Samantha Bee is attempting the seemingly impossible and no, this time we’re not talking about her bid to blow a vagina-shaped hole in the boys club that is late night TV. Instead, we’re speaking of her sincere effort to sit down with Trump supporters and hear what they have to say without making fun of them. It does not go great.
“The whole presidential nomination is a big reality show and that’s why he’s winning,” suggests one young Trump fan in a moment of clarity. It’s fleeting, though—seconds later, he calls Samantha Bee “a trickle down media whore.”
“In the big bukkake of media, I’m the one at the bottom of the fuck pile,” Bee suggests.
The young man agrees, saying, “I think that’s an accurate assessment.”
What Bee ultimately comes away with is that no amount of reason or fact-checking will change these Trump supporters’ minds. In fact, try to do it and they’ll only call you biased, accuse you of taking things out of context (even when they’re presented in context), or this will happen:
Bee: Do you think it’s wrong for the media to report that half the things he retweeted were associated with white supremacists?
Trump fan: It’s clearly illogical to do this “guilt by association thing because we can play it all day long.
Bee: You mean like with Muslims.
Trump fan: That was a little condescending. It was a little condescending.
Bee: Some sweeping generalizations are okay. Others are not.
The good news, as one young Ann Coulter lookalike points out, is that “we all love America...Everybody can get behind that.” And by “everybody,” she means white Trump supporters, black Trump supporters, white supremacists, and all other kinds of hateful bigots!
Welp. Bee tried her best to listen. Unfortunately, they have a lot to say and it’s all terrible.
Contact the author at madeleine@jezebel.com.