As Dade Hayes over at Deadling Hollywood discussed last night, Real Time host Bill Maher "didn't draw much blood" during the first half of his interview with the Conservative Union chair Matt Schlapp, mainly due to his deference to Schlapp for being willing to come on his show in the first place. He did however, make up for it somewhat during the latter half of the interview where he hit Schlapp over how the right would react if there was the sort of relationship with anyone on the left that we've seen between the right and Fox "news," and for the portion at the end where he pulled out a book out a gag book titled "If Obama Did It," asking the Republican pundit to explain how he'd react if Obama had done some of the same things Trump has done:
Maher might have saved a winning line from his monologue to help spice up the Schlapp interview. Marveling at the 2 hour 20 minute length of Trump’s flag-hugging speech at CPAC, he joked, “There were children born at the beginning of the speech. By the time he was done, they were dating R. Kelly.”
Maher redeemed the segment with a somewhat strained but ingratiating bit at the end. He pulled out an oversized, made-up book called If Obama Did It, with the gag being that it was filled with things Trump did, asking the reader to imagine the consequences if the same things had happened during Obama’s two terms. The jailing of Trump’s former lawyer, campaign manager and national campaign adviser and indictment of “albino assassin Roger Stone” headed the list. Russia, inevitably, also merited a page in the book, with Maher wondering what the reaction would have been to Obama consorting with Russians in the Oval Office.
Having gotten Schlapp to budge only on the point that, yes, OK, if Trump didn’t agree to leave the White House after being defeated in 2020, maybe that would be enough to dim Schlapp’s enthusiasm.
In closing the segment, and getting only a few hands to quietly stir when invited to clap for Schlapp, Maher muttered, “Oh man … that ain’t easy.”
You'll never get anyone on the right to admit it, but we already know the answer to the question of how they'd react if Obama had done one tenth of the things we've seen from Trump. They'd have started impeachment hearings the minute he took office.
