Friday’s Real Time featured Bill Maher extending the olive branch to The Blaze’s Tomi Lahren and it did not disappoint. Unlike her bridge-building interview with Trevor Noah, Lahren faced some opposition from the other members of the panel. One moment featured Lahren informing Maher that white people and black people face an equal amount of discrimination, something that forced GOP strategist Rick Wilson to respond with the quote of the night:
“Since I’m a conservative and not a Trump person, let me say this,” Wilson began. “That’s absurd. That’s f*cking crazy”
Lahren didn’t face too much criticism from the host himself. Maher seemed more interested in copying Trevor Noah, lecturing those who protested at UC Berkeley about silencing speech before revealing he’d booked Milo Yiannopoulos on the show in the coming weeks. He has never shied away from inviting controversial guests on his show. He’s given equal coverage to folks like Ann Coulter, so it shouldn’t be a shock. It will raise a few eyebrows, though, given the current political climate we’re seeing around the country.
Lahren spent most of the evening defending President Trump to the rest of the panel. While discussing the slew of decisions by Congress to rescind President Obama’s order making it illegal to dump pollutants in waterways, Lahren defended it by claiming it allows coal miners to keep their jobs. A heated discussion follows and Wilson once again chimes in to close the debate:
“There’s a kind of hazy nostalgia with Trump’s plan, ‘We’re going to have ironworks and shipyards and coal miners,’” Rick Wilson said. “These are things — we might as well get our buggy-whip industry back together again. It’s this retrospective, fake past that doesn’t exist anymore. And, God bless them, they work their asses off, and you know what, natural gas took their jobs, not Barack Obama.”
The discussion then shifts to the Supreme Court pick by Donald Trump and his role with the raid in Yemen where “almost everything went wrong.” Maher is quick to say that Hillary Clinton would be hit with criticism if she were in President Trump’s shoes, calling it the new Benghazi. This prompts Lahren to chime in and defend Trump, but then she’s also quick to still blame Clinton for what happened in Benghazi.
(Via Real Time)