Bill Maher Mocks Trump’s ‘Illiteracy’: ‘If You Can’t Read, You Can’t Be President’

Before wrapping up his show Friday night, Bill Maher declared “if you can’t read, you can’t be president.”

“I know Donald Trump is a stable genius, but he handles a teleprompter about as well as The Real Housewives handle wine,” Maher joked. “That’s why it took him an hour-and-a-half to sound out the State of the Union Address. The man is an after school special waiting to happen.”

Maher admitted that Trump can read “a little” just as FDR could dance “a little.” He then borrowed an excerpt from Michael Wolff‘s book Fire and Fury that said that “if it was in print, it might as well not exist.”

“And pretty sneaky of Wolff to put it where Trump would never see it––in a book,” Maher quipped.

The Real Time host went on to say that “one of the worst things” about Trump is his “certainty” that all he knows is all that anyone else needs to know.

“He’s actually proud that he makes decisions without learning anything, which makes him the perfect president for a nation perpetually looking at is phone,” Maher continued. “Illiteracy isn’t Trump’s shame; it’s his bond with us, a sub-literate president for a sub-literate country, a country where the majority of adults get their news from Facebook and 24% of teenagers are almost constantly online- mostly with James Franco. A quarter of Americans say they haven’t read a book in the past year and the other three quarters are lying.”

Maher added that Facebook “is not a place” to read valuable information but that it “replaced reading.”

Watch the clip above, via HBO.

[image via screengrab]