Samantha Bee Roasts CNN for “Milking” Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren’s Feud

We’re now on Day 4 of the Elizabeth Warren-Bernie Sanders feud news cycle, and Samantha Bee is one hundred percent over it. On Wednesday night, the Full Frontal host took CNN to task for “milking” the spat between the senators, which culminated in a non-handshake at this week’s 2020 Democratic debate. Bee slammed CNN’s anchors for encouraging a Sanders-Warren cage match, saying, “The only way they could be trying harder to get them to fight is if they personally oiled up these senior citizens and threw them into the Octagon.”

Bee began her breakdown of Tuesday’s debate by offering her thoughts on various candidates, from former Vice President Joe Biden — who “turned in a performance that critics are hailing as ‘awake,’ ‘standing,’ and ‘are you okay?'” — to “businessman and guy who wants you to know he was at the club last night” Tom Steyer. “This tall glass of ham decided to buy his way into the debate with the most inessential campaign of all time,” said Bee.

But despite the weird checkmarks on his hand, Steyer actually “got off pretty easy, especially compared to the much rougher night that mom and dad had,” said Bee. The TBS host gave a quick rundown of Warren and Sanders’ “first personal disagreement,” a weeklong back-and-forth about whether he really said that a woman can’t be elected president (Sanders has denied saying it, but Warren insists that he did). “But don’t worry, the talking heads are being super civilized about it and not milking it at all,” she added, before cutting to a montage of CNN hosts Jake Tapper and Brooke Baldwin doing that very thing.

“Jesus Christ! The only way they could be trying harder to get them to fight is if they personally oiled up these senior citizens and threw them into the Octagon,” said Bee.

The Full Frontal host then turned to the “epic, no-holds-barred brutal smackdown for the ages,” when Warren avoided shaking hands with Sanders at the end of the debate. “That’s it? That’s what’s dominated our national discourse for 36 hours?” she said, deflated. “Two great candidates who are a little sad and disappointed in each other over a misunderstanding?” Bee added that it’s not crazy to say that “America couldn’t elect a woman president,” as she “might have shouted it into a bottle of wine or 10 herself.”

“Look, we have not yet found a way to have nuanced conversations about how sexism impacts female candidates,” continued Bee. “But I will tell you one thing I know for sure. This was the last debate before the Iowa caucus and if we’re having fights, they should be about how to protect reproductive rights, and how to fight gun violence and how Biden looks like he got run through The Irishman de-aging machine … If we make enemies of each other now, the fight won’t be about if a woman can ever be president, it will be about if anyone else will ever be president again.”

Watch Samantha Bee tear into CNN in the clip above.

Where to stream Full Frontal with Samantha Bee