While the Democratic National Convention opened on Monday, strangely, Samantha Bee kept her focus on the Republican National Convention for the third straight episode of TBS’ Full Frontal.
On Monday night, the latest episode of Bee’s show included a look at GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s speech at last week’s Republican National Convention. Bee called Trump “a sociopathic, 70-year-old toddler” while deriding the billionaire and former reality TV star for what she said was a “fear-mongering” RNC speech with a tone and message borrowed from late-1960s Richard Nixon.
Later, though, Bee turned things over to her Full Frontal correspondents, who spoke with various Trump supporters throughout the RNC in Cleveland about the Black Lives Matter movement. Unsurprisingly, the general attitude toward BLM from Trump’s backers was a negative one, with several people in the crowd describing the movement as “a racist group” and “bordering on domestic terrorism.”
Each of the show’s three correspondents tried to get some Trump supporters to say that “black lives matter,” but every single interviewee in the video refuses to say the phrase, opting to say instead that “all lives matter,” despite being informed that the two phrases are not mutually exclusive.
Meanwhile, several of the Trump supporters also admitted to the Full Frontal correspondents that they were generally unaware of BLM’s purpose and goals. “I don’t know what they’re saying,” one woman Trump supporter told Full Frontal of BLM. “I just know there’s a lot of anger out there.”
However, as Bee notes, most of the Trump supporters being interviewed did show a willingness to be learn more about the BLM movement. One man at the RNC admitted that it is “certainly possible” that African-Americans could receive more scrutiny from police than white people, while another man said that “of course, black lives matter,” but he couldn’t support the BLM movement without learning more about their mission.
The segment ends with a Samantha Bee voiceover saying, “Bad news, Donald Trump, white conservatives are creeping ever closer to getting ‘woke’ for something other than brunch.”