Bill Maher kicked off his show this week by running right past the important news to dive into the feud between Morning Joe and President Trump. The tweets by Trump on Thursday aimed at the show and co-host Mika Brzezinski had plenty of critics and supporters fuming, while a select few decided they still wanted to defend the president. For Maher, it represented a clear fact about the president for him: “You can never be too rich to be white trash.”
None of it is new for the president at this point. He’s had social media spats with countless celebrities and critics over the years, something that isn’t going to change overnight once he’s in the White House. It’s hard to wash away when it seems to be in your DNA. The next logical step will be Trump taking the feud off of Twitter and including it in his next press conference, calling the Morning Joe crew “fake news” and stuffing another news cycle with nonsense once again.
For Maher, you have to feel that he’s just happy that things are back to normal for his show this week.
Later, Maher actually tackled some issues outside the realm of Trump’s Twitter feuds, focusing on some of the issues facing the 2018 and 2020 election in his chat with former counter-terrorism advisor Richard Clarke. The topic of his new book is all about the Warnings that go unheeded throughout history, including his own about 9/11, leading into a look at the Russia’s future involvement in the 2018 and 2020 elections. Clarke doesn’t hesitate to say Russia will be there and they will keep trying to affect the process, noting that the government should’ve started counter-planning almost immediately.
If that wasn’t enough to make you unsure about the next couple of elections in the US, Maher and the panel floated the idea of a possible splinter group running for the Republican ticket in 2020 if things don’t go well in 2018. Using Teddy Roosevelt’s failed Bull Moose experiment in 1912 as the prime example, Michael Steele and others agree that some anti-Trump candidate could rise to run. Ben Sasse and John Kasich were the obvious choices, but who knows what could happen between now and then.
The only sure thing is that the next two elections will be exhausting events that might make 2016 look like a party.
(Via Real Time)