On Monday’s Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, Jon Stewart made a brief appearance after Sam Bee pointed out how we’ve managed to hang the election outcome on his shoulders. “I’ve really turned into a very odd person, with the little horses and the coloring,” he gleefully shouts, doodling away.
Sadly, this interlude was necessary after a full episode of cruel truths about Donald Trump’s White House staff, whose terribleness Bee outlines with as many quips as she can. There’s white nationalist and “outsider” Steve Bannon, who Trump has tapped as his chief strategist for the incoming administration, meant to balance his new chief of staff, establishment Republican Reince Priebus, whose names Bee points out can be rearranged to “Eerie R.N.C. Pubis.”
While Bannon and Priebus are both unalloyed nightmares, Bee reminds us that some of the terror fuel appointments that Trump is suggesting are distractions from the real dangers. For example, Sarah Palin and her love of all the oils and minerals God put in the earth for us to pry out. While Sarah Palin would gleefully dismantle the Secretary of Energy position, there are plenty of folks on Trump’s short list who would do much much worse by staying in it, like Forrest Lucas, who actively hates animals.
Overall, these segments are carried by the many clips of Trump’s future staff saying and doing ridiculous things. Sam Bee doesn’t have to interject much to underline how ludicrous it is for Hot Lips Myron Ebell to say climate change is fine because “most people prefer less severe winters” or that Ben Carson thinks the pyramids were built by Joseph to store grain. Unfortunately, those things get progressively less funny until we really, really need to sit down with Jon Stewart and a coloring book.