ABC drama Scandal continued its sustained attack against Republicans and party presidential frontrunner Donald Trump in Sunday night’s episode, and in the process derided “country people” as “inbred, filthy” “morons” who don’t know how to read.
In Sunday’s episode, titled “Trump Card,” Olivia Pope (Kerry Washington) meets privately with GOP presidential candidate Hollis Doyle (Gregg Henry) to try to convince him to consider taking on Mellie Grant (Bellamy Young) to be his vice presidential nominee.
As fans of the show know, Doyle is a thinly-veiled spoof of real-life GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump. He’s a vulgar, sexist, xenophobic oil magnate from Texas who upends the presidential race by stealing Grant’s entire campaign platform as well as her slogan, “Embrace America’s Tomorrow” (which later changes to “Dare to Be Great Again”) and jumping into the race himself.
In Sunday’s episode, Pope meets with Doyle to inquire about getting Grant on the ticket; but unbeknownst to Doyle, she is secretly recording the meeting.
“I want Mellie Grant on that ticket,” Pope tells him.
“Oh, so do I. So do I. Classy piece of ass, that lady. Elevates us both,” Doyle replies.
When Pope expresses “serious concerns” about the “exclusionary” nature of Doyle’s message, the candidate fires back: “Oh, hell, you don’t think I believe any of that racist crap I spew out there in the boonies, do you?”
He adds that his message in the primaries has been tailored to a “specific market.”
“And when I get to the general, all them mouth-breathing morons who couldn’t read a newspaper column if their lives depended on it, well, they’ll think I only just started telling people what they wanted to hear, and they got the real me six months ago,” he adds. “To tell you the truth, my most pressing concern is there ain’t enough Purell in the world to make me want to keep shaking their filthy, inbred hands. I mean, ugh! Country people. Am I right?”
But this exchange is only a small part of the episodes’s criticism of Doyle/Trump and his supporters.
Later on, Democrat presidential candidate Edison Davis (Norm Lewis) unleashes a scorching rant against Doyle, calling him and his supporters “thugs and punks.”
Here’s the full transcript of Davis’ impromptu speech, transcribed by Media Research Center:
“You want a sound bite? You want the truth? Hollis Doyle is a disgusting piece of trash. A relic. A man, like many other white men, who have had a free run at prosperity and opportunity. For whom discrimination and injustice are as foreign to them as the Muslim immigrants that they want to ban from our country. And now that they don’t have a free run, they’re lashing out.
To be honest, I can’t believe it took him explicitly expressing his racism for you all to start asking these damn questions. He ends every speech with “Dare to be great again.” Huh? What? Should we return to slavery? Jim Crow? In today’s America, my gay friends can get married. In today’s America, I can vote. 50 years ago — in Hollis Doyle’s lifetime — that wasn’t the case. In today’s America, my parents don’t have to recruit a white couple who worked alongside them at the cereal plant to apply for a mortgage because banks wouldn’t lend to folks with brown skin. In today’s America, we have the Brandon Bill, which means I may not have to tell my future son that he could be murdered by law enforcement just for asking why he was pulled over.
Black lives do matter because young black people are under attack. Immigrants, too. The fact that Doyle insists on saying “All lives matter” when talking about this movement really pisses me off. It’s like walking up into someone else’s funeral and screaming, “Why are you not crying for my daddy? He’s dead, too.” Well, yes, he is. And that is sad. But that is not the topic of the conversation. Go stand over there and let the adults talk.
Hollis Doyle is a thug. A punk. And the people who support him are thugs or punks. Or they condone his behavior. They are not Americans. The idea that this country belongs to one kind of person is the least American idea that anyone has ever had. In fact, it is the opposite of the ideals of this nation. Nothing needs to be restored. Nothing needs to be made great again. We are a better nation than we were 20 years ago. Than we were 50 years ago. Than we were 100 years ago. Than we were at our founding. That is the point of America. We are a country where we are always greater than our past. I am proud to live in a nation where a black man has a legitimate shot at the White House. That’s American greatness.”
Watch clips of both scenes above, courtesy of MRC.
The fifth season finale of Scandal airs Thursday, May 12 on ABC.
Follow Daniel Nussbaum on Twitter: @dznussbaum
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