On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher dodged multiple questions on if the country is better off under President Joe Biden before finally saying that “We’re not worse” than we were in 2018.
Maher began by saying that on health care, Trump “never even came up with a piece of paper. They didn’t even have a plan. So, that, to me, is exactly who Donald Trump is, the con man who promises you something and then just gives you nothing. Whereas, Obamacare was real.”
Newsweek Opinion Editor Batya Ungar-Sargon then asked, “So, Bill, you think the country is better off now than it was four years ago? You really can say with a straight face that we’re doing better now than in 2018, economically, in terms of this immigration? You think we’re doing better now than four years ago, really?”
Maher responded, “Well, there was a pandemic in the middle of it, which we completely overreacted to.” He also stated that there has been a recovery from the pandemic that Biden engineered.
Ungar-Sargon then asked again, “Do you think the country is better off now than it was four years ago?”
Maher said, “I think after — I think there were these…two major economic crises in this century. One was the meltdown in 2008, Obama came in, no drama Obama, people like Mitt Romney said, let the auto industry die, didn’t. The country didn’t go into a depression, and it could have with the wrong president. I also think the wrong president, we came back better from the pandemic than any other big boy country in the world. So, yes, I do think it matters who the president is.”
Ungar-Sargon then asked, “Do you think we’re better off now than four years ago?”
Maher responded, “Four years ago was 2020?”
Ungar-Sargon rephrased her question to say she was asking if things are better than they were in 2018, not 2020.
Maher continued his response to the 2020 question by saying, “I don’t know, I was wearing a mask. I hated my life.”
Ungar-Sargon asked again, “2018, are we better off now than we were in 2018?”
Maher answered, “We’re not worse. How are we worse, in what way are we so — what’s so terrible out there that wasn’t happening in 2018?”
Ungar-Sargon answered Maher’s question by saying, “Ask the American people, inflation, immigration crisis, 8 million people here who crossed here illegally, we don’t know who they are, crimes being committed.”
Maher responded, “Well, crimes are being committed always.”
Ungar-Sargon then cut in to say, “People can’t afford homes because of the high rate — the mortgage rates.”
Former Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH) then cut in to say that maybe there wouldn’t be so many people in the country if Trump built the wall, which Maher agreed with. Ryan and Maher then both said that Trump didn’t do anything on immigration and tanked the Senate border bill because they want to keep the border as an issue.
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
