Bill Maher, On Tour in the South, Explains Why He Refuses to Write Off Trump Voters

Bill Maher/HBO

HBO host Bill Maher told an Alabama news outlet he refuses to write off supporters of former President Donald Trump, as he believes doing so will further divide the country.

Maher is currently on tour in the southeast with stops in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee — a part of the country that is as likely to enjoy college football as it is to vote for Republicans.

The Real Time host spoke to AL.com ahead of a show next week in Birmingham.

Ben Flanagan, writing for the outlet, asked Maher:

You’re hitting a lot of Southern cities on this tour: Birmingham, New Orleans, Chattanooga, Jacksonville. You’ve said, during COVID, it’s harder to sell tickets in blue states, that liberal media are scaring people with their coverage, but “In red states, it’s all good to go” and people there are maybe more open to edgier humor. What do you like about performing in the South, and if anything, what surprises you about Southern audiences?

Maher explained that he is not willing to write off half the country over politics.

“I think you kinda just did my act for me there, all the things you mentioned. I attract mostly a liberal crowd, but liberal is different than woke,” Maher said. “To me, woke, if we want to use that broad term, is something that is not an extension of liberalism.”

Maher further explained:

It’s very often the opposite of what an old school liberal like me believes. I’ve never been someone who was part of any specific party, per se. I usually vote Democratic, but it depends on the person. Certainly in the age of Trump, they’re never going to get me there with the Republicans. But there are many Republicans who are not Trump Republicans. And they have a good point, that there is that faction of the left that we will call woke who’s gone of[f] the deep end.

I was in Nashville three or four months ago, I think the audience there was almost 50-50 between conservatives and liberals, which is quite a trick, I must say, in this era of a lack of bipartisanship, where everything is binary. Gender may not be binary, but politics sure is right now. It was great to see where there were people who don’t agree politically who can get in the same room. There were a few groans from the right when I said something bad about them, and some from the left when that happened. But basically everyone laughed together. And we have to get back to that.

Maher later slammed social media for helping to divide people when he explained that he enjoys hearing a variety of political viewpoints.

Maher concluded:

Facebook, when it started was not political. It was just about sharing your photographs and talking about who got fat from high school days. It was your high school yearbook come to life. It was humble brags and cat pictures. Then it became arguing with some kid you were in chem lab with about ivermectin or the Supreme Court, or whatever.

And this idea that we have to constantly be arguing politics with everybody — that’s what has to stop. Because when you take the politics out of the discussion — and this is coming from a person who made his living talking politics — you find that people are just people, and you can’t hate them. I constantly say it, you can hate Trump. You can’t hate all the people who like him — it’s half the country.