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Why Thank You, Samantha Bee: You Just Gave The Trump Campaign A Huge In-Kind Contribution

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 01, 2018 3:00 PM

I have to say something to Samantha Bee: thank you. Thank you for giving the Trump campaign a rather large in-kind contribution. I would say CNN and other news networks because they gave $2 billion in free media to Trump in 2015-2016, but they probably know better: they helped get the man elected whether they like it or not with their non-stop exposure, confident his antics would usher his defeat. That didn’t happen. Now, we’ve kicked it up a notch with Samantha Bee’s vulgar and disgusting attack on Ivanka Trump, who is more than just a member of the First Family; she’s a senior adviser to the president. 

The Left had a collective stroke over the weekend because Ivanka shared a photo of herself and her son over social media. Liberals are infuriated over Trump’s immigration policies, slamming them for separating families. So, they trolled her because a mother loving her child is now a bad thing…if you’re a Republican or a member of the Trump family. A widely circulated story featuring photos of children being detained became a quick rallying cry fro left-wingers in their outrage antics over Trump’s immigration agenda, though those photos were from 2014 when Obama was in office. They stepped on a rake…again. Yet, on Wednesday, Samantha Bee, host of TBS’ Full Frontal, took it way over the line, calling Ivanka a “feckless c**t” for failing to confront her father on his immigration enforcement measures.

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“Put on something tight and low-cut and tell your father to f—ing stop it,” she added.

Now, Bee did apologize after sponsors started to jump ship from her show. The thing is this isn’t shocking to us on the Right. Is the use of that word shocking? Yes. But we all know liberals hate us. Trump, never Trump etc. it doesn’t matter; if you’re not a liberal, you’re evil. This feeling has only been exacerbated on the Left since the 2016 election. Trump Derangement Syndrome is real. At least, for now, Bee's remarks are so bad that even CNN is criticizing her. 

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So, the vicious cycle continues, some liberal crosses the line, said liberal apologizes, and the left-leaning media accepts the apology. It’s okay because they’re progressive. If a conservative had called Valerie Jarrett, Susan Rice, Sam Power, or any female members of the Obama administration the c-word, this would be a national debate. Instead, this will be forgotten. The excuse will probably be that Trump says awful things, so why not Bee? Well, maybe that’s because Bee said “We’re facing a new reality after the election. These next four years are going to require a broad coalition of straight-up decency” last year. 

 Yeah, that argument is dead. If liberals wanted to win this on “decency,” they lost. The moral high ground is lost—and maybe that’s the harsh reality here. There is no ground to be fought over. It’s straight-up fisticuffs. It’s who can remain standing after relentless and merciless blows to the face. With Trump, he’ll win. He knows the media, he knows the Left, and he’ll dominate every time. 

Trump has forced the Left to defend disrespecting the flag and by extension our men and women in uniform, defend the vicious thugs of MS-13 as people who aren’t so bad, defend illegal aliens committing crimes, and Hamas, a terrorist organization. The media's pervasive campaign to write off his presidency, to checkmate it, has led to epic embarrassment. From being unable to report on how he fed koi fish with the Japanese prime minister accurately (feeding fish, people), the Russian collusion nonsense, and criticizing having celebrities at the White House, conveniently ignoring Obama’s attraction to the Hollywood Left, the media will be this White House’s favorite punching bag—and he’ll always win. 

Yet, moving on from the liberal news media and Hollywood idiocy, Bee only made Trump’s base of support stronger, pushed others teetering on the line towards supporting the president, and only confirmed what we already know about the progressive left: they hate us. Even people who have not caught Trump Derangement Syndrome, like Caitlin Flanagan, have noticed Bee and other on late night shouldn’t be so high and mighty as their antics led to Trump’s presidency. Also, it’s hardly the first time Bee did something stupid; from mocking a kid with cancer to a young boy for believing in God—this an event years in the making. Granted, Flanagan’s criticism is mostly centered on the fact that Bee and the Left’s sense of moral superiority is crap since they’re both cut from the same cloth regarding Trump’s antics, it once again goes back to the point that maybe we’re just in an era of fighting in the gutter. I’m not necessarily saying that’s a bad thing (via The Atlantic):

During the campaign, Bee dispatched a correspondent to go shoot fish in a barrel at something called the Western Conservative Summit, which the reporter described as “an annual Denver gathering popular with hard-right Christian conservatives.” He interviewed an earnest young boy who talked about going to church on Sundays and Bible study on Wednesdays, and about his hope to start a group called Children for Trump. For this, the boy—who spoke with the unguarded openness of a child who has assumed goodwill on the part of an adult—was described as “Jerry Falwell in blond, larval form.” Trump and Bee are on different sides politically, but culturally they are drinking from the same cup, one filled with the poisonous nectar of reality TV and its baseless values, which have now moved to the very center of our national discourse.

Yes, yes, I know: She is a comedian, he is the president of the United States; there is no scale by which their words and actions can be reasonably compared. Yet while for Bee, as for so many in her field, Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” may have been a ravishing meme, Trump’s mockery of a war hero, grieving parents, and a disabled man showed how you get the job done. When John Oliver told viewers that if they opposed abortion they had to change the channel until the last minute of the program, when they would be shown “an adorable bucket of sloths,” he perfectly encapsulated the tone of these shows: one imbued with the conviction that they and their fans are intellectually and morally superior to those who espouse any of the beliefs of the political right.

[…]

As I embarked on writing this essay, Trump had just made what was then the latest in his endless series of preposterous moves: He had tweeted, without evidence but with certainty, that Trump Tower had been “wiretapped” by Barack Obama in the final days of the campaign. In the range of things Trump is capable of saying, doing, or tweeting, this was not “big league”; it was just another day at batting practice. But the episode was one more stunning reminder of how this impulsive, self-obsessed leader—who holds grudges, lies recklessly, and appoints his own family members to substantive positions—is making America into a laughingstock around the world. We are a country with the greatest creed in all of history—the Constitution of the United States—yet we are looking more and more like a banana republic.

I’ve thought about that a lot—but I’ve also thought a good deal about the boy on Samantha Bee’s program. I thought about the moment her producer approached the child’s mother to sign a release so that the woman’s young son could be humiliated on television. Was it a satisfying moment, or was it accompanied by a small glint of recognition that embarrassing children is a crappy way to make a living? I thought about the boy waiting eagerly to see himself on television, feeling a surge of pride that he’d talked about church and Bible study. And I thought about the moment when he realized that it had all been a trick—that the grown-up who had seemed so nice had only wanted to hurt him.

My God, I thought. What have we become?

She’s not the only one. An op-ed in The New York Times pretty much hit on the same points, though were more pointedly directed towards liberals: you’re not as smart as you think you are—and you’re only helping Trump win a second term.
There’s also the notion that even if we’re in a race to the bottom, does the American voter care? If jobs are being created, if the economy is good, if more money is being added into your paychecks, are you really jolted by the president being a little kooky on Twitter? My bet: not much. 

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Honorable Mention: That time Sam Bee’s show made disgraced New York Attorney General and alleged abuser of women Eric Schneiderman into a superhero.