Bill Maher closed out the 21st season premiere of HBO’s Real Time Friday night by taking on the scandals surrounding Rep. George Santos (R-NY). His big takeaway? Democrats are to blame for believing his many, many lies.
“Of course, we’ve seen liars before,” the host said of American politicians, “but it was always about tacking from the extreme to the center of your own party.” What Santos “pioneered,” he argued, is the idea that “since we’re all in our own hermetically sealed media bubbles,” he could “pretend to be everything to voters in both parties.”
While, on the one hand, Santos pandered to the right by going all in on Trump’s election lies, Maher claimed that the real reason he won his election is that he convinced the left to come out for him—something not exactly supported by evidence.
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“How did a Trump-loving, election-denying white nationalist get elected in a Democrat-leaning district?” he asked. “Simple, he told them what they wanted to hear too.” He left out the fact that New York’s Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin significantly out-performed Santos on Long Island.
“What do liberals love?” Maher asked. “Identity politics and victimhood.” That’s why, in his estimation, Santos claimed to be one of the earliest COVID cases and be a “Jew-ish” descendent of Holocaust survivors.
“Everybody keeps asking, how could a guy like this get elected?” he continued, chalking it up to “tribalism” with Democrats as much if not more at fault than the Republicans who have mostly rallied around him even after his lies were exposed.
As Maher put it, “Republicans love a winner and Democrats love someone whose life story makes you want to kill yourself.”
Ultimately, he concluded, it was Santos’ identity as a “brave, sad, proudly gay, half-Black, Latino Holocaust victim” that apparently convinced enough Democrats to put him in office. “Vote for him? I’m surprised they didn’t have him host the Oscars!”
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