Bill Maher On Trump vs. Biden, The State of the Media, and Fighting With His Own Audience

Bill Maher’s audience has changed considerably over the years. Bill Maher, he insists, has not.

The comedian and commentator, who revels in challenging the sensibilities of his own viewers, is in the thick of the 22nd season of Real Time, the late-night show he hosts on HBO. In recent years he added to his plate a video podcast called Club Random, which features rollicking and wandering conversations with various celebrities that touch on everything from esoteric rock history to the hazardous effects of fungus — often with a drink and a joint in hand. The show, born in the Rogan era of the Holocene epoch, has been a success, building up more than 500,000 subscribers on YouTube and millions of views for individual episodes. Maher’s nearly two-hour chat with Jordan Peterson has been watched 4.6 million times. Maher also has a book coming out this year inspired by his Real Time editorials, What This Comedian Said Will Shock You.

Maher sat down for an in-depth conversation with Mediaite at the Club Random studio in Los Angeles, for the premiere episode of Press Club, our new podcast. He discussed his career, which he began as a start-up comic appearing on Johnny Carson, and involved more than a few years of toil, before his big break as host of Politically Incorrect on Comedy Central and then ABC. That show was canceled after Maher made a politically incorrect remark that offended Ari Fleisher (and a few others). Soon after, Maher would launch Real Time, a show he’s hosted for the last two decades. At some point in the last few years, Maher says, some of his audience became overly sensitive to his commentary — which he maintains hasn’t changed ideologically. Fortunately for Maher, self-selection ensured “the groaners,” as he calls them, no longer populate his live studio audience.

In a wide-ranging interview, Maher discussed fighting with his audience, his career, the state of the media industry, why he no longer watches cable news, the 2024 race, whether President Joe Biden should drop out, the continued appeal of President Donald Trump, and the year he did cocaine.

Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: How are you doing, Bill?

Bill Maher: Good. How are you doing?

I’m doing good. Thanks for coming on the show. We’re at Club Random.

Yes. I’m reading it behind your head. Club Random VIP lounge. Best friends only. Drink what you want, say what you like.

I got a drink here. I got some water too. I’m all stocked up. The show is great, it’s a couple hours with these guests. You don’t write questions for this, do you?

Do I look like I write questions? The only reason to do a podcast when you already have a successful television show is to do something completely different. And in fact, I had to promise to do something very different. But it was okay because I wanted to. And completely different includes zero preparation. I prepare my ass off for Real Time. That’s my real job, and I’ll always have to believe and do think it’s a better product because I work on it all week. It has written comedy bits, an editorial at the end. I have a book coming out in June, it’s a collection of these editorials. It’s really a polished product.

This is the opposite. And it’s the difference between the Beatles and the Stones. You know, one is like, studio perfection and the other is raw, and you can like them both. But no, I don’t have time and I don’t have desire. I just like to sit here and get high with people just the way I always did before it was a television show. All I did differently was I built the cameras into the walls and so it’s just me and the person here. And, I think there is a level of naturalness that I’ve never seen anywhere else, if I do say so myself.

And I’m guessing you don’t smoke or drink before Real Time either? That requires a little bit more discipline.

Correct. And you have a senator on and a governor or something. And also people are watching it in a different setting. It’s a catch up show. Here’s what happened that I think is important this week in the news that you should know about. I take that job seriously, that people watch it — “Oh, I don’t have time to follow the news, I’m going to let Bill fill me in.” This show, I’m always saying, “what are we talking about?” That would never happen on Real Time. I got to know what we’re talking about.

I want to go back to the start of your career. I read your novel True Story.

Well, great. Thank you.

It made me want to ask how you made the jump from being a standup comic, appearing on Johnny Carson, to hosting what was in many ways a politics show, Politically Incorrect. How did that come about?

Too slowly. I should have been aiming at that. But when I started in comedy, we all wanted to get on a sitcom. That was sort of like the template. We saw Robin Williams do that, and Roseanne, you know people who took their comic persona, or just got on a show. And that is exactly what happened. I came out and I did sitcoms, but I always did think I was better at this. My hero growing up was Johnny Carson, who wasn’t a sitcom actor. And I was always like, not really down with what the essence of acting is, which is the opposite of what being a comedian is.

Comedian is being your truest self. This interview I just did [with Sheryl Crow], that’s the truest I can get with the person. And because it is, there’s no difference from if we weren’t on. I certainly wouldn’t have been different. I don’t think Sheryl Crow would have been different. That’s different than an actor who’s like, it’s all camouflage. There’s a friction there. Some comics are great actors. You can pull it off and you can do both, but I think I knew what I was destined for, and it wasn’t playing, the third lead on Bringing up Chunky. Although I was good in it.

You also talk in the book about how crowded the comedy space was, which reminded me in a lot of ways of the podcast world.

Very good analogy. You’re right.

Everyone has a fucking podcast now. Everyone used to be a standup comic.

I wrote one novel in my life. I’m never going to write another one. It took too much out of me. But I did make it funny on every page, I think. I really labored over it. I was at a time in my career when I had the time to do it, because no one was asking me to do anything. It was between the talk show and the sitcoms that I did that. But it’s about that period of my life, that is usually the time when if somebody is going to write a great novel, it’s probably about that time in your life when you’re starting out. When you think about so many of the great novelists and what they did. Catch 22. Yeah, it’s when he’s in the army, he’s 22 years old. It’s the formative time in your life when you’re learning about life, blah, blah, blah. It’s interesting. You’re young. Romance. Then they write novels the rest of their lives that are kind of somehow rewriting the same novel. So I just quit at the one.

I also heard you once say that you banged it out thanks to a diet of cocaine and cigarettes.

I didn’t do cocaine when everyone else was doing it. It never appealed to me. I’m a pothead. I could do it like at a party, somebody would have it. Okay, sure, you’re doing it. And then never think about it the next day. If you do that long enough, or with any drug, same thing with cigarettes. For years I smoked casually. It will catch up with you. I just happened to be at the point in my life, right in that period between the sitcoms and the talk show, where all I had was writing. So cocaine was very handy.

I can imagine.

There was a year or so, my cocaine year, when I did it every day. Not usually in the day. I wasn’t, I get up in the morning and do coke, that would have been even sadder. But at night and, every time I do it, I’d be like, I’m not the kind of guy who does coke every day. And yet there I was doing it. But it did help me finish. I’d written most of it, but this is when I first had a computer. This is like 1989. So it had to go from handwritten notes into the computer. That was a job for cocaine.

What’s your process now?

Definitely not cocaine. Real Time, what I work mostly on is the editorial at the end. That’s 8 to 10 minutes, but it can take me 20 hours. I like having a show on Friday and being able to move it closer to what I would like it to ultimately be, as perfect as I can make it, Friday night. So Monday I start, get a first draft Tuesday, rewrite it Wednesday, rewrite it. I like that process of first, make it too big and then squeeze it out until there’s nothing extra and you’re not boring at any moment. It’s making a point. It’s new, it’s original, and it’s funny. It’s a process. I’m a creature of habit. I like having Monday, I do this Tuesday, I do this Wednesday or this Thursday. I like that, that’s helpful for me.

You’re in the throes of the 22nd season now. Has your audience changed over that time?

Oh, definitely. First of all, for years I was complaining about the audience. For good reason. It was very frustrating because I would say, why am I always fighting with my own audience? These people write in like months, sometimes years ahead of time, they’re desperate to get tickets. But they were just too woke. They were just assholes. Not most of them. But groaners, we would call them. Just groaners.

Who do you think you came to see? You can see literally any other talk show on TV, political or not, although they’re all somewhat semi-political at least. So why are you bugging me? Why are you coming here? People would say to me, I love it when you fight with the [audience]. Yeah but I don’t.

And then it started to get better, I don’t know, a little before the pandemic. And then the pandemic was really the great thing because it made us winnow off the audience by two thirds, you know, because of distancing, it was very important that we kept apart from each other during the forever flu. So we had to weed out a lot. Somehow they just got rid of the groaners. I don’t know how it happened. And then it just kind of took off. And there’s another factor, I think, which is also we had to switch out the groaners for a different kind of old school liberal, who’s mostly liberal, or conservatives, but not Trump conservatives. So it’s a much more centrist kind of audience. I was reading in the paper today, extremism is what Americans think is the worst problem. The people who feel that way, which I assume must be vast if it’s the number one thought, they kind of found this show and they want to be part of it. And it happens on the road too. So I almost never fight with the audience now, and I never have to. They’re down with, okay, this is the show, this is the point of view, this is the way he goes about it, and we’re so there for you. It’s great.

You made some comments about cable news that I thought were spot on. You were speaking about MSNBC and Fox News and about how the incentives to cater to ratings are really strong. Because there are minute by minute ratings on cable news, and so hosts and producers and executives are very attuned to what the audience wants. And there’s a strong incentive to feed into that.

Exactly.

Do you feel any incentives like that, or is one of the things about your show that you can defy the assumptions that your audience has?

I feel like that’s the one thing that would alienate me from my audience. Would be if they smelled that at all, if they ever smelled on me that I was appealing to them on purpose. I’m going to say what I think. I hope everybody agrees with me. I never want anybody to disagree with me. Some people think I’m a contrarian. I’m not a contrarian. Contrarian is somebody who wants disagreement. I think it would be a much better world if everybody just saw it my way. The only reason I’m arguing is because you’re arguing with me.

But I’m going to say what I think is real about whatever the subject is, and then you can have your reaction to it. But I’m not going to be cowed, as I’ve seen happen to so many guests who we think are going to take one position, usually the more conservative position, and then they would get out there and the audience would be intimidating. And suddenly I’m not talking to a conservative. Especially when it’s in the middle of the show. And I’m like, really? And now you’re the one who’s like, “And brown people…” Brown people? When did you ever give a shit about brown people? Suddenly they’re making the kind of speech that they just know the audience will — it’s amazing how that can happen. But not me. I’ve been booed many times. I have many pictures of me [flipping off] the audience, but I’m not going to say something I don’t believe.

I’m curious what you think of independent media. Because I have a little criticism. You hear a lot from people that work and make their money in independent media, they always say, “The mainstream media is lying to you. They have all these perverse incentives that push them to lie to their audience.” But I think that independent media also has an incentive, and their incentive is to tell their audience that they can’t trust the mainstream media, so they can say “I’m the only person that can be trusted. My podcast or my Substack is the only thing that can be trusted. So don’t listen to them.”

Yes! It’s a little game they play. When you said independent media, I was and still am a little fuzzy on exactly, specifically who are we talking about?

I’m thinking of people that exist outside of the structures of the traditional media. Let’s say they don’t they don’t have a newsroom or editors. Like Substackers. Glenn Greenwald is a great example.

Well, I think he would be a good example then, because he I can’t even conjure up exactly now what I’m thinking of. But I know he has some, writings, thoughts and positions that I went, “Wow. That’s just wrong, and kooky and stupid.” He seems like a smart guy. And there are times when I think I’ve been with him and an admirer, so I don’t know.

You’re very tough on the left for a culture of censorship. Do you think that’s uniquely a problem on the left?

No. You mean like cancel culture? No one was ever canceled harder than Colin Kaepernick. Kathy Griffin. Me!

Yes, Politically Incorrect. I believe you offended Ari Fleischer.

I offended a lot of people! So it can happen both ways, but it’s definitely more of a problem on the left. They sort of have taken ownership of that. It is funny that, I mean, many people have pointed this out, but back in 2001 it was completely the opposite. I was totally canceled by right-wingers who, by the way, they were trying to get me on other stuff. They just saw an opportunity with that. It was their moment and they played it right, and they got their scalp on the wall.

But the scalp hunters, and I think the common thought is much more that it is something on the left. That these are the scalp hunters, the kids on social media and so forth who just want to find something. We have a joke around the office, we always go, is this something? Could we get a reaction? And it invariably surprises me. Things that I think will get so much blowback. Nothing. And then something that’s completely out of left field. I’m like, “Really? That’s what bothered you?”

I can’t even understand why they’re mad. Because it’s not really about what they’re mad at. It’s just they want to be mad. They want to be social justice warriors. That’s very important that they’re warriors. What you’re warrioring about doesn’t matter that much. Defending Hamas? Sure, as long as it’s a war and and we’re social justice warriors, we’re good. We don’t need the details of who we’re backing. That’s immaterial. So, it’s always walking through the raindrops in this business these days.

A Real Time panel aired on CNN on Fridays for a bit.

We hope to do more with CNN in the very near future.

What do you think of the drama that they’ve had over there the last couple of years?

I’m very interested in what’s going on at CNN. I’m good friends with Jake Tapper. I think he’s a great reporter and straight down the middle. More like what CNN should aspire to be. It became, because of Trump, an impossible job to be fair and down the middle. Because Trump is so extreme. I remember at the beginning they tried to have Trump people on their panels. They had that Jeffrey Lord guy. They had Kayleigh McEnany. It would be tough. It was hard to defend him. And so it’s like, “Well, we want to have balance.” And look that does expose how crazy Trump is and how wrong I think his people are to follow him so blindly. He is, as I always try to point out, both crazy and stupid. And that’s a tough combination to deal with.

What do you think of Fox News these days? You’re friends with Greg Gutfeld? You had him on Club Random.

He was here. I mean, look, I’m not unfriendly. I just don’t know him other than that one time he sat here and we had a nice — honestly I don’t watch cable news anymore. I quit when the pandemic happened. I couldn’t deal. Because as much as I have different ideas sometimes from either one of those. I used to watch MSNBC quite a bit. But it was a little more old school than Chris Matthews. Then it became super woke. And then during the pandemic, of course, my views on medical matters are very different than the mainstream. So I just couldn’t take it, I just couldn’t deal with it. There was only one, true, allowable opinion. Now that the pandemic has been gone for a couple of years, I think we’re seeing that a lot of the things that people like me were saying turned out to be true. But we won’t go there. We don’t need to go back over and say, told you so. Bu that kind of put the kibosh. And TV, it’s just not the place for news. Jake [Tapper] is on somehow when I’m in the kitchen making my first meal of the day.

Afternoon?

Yeah. So. I do see him. But it’s tough. I feel like I can get all the news I need from other sources, but mostly reading. Reading a lot of these independent kind of people you’re talking about.

I do read The New York Times, but it’s an eye roll, in a lot of places. Front page has things, headline writing, that’s like really crazy woke shit. Taylor Swift, remember that story they did a month ago: Taylor Swift is a lesbian, and she doesn’t know it, and shame on her for not admitting it! I’m like, really? And I wasn’t the only one to say this, but it’s important to know what they’re covering. And also there’s only a few papers who have a reporter in Mogadishu. I see articles in the Washington Post all the time. My staff sends me a digestive of stuff. It’s not hard to keep up with most of what’s happening.

But I also love my independent writers. Without the magazine around them or the newspaper. Just read Andrew Sullivan. My friends Bari [Weiss] and Nellie [Bowles] who run the Free Press. Andrew Sullivan, George Will, a bunch of people like that. Fareed Zakaria. And some of the Times editorial writers. I still love my Maureen Dowd. I love my Tom Friedman and Bret Stephens, Pamela Paul I’ve come to like a lot. I will occasionally watch the evening news just because I want to see footage.

Sometimes you just want to keep your eye on what mainstream is covering. You only get really one segment. Then it’s the fucking grizzly bear that got in the jacuzzi. So if you think you have problems with the media, I used to love the nightly news and it just became, “Hey, look, we got some cool footage! Hey, something weird happened on a plane today!” That’s not news. They used to bitch and moan, “We only have 22 minutes.” You don’t even use the 22 minutes!

I want to talk about 2024. You think Biden should drop out of the race.

Of course, I said it long ago. I called him Ruth Bader Biden.

If Biden does drop out, do you worry that could help Trump?

If Biden drops out they’ll win. Without doubt. Biden should drop out. That’s the point. He’s being selfish. James Carville was here and said, this is months ago, he said, any 50-ish Democrat, it won’t even be close. Of course, he’s not the voice of God, who knows. But that is my basic belief also. It’s theirs for the taking.

What do you think drives the continued appeal of Trump? Derek Thompson at The Atlantic had a great piece about the need for chaos. The theory is that, there are all these Americans that live very happy lives, but that have this odd impulse to want to vote for someone that’s going to burn everything down. Even though their lives are quite nice.

That’s bullshit. No one wants to burn everything down. Aside from anarchists, I guess a few weirdos, they don’t want to burn everything down. They just want to rule everything. I don’t think people want to see everything burned down. I don’t think Trump wants to burn everything down. I think he wants to own everything, to control everything, to have power over everything. But that’s what presidents do. He’s insane, so he wants it in a much more different way.

But I don’t think that’s the source of his appeal. The source of his appeal is, I’ve quoted a million times, my friend Jimmy said it, insanity photographs. You can’t take your eyes off it. He’s just something that is the center, and you can’t look away. That in itself is attractive to a lot of people. He was the guy in The Apprentice. He’s a star. But also, he doesn’t back down ever. They love that. They don’t know the issues. They don’t know the nuances. It’s not about that.

That’s why nobody can affect the election except Taylor Swift. Because that’s another cult following. And her followers, like the people who say in polls now that they would do whatever she said election-wise, don’t be so proud of yourself. That’s horrible. Any kind of cult is horrible. It does not say good things about you. It says you’re a shallow shell who wants to be filled with another human being, making you a slave to what they tell you. Ugh. I don’t think I could affect it or anybody else except Taylor Swift and Trump himself.

But his appeal, I think, is — if you asked me, who is the bigger danger to America? Absolutely it’s the right-wing and Trumpers and people who don’t believe in democracy. They’re not even keeping it a secret anymore. They’re not even saying that quietly. They’re saying we don’t believe in [democracy]. There was a CPAC convention this week talking about that, many of them. I mean, it is really weird that they are shitting on democracy in America?! Okay. To say nothing of where they are on the environment and lots of other issues, they’re definitely the bigger threat.

But who makes me want to punch you in the face more? That is often from the other side. The woke people. The cancel people. The “how dare you think differently than I do?” The people who love diversity of everything except thought. And just don’t want to breathe the same air as you if you don’t agree with them and will unfriend you. That bad attitude combined with some very bad, crazy ideas. You know, let’s give communism another try, and get rid of the police, and just really stupid ideas combined with a terrible attitude.

That’s Trump’s appeal. He’s a star who isn’t afraid to want to make those liberals cry their liberal tears. And I get that. You’ll never get me voting for Trump. I rationally can see what’s by far the worst choice. But I get it, and I certainly get the emotional appeal. And people in this country are beyond using their minds to vote or for most things. So it’s all an emotional appeal. Probably always was, mostly. He’s that guy who’s sticking his thumb in the eye of the elitists. And you can go all day turning yourself blue in the face, talking about, “He’s the biggest elitist of them all! And how can religious people vote for this pussy grabber!” Yes. Humans are complicated, they’re full of contradictions. Just give it up. It’s not going to change anything. They don’t see it that way. They don’t care. Emotionally, he fits the bill.

I wanted to ask you about some comments you made on Real Time about the horrors in Gaza. And you made these comments just a few days after Israel started its bombing campaign there in response to October 7. You said:

“I’d also like to say to my friends in Israel, there’s a siege that’s now been going on for six days. No food. No water, no medicine is getting in. The head of the Red Cross in the Mideast said today, ‘This is not acceptable. We need a safe humanitarian space.’ I agree. You know, don’t lose the moral high ground. I mean, I hate the word proportionate when it comes to killing. It’s horrible, but it’s sort of like the best we can do… If Israel is going to kill babies now for the next I don’t know how long, the world’s just going to able to say, you just do it in a different way [than Hamas].”

Yeah, I don’t feel exactly that way now. That was six days after.

We’re now months later. The death toll in Gaza is bad.

Yeah. I remember what you just quoted back to me, because I remember thinking about it over the weeks as they unfolded and thinking, yeah, I have I think changed on that. Not that I would like. I mean, look, it’s one of those situations where both things are true. I mean, it’s not a 90-10 or an 80-20. It’s a 55-45 kind of decision. It’s rough. I do think Israel could lose the moral high ground.

You don’t think they have yet?

Moral to who is the problem? Moral to people who don’t understand who is really responsible for this war? I mean, yes, it is very hard. And maybe that comment that I made six days after had to do with the fact that we had just seen the images, you know, the first images coming in, or descriptions, or I don’t remember exactly where we were, but I think I was probably, as most people were, emotionally moved by that. And I would love that to be the case.

But no, I can’t quite agree with myself on the proportionality thing. I really can’t. Because this idea that you can attack a country and if they get to attack you back, first of all, you label that a war crime. When they attack you, it’s a war. When you attack back, it’s war crime? No, I’m not down with that. And then you get to only kill us up to the level we killed you? No, I’m sorry, that’s not the way war works.

And you know what, Hamas, you’re dealing with people who, more than anyone else on Earth, more recently, actually were almost genocided off the planet. They faced it in a way nobody else has in recent centuries, and that’s every ethnic group. Lots of things were bad to lots of ethnic groups, not 6 million people within the last 100 years. So read the room. Maybe if you attack that people, they’re going to take this war to the end. They’re going to finish it. Because they have to. Because they do see it as existential.

We never hear about the problem that Hamas doesn’t offer any sort of two state solution. That’s not what they’re saying. They’re saying we get all of it. And that’s what they’ve always been saying. Israel at least tried for a long time in different manners to have a two state solution, including at the founding of the state in 1948. It was always rejected. One side just never accepted that idea. And I’m sorry, but you do what they did on October 7th, it’s going to get ugly. I don’t know when the war ends and that’s up to them, but I don’t think I’m going to look over their shoulder and say, you should wrap it up now or this isn’t proportional anymore. It can get to that level, I guess, but I don’t think it has.

I mean, it’s horrible. 30,000 people is horrible. Numbers matter. Size matters. It’s not 6 million. And it’s not genocide. In a country of 2 million, I guess is what Gaza is. Look, no death is good and none should be acceptable. But we don’t live in a world of shoulds. We live in reality. And so I just hope to God they can fucking finish it soon. At least the part where people are dying. And then we’ve got a whole ‘nother bunch of problems on our hands.

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