Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
The Schmooze

Samantha Bee Goes Full Frontal On Ivanka Trump, Then Apologizes

Is Ivanka a feckless cnt? That is the question of our time, and it’s one that Samantha Bee, host of Full Frontal, posed recently on her show. “Do something about your dad’s immigration policy, you feckless cnt!” Bee declared.

The media was in an uproar, comparing Bee’s use of profanity to Roseanne Barr’s. Conservatives took the opportunity to demand Bee’s firing.

The likes of Kathy Griffin (who incurred a similar amount of media outrage when she posed for a picture with a facsimile of Trump’s severed head) and Billy Eichner (resident curmudgeon of our time, excepting Larry David, who is the resident straight curmudgeon of our time) urged Bee not to apologize.

Bee did damage control, apologizing in a statement released by TBS, she wrote that “I crossed a line and I deeply regret it.”

If vulgarity is a fireable offense, then Donald Trump should have been fired a long time ago. As a culture we may have long lost our once-tenuous grip on nuance, but surely we can understand that a white woman calling a woman of color an ape is not the same thing as one white woman being vulgar about another.

The White House called Bee “not fit for broadcast.”

As for me? I’m hoping she stays on the air forever.

Shira is an ardent lover of banana mango smoothies. She’s at feder@forward.com__

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at editorial@forward.com, subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.

Exit mobile version