On Friday night, Real Time host Bill Maher opened his show by mocking presidential loser Donald Trump, who keeps—against all logic, or reason—trying to convince the American public that he didn’t lose the recent election to Joe Biden, despite the fact that Biden took home 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and also received well over 5 million more votes in the popular count.
“This guy reminds me—remember the movie The Sixth Sense? Remember that movie? The main character doesn’t know he’s dead?” Maher joked of Trump.
Later on, the comic welcomed Jenna Ellis as his first guest. Ellis is the Trump campaign’s senior legal adviser whose recent job has been to defend her boss’ baseless claims that the election was fraudulent. In a tweet that was roundly mocked, she went so far as to say, “If Joe Biden is really confident he won legally and legitimately, why is he so afraid of proving it?”
Even though Maher cautioned Ellis about using canned talking points, she nevertheless opened with one: “What all Americans should be concerned about is that every legal vote should be counted fairly and accurately.”
“Right away, you used a talking point there. ‘Legal vote.’ No one is contesting the idea that we are not wanting to count ‘legal votes,’” Maher fired back.
After Ellis repeated the far-fetched claim that Trump’s main motive for questioning the results of the election was to ensure that we can have “free and fair elections in this country,” Maher was incensed. “But we do know that,” he said. “Your lawsuits are being laughed out of court. I mean, I’m sorry, I don’t want to make this a contentious interview. I’m just trying to present what is the truth. What’s going on in the court.”
Indeed, the Trump campaign has thus far gone 1 for 20 in (almost entirely frivolous) lawsuits contesting the results of the 2020 presidential election. (And the one minor case they won involved the disqualification of a small amount of mail-in ballots of Pennsylvania voters who “were unable to confirm their identification by Nov. 9,” and which did not affect the vote count in the state.)
Even the Department of Homeland Security stated that there was “no evidence” of voter fraud in the election, and that it was “the most secure election in history.”
When Maher asked Ellis, “Where have you prevailed?” she repeatedly claimed that they’ve made headway “in Pennsylvania.”
Then Maher snapped. “No, you haven’t,” he replied, later adding, “Just stop. Just stop.”
Becoming more animated, Maher cited a judge in Philadelphia who questioned a Trump campaign lawyer about their allegation that their observers weren’t allowed in the ballot-counting room. When the Trump campaign lawyer said there was a “non-zero” number of observers from team Trump in the room (translation: there were Trump observers in the room), the judge replied, “What’s the problem?!”
“Aren’t you a little bit ashamed of how you’re denigrating the people who work so hard in the most difficult election in memory?” Maher asked Ellis. “They worked so hard to make this come out right.”
Reader, she was not. Not even a little.
