During the “New Rules” segment of “Real Time” on Friday, Bill Maher touched on the wild week that just ended, and how Trump’s behavior about pretty much everything is both terrifying — and exhausting enough to want to turn to narcotics for relief.
After first giving viewers his permission to take the rest of the year off from politics — and then calling Trump “the Santa Claus of chaos” and “the gift that never stops taking” — Maher reflected on the nonstop stress volcano of paying attention to politics during his administration.
“Each morning you confront the news, with the same thought that Stormy Daniels said she had when sat next to her on the bed: Ugh. Here we go,” Maher said. “Every day it seems like it’s the same thing. You open your news feed. Face-palm.”
“Now, all year long, and going back to before the election, I have been calling the Trump phenomenon a slow-moving coup. Well, this week it started moving a little faster,” Maher said, referencing the firing of Jeff Sessions for acting U.S. Attorney General Matthew Whitaker. “In Third World dictatorships, the chief law enforcement officer’s main qualification is he doesn’t enforce the law. Officials of independent mind are hounded out, or shoved aside.”
Then the host turned his attention to Trump’s lack of transparency and hostile relationship with the press. “For a coup to work, it is necessary that truth has to be destroyed. As well as the people who try to report it. So the dictator is free to say anything and his followers believe it,” Maher said.
Maher then said that Fox News is now state TV, “where the reporters openly endorse the leader, and we have people overseeing the elections they are running in,” referring to Georgia GOP gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp.
Next he quoted Rudy Guiliani, “Trump’s semi-liquid mob mouthpiece,” who said earlier this year that “truth isn’t truth.”
“So ‘truth isn’t truth,’ the press is the enemy of the people, there are ‘alternative facts,’ ‘there’s no proof of anything,’ ‘what you see and hear isn’t what’s happening,’ and at some point people go, ‘You know what? Fine, f— it. Truth isn’t truth, facts aren’t facts, what I see isn’t happening, nothing is real and nothing to get hung up about, strawberry fields forever,’” said Maher.
“Please pass the joint — or some crack, because I can still reason, and it hurts,” he concluded.
Watch the whole clip below:
For a coup to work, It is first necessary for truth itself to be destroyed as well as the people who try to report it. #PressFreedom #CNN pic.twitter.com/y3Xix6QtYc
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) November 10, 2018