After a week of even greater political brinksmanship at home and abroad from Donald Trump, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro tonight weaved around admitting to HBO‘s Bill Maher host if he is running for POTUS in 2028.
“I’m not an expert in the DC stuff,” Shapiro said on Real Time Friday as the latest leading Democrat getting exposure off Maher. “I try and stay as far away from that as I can. I live in the real world in Pennsylvania, where we have to balance budgets.”
However, often channeling Barack Obama, the first-term Keystone State governor was very clear that he felt Sen. Chuck Schumer and top Democrats in the Senate blew it today. Shapiro was dismissive of their strategy of voting to move forward the GOP’s Trump approved six-month spending measure and avert a federal government shutdown starting this weekend.
“I would have liked to see when Chuck Schumer had leverage here, to say we need A, B, C and D for the Democratic Party, and force the Republicans to meet him halfway on those issues and deliver something for the folks who are worried now,” Shapiro told Maher of some realpolitik the Senate Minority Leader could have demanded from the GOP in exchange for relinquishing its filibuster power.
“I hope folks in DC are listening to these people that I heard at the store, that I see every day,” the governor said a bit later of a recent trip he made to a Dick’s sporting goods store recently and constituents coming up to him about Democrats’ tepid responses to Trump, Elon Musk and what seems to be the gutting of the government.
With that Trump 2.0 gutting, the chaos of attacking Canada and Mexico with crushing tariffs and being hit back with counter tariffs, mass civil service firings and resident aliens being plucked up off the street for their politics, Shapiro has emerged as strong voice of centrist opposition in the galling absence of Obama, Bill Clinton and Joe Biden.
“They’re worried,” Shapiro insisted of those everyday citizens he said came up to him at that Dick’s. “They want to see action. There was an opportunity for more action here.”
More on point of late than most of the anchors you’ll see on cable news right now, Maher tried to nail Shapiro down on if part of the reason the swing state governor wasn’t picked by then VP Kamala Harris’ to be her running mate last year was because he is Jewish.
“Look, I’ll just say one quick thing on that whole vice president thing,” Shapiro said on this Shabbat. “I said all along that Kamala Harris had a deeply personal decision to make in that process. In the end, so did I.”
Waiting with a dramatic pause, one of the frontrunners for 2028 then went into what would be the beginning of a stump speech. “I love being governor of Pennsylvania, and I love charting my own course and being able to serve the people on my terms,” Shapiro proclaimed. “That’s point number one. Point number two is, as relates to faith, as it relates to my Judaism. I’m damn proud of my faith, and I’m damn proud of the people of Pennsylvania, and how they received that.”
“I’m inspired every day by the way my outward expression my faith is received by the people I serve,” Shapiro went on to say this Purim holiday, sounding just like a presidential candidate.
Still, Shapiro wouldn’t directly take the 2028 bait tonight.
The MAGA despising Maher won’t be on any ballot soon, but he leapt straight into the fray once again Friday.
Slashing Trump as “the Ozempic of the economy” in his opening monologue Friday, Maher lamented the loss of $5 trillion due to market downturn from the President’s erratic tariff policies and Musk’s DOGE slashing of government agencies. Mocking subservient “level of North Korea from the Republican Party,” he went on to pile on the already failing economic and diplomatic moves by MAGA and Project 2025 less than two months after the ex-Celebrity Apprentice host returned to power.
Along with the sit-down interview with potential 2024 VP pick and the very likely 2028 contender Shapiro, tonight’s Real Time also featured The Bulwark managing editor and MSNBC pundit Sam Stein, and self-described “MAGA leftist” Batya Ungar-Sargon, author of ‘Second Class: How the Elites Betrayed America’s Working Men and Women.’
The main topic?
Donald Trump, of course. Which is all the 45th and 47th POTUS really cares about.
