A Pre-Election “Real Time With Bill Maher” Got Serious

It’s pretty much a given that you’ll get two things out of any given Real Time With Bill Maher episode. One is comedy; the other, politics. Sometimes the balance between the two clicks smoothly; at others, a mood of either humor or contemplation wins the day. In the case of this week’s episode, the latter was very much the case. This is the last Real Time episode before the 2024 presidential election, and everyone Maher spoke with had a lot on their minds.

Up first was Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, who was the impeachment manager in former president Donald Trump’s second impeachment. “These things [Trump] says he’s going to do — put people like you in jail. Say he wins,” Maher asked Raskin. “What are you actually going to do?”

“I’m going to wake up and I’m going to go to work,” Raskin said. It got plenty of applause, but Maher seemed wary of optimism in a situation like that.

Raskin went on to make an impassioned argument for a national popular vote. “If we had non-gerrymandered districts and a national popular vote for president, this thing would not be close,” he told Maher.

Maher agreed, but noted that that isn’t the world we live in. “And if we had beer and nuts,” he replied, “it would be a hell of a party.”

Raskin went on to make an argument against taking too stark an approach to campaigning. “We’ve got to cheer people up,” he said. But for Maher’s part, he noted a few cases where he’d anticipated challenges to democracy before most people. There are cases where you don’t necessarily want to be right; this felt like one of them.

For this episode’s panel discussion, The Bulwark’s Tim Miller and The Fifth Column host Michael Moynihan took to the stage. The three men began by talking about the backlash to Tony Hinchcliffe’s remarks at a Trump rally last weekend. Maher mounted a halfhearted defense of comedy’s existence, but also argued that having an insult comic at a political rally is “like bringing cocaine to a funeral.”

From there, their discussion turned to both the Trump and Harris campaigns courting male voters. Miller wasn’t convinced by the argument that American society has pushed some men rightward. “That’s the thing I really don’t get about the bro grievance: Our society is ‘so p.c.’ these days that the top 10 podcasts are all bro podcasters talking about boobs and dicks,” he said. He and Maher also butted heads over whether or not No Nut November would influence the election.

In the episode’s final segment, Maher addressed undecided voters — or, as he dubbed them, the “Christmas Eve shoppers of politics.” He argued that “‘I’m not Trump’ is still a pretty good reason” for those voters to support Kamala Harris. And with that, the episode reached its end — and we all waited to see what next week has in store.

Conversations Before the Election Can Be Awkward. Bill Maher Explained How.

Debate heated up on a new “Real Time”

Some other notable moments from the episode:

Bill Maher on safeguards to democracy: “The institutions did not hold. Certain individuals held.”
Maher on electoral strategies: “Well, it’s always about turning out the people who like you. We used to go to the middle in the elections.” This is a strange argument for Maher to make, given that both Liz and Dick Cheney have endorsed Kamala Harris’s candidacy.
Jamie Raskin on the Capitol riot: “The Electoral College can get you killed these days.”
Sometimes conversations take unexpected turns, which is presumably how this episode ended up with Maher explaining the dynamics of a rap battle.
In New Rules, Maher observed that the pundits fond of “shut up and play sports” rhetoric have been strangely silent about Nick Bosa’s Trump hat.
Maher on economic doomsayers: “You think you’re living in the Second Great Depression because you can’t buy a foot’s worth of sandwich for five dollars?”