‘We gotta look in the mirror’: Maher warns left they can’t use Trump as scapegoat anymore

HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher on Friday warned that now that the left has gotten rid of Trump, they can’t blame everything on him anymore. He says we’ll ‘find out’ in the next 100 days if Trump was really ‘the bad guy’ during the pandemic.

During Maher’s panel-discussion segment, he referenced recent violence in Portland, OR, and Seattle by left-wing groups including Antifa, emphasizing it was the political left that was “breaking windows” following President Biden’s inauguration instead of the right.

“It does feel like the whole Trump administration just sort of disappeared, like we lived through a fever dream,” said Vanity Fair contributor Peter Hamby during the mid-show roundtable. Maher agreed, comparing the current situation to the “Who Shot J.R.” episode of ‘Dallas.’

The segment started off with Hamby blaming “Trumpism” for “infecting every state capital.” Maher’s other guest, “The Fifth Column” podcast co-host Kmele Foster, proceeded to aggressively and logically push back.

“I just want to try to put it into another context,” Foster said, “that what we’ve seen here over the course of the last, say, 10-12 months is actually a bit of an unraveling; this escalation in political violence that is not limited to the right, but existed on the left as well.

“We saw $2 billion worth of damage done over the course of several months. We saw days of civil unrest in the street. We saw federal buildings surrounded, held under siege for days at a time,” he continued. “This is the United States of America and we have seen a steady increase in the regularity of political violence in this country.

“And if there is a broader trend, as opposed to a specific movement that is broken,” he said, “then we’re talking about too narrow a problem as opposed to the right problem. It might be a really major defect in our policy.”

“There’s always been an anarchist, black bloc gutter punk element on the left,” countered Hamby. “But Trumpism has infected every state capitol. It is everywhere.”

“We were promised armed rebellion at every state capitol,” interjected Foster, indicating that those rebellions were not pervasive. “Which is why I’m worried we may be miscasting this. We’re thinking: It’s Trump. Trump is the problem. We saw hundreds of people in the street breaking windows after Biden won. Something is wrong. And I’m worried we’re not talking about this in the right way.”

“Now we can’t blame everything on him,” Maher stated concerning Trump.

“When folks talk about Black Lives Matter, it’s often said that, ‘Look, this is just an ethical statement. If you can’t acknowledge this, then that’s a real problem.’ Black Lives Matter is a political statement and there is a political program attached to it,” said Foster. “And plenty of people broadly may not be aware of it. The fact that it does have some roots in Marxism, that there are radical elements of the Black Lives Matter movement that are very disinclined towards free markets and capitalism, that challenge very basic notions that I think are broadly shared by Americans. Like equality under the law, for example. This pivot toward equity and a focus on racial outcomes is something that is rather new but seems to have taken the country by storm.

“Equity as opposed to equality?” asked Maher.

“Yes,” said Foster. “Quite frankly, talking about racism all the time is not a solution.”

Maher took it up and said, “That’s a great question to get to… Now that we’ve gotten rid of Trump, we’re faced with this problem as Americans. Now we can’t blame everything on him. Now we gotta look in the mirror and we’ll find out in the next hundred days, like, if it was all Trump who was the bad guy.”

“I’ve said from the beginning with the virus, he certainly played his part horribly, horribly beginning with getting that little team out of China that could’ve stopped the whole f—in thing to begin with, but it’s also, I think, on the American medical establishment that never told the American people the best way you can handle this is get yourself in better shape, get your immune system better, stop eating s— food and sugar and day drinking. They never had the guts to do that. They wouldn’t even say the word ‘obesity’ on television. That would be fat-shaming. The code is now ‘precondition.'”

Maher then wondered “can we do s— anymore” as Americans, citing the disastrous coronavirus vaccine rollout, “even if we can’t blame Trump.” He snarked that the only bipartisan things the country is good at are “printing money” and “bombing” other countries.

“I think you’re absolutely right, Bill,” Foster agreed. “The profound failure of this entire government, the bureaucracy, Democrats and Republicans alike to actually rise up to the occasion and meet this challenge of COVID, they failed profoundly and the question of what we do from here is the most important question that we ought to be pondering and we don’t have Trump to kick around.”

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