Bill Maher wants the Democratic Party to do some serious reflecting after once again losing a presidential election to Donald Trump.
His imploring message at the top of Friday’s Real Time, however, initially seemed to confuse his own audience.
“We’re gonna hear about both tonight on the panel, and throughout the whole show, the winners and the losers,” said the host and Trump critic in his opening monologue. “My message to the losers? Losers, look in the mirror.”
“No?” Maher added, when the crowd met him with stunned silence. “Well, maybe you should.”
Maher eventually earned some applause after pivoting to a joke and criticising pundits who felt blindsided by the results.
“For months, Democrats have been saying, ‘How is this even close?’” Maher told the crowd. “And they’re right — it wasn’t. They could not conceive of a second Trump term, but they should’ve. When does America ever turn down seconds?”
The results left many pundits in shock, however, as Trump ran an extremely xenophobic campaign centred on “bloodthirsty” migrants “bringing bad genes” into the country — and the notion of him winning amid numerous criminal indictments seemed unlikely to many.
Maher’s peers in the Democratic Party have exchanged plenty of blame in the days since Harris lost. Moderate Democrats like Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (Democrat, Washington) and progressives like Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent, Vermont) have claimed the party’s leaders are out of touch with the working class’s economic struggles. Still others have blamed Harris’ unwavering support for Israel’s brutal military campaign in Gaza.
Maher, meanwhile, had another diagnosis, which he made after a jab referencing the anti-trans ads Harris’ opponent ran.
“Make no mistake, this election was very much about what I’ve been saying here, and lost a lot of fans for saying over the years,” Maher argued on Friday. “That this country has had enough of the anti-common sense woke bullshit.”
While countless pollsters predicted a close election that Harris would ultimately win, Trump swept every battleground state — with even traditionally blue areas of the country shifting toward his conservative policies — which Maher made light of Friday.
“This is just the facts,” he told the audience. “Trump won all the swing states, all seven — he ran the table. Trump won so big, today he called the Secretary of State in Georgia, and he asked them to lose him 11,000 votes.”
Trump, who was caught telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him as many votes after losing the 2020 election, and was later indicted on election interference charges, is nonetheless now set to retake the White House on Jan. 20, 2025.
Later on in his show, during the Overtime segment, Maher mocked MSNBC’s Joy Reid for praising Harris’ now-failed campaign.
“All this was this week was people who said, ‘Oh she ran a flawless campaign’ — how ridiculous,” he added. “Or, ‘it’s sexism, it’s racism.’ This is an old playbook … I think America’s perfectly willing to elect a woman — they just didn’t like the last two that were put up.”