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On Real Time, Bill Maher didn’t hold back when he pressed former Vice President Al Gore on his recent comparison of the Trump administration to Nazi Germany.
Earlier that week, Gore had cited “Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich” during a Climate Week speech in San Francisco. Though he acknowledged it was a heavy analogy, he argued “there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil.”
Maher challenged the rhetoric. “I just think that Nazis is a hard word to use with nuance,” he said. “So when you bring that word out, you know, I feel like they’re the GOAT of evil.”
Gore pushed back. “I agree with that. But look at what I actually said in that speech,” he began, referencing post-war German philosophers who examined how evil regimes take hold. “One of them said that the first step on the descent into Hell in that case was, and I quote, ‘The conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.’ They attack the distinction between true and false.”
He pointed to repeated disinformation as a warning sign. “And when I see and hear over and over again the assertion of complete inaccuracies that Ukraine is responsible for starting the war with Russia. There’s so many of them… The climate crisis is a hoax invented by the Chinese, that windmills cause cancer… that coal is clean. And they try to assert, with the force of power, their own special version of alternative facts.”
But Maher wasn’t sold on the Nazi framing. “I guarantee that the side of the country that voted for Trump, they hear Nazi and they just go, ‘Oh, you’re calling us Nazis?’” he said. “It just says to them, ‘Well, you just hate us.’ … the one thing that’s more powerful than money is hate.”
He continued, “This idea that well—just take a random example, you can’t even break bread with them. We hate you so much. You’re a deplorable and you’re not worth having dinner with.”
Maher has long criticized left-leaning figures for invoking Hitler when talking about Trump. He recently clapped back at Larry David for his satirical New York Times piece, “My Dinner with Adolf,” which mocked Maher’s White House visit.
“I think the minute you play the Hitler card, you’ve lost the argument,” Maher told Piers Morgan. “Hitler? Nazis? Nobody has been harder about and on and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me… Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that.”
He concluded, “To use the Hitler thing… it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews… Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil, and we’re just going to have to, I think, leave it like that.”
English (US)