It’s been two months since Real Time With Bill Maher aired a new episode, and a lot has transpired. (Including, tragically, the death of frequent Real Time guest Rob Reiner.) Maher began the show with enthusiasm, telling the audience, “I missed you too, including the guy who yells, ‘Woo!’” But the show returns during an upsetting time for the country, and Maher was blunt about it on several occasions.
“The images out of Minneapolis are just fucking ugly, are they not?” he said. Later in the episode, he briefly commented on the killing of Renée Good, which he called “an execution in the street.”
Maher was also critical of the Trump administration’s policy towards Greenland, in which the president announced the beginnings of a deal to avert a crisis that he created. “We are declaring victory for a problem that wasn’t there until he made it,” Maher said. “It’s like when the dog throws up on the rug and then eats it.”
“These are very serious times, so we needed a very serious person,” Maher said when speaking with the episode’s first guest. That was Major General Paul Eaton, who now works with the advocacy group VoteVets. This interview fell into a familiar but largely rewarding category of Real Time conversations: Maher asking an expert about the logistics of pressing domestic or international issues.
In this case, Maher was curious about the military being deployed within the nation. Eaton pointed out that governors can request aid from the Pentagon. He cited a few examples of troops being used for diaster relief efforts, including the military being used to address damage from Hurricane Andrew.
Maher raised the obvious point where this differs from the present moment “Hurricanes and fires — this is different from fighting the people,” he said. Maher also brought up a difference in viewpoint between military and police. “When you give people a badge, it’s sort of an invitation to be a bully,” he added, arguing that ICE abounds with “people who are there for the wrong reasons.”
Eaton spoke about the importance of the military being used to de-escalate situations. But he, too, was concerned about what the near future has in store. “We are in the greatest civil-military relations crisis our country has had,” he told Maher.
For this week’s panel discussion, CNN’s Kasie Hunt and Republican senator (and author) John Kennedy joined Maher on stage. “Your party is going to get the dogshit kicked out of it in the midterms,” Maher said. Kennedy sought to equivocate on some issues, stating that the method of enforcing the law mattered, and commenting that he opposed violent protests. But he also had more candid moments, as when he commented that “the president’s enforcement efforts are polling up there with toenail fungus.”
All three participants discussed the gap between the president’s public and private personas. “He has one setting when those cameras are on and one setting when those cameras are off,” Hunt said; Kennedy, for his part, commented, “He is what he is.”
Bill Maher’s 2025 “Real Time” Finale Had Plenty of Thanksgiving Advice
And an appearance from “The Let Them Theory” author Mel RobbinsMaher closed out the episode by returning to one of his recurring themes: for people on both the political right and left to step outside of their ideological media bubbles. Looking deeper into a given issue isn’t bad advice, though the two examples Maher brought up (corruption in the Trump administration and past comments made by a recent appointee in the New York City government) seemed very different in scale.
The segment did allow Maher to express more skepticism about cryptocurrency as well. “In the Watergate days, the refrain was, ‘Follow the money.’ Well, now the money’s in crypto, so you can’t,” he said.
Other notable moments from this week’s episode:
- Maher on the president conflating Greenland and Iceland in remarks at Davos: “It’s so awkward when you’re fucking one country and call out the name of another.”
- Maher on Mott & Bow’s jeans: “The idea that denim can take you from flat buns to badonkadonk is something they just pulled out of their ass.”
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