“What a shitty week, right?” announced Bill Maher. “Poor El Paso and Dayton, still reeling from two disasters: a mass shooting and a Trump visit.”
The comedian kicked off the latest edition of his show Real Time with an extended rant on President Trump’s bizarre, self-centered reaction to the horrifying mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, that left 30 people dead—including a visit to a hospital in El Paso where Trump ordered an orphaned baby whose parents were both killed in the shooting back to the hospital so it could pose for photos with the president and first lady, since none of the eight gunshot victims being treated in the hospital were willing to do so, according to a CNN report.
“We know now this pattern we’ve always seen where whenever there’s a tragedy, it’s always about how he’s feeling, right?!” Maher exclaimed. “It’s like, is he OK? This week after the massacres, he attacked the media, Obama, Google, Sherrod Brown, the mayor of Dayton, Beto, California, Sleepy Joe. He’s the only president who thinks ‘Consoler-in-Chief’ means you console him.”
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“But seriously, Mr. President: Don’t console us,” he continued. “And mostly, stay out of hospitals. I mean, we have seen what he does in these situations. He threw paper towels to hurricane victims [in Puerto Rico]. What does he do in a hospital, throw Tylenol? I mean, these poor people. Imagine waking up from surgery and standing over you is this grinning, gaseous blob and his scowling trophy wife. People are like, shit, I must have died and went to hell.”
The HBO host then focused his attention on the El Paso shooter’s troubling “manifesto,” whose anti-immigrant language mirrored Trump’s.
“The shooter in El Paso did it because all the things that Trump says all the time he took to be true, like that Mexico is invading us—all of that shit,” Maher explained. “Also this shooter wanted you to know, nothing to do with Trump, although in the manifesto, Trump does get a ‘story by’ credit.”
Then there was Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s reaction to the massacre, which was to call white supremacy a “hoax” that was “not a real problem in America.”
“It’s scary the way some of this stuff is going so mainstream. Tucker Carlson of Fox News says white nationalism is a ‘hoax.’ You gotta love Republicans: global warming is a hoax; Russia, that was a hoax; white nationalism is a hoax. Hillary Clinton runs a pedophile ring out of a pizza parlor? Completely true. That one we know is true!” cracked Maher.
“And Tucker’s evidence that white nationalism is a ‘hoax?’ He says it’s because he’s never met one. Oh come on Tucker, yes you have!” offered Maher, before throwing to a photo of Carlson interviewing Trump on his program.
