Maher: When People See ‘Grateful Black Folks’ Like Alice Johnson on TV, Trump’s Polls May Go Up

Bill Maher weighed in on the recent commutation of 63-year-old first-time drug offender Alice Marie Johnson.

After a video of Johnson when viral last fall, Kim Kardashian West advocated for her clemency and took her mission directly to the White House and met with President Trump in the Oval Office. Less than a week later, Trump honored Kardashian’s request.

Sitting down with author and Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson, Maher asked if “policy even matters” to black or white Americans, listing Trump’s recent rhetoric of legalizing marijuana and the commuting Johnson’s sentence.

“People are gonna watch TV and see grateful black folks, ‘Thank you, President’… I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes up in the polls,” Maher told Dyson. “I mean, he’s a master manipulator.”

Dyson responded by saying the “individual approach” of addressing specific cases doesn’t “deal with structure.”

“We live in a country where not everyone is a professor,” Maher reacted. “So everything you just said was, ‘What?’ He let this beautiful black lady go. Well, Obama didn’t do that. She was in jail the whole time.”

“That’s true,” Dyson said.

“There’s a lot of low-hanging fruit that he wildly enough to make you popular,” Maher continued. “Legalizing pot, he could do that tomorrow. He’d do that just to piss off Jeff Sessions and he’d get a lot of black and white- I’d be his biggest fan… for a day.”

Dyson repeated that no one should be “seduced” by the individual circumstances and not addressing the entire system.

Watch the clip above, via HBO.

[image via screengrab]