This past Friday night, in addition to getting bested by Steve Bannon, Bill Maher also welcomed Fareed Zakaria as his guest on HBO’s Real Time. Zakaria returned the favor, hosting Maher on his Sunday morning CNN show.
And just as Maher opened his interview with Bannon—“your boy had the best week so far”—he told Zakaria he thought it was Trump’s “best week ever,” and therefore his own “most depressing week” of the Trump presidency.
From the “Teleprompter Trump” that America saw at the State of the Union to “veiled threats” against political enemies at his impeachment victory lap speech two days later, Maher said, “The worst thing that could possibly have happened, that we all feared and talked about, has happened. He’s normalized. Anything you see enough becomes normal. You don’t notice it.”
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Admitting that Trump is going to be “hard to beat” in November, Maher said, “If this was a superhero movie, this is the moment when Superman is on the ground,” adding, “I don’t how we get from here, this week, to November 3rd where [Trump’s] defeated and leaves, which I don’t think he’s going to do.”
Asked by Zakaria how he manages to make comedy out of someone who has become so “normalized,” Maher said there is no shortage of comedy with Trump. “I’m not worried about the comedy,” he said. “I’m worried about the country.”
Maher then turned his attention to the Democrats, or as he called them, “the gang that can’t shoot straight” after the chaos surrounding the Iowa caucuses. “If they can’t get their act together, soon, it’s going to be over before it begins,” he said. Citing a recent poll that shows only 44 percent of Democrats think they can beat Trump in 2020, Maher summed up their current attitude as “No we can’t.”
Later in the interview, Maher explained why he believes one of Trump’s favorite campaign lines, “You have no choice,” is likely to work. “He’s saying, ‘Yeah, you may not like me, I may be crude and vulgar and horrible, but they’re crazy,’” Maher said as Trump. As himself, he then added that he agrees there is a lot of “crazy” in the Democratic Party.
“People read it every week, just these too far out left, woke-y stuff,” Maher continued, warning that if Democrats continue down that path voters will say to themselves, “Yeah, I don’t like Trump, but he’s right, I’ve got to vote for him, they’re nuts.”
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