Bill Maher Capitulated to Trump’s ‘New Rules’ for America

As Crisis Looms, We’ll all soon be in Cowardly Comedian’s Shoes

Comedian Bill Maher’s controversial White House dinner with President Donald Trump has confounded liberals, many of whom have called him a traitor. Especially after the traditionally left-leaning jester gushed on Real Time, his weekly HBO show, on how Trump was warm, gracious and sane in person.

“Everything I’ve not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent. At least on this night, with this guy,” Maher said during his monologue. “I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him. And honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump…. He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public…Make of it what you will.”

At first glance, it appears Maher “got played”, by Trump’s charm offensive. I see it as something far more sinister and emblematic of the precipice on which our nation sits. Maher is too astute a political observer, too cynical a satirist, too wise a political prognosticator to fall for Trump’s Miss Manners schtick.

Instead, Maher revealed himself to be a weaselly sell-out, bowing before the dictator to save his own hide. Maher is a realist who intuitively knows that America is on the brink of a brutal right-wing dictatorship. He’s also aware the leaders of this coup against democracy are overwhelmingly religious zealots who promote “family values”.

Maher is probably the nation’s most famous atheist, who produced the anti-religion movie Religulous. The unwed comedian has no use for marriage, and he considers children an annoying inconvenience. Maher is the antithesis of everything these extremists stand for, thus he’s terrified that he’s at the top of their revenge list.

Bill Maher trekked to the White House because he didn’t want to end up in prison. He broke bread with the president because it’s preferable to ending up broke and blacklisted. The comedian, who has made a living denouncing cancel culture, kissed the ring because he’s terrified his show will be canceled in a MAGA autocracy. Most of all, Maher flattered the president, because he knows Trump is a malignant narcissist who takes care of those who flatter him.

Mr. Maher went to Washington because he is a rat who saw the coming rogue wave headed directly towards our democracy and coldly decided this might be his last moment to jump ship. A constitutional crisis is on our doorstep, with Trump defying the Supreme Court, and Maher shrewdly weighed the frightening evidence and chose to hedge his bets.

Maher’s reputation is now irreversibly in tatters. In the moment of truth, Maher revealed that he doesn’t care who is in power, as long as he retains his privilege. We learned that Maher could live with FBI Director Kash Patel’s enemies list, as long as he wasn’t on it, and cash kept flowing from his Beverly Hills ATM.

Maher’s audience warily tolerated his rightward shift, but it won’t countenance outright betrayal. How ironic that a man who originally achieved fame with his irreverent network television show, Politically Incorrect, will finish his tarnished career known as “Bill the Shill”. Whatever credibility that remained, evaporated with his bootlicking monologue that tried mightily to normalize the abnormal Trump.

Bill Maher is a cautionary tale but relevant to all of us in these precarious times. If you thought Elon Musk’s chainsaw purge of the U.S. government was bad, the coming surge will be much worse. After experts are eliminated, they will be replaced by the legions of incompetent fools, religious fanatics and deranged fruitcakes who are in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 employment database.

Once the obsequious toadies, obedient apparatchiks and muscled MAGA goons are in place, Trump will have the machinery of government to enforce his illegal edicts. At that moment, we will all be in Maher’s shoes and forced to make a fateful choice: Fight, Flee or Flop.

Fight: The first thing you must internalize, is that fighting against an autocrat is not the same as fighting within a democracy, where you are protected by the First Amendment and a functioning judiciary. If Trump effectively overthrows the constitutional order, he can declare protesters terrorists, which could include shooting them or shipping them to a foreign gulag. We also live in an age of extraordinary surveillance technology, which could make effectively organizing against the regime difficult, if not impossible.

The time to fight back is NOW before the Trump administration fully consolidates its power. When confronted with difficult choices, each one of us must be Harvard, and stand up to tyranny before it’s too late. The clock is ticking on civilization, and we must ferociously combat Trump and his quislings before we are no longer able to do so.

In the coming days, we will learn much about ourselves. Will we have the courage to stand by our convictions or succumb to cowardice like Bill Maher or cave like the law firm Paul Weiss? Each one of us won’t know the answer until the moment of truth arrives—then we will find out who we really are. We will be surprised, in many cases, who is a hero and who is a zero.

Flee: Donald Trump might finally build his towering border wall – however it will not be to keep foreigners out, but to keep fleeing Americans in, as they try to escape to more civilized, prosperous countries. If the administration doesn’t change course, we are likely going to face economic collapse and a crackdown on civil liberties. At best, we will devolve into a failed nation like autocratic Hungary, which is the preferred model of governance for much of the MAGA right.

Given the dire outlook, people of means are already looking to relocate, or at least establish residence in a second country as a safety valve. This is a smart idea, especially if a worst-case scenario occurs, which looks more likely by the day.

Some people might feel guilty leaving the United States, believing they are abandoning the resistance. However, if the U.S. descends into dictatorship, fleeing might be the best way to fight. Trump will most certainly curtail free speech, close independent media, arrest protesters (or worse) and use the IRS to audit foes. How much effective resistance can one accomplish in an oppressive dictatorship? That’s why the dissidents leading resistance movements against authoritarian nations are almost always based in other countries.

Flop: This is the scenario that most terrifies me. Americans may grow increasingly wary and fearful of revenge—so they opt to do nothing. Slowly, a creeping authoritarianism submerges our democracy until we are stuck living in a dictatorial hell. We then find ourselves existing in a world with limited freedom, self-censoring, news dictated by the state, and neighbors spying on each other.

Each time Trump ignores a court order, falsely accuses opponents of being terrorists, arrests innocent people, takes over a university or harasses news outlets, we surrender more liberty. Before we know it, we could be living in a Russia-like nation where we are property of the state and subject to a leader’s whims with no legal recourse. Sleepwalking into autocracy is a very plausible scenario and one that would be very difficult to reverse.

Democracy is Teetering

The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia should end all illusions that Trump isn’t trying to destroy America.

Abrego Garcia was born in El Salvador but moved to the US in 2011, when he was 16. He is married to a U.S. citizen, has an American child, and he was gainfully employed. Abrego Garcia remained in the U.S. under a judicial protective order given because the judge feared he’d be attacked by gangs if he was returned to El Salvador.

Without a shred of evidence of wrongdoing, Trump’s brownshirts falsely accused Abrego Garcia of being a “gang member”, rounded him up and sent him to an infamous concentration camp in El Salvador (pictured). The Trump administration was forced to admit his incarceration was an error and the Supreme Court ordered that Abrego Garcia’s return to the U.S. must be “facilitated”.

Alarmingly, Trump defied the Supreme Court, while acting like he was trying to comply. The president pretended he had no control over Abrego Garcia’s return. El Salvador’s degenerate president Nayib Bukele played along, claiming he was also helpless to intervene, which cruelly left the innocent prisoner in eternal limbo.

“The question is preposterous. How can I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele, seated alongside Trump, cynically told reporters in the Oval Office. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.”

The Abrego Garcia situation is a test case on whether Trump is a king who is above the law. It also highlights the moral depravity of Trump and the MAGA monkeys carrying out his perverted policies.

What kind of monsters would knowingly allow an innocent man to languish in a notoriously violent prison, while fighting to keep him there for life? Trump’s despicable actions are a deliberate warning to American citizens that he is a sociopath with no bottom to his capacity for evil. The sadism displayed by Trump is why Maher decided he better get on this man’s good side before it’s too late.

In terms of the Kafkaesque Abrego Garcia situation, the lies told by Trump are transparently obvious. He’s pretending he has no say in his release, even though the administration is paying El Salvador to take our prisoners. It’s notable that the same Trump who exerted extraordinary pressure on the Romanian government to release influencer Andrew Tate, who was detained for two years on rape, sex trafficking and money laundering charges, won’t lift a finger to help Abrego Garcia. The Guardian reported:

The Romanian foreign minister, Emil Hurezeanu, was reportedly approached by a Trump envoy about Tate’s case at a security conference in Munich in February; Tate arrived in the US within weeks. When asked if Trump had played a role in Tate and his brother’s release, the Tates’ lawyer Joseph McBride said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

Yes, we are doing the math and Trump’s egregious lies don’t add up. Trump is deliberately keeping an innocent man in a concentration camp, while he intervened to release an alleged degenerate sex trafficker. A man with such low character will eventually come for Americans, who he calls the “homegrowns”. The Atlantic put this looming threat in perspective:

If the Trump administration can defy court orders with impunity, and Congress is unwilling to act, there is no reason for it to respect the constitutional rights of American citizens either. The Roberts Court will now have to decide whether to side with the Constitution or with a lawless president asserting the power to disappear people at will. This is not a power that any person, much less an American president, is meant to have.

To invoke a segment on Real Time, Bill Maher embarked upon his craven journey to Trump’s White House because he realized America is operating under “New Rules”. Except Trump’s version has no punchlines, just disfavored scapegoats serving as MAGA punching bags. Maher should have stood up to Trump, but it seems he’ll be content making fun of “woke” liberals while entertaining the future orange king in his court.