Samantha Bee
“This is not the time to get complacent,” said Samantha Bee on a remote Full Frontal filmed during the second day of the Democratic convention. “We don’t know what’s about to happen! Next week, the president is going to accept the nomination from the White House, or Gettysburg, or Epcot Spaceship Earth, we just don’t know.”
Which is why Full Frontal’s theme for the 2020 election, Bee revealed, is “expect the worst.”
Case in point: though there are valid reasons to criticize Kamala Harris as Biden’s running mate, such as her “controversial record as a prosecutor or the fact that she met her husband on a blind date set up by the director of House Party”, Bee noted, Republicans are “instead choosing to criticize her for being a black woman”.
Bee played a series of Fox News clips dismissing Harris’s bid as “identity politics”, calling the California “nasty” and claiming she was just “supposedly African-American”.
“If these attacks on Harris’s gender and race sound familiar, it’s because a lot of them are just repeats of the bullshit used against Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama,” Bee explained.
Less well-trodden territory is the Trump administration’s dismantling of the US post office ahead of an election that will probably depend on mail-in ballots. “We already know to expect that Republicans will do whatever it takes to prevent black and Hispanic people from voting,” said Bee, “but it’s truly terrifying to see how the pandemic is allowing them to suppress voter turnout at warp speed.”
Still, “we should allow ourselves to feel hope for the future,” Bee concluded, “and then we should get right back to work, because when you are dealing with a pack of decomposing racists, you have to expect the worst.”
Trevor Noah
On the Daily Show, Trevor Noah blasted Fox News and other conservatives for trotting out the “not black enough” line against Kamala Harris. Noah played several clips in which conservative commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Dinesh D’Souza called Harris, whose mother was born in India and whose father was born in Jamaica, not “African American” or “American black”.
Conservatives are asking: Is Kamala Harris really Black?
— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) August 20, 2020
…but best believe the second she steps foot in the White House and makes a few decisions they don't like, she’ll be Black as can be. pic.twitter.com/CqVwH9jmFM
“You can dissect Kamala Harris’s heritage however you want,” said Noah. “But to say she’s not black?” You have to ask yourself, he added, “is she black enough to get kicked out of a restaurant back in the day in the Jim Crow South? Would she have been black enough to get redlined? Is she black enough to be kept out of a whites-only school as a little girl? Then she’s black!”
What’s “especially ironic” about conservative media “trying to exclude” Harris from blackness, Noah continued, is that “it’s the reverse of what white America did for centuries: defining as many people as black as possible, whether they wanted it or not.” He explained the “one-drop rule”, the historical practice of defining blackness by the existence of a single black ancestor, which was “never meant to accurately portray the black experience or many shades of blackness itself. It was made with the singular intention of finding the most efficient way to exclude as many people as possible from whiteness.
“So yes,” he concluded, “it is disgusting that these people are now trying to exclude Kamala Harris from being black.”
Stephen Colbert
Stephen Colbert continued the Late Show’s live coverage of the virtual Democratic national convention on Wednesday night, during which Barack Obama delivered a fiery speech to introduce Kamala Harris. The former president’s address was “everything I miss”, joked Colbert. “Obama! The constitution! A president! Haircuts!”
Obama admitted that he had hoped “for the sake of our country” back in 2016 that Donald Trump “might show some interest in taking the job seriously”.
“Look, sir, I know you’re the guy who coined the ‘hope’ slogan, but even your poster doesn’t buy that,” said Colbert. Nevertheless, the former president transitioned from “no drama Obama” to “trash talk Barack” and said Trump had “shown no interest in putting in the work, no interest in finding common ground. Donald Trump hasn’t grown into the job, because he can’t.”
“It’s true, Donald Trump hasn’t grown since he was a toddler,” Colbert added. “He’s the only president who still needs a sippy cup.”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers discussed a damning report from the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee which confirms that Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort briefed a Russian intelligence officer on campaign data.
“This is as definitive as it gets,” said Meyers of evidence for election collusion with Russia, “and the worst part is, no one cares because it’s old news. It’s like finding out now that the characters on Lost really did die in the plane crash.
“I just want to say to the Senate and Robert Mueller and everyone, everyone else involved in the Russia investigation: way to slow-walk it, fellas,” Meyers added. “You couldn’t have released definitive proof of a criminal conspiracy to cheat in the 2016 election before Trump botched the deadly pandemic?
“I can’t wait till August 2022 when the Senate announces that, yes, Trump did burn all the mail-in ballots from blue states the day before the election.”
