Bill Maher Scolds Al Gore For Comparing Trump To Nazis — After Furor Over Maher-Trump Dinner
Comic and political pundit Bill Maher scolded former Vice President Al Gore for comparing President Donald Trump to Nazis — just days after he lashed out at comedian Larry David for comparing Trump to Hitler.
David cut deeply at Maher with a satirical op-ed mocking the Real Time host’s account of a White House visit by equating it to a humanizing dinner with Hitler. Entitled, “My Dinner With Adolf,” David’s piece mimicked Maher’s post-Trump explications.
Gore, meanwhile, drew attention this week when he told the San Francisco Climate Week conference that the “scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented,” and went on to draw parallels to the Nazis by quoting philosopher Theodor Adorno.
On Friday night’s edition of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, the interview guest was Al Gore, former vice president under Bill Clinton, environmentalist, and co-founder of The Climate Reality Project
The panel guests were Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Bret Stephens, Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative opinion columnist at The New York Times.
During the interview segment, Maher lectured Gore about the Nazi comparisons, despite Gore’s disclaimer in his speech that “it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement — it was uniquely evil, full stop”:
BILL MAHER: So I think we generally have the same view of the Trump administration. You were in the news this week for invoking Nazis.
AL GORE: Well, I didn’t do what J.D. Vance did and call Trump America’s Hitler when he did that a few years ago. I think there’s a big difference.
BILL MAHER: He’s, what he actually said was “I think about Trump a lot and he could be an asshole just like Nixon or he could Be America’sHitler,” and I remember thinking oh, so the good option is that he’s just an asshole
AL GORE: I think there’s a big difference in comparing someone to Hitler, on the one hand, which I don’t do. I think that’s a mistake, and I said that in the speech that you’re referring to. That’s a unique form of evil that should not ever be compared to anything.
But we are not living up to our responsibility to our Constitution if we don’t remain alert to warning signs that we know from history, not only from the Third Reich, but from a whole series of strongmen dictators.
When they start trying to tell people what to think, when they start to try to expand their power so that they push the Congress around, push the judiciary around, and try to consolidate dictatorship, the first steps on that road are ones that we should see as warning signs.
BILL MAHER: I know, I just think that when you use the word…
AL GORE: I couldn’t agree more, but…
BILL MAHER: I just think, you know, Nazi is a hard word to use with nuance. So when you bring that word out, I feel like they’re the GOAT of evil. And so it just conflates–
AL GORE: But if you look at what I actually said in that speech, there was a group of German philosophers that went back after the war and conducted a kind of moral autopsy.
And they said, one of them said that the first step on the descent into hell in that case was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.”.
They attacked the distinction between true and false.
And when I see and hear over and over again, I see the the assertion of complete inaccuracies that Ukraine is responsible for starting the war with Russia. There’s so many of them, and they keep asserting these things, expecting us to believe that the climate crisis is a hoax invented by the Chinese, that windmills cause cancer, that coal is clean. And they try to assert with the force of power their own special version of alternative facts.
BILL MAHER: Yeah, but I guarantee that the side of the country that voted for Trump, they hear Nazi and they just go, oh, you’re calling us Nazis?
First of all, it’s a bit of a false premise, as bad as they are. And also, it just says to them, well, you just hate us.
Watch above via HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher.
