“The Real Housewives of the White House.”
Those seven words about the sordid reality TV franchise were really all Bill Maher had to say tonight on HBO’s Real Time of the Oval Office shouting match Friday after showing footage of the very undiplomatic exchange.
Everybody gets it.
A fiasco that saw a flattery seeking Donald Trump blow his stack at Volodymyr Zelensky when the Ukrainian President tried to deliver some truths to the former Celebrity Apprentice host about Vladimir Putin’s trustworthiness. At the end of the 15-minute blow-up, with VP JD Vance as vice enabler, Trump revealed himself by saying “This is going to be great television.”
“In World War III news, we’re on the other side now,” Maher also said Friday just hours after the White House debacle that put Trump once again on the same side Putin.
(L-R) Volodymyr Zelensky, Donald Trump on Feb. 28 in the Oval Office
Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Out of a day that saw cable news and broadcast TV almost wall-to-wall on what happened at the White House, Maher had a real advantage by recording his opening monologue on Friday afternoon. Of course, crunched for time, there were only a few Trump and Zelensky jokes tonight, with Oscar swipes, Ramadan remarks and Elon Musk mocking taking up the bulk of Maher’s routine.
Sitting down with Rahm Emanuel and CNN’s Fareed Zakaria after a chummy chat with former Canadian Finance Minister and Liberal leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland, Maher called Trump and Vance’s behavior “deplorable.”
“I’ve tried to not use the word deplorable as much as I can, but when it’s deplorable, it’s deplorable,” Maher said with a nod to Hilary Clinton’s damning 2016 put-down of Trump’s MAGA base.
In that vein, a much more modulated than usual ex-Obama era White House Chief of Staff and Chicago mayor Emanuel painted a bleak realpolitick picture of the world. Connecting a couple of other instances when Trump sunk to new lows to today and POTUS’ apparent reverence of Putin, the brother of Hollywood power player Ari Emanuel predicted a coming era of “proliferation,” where many nations start arming themselves with nuclear weapons as the U.S. retreats from its traditional
“What Trump has understood really better than anyone is the Attention Economy,” Zakaria stated, going straight to the point. “He knows how to dominate the narrative,” the CNN host went on to say. Unexpectedly, Zakaria got one of the biggest and most telling laughs of the show when he recommended that Zelensky promise Trump a giant Trump Tower in Kyiv and a shiny made up medal to get his way with the Republican and a good deal for Ukraine.
In a much more somber Real Time with Bill Maher in a much more somber America than usual, Emanuel summed up Trump 2.0 so far perfectly: “Five weeks that feels like five years.”
