On Friday’s edition of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said people who wished for Donald Trump’s death are not good and argued that political violence would only make Trump a martyr. “The shoe’s on the other foot now,” Maher said about political violence. “I mean, it’s on both feet. But you’ve got to own this kind of rhetoric. And, you know, if you call Trump, this is why I was against this, he’s Hitler bullsh*t. I mean, if you really believe that he is a Hitler McPedophile, then you kind of have to kill him. That’s the mentality they have.”

BILL MAHER: He is a Pulitzer Prize winning opinion columnist for the New York Times. Bret Stephens is over here. A bearded Bret Stephens. And she’s the head of King’s College, Cambridge, and a columnist for the Financial Times. Gillian Tett. Okay. Well, let’s get the ugly news about the political violence out of the way first, because we have to talk about it. I’m just going to vomit my take on it, and then you can argue. I would just like to say, if you’re one of these people, and there’s many in this country who watched that and was disappointed the president wasn’t killed. See? [LAUGHTER] They’re laughing at that. You’re not a good person. Or a smart person. But definitely not a good person. I was reading this in your paper, an interview with Governor Pritzker of Illinois, and they asked him, like, well, what does the next president have to be? And he said, good, decent, and kind. Which, who can disagree with that? And certainly Trump has often not been good, decent, or kind. But he’s not Hitler. BRET STEPHENS, NEW YORK TIMES: You can’t say that you are fighting for democracy, or a believer in democracy, and at the same time excuse political violence as a mechanism for political change. It’s one or the other. And that’s the essence of our system, that it gives us the opportunity to change things through the will of the people, and not through the barrel of a gun. And people who don’t get that don’t understand the basis of the system they are supposedly championing. GILLIAN TETT, FINANCIAL TIMES: If you look at opinion polls, it’s scary how much a proportion of Gen Z are now saying that they support some form of political violence to express, you know, their opposition. And that’s got to change. I mean, that is simply not, as Bret says, the way to build a democracy. And it took King Charles to come over to America to essentially give a lecture about democracy. [APPLAUSE] And it was probably about the only lecture about democracy that President Trump, a.k.a. King Trump, would actually listen to. MAHER: You British really don’t want to let go of that democracy. TETT: I am both American and British. MAHER: You really, really don’t. TETT: I’m actually both. I swing both ways. I’m American and British. STEPHENS: When you mentioned Gen Z, I also think that it’s a function of an educational system that for way too long thought that censoriousness was a mechanism for social change, that telling people to shut up, that their views were wrong, that you could shout down speakers, that you could disinvite people from your campus. You didn’t have to listen to the other side. You could go and occupy a college campus because you believed in, say, Palestinian rights, and you wanted to champion globalizing the intifada. Eventually, that has consequences. I mean, there’s a reason why you’re seeing this kind of sense of permission among younger people for violent behavior, because if you think globalizing the intifada is like a cool slogan to chant, at some point, whether it’s the intifada or some other trendy political cause, someone in that group is going to believe it’s true, and they’re going to act on it. [APPLAUSE] TETT: And it’s not just universities. I mean, a lot of this is actually TikTok, YouTube, all the kind of social media that presents these very simple one-dimensional solutions and assume that you can basically treat life like a video game, and if you don’t like it, go bang, bang, and it’s over. MAHER: But some of the rhetoric is not just from TikTok. I get why that’s a sewer. But this is mainstream. I mean, it’s funny, because I remember when the shoe was on the other foot, and the liberals used to always say, and they were right to say it, that a lot of this very violent rhetoric that we hear on the left, it inspires the borderline personality to then do something. And they were right. I never thought they were wrong. But the shoe’s on the other foot now. I mean, it’s on both feet. But you’ve got to own this kind of rhetoric. And, you know, if you call Trump, this is why I was against this, he’s Hitler bullsh*t. I mean, if you really believe that he is a Hitler McPedophile, then you kind of have to kill him. That’s the mentality they have. TETT: Well, both sides. You’ve got extremists on both sides. And the tragedy is, most Americans, the majority of Americans actually are pretty centrist and don’t like either extremes. But the political system is pulling us both ways right now. STEPHENS: I think it’s true. And I don’t think that anyone who supports Trump and is horrified by the violence that they saw at the correspondence dinner, the two previous assassination attempts, they all have to take a big step back and ask themselves, how are they supporting a president whose tweets or social media posts, whose rhetoric is consistently trying to delegitimize his political opponents? Trump did it not with one Democratic president, President Obama calling into question his birth certificate, but with President Biden as well. And I just would like to ask people on the right, imagine if this had happened two or three years ago when President Biden was in office and the killer was some guy or the would-be assassin was some guy with a manifesto saying that Biden stole the election of 2020. Where would he have gotten that rhetoric? So, there needs to be a deep chill in terms of the way in which we speak about our political opponents. [APPLAUSE] TETT: But here’s the thing, Bret. I mean, you know, so I’m trained as a cultural anthropologist. And anthropologists pointed out that a lot of what… STEPHENS: That’s your first mistake. TETT: My first mistake, apparently, yeah. But there’s a lot of the rhetoric and stylistic, you know, performative approach that Trump has borrowed from the wrestling ring, if you look at how he’s actually presenting himself politically. And an awful lot of it is about calling each other names and stage managing this fake conflict like it’s a game. And so, in a wrestling ring, it’s fine. You can shout violence against each other, but then you take it to real life. MAHER: Excuse me, today we are talking about assassination, actually putting someone to death. What I’m saying here is that there is a problem with… Of course, whatever you just said about Trump is true, and everything he tweets out and everything. There is a little bit of a difference between that and people who think, we’re in a mess in this country. The way out of this mess is he dies. That’s what a lot of people think. And I’m just telling you, I don’t think you’re a good person there. I wouldn’t want to be that person who thinks that way. Also, it’s just not smart. You think that’s going to solve the problem? He would be a martyr, first of all. They tried… STEPHENS: J.D. Vance would be president. MAHER: Well, yeah. I mean, MAGA’s not going to die. They’d probably get — We tried impeaching. That didn’t work. We tried going to the courts. That didn’t work. The only way this actually works, it’s happening. His popularity is at the lowest level it is. Even among his core supporters are falling off. The only way this ends is at the ballot box. Like in Training Day, when Denzel goes to the neighborhood, and they’ve all turned on him. And he’s like, I’m King Kong up in here. And they’re like, no, you’re not anymore. That is the only way it actually ends… Once you start with Hitler, it’s like any time you do… We’ve seen it in many places in the world where they make someone into, whether it’s Rwanda or, you know, the Hutus saying the Tutsi were vermin. Or the Hutu… Somebody was vermin, I remember. The Tutsi were vermin.

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