Samantha Bee Rips ‘Racist’ John Kelly Over Civil War Comments
Samantha Bee slammed White House chief of staff John Kelly on Wednesday for saying “the lack of an ability to compromise led to the Civil War.” Kelly’s comments surfaced in an interview broadcast earlier this week.
“We knew when the indictment [of Paul Manafort] dropped, the Trump team would immediately do something frantically racist to distract us from how they pillaged our democracy,” Bee said. “The only surprise was who was doing the racism this time.”
“Fuck all the way off with that revisionist, ‘both sides’ bullshit,” she added.
Bee admitted that she did not expect to hear these comments from Kelly, who was initially portrayed as a stabilizing force in a chaotic White House. “That guy was supposed to whip Trump into shape,” Bee lamented. “July John Kelly was such a dreamy hunk of responsibility. Even I did a segment on how not-completely-awful he was.”
But looking back, the Full Frontal-host acknowledged that this idea of Kelly as a positive influence was mostly wishful thinking. “Kelly didn’t suddenly become a racist dickbag when the leaves turned,” she noted. “Before he was chief of staff, Kelly was chief of Homeland Security, a position he got because his hawkish views on the southern border caught the severely bloodshot eye of Steve Bannon. Kelly was the guy in charge of two of Trump’s most racist policies: banning Muslims and deporting Mexicans.”
“Kelly’s views on refugees are just as disappointing,” Bee continued. “According to The New York Times, he said if it were up to him, the number of refugees admitted would be between zero and one – further proof that Kelly is a monster, because between zero and one technically only includes fractions.”
“If this guy is the adult in the room,” she concluded, “we need to start looking for ways to lock that room from the outside.”