The last time we saw Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time, he was defending his friend Al Franken and condemning his ideological enemy Roy Moore. Three months later, neither man is serving in the U.S. Senate and the government is on the verge of a possible shutdown.
As the Senate began to vote on a continuing resolution to keep the government open, Maher kicked things off by wishing his audience a happy New Year, or as he called 2018, “the year of the shithole.” The host summed up Trump’s immigration position with one question: “Why can’t we do immigration more like the way I got Melania, by using a catalog?”
But the main event of Maher’s first show back came in the form of a sit-down with Michael Wolff, author of Fire and Fury, the book that managed to make Trump’s White House even more chaotic during the first few weeks of 2018.
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“Well, you have done the impossible, you’ve made America read again,” Maher told Wolff at the top of their interview. Since Wolff has done so many TV appearances over the past few weeks, Maher asked him for one detail from the book that he’s surprised no one has picked up on yet.
Instead of telling Maher about something that he did put in the book, Wolff slyly teased a White House anecdote that he apparently didn’t feel comfortable including. There was one story about Trump that he kept hearing, but couldn’t confirm, even by his questionable standards.
“I didn’t have the blue dress,” Wolff said, referring to the evidence that damned Bill Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
“It’s about somebody’s he’s fucking right now?” Maher asked, excitedly.
“Yes,” Wolff replied, but he refused to elaborate. “You just have to read between the lines,” he said, adding, “Now that I’ve told you, when you hit that paragraph, you’ll say bingo.”
Maher struggled to get any more specifics out of his guest, but when Wolff mentioned “back doors” that could allow Trump to have a White House affair without anyone noticing, the host joked, “There are back doors? Oh, it’s a gay liaison!” As the audience groaned, Maher ventured a guess: “Sean Spicer!”
If Wolff got attacked for the shocking stories he put in Fire and Fury, it’s not hard to imagine how his critics will react to him teasing something he left out.
