“I’m trying to avoid talking about Donald Trump.”
Real Time host Bill Maher let the Republican presidential frontrunner off easy Friday night, instead sounding resigned when describing Trump’s latest antics.
“He’s everywhere,” Maher complained in his opening monologue. “CNN could not be any more obsessed with Donald Trump if that missing plane turned up in his hair.”
He noted the week’s top Trump revelation, that the candidate’s toupee-like hair is actually “real,” according to a woman Trump summoned on live TV to touch it. “It’s his ass hair, brought up over his head, but it is his real hair,” Maher deduced.
But the host saved his most incredulous barbs for Josh Duggar, the ex-19 Kids and Counting star who has not only been accused of molesting two of his younger sisters, but also admitted to cheating on his wife, Anna. Two accounts on affair-seekers’ website Ashley Madison were also discovered in Duggar’s name. He checked himself into rehab on Tuesday—for, of all things, “porn addiction.”
“Oh Josh, dude, you’re just horny,” Maher said. “I’d say the genie is out of the bottle but I’m afraid you’d bang the genie. And the bottle.”
Maher used the opportunity to issue a call for sexual freedom. “Josh Duggar, like lots of people, just wasn’t cut out to be married. Isn’t it a bit weird that in a country which now celebrates every alternative gender and sexual choice, we’re still judging and micromanaging straight sex?” Maher asked. “Caitlyn Jenner gets up at the ESPYs in a dress with tits and a dick under it and there’s not a dry eye in the house. Somehow with gay and transgender people, we celebrate—as we should—the concept of ‘I am who I am, I was born this way, this is my truth.’ Well, great! But can we get the same deal for the other 95 percent of us?”
Maher also sat down with Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum and asked for his climate change game plan. Santorum of course doesn’t have one—he doesn’t believe in climate change, but he’s “not alone,” he says. Santorum quoted a survey of 1800 climate scientists, 57 percent of whom apparently “don’t buy off” the idea that carbon dioxide “is the knob” controlling climate change.
“I don’t know what ass you’re pulling that out of,” Maher said, shaking his head.
Santorum plowed ahead, finding a way to blame this on Obama and foreigners. “If you look at what the president has proposed, an 80 percent reduction in emissions, and the consequence of that to folks… that are blue-collar Americans that are losing jobs to China, that are losing jobs to Mexico…”
“There are twice as many jobs in solar as there are in coal now. You’re living in the past,” Maher interrupted.
He pointed out that even Pope Francis, the head of the Catholic church (Santorum is Catholic), understands the severity of the issue. “I’m not a Catholic, I’m an atheist, but I like the Pope better than you do,” Maher said. (“So much of religion is arrogance masquerading as humility,” Maher said in the same episode.)
The Daily Beast’s own Michael Weiss also sat down with Maher as part of a panel with The Washington Post’s Robert Costa, California congressman Dana Rohrbacher, and Texas senator Wendy Davis to discuss, among other topics, immigration. “Who’s doing the raping and the killing? It’s actually not the immigrants coming to this country, lawfully or unlawfully,” Weiss said, referencing Trump’s “well somebody’s doing the raping” anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Maher agreed, zeroing in on Latinos in particular. “I’ve lived in California for 32 years,” he said. “I think Latinos are the only ones who work hard out here.”