Bill Maher’s penultimate Real Time before the holidays packed a wallop.
Maher began by trying to have a civil conversation with Jenna Ellis, a Senior Legal Advisor for the Trump 2020 campaign.
He thanked Ellis for being brave enough to be on the show. He then tried to allow her to state her case.
Ellis ran through a list of debunked election fraud claims that Maher tried to fact check before resorting to: “Just stop. Just stop it.”
But the host was more critical of Democrats who, Maher seemed to be saying, were finding ways to seize defeat from the jaws of victory.
In his “New Rules” soliloquy, Maher noted that Democrats failed to flip the Senate. That they failed to flip state legislators. They lost seats in the House. That, for all Democrats’ talk of systemic racism, their share of minority votes went down.
The message to Democrats from so much of the country, he said, seems to be: “We don’t like Trump, but we still can’t bring ourselves to vote for you.”
“Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable,” Maher said, “or they can ask, ‘What is is about a “D” next to a candidate’s name that makes it so toxic?’”
He cited Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb who says the party’s rhetoric “needs to be dialed back. It needs to be rooted in common sense.”
“There, in my opinion is the crux of the problem,” said Maher. “Democrats too often don’t come off as having common sense to a huge swath Americans. Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social justice warrior woke bullsh*t story in the news.”
Maher ticked off a litany of headlines, including the one this week about Anne Hathaway apologizing because she plays a witch with three fingers in her new movie and that might offend some.
“Who are these jellyfish?” he asked.
“I can do this all day,” he continued, “Cite stories big and small that are endlessly on people’s news feeds that add up to a constant drip, drip, drip of ‘These people are nuts.’”
“That’s what people vote on,” said Maher. “Not policy.”
Democrats kept saying in the campaign, ‘You can’t possibly think Trump is preferable to what we’re selling,’ and many voters keep saying, ‘Yes. We. Can. In fact our primary purpose for voting for him is to create a bulwark against you. Because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not.’”
Watch this week’s “New Rules” in the Real Time clip below.