Bill Maher on Awkward Pre-Election Conversations

Election Day is less than 10 days away as of this writing, so it’s not at all surprising that discussion of it dominated the latest episode of Real Time With Bill Maher. In the episode’s interview segment, Megyn Kelly joined Maher for a very contentious discussion of the presidential race. Kelly backs Donald Trump’s campaign; Maher supports Kamala Harris’s candidacy. At the heart of their conversation was a simple question: how do you converse about politics with someone whose position is opposed to yours?

“The reason I think we can be friends is, we both think the other one is not stupid,” Maher said. “So we want to know how the other one can possibly think the way they do.”

Their conversation quickly turned combative, with Kelly seeking to minimize the Trump campaign’s 2020 election denialism and Maher rebutting her. “There’s a difference between grumbling about something and trying to overthrow it, like [Trump] did,” he said. He was also critical of Kelly’s arguments about immigrants breaking the law, noting that “[a]ny time you take in a million people, some of them are going to commit crimes. Of any group.”

Kelly found a more receptive side of Maher when she brought up her frustrations with trans kids, which Maher broadly shared. (That said, there’s evidence that her claims were, shall we say, less than accurate.) Maher was somewhat sympathetic to her comments, but also pushed back against it as a reason for voting for Trump in the election. “This is more important to you than fascism?” he asked.

Maher then spoke bluntly about his fears of a potential second Trump term. “Somehow, the world seems to be dividing between the ‘good guy’ countries, the democratic countries, and these autocracies,” he told Kelly. “And if your guy gets in, we’re going to be on the wrong side of this one.”

His closing words to her felt more diplomatic than anything else: “I think history’s not going to be kind to your point of view, but I appreciate you coming on.”

Van Jones and Colorado governor Jared Polis joined Maher for the panel discussion, which touched on a wide range of election-related issues. Eventually, talk turned — as has frequently been the case on Real Time lately-— to a past guest on the show: specifically, Elon Musk.

“Apparently you can bribe people to vote,” Maher said. (As Maher pointed out, this is very likely illegal, and could lead to, in Maher’s words, “bobblehead night at the voting booth in two years.”) Not long after that, Maher was even more candid, saying of Musk, “as good as he is for everything tech, he’s just as bad for everything political.”

“It’s sad that we lost Elon Musk,” Jones said, and made the case for a more inclusive Democratic party. It was Polis, however, who seemed most spot-on in his take on Musk: “He has, sadly, bought into this perception of what far-right people think Democrats believe, rather than what Democrats actually believe.”

Bill Maher Debated Masculinity and Movements on a New “Real Time”

Unsurprisingly, there was plenty of election discussion this time out

Some other notable moments from the episode:

Maher on the final weeks of the election: “Trump’s closing argument seems to be, ‘I work at McDonald’s and Arnold Palmer has a big dick.’”
Maher referred to the New York TImes as “pretty woke on these kind of issues” when talking about transgender kids with Kelly; it’s worth mentioning here that the paper in question has come under a significant amount of criticism in recent years for that very coverage.
Van Jones’s notebook, which he consulted a few times during the evening’s discussion, was a nice touch.
Jared Polis got plenty of applause when he mentioned being part of a Harris fundraising event with Willie Nelson. The man clearly knows his audience.
Van Jones on the momentum of the Harris campaign: “We went from brat to flat.”
Maher on Dior’s Sauvage ad campaign: “Who looks at Johnny Depp and thinks, ‘That’s what I want to smell like’?”