You’re about to see a lot more of Bill Maher.
The stand-up comedian turned political satirist is set to host a series of four live half-hour specials of his HBO program Real Time during the Republican and Democratic conventions. Maher promises that these specials, which will also be broadcast live to nonsubscribers on the show’s YouTube channel, are going to offer the same sort of unfiltered takes we’re accustomed to seeing every Friday night.
Unfortunately, Real Time was off this past Friday, depriving its fans of any commentary on the tragic events of the last week—including the deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile at the hands of police, as well as the deadly sniper attack in Dallas that claimed the lives of five police officers. Oh, and also FBI Director James Comey’s speech on Hillary Clinton’s email scandal—and the bureau’s recommendation of no charges—as well as the latest crazy things emanating from Donald Trump’s mouth.
ADVERTISEMENT
In advance of the specials—and the Republican National Convention on July 20 and 21, The Daily Beast spoke to Maher about the precarious state of our union.
This is exciting—the conventions are coming up. What can we expect with your convention coverage here? What are you plotting?
[Laughs] I’m not plotting! The plot is the Republicans against Donald Trump, and I hope there is a plot afoot. I was just re-watching the movie Valkyrie and looking for a one-armed colonel to take out Donald Trump. So I’m thinking Bob Dole. We’re not plotting, I just thought it would be a great idea to be on this week because, well, I’m a ratings whore, and I saw that the ratings for the Republican debates were through the roof. Was it 24 million for the first one? I mean, that’s insane for a political event, so I think there will be incredible interest. And for those people who feel Real Time brings you realer time than anything else on TV, first of all I would agree with them, and let’s give them a little more, because there will be too much news to include in one show on Friday night, so let’s broadcast live right after the convention.
But you’re not going to Cleveland, right?
We’re here in L.A. I’m not sure that you get anything by traveling to the site. So what? We all see it on TV, so what is it going to be? And for the convention, first of all, Donald Trump probably has a restraining order against me. He’s sued me once, so I doubt I could get near the place, so what’s the point? Are you worried about what’s going to happen during the RNC, given all the political unrest in the country at present?
Well, I’m hoping for a peaceful riot where no one gets hurt, and I’m hoping that if there are any fisticuffs—and come on, Donald Trump’s fan base is professional wrestling people, and the convention hall is full of folding chairs, so to me, that looks like a terrible combination—it looks to me like it will be Republican-on-Republican violence, because if they try to take it away from [Trump], I don’t know what people will do. Other than that, there’s also the possibility that, gee whiz, with all the racial tension in America, and his abhorrent comments today that he can relate to racism because he knows what it’s like to be up against a rigged system, I mean, yeah, that certainly would make me want to get in the streets.
Given Trump’s history with the African-American community, from housing discrimination suits in the ’70s to the full-page ad he took out to reinstate the death penalty to kill the Central Park Five in the ’80s, that comparison seemed particularly out there.
And it’s not just him. A majority of Republicans in polls say they think reverse racism is a far bigger problem than racism. I mean, how far up your ass does your head have to be to believe that? Pretty damn far! You have to be glued to Fox News 24 hours a day—which a lot of his fans are. I’ve talked to many people who say that Obama not only wrecked the country, which is factually ridiculous, but that he did it on purpose. They think he’s some sort of Kenyan sleeper agent sent here to destroy America, so as usual, there is a bubble in which facts do not get in.
The way I see it is that Obama is half-white, so he’s in many ways the ideal person to deal with this era of racial strife because he can see it from both sides.
He does. And he always takes both sides. If you saw that speech yesterday in Dallas, there was something for everybody. I’ll give him this: He’s a master of telling people exactly what they want to hear in certain occasions. I didn’t agree with everything he said, but I totally understand that’s his job. He’s the president—he’s the healer in chief—and he has to say the things that help bring this country together.
What did you not agree with in Obama’s speech?
Well, this idea that the police are now allowed to use C-4 and robots—a weapon of war—and if there’s a dangerous situation, just send it in and blow the whole fuckin’ thing up? The police chief said, “We had no other choice…our men would be put in danger.” Well I’m sorry, but when you’re a cop danger is part of the job! I feel like almost more than the racial situation, this is what’s wrong with the police these days: They seem to have forgotten that. They keep saying it’s a dangerous job, but their reaction is too often, “Well, if something scares me, I just get to empty my clip into it or send in the bomb.” That’s not what police work is supposed to be. We want to pat them on the back and say, “You’re brave and what you’re doing is a dangerous job,” but it’s hard to do it when every time there’s danger, they take that way out. I don’t agree with that method, and I don’t agree that it was the only option. They had the man shot, he was contained, so I don’t think the only option was to blow him up, and I think that’s a terrible precedent. Is that the future? Whenever there’s a problem with cops we send in a robot with a giant bomb?
It also speaks to the general hyper-militarization of police these days. Those videos out of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, are jaw-dropping. The cops look like look like heavily armored supersoldiers straight out of a Michael Bay movie.
Exactly. I’ve been talking about this for a long time on our show. Certainly after the Boston bombings in 2013, if you recall, one of the Tsarnaev brothers was still on the loose and hiding in a boat. I remember thinking when I saw the pictures in the paper and on television, “When did Boston get an army? Are they a regional power now? Because I think they could take on Canada if they wanted to.” The Tsarnaev kid was lying in the boat wounded, and they just all emptied their clips into the boat. And we didn’t know at the time whether there were more people! He should’ve been captured alive so that they could question him. The only reason he was is because they all missed! I saw this statistic the other day that said the German police only fired 85 bullets in a year. Eighty-five bullets! That’s any time the cops fire their weapons here. When you talk about militarization, I think cops have this idea in their heads from the U.S. military of “overwhelming force,” but overwhelming force is not what we should be using on the streets of America.
I distinctly recall last summer when the police broke up that pool party in McKinney, Texas, and at one point in the video you see a police officer do this comical tactical roll, as if he’s starring in his own action movie—only he was in pursuit of black teens in bathing suits.
I remember it vividly! It was comical. And 12 cops they sent to break up a teenage pool party! I remember the cop wrestled one of them to the ground and stuck her head in the dirt.There have been several right-wing reactions to the Dallas shooting claiming that Black Lives Matter is responsible by stoking the flames of racial animus in America. To me, it appears to be a nonviolent movement that is fighting for racial equality. What’s your take on it?
It is absurd. What Giuliani said is disgusting, and it’s part of the idea of, “Whatever the cops do, they’re right.” It’s always, “We followed procedure.” Rodney King? “We followed procedure.” A lot of these shootings? “We did it by the book.” Well, you’re reading from the wrong book. They’re not infallible, the police. It’s only in the last four or five shootings that I’ve seen police actually say, “Yeah, maybe we were wrong.” That’s great, because we need that crack in the ice to at least admit you possibly could have made one in the wrong here. But Black Lives Matter is a completely legitimate movement. How many videos do we have to see where it looks like black lives absolutely don’t matter to the police before such a movement sprang up? Black Lives Matter because all lives don’t seem to be in equal jeopardy when it comes to the police. Black Lives Matter is the right title for that.
There is this code of omerta with the police where you can’t really criticize your own. It’s strange because, in the journalistic profession, when one of ours commits plagiarism they’re immediately called out on it by fellow journalists because it reflects badly on all of us.
They get in line—almost as badly as Republicans do. It’s like, when they have a Donald Trump committing a horrific act, somehow they still endorse him. But we constantly hear this mantra about how the vast majority of police are great and do their job professionally. I personally have known police who’ve done their jobs great, so obviously there are great cops. But this idea about the “vast majority”? That’s just something they pulled out of their ass. We have no idea. Obviously with just the number of videos we’ve seen—and we know it must have been worse before the age of video—it’s more than just a few bad apples. And even if the vast majority are good, the vast majority also do cover up for the bad ones. There’s no doubt about that.
We’ve all seen Serpico, and what was Serpico about? It was about a cop and all he wanted was to not take money. He just didn’t want to be a part of the corruption, and they tried to kill him. I’m not saying every police department is the New York City Police Department in the 1970s, but it just goes to show you that if you don’t go along with what the blue sea is doing, it’s hard to survive. That more than anything is what has to change. The good cops have to say their loyalty is to morality and not to the man or woman whose locker is next to theirs.
It’s looking like Newt Gingrich might be Donald Trump’s VP pick. There are four divorces and two affairs—that we know of—between these two, and they’ll be facing off against the first female nominee of a major party. This election is starting to look like a referendum on women in America.
I remember the PBS show The Six Wives of Henry VIII. This will be The Six Wives of the Republican Ticket. I don’t know who he’s going to pick, but I can reveal who it will be: an asshole. Because who else would take that job? It’s so funny that the people who are up for the job are being vetted by Trump’s kids. This is so Third World—that the kids are basically the chief operators of this political campaign: Ivanka and the two douchebag sons. The only people in the running are the ones who have absolutely nothing better going on, and have no future. Many of them, like Newt Gingrich, don’t even have a recent past, and there’s nothing left to lose. I personally think it might be Christie because I think Trump is the bully who likes to have the fat kid around him. He just does. He likes to have Christie around, and whenever The Apprentice had a fat guy on, he always kept him around. He likes to make fun of them. He does it all the time! That’s what bullies like—a fat kid.
I wanted to discuss the Roger Ailes situation with you. We obviously don’t know exactly what’s happened there, but what’s your take on all the sexual harassment allegations against Mr. Fox News?
Look, we never know what goes on between two people, but to me it passes the smell test. Gretchen Carlson does not seem like the kind of person who would do this gratuitously. She doesn’t seem like a vindictive person, or someone looking for a battle with the network that’s employed her for all these years. And Roger Ailes absolutely looks like a pig to me. Their whole attitude at Fox News is “Things were great in the ’50s!” And their audience’s average age I think is 70, so these are the Trump voters—the people who think things were great back then. Trump’s whole campaign isn’t about policy, it’s about a feeling, and that feeling is: White men just cannot catch a break in America. Trump once said that if Hillary wasn’t a woman she wouldn’t be a viable candidate, and that she’s always playing the “woman card”—you know, the card that women play by being born female. So this is their attitude at Fox News: Things were great in that era where you could grab your secretary’s tits and nothing would happen.
You were critical of Bill Clinton’s airplane meeting with Attorney General Loretta Lynch—and rightfully so, because it looked terrible. But what are your thoughts on FBI Director James Comey’s thoughts on Hillary’s emails and the decision to not bring charges against her?
I think the more you look deeply into this, the more there’s absolutely nothing there. I know that 56 percent of Americans say she did commit a crime and should be indicted, because of course they know the law better than James Comey, but the talking point of how she got off because she’s above the law and if a regular person did what she did they’d be in jail? That’s such bullshit. First of all, the private server only came to light because of the Benghazi committee, and regular people aren’t usually exposed to partisan witch-hunts 24/7. Trey Gowdy combed through every stitch of potential dirty laundry for the better part of this decade and said, “I got nothing.” Now, a Republican prosecutor, James Comey, has come back with “no reasonable prosecutor would bring charges.” So either Hillary is Houdini or they really just don’t have anything. I feel Hillary’s been like a black driver in a white neighborhood with the Republicans as the cops, and they keep pulling her over and keep having to let her go. Her friends aren’t exonerating her, her enemies are!Lastly, what are your thoughts on Bernie’s very reluctant endorsement of Hillary Clinton, and your Sanders campaign obit?
[Laughs] It was a little strained at first. I think what Bernie thought is, well, now that James Comey is not going to send her up the river, it’s about time to fold the tents, and they are united against a common enemy: osteoporosis—no, Donald Trump. There was a bit of a weird buddy cop thing going of, “Well, he’s a socialist and she gives speeches for Goldman Sachs, and together they’re going to bring down this lunatic!” The question now is, will the kids go along? Will the Bernie Bros go along? I saw a lot of stuff on the internet where they felt betrayed by Bernie himself. They think everybody in the world has betrayed Bernie, and now they think Bernie has betrayed Bernie. Hopefully they will come on board and realize that there are only two choices on the menu, and nobody wants to eat poisoned vomit. I saw one Bernie supporter say, “Convince me to vote without using Trump in a sentence.” Well, Trump is in the sentence, you fuckin’ baby! Convince you to vote? I don’t have to convince you to vote! It’s your life; I’m out of college. My college bills are paid off and Trump’s going to cut my taxes, so I’m not going to convince you to vote. This country is more in your future than mine, so two choices, pal. America: land of the free. Deal with it.
