Capitol riot a week after the fact. (If you ever wonder why late night roundups like this are pretty much all white guys, well, that’s on TV, not us, friends.) Bee, a graduate of the Daily Show school of pointed political comedy when Jon Stewart was still the dean, wastes no time pointing out the complicity of prominent Republicans in denying Biden’s election victory and stoking the uprising that led to five deaths and briefly occupied the Capitol last week. Bee also targets the cynical hypocrisy of the GOP, who gleefully embraced Trump as a vehicle to get all the tax cuts and judges they could possibly get, no matter how baseless and unhinged his conspiracy theories grew, and then immediately cut bait as soon as the powder keg they helped build blew up in their own office.

Bee traces the whole cascade of failures from last week across two segments, from the Republicans whose rhetoric encouraged the protesters-turned-rioters, to the fact that D.C. seemed totally unprepared for what happened despite the event being organized in plain public sight, to the self-serving functionaries who tried to save face by quickly ditching their appointments in the Trump administration. Yes, it’s a depressing refresher on just how stressful our country is today, and on how shamelessly Trump and his enablers exploit and exacerbate these divisions, but it’s also disarmingly funny throughout. Bee routinely has some of the sharpest, wittiest rejoinders to the madness we’re all struggling through, and these clips are no exception. Check ‘em out below.