Seeking to bridge the vitriolic American political divide, Bill Maher said it is possible to hate President Donald Trump and condemn the Capitol Building rioters but still treat those backing the president with respect.
"Let's not confuse 5,000 people with 74 million," Maher said on HBO's "Real Time" on Friday night. "Yes, even supporting the insurrection in spirit is, well, deplorable. But there's a difference between holding illiberal beliefs and acting violently on them. At least that's what they always told me about Islamic terrorism.
"I keep wrestling on this show with the hard question of how do Americans, all of us, learn to share a country with a**holes you can't stand. I preach, and still do, you can hate Trump, but not all the people who like him. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, you can like something run by a**holes without being one yourself."
Maher noted liberals like himself will have to get along with Trump supporters, because future elections are going to remain close and fiercely divided, because "74 million Trump voters are not self-deporting and neither are we."
"It shouldn't be that surprising that America is full of fed-up unhappy people who just want to break sh*t," Maher said. "Trump sure didn't drain any swamps, but when it comes to graft and corruption and everybody wetting his beak, California, yeah, that's a swamp too. We can't put up a housing unit for the homeless for less than $500,000 or build a rail line connecting the state for less than $200 million a mile."
"California's a blue state that is completely held together by red tape," he continued. "It's no wonder people are leaving in droves. I am in year 4 of trying to get my solar power hooked up. Just building this shed [pictured] up to code took 3 years. We'll all be getting our power from dilithium crystals before my solar gets turned on."
"How about this? Will you let me hook it up if I let the homeless live in it?"
Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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