Bill Maher scolded an MSNBC host who called Trump supporters at odds with “reality,” retorting, “There’s a lot of crazy on the left,” too.
The liberal comedian was a guest on MSNBC’s “The Beat With Ari Melber” on Wednesday when Melber commented on the differences in reactions between Trump’s base and “normal, reality-adjusted” persons to the Georgia election interference hearings against Donald Trump.
Maher pushed back against Melber’s dig at the former president’s supporters.
“I got to stop you and say, I don’t think this helps, the media world that we live in, where we sit here and everybody else is just a deplorable who’s — reality challenged,” he responded.
The liberal host defended himself, saying he didn’t call anyone “deplorable,” but argued there was a difference between those “against sedition” and those who weren’t.
Voicing agreement with Melber on that point, Maher reiterated his belief that the liberal media took no effort to understand the other side.
“They (Trump supporters) see him as the one thing that is standing between them and something even crazier. And there is a lot of crazy on the left,” he retorted.
Maher implored MSNBC viewers to “try to understand” why half the country still supports the former president.
“I think it would be helpful if the people who watch this would see that. Just crack a window a little bit, and you maybe understand why people would — you have to try to understand why half the country is looking to Donald Trump as some sort of savior. Yes, it’s not what we think, but, you know, people are not self-deporting in this country. Half the country isn’t going away. Even if the Democrat wins the next time, they’ll still be here, and they’ll still have these views. And some of them are not crazy,” he argued.
Maher went on to criticize Trump supporters playing up the Hunter Biden scandal in light of the indictments against Trump.
“I don’t understand how they can equate this equivalency between Trump and Biden,” Maher remarked.
“Does the Hunter Biden scandal stink? It really does. Stinks to the high heavens. I mean, that’s real corruption there, that a lot of the left-wing media will not cover. But it’s nothing like what Trump did. I mean, there’s just no equivalency,” he argued.
Regardless, he argued the media shouldn’t “cover up” what President Biden’s son is accused of.
“If Don Jr. had done the things that Hunter Biden did, he would be [covered in the media] every day. If they found cocaine in the White House? Whose could it be? Who does cocaine around here. We can’t figure it out?” he joked.
On “The Joe Rogan Experience” on Saturday, the comedian clashed with Rogan over who was “worse”: President Biden or Trump.
While admitting he wasn’t a fan of Biden’s embrace of fringe-left politics, Maher felt the two couldn’t be compared because Trump was a “crazy, stupid criminal.”
Maher has often rebuked the far-left as opposed to classic liberalism. On the podcast appearance, he also slammed progressives as like the Ku Klux Klan, due to their fixation on race.
“They believe race is first and foremost the thing you should always see everywhere, which I find interesting because that used to be the position of the Ku Klux Klan,” Maher told Rogan, invoking the White supremacist hate group.
“Again, you can have that position, but don’t say that’s a liberal position. You’re doing something very different.”
Fox News’ Brian Flood contributed to this report.