On the latest episode of his Club Random podcast, host Bill Maher mildly scandalized his guest, Katie Couric, when he insisted that Donald Trump “killed it” during his CNN town hall last year.
“He’s not a stand-up comedian!” Couric retorted after Maher discussed how “the audience loved it” and heavily applauded the former president.
“What?” Maher said.
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“‘He’s killing it.’ He’s not a stand-up comedian,” Couric repeated.
“Popularity. Doesn’t matter. People loved him and what he was saying,” Maher said. “And then you cut to a panel of six know-it-alls in Washington who do nothing but talk about the negative. I’m all-in on the negative. No one’s been harder on Trump than me. But I get it, and I’m bored with it. And there’s a different way to do this, I think.”
“So, what is it?” Couric asked, to which Maher said he thinks media pundits and commentators should try to better understand Trump voters.
“Not to defend Trump, but to defend the people who still vote for him,” Maher said. “Because what they see on the other side, to them, is even more dangerous. Because it’s closer to home: ‘My kid is coming home from school and he thinks he’s a racist? He’s five, what have you been telling him? My son thinks maybe he’s not a boy.’ And maybe that’s true, that happens. Those kind of things are what they say. ‘That’s why I’m voting for Trump.’”
“A backlash to the pendulum swinging so far to the left,” Couric said, tactfully ignoring Maher’s sideswipes against gender-affirming care for trans youth and educational programming on race in the U.S.
For “lots of people,” Maher theorized, it’s not as though they actually like Trump. “But he’s all that stands between us and madness.”
