Anthony Bourdain Takes Shot At Donald Trump From Beyond The Grave In ‘Parts Unknown’ Premiere
Anthony Bourdain is delivering a shot to Donald Trump, months after his own death.
The late host of Parts Unknown launched a direct attack at the president’s statements on African countries in the premiere of the final season of the show, which had wrapped up filming before Bourdain’s death earlier this year. As Page Six noted, Bourdain had traveled to Kenya for the episode, a country he noted was “phenomenally beautiful.”
“There is a growing middle class, a highly rated educational system and an enthusiastic and multilingual professional sector,” he said, adding, “Which is to say: This is decidedly not a s**thole.”
The remark was in response to a statement from last year in which Donald Trump described African nations as “s**thole countries.” As CNN noted, Trump made the remark during a White House meeting on immigration and was bemoaning why the United States had to take in immigrants from countries he saw as inferior. He also took aim at Haiti during the meeting.
There was another shot at the Trump family later in the episode, while Bourdain was discussing safaris in Africa. His partner in the episode, comic W. Kamau Bell, said that he always had a negative connotation of safaris.
“There’s our kind of a safari and then there’s the Trump Jr. kind of safari,” Bourdain answered.
He was making reference to Donald Trump Jr.’s penchant for trophy hunting in Africa and the pictures of Donald Trump’s eldest son killing giant cats like leopards and showing off the tusk of an elephant he had killed. As The Guardian noted, Donald Trump’s administration put together an advisory board called the International Wildlife Conservation Council (IWCC) that tried to make the case that trophy hunting, in which wealthy individuals paid large sums to kill rare animals in Africa, was actually good for conservation.
The idea generated considerable blowback from conservationists.
“People who consider themselves conservationists don’t consider trophy hunting conservation,” Tanya Sanerib, international legal director for the Center for Biological Diversity, told The Guardian. “It’s an elite, bourgeois activity.”
Anthony Bourdain's Final Full Hour of Television Is Just Another Episode. That's What Makes It So Special. https://t.co/cCwbTnXdSz pic.twitter.com/B8m9ny1HeP
— Esquire (@esquire) September 24, 2018
Anthony Bourdain took a number of shots at Donald Trump while he was alive. Bourdain sharply disagreed with Trump’s policies and declared that he would not eat at any Trump-owned restaurants. Bourdain also got into some hot water last year when he joked that if he were asked to cater a summit between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il, he would serve “hemlock.”
