MAKICHUK: The Trump debacle, from Bill Maher's perspective
CNN's Fareed Zakaria explores the MAGA mindset and what the future holds for America
Comedian and political commentator Bill Maher was interviewed by Fareed Zakaria’s GPS program that aired on March 2.
The following is the transcript:
ZAKARIA: Bill Maher asked me to appear on his HBO show real time on Friday. I asked him if we could flip the cameras around so I could get his stake on Trump 2.0. I should note that HBO and CNN share the same parent company, Warner Bros. Discovery.
Bill Maher … always good to have you on my set, on your show. Love turning the table. So tell me, you are looking at Trump 2.0. What is your reaction? I mean, most people say this is the real Trump, he was kind of, he had guardrails of all the generals, all the Republican establishment. This is the real Trump. What do you think?
MAHER: Well, this is Hollywood. If this was a secret, we'd call it Trump 2: This time it's personal. I mean, look, I predicted it. I talked about it a million years ago before he got elected the first time. Politics follows personality. I've always believed that.
And his personality hasn't changed and it's not going to change the vindictive part. And he has a lot of people behind him who feel wounded and forgotten and all that stuff, and that's what he is playing on.
Look, I said at the beginning, I'm not going to preheat anything. Well, now I hate a lot of things. Okay. There's a lot of things I hate like becoming an empire again. I sure didn't have that on my Bingo card. I didn't see that one coming, that we're going to own Greenland and Gaza and Canada.
Okay. Is it okay to have a breath of fresh air on certain issues? Like does Gaza have to be a hellhole? Could it be Dubai? Yeah. Other people, smart people have said that. Why couldn't it be more Dubai than it is someplace like that.
ZAKARIA: But do you think the the empire stuff, the humiliating Zelensky, the tariff wars, do you think that it's going to work for him politically?
MAHER: No, it's not. Of course he's not doing well, right? Biden's approval rate was much higher at this point, at his presidency.
Yes. We're still in the honeymoon phase and she's crying and left the bedroom. Okay. No, how could it, I mean, the tariffs haven't even gone into effect, but just the fear of them. He hasn't brought inflation down.
I mean, eggs, eggs, eggs, everything was always eggs. Eggs. I never knew we ate so many eggs, these poor chickens, God. But that's what people are concerned about. And we do have a bad memory about politics, but not when it was just a few months ago, not when it's the same inflation.
That was the last guy had that. He said he was going to fix it lickety split. And he's a genius at being able to do that. He says so many crazy things so often. I always said his superpower is that he's such a voluminous liar that whatever he says you take with a grain of salt, whenever he says Zelensky’s approval rating is 4%. Well, it's 57.
ZAKARIA: We've given 350 billion dollars of aid …
MAHER: … and his fans just factor that in. They don't take him literally. They take them seriously, but not literally. And that's a great superpower to have as a politician when you don't have to stick to the facts.
But when people actually feel it in their personal lives, in their homes, when the price of things go up, which I can't find any economist who says they won't because of tariffs.
I mean, wasn't the depression really brought on by the 1930 holy smoke tariffs? Wasn't that the worst thing we could have done at the time? And we seem to be doing it again.
I mean, their idea that you have to, the only way is to swing the pendulum so far that you just break everything. No, that is not going to work because things were not going that badly.
Obama once had a great quote, I use it often. I usually use it on the left, but it pertains here too. And he said, the American public, they don't think we need to remake the entire system and just crash it all down.
They just want to see things make sense. They just don't want to see crazy stuff. And he was really talking about the far left when he said that, but it applies the other way too. But they just don't want to see crazy stuff.
ZAKARIA: But it really has become his base that wants to burn the house down. This is the Elon Musk stuff. Just destroy the federal government. I agree with you. I don't think that that's where the vast majority of the American people are.
MAHER: No, I think a lot of people saw all the large need that went on with COVID. I remember we did a long pace here. So we did a deep dive. And when you look at the numbers, we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars that were just given away to people who didn't need the money.
It was just like, oh my gosh, there's a thing that kills 0.7% of the population. It turned out something like that.
ZAKARIA: It was like a panic. Let's solve this problem …
MAHER: Such a panic … and we're just going to throw crazy money at it and we're not going to really look at where it's going too carefully.
That kind of stuff sticks in people's mind. It certainly did stick in my mind. And of course over the years we've always heard this. Every politician in the world has ever run on, at least in this country, waste fraud and abuse, waste fraud and abuse. So there is that. It's like how do you get it out? I mean, your column today perfectly put it and reminded me that it's been done before. Better … you can do it surgically.
ZAKARIA: And you have to know government to be able to figure out where, because a lot of it is very complicated and people are smart.
MAHER: The government is being run by guys who they have a certain connection with that person who feels aggrieved. But both Trump and Elon, they're driven by this sense of they've been wronged.
Elon thinks they took one of his children who was born a boy and is now a girl …
ZAKARIA: … and the day is the California kind of liberals, the government, the woke mind virus …
MAHER: … and there is a woke mind virus. It's not like it doesn't exist. And I've been criticized for criticizing it too, but it does exist. Sorry. So he's just out preventions. He was not that he wasn't conservative at all. Five years ago.
He hosted Saturday Night Live. The inventor of the Tesla, the electric car, none of these guys were. Rogan wasn't a Trumper, Trump was a Democrat. The left has to take some responsibility in a way driving these people there.
But they have to take responsibility for going all the way there. They could have driven me there too. The left has been very bad to me too. But you're not going to drive me to a place that's even worse.
ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, I asked Bill Maher for his thoughts on a question. Many Americans have been asking, where are the Democrats? What do you think they should do?
COMMERCIAL BREAK:
ZAKARIA: What do you think of (James) Carville's idea, which is basically stand back, let them destroy themselves. The poll numbers are bad, they're going to get worse.
MAHER: Well, I mean, it's almost a moot point because what else can you do? They don't control the Congress. I mean, it's funny that Trump got into August immediately everything was by executive order. And I was thinking, why do you have the Congress?
ZAKARIA: They have such a small majority.
MAHER: Yeah, But they all do whatever he says. Anyway, you could have done these things, Congressionally some of these things, and now they're using the Congress obviously to get a budget passed.
But I don't know what recourse you have when, again, you said it on the show, the answer is winning elections, power begets power. When you have power, it allows you to get more power.
And now they have all the power. That's not good. I'm not sure we will ever see another election. The mindset, you really worry about Trump. I said it about the first Trump term, and he did exactly what I thought. He tried to stay in power by every means possible.
Luckily there were still Republicans, Republicans and court people who stopped him. But that's what a lot of my editorials when he was out of office were like, ‘Oh, you know what he's doing behind the scenes now. is he's replacing those people who stopped him last time with loyalists,’ which is what he has been doing.
And you have to understand the mindset, I think of the true MAGA person is that the left is so crazy. And again, the left does give them a lot of ammunition for that. But they're believers that the left is so crazy and they want such a revolution of everything that it is almost our patriotic duty.
It is our patriotic duty, they think, to stay in office no matter what that takes. It's a little like the old, we have to destroy the village to save democracy. We have to not have democracy. So I mean, right now they're chanting Trump 2028.
Put that on page one of things we never used to see in America before. A guy who had already had in his second term, and they're chanting for the third term. Nobody even thought to do that. And now it's a joke now, ha ha ha, get it. We're ending democracy except that today's joke becomes a little more realistic.
ZAKARIA: When you have an attorney general who’s a loyalist, a vice-president was was a loyalist …
MAHER: … and then you'll find somebody, you'll find something in some law book or some this or that and the constitution. And it didn't really mean that. And not on a Tuesday. Next thing you know it's Donald Trump forever.
ZAKARIA: When you look at where the Democratic party is now, you've been a consistent critic of the woke business. You've basically been a kind of common sense Democrat. I think the party is moving in your direction …
MAHER … it has to, or else they'll be the Whigs. The problem is that the part that doesn't want to move is not moving and they're not going to move and they're just going to dig in. And there's always people like that who when they get their ass kicked, what they say is, we should have been more …
ZAKARIA: We should have been more extreme …
MAHER: We should have been dumber. We weren't dumb enough. We dumbed it, but not down enough and we got to be dumber. And those people are very hard to defeat because you can't prove it. You can't prove that wrong.
ZAKARIA: When you look at the two successful residents and Obama, they're both market friendly economic policies, carefully centrist on cultural issues. I mean, it's recognizing that there's a big country out there and they don't all talk or think like Northeastern liberals.
MAHER: No, I didn't like it on the Saturday Night Live 50th anniversary show, which was awesome. But they did a sketch and Tom Hanks was playing a MAGA guy with the Naga hat and wouldn't shake hands with a black person. And I thought it's old.
I mean, I'm not a MAGA person. I didn't vote for 'em. But I know lots of MAGA people, they wouldn't not shake hands. I mean, of course there are some racism in this country … but I don't think that's helpful or healing or accurate. It's old, it's tired. It's a zombie lie. And again, I know a lot of these MAGA people and friends, people on all sides, and it's just not where they are. And I don't think that helps.
ZAKARIA: So you were joking about a possible third term, essentially at least the transformation of American democracy into something else. How worried are you? How do you think about this? I mean, just personally, do you get up and get depressed?
MAHER: No, I did that a little bit the first term, and I let myself chase everything down a rabbit hole. It was so new and I'm not going to do that. And I said that many times. I'm just not doing it a second term.
And people come up to me all the time, and Bill, what are we going to do? And I always just say, go back and finish your dinner. Your dinner, which probably costs $200 a plate. Your life is fine. It may change. He could blow up the world tomorrow.
And he's certainly hurting a lot of people and we should do everything we can to stop that and help those people. But I'm not going to have this cognitive dissonance about my actual life, which is great, and this world, what he's creating. I'm going to do whatever I can. This is my platform.
But mostly what you're always doing in this country is preaching to converted. The number of people who won't watch a show like this is legion because there's a lot, I'm not far left enough and some I'm not far right enough.
I'm talking to the people who can hear both sides and understand there is arguments on both sides, even though they understand I'm obviously not for Trump. And especially now he's making it kind of easy to just go all out against him again.
But I understand also that the reason why Trumpism will always stay alive is again, because they think that there's something on the left that's even crazier. And as long as you keep feeding him that ammunition, you are going to be vulnerable to Trumpism, even if it's not Trump. Okay.
ZAKARIA: Bill Maher … pleasure to have you on. Thank you. I appreciate it.
— Courtesy CNN