In recent months, Bill Maher has asked a lot of his guests on “Real Time,” including some politicians, what they’d do if Donald Trump loses the presidential election this November and refuses to step down. But on Friday’s episode he got the chance to ask an actual presidential hopeful, Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who maintained that she’s confident things won’t come to that.
“It’s very hard for me to imagine you winning the electoral vote fair and square, and him sending out a congratulatory telegram,” Maher told Klobuchar at the top of Friday’s episode of “Real Time.” “He’s not leaving. These people are not going to give up power. What is the plan if,” he continued, Trump said something like “‘I have to stay, it was rigged’”?
“The first thing you do is now, you start now, and that is to win big, which I believe will help,” Klobuchar replied. “You win all these states in the country and it’s harder for him to stay.”
“Secondly, you make sure that we have backup paper ballots, you do everything to protect our election” said Klobuchar, who appeared on the show days after her surprisingly strong showing in the New Hampshire primary.
Maher countered, “We’re living in the era of fake news. There’s no facts anymore, there’s just power.”
“We have always had a peaceful transition of power,” Klobuchar said.
“Always have had, correct. We are now in a different world,” Maher responded.
But as far as Klobuchar is concerned, Maher’s nightmare scenario isn’t that likely “when you have the people on your side in a big way.” To that, Maher countered that Trump “has a lot of people on his side — the ones with the guns.”
Klobuchar said that she thinks the Democratic nominee will win the election handily, but said that “what we have to unite around as a country is that the rule of law cannot handle four more years of a guy that thinks he’s above it.”
However, Klobuchar did have a witty explanation for why she’s optimistic things will work out — at least if she ends up as the Democratic nominee: “Every single Republican that I’ve run against, in my entire career, has left politics for good.” So now you know.