It was the politics of pandemic that took over Real Time with Bill Maher tonight with Michael Moore as the marquee guest.
“The only way they are going to pull it off is if he’s able to cancel the election or postpone it,” the Fahrenheit 9/11 director said of Donald Trump’s chances at the ballot box in November against Joe Biden after this COVID-19 spring that has seen almost 100,000 deaths so far from the respiratory ailment. “I’m certain that’s what’s going on in his head right now,” Moore worried as he has before, pledging that people will need to take to the streets on January 20, 2021 to “get this motherfucker out.”
“The only way Republicans can win is if they cheat,” Moore declared to Maher as he stated that most Americans are actually in sync fundamentally with progressive policies.
Not that the Oscar winner was advocating to Trump rivals that things should to go that far or that they take the ultimate bait and switch as an easy blunted move – as you can see in this excerpt below:
“None of us should take him for granted,” Moore told the HBO host of Trump’s reign of error continuing, despite the Art of the Deal co-author’s disastrous fumble of the coronavirus crisis. “We need to behave as is if he will win a second term,” Moore added with a jab at Democrats who whine at such language.
And remember, love him or hate him, Moore has good pedigree on this. As Maher pointed out on Real Time today, the filmmaker was one of the few public figures who took Trump seriously in 2016.
“He knows exactly what he’s doing, he was in Michigan this week,” Flint-born Moore went on to say in the bi-coastal interview that was actually filmed yesterday. “It’s the third time he’s been in Michigan in three weeks,” he noted of the corona-campaigning in the vital Wolverine State, “he believes he is going to pull this off,” Moore noted, even as most polls have ex-VP and the Democrats’ presumptive nominee Biden leading.
“Hillary won by three million votes in the popular vote, as we call it, I think Biden, he’ll win by five million,” said Rumble podcast host Moore in comparison between 2016 and 2020 from his NYC apartment on top of a shuttered movie theater. “But, I think that Trump could still win the Electoral College. So, all of us have to be really in fighting mode – cause he is.”
“If you listen to him and you take him at his word, understand that he is a lot of time telling the truth,” Moore very seriously stated about the 45th POTUS after Maher gave Trump a backhanded compliment of “speaking his inner monologue” in his political calculations. “Not the greater truth, but his truth …he’d pass a lie-detector if you wire him up.”
“He is just trying to scare liberals because liberals get scared easy,” he went on to say of heavily armed pro-reopening America mobs that have stormed state legislatures and protested outside lockdown governors and mayors’ home under nudging from Trump. “Don’t be scared, we are the majority!”
Before the Bowling for Columbine filmmaker joined the latest edition of the stay-at-home Real Time, a suited and booted Maher started the show with his traditionally timely and sometimes heavy-handed monologue from his spacious West L.A. backyard.
Joking about GrubHub delivery workers and spending Memorial Day weekend “at home” to big laughs from old crowd footage, Maher wasted little time launching into his primary foil – Donald Trump.
After dispensing with the former Celebrity Apprentice host’s current intake of hydroxychloroquine to ward off the coronavirus and with a quick scene of John Wilkes Booth preparing to shoot Abraham Lincoln, the Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death actor also mocked the largely stumbling efforts of most states to reopen. “No plan, no consistencies,” Maher said standing in his outside bar. “It’s the opposite of Afghanistan, we don’t have an entrance strategy
Along with Moore, Real Time had remote and split screen sit downs with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and LA Lakers’ nutritional consultant Dr. Cate Shanahan as guests tonight. The latter being another one of those insightful conversations on health and “realer foods” that Maher has come to specialize in over recent years.
Fresh off the much-watched YouTube success of the environmental aimed Planet of the Humans documentary that he executive produced, Real Time wasn’t Moore’s only media hit of the day on the topic of the election. Earlier on Friday, the Fahrenheit 11/9 helmer was on MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber proclaiming that Trump has “has to be fought tooth and nail” on probable efforts by the incumbent to hobble voting one way or another in November.