Maher to Democrats: Instead Of Conjuring Up A New Joe Rogan, Ask Yourself How You Lost “The Old One”
HBO “Real Time” host Bill Maher encouraged Democrats to win back people like Joe Rogan or Elon Musk instead of trying to create their own version.
BILL MAHER: And finally, new rule, it’s never too early to strategize. Democrats have been having a lot of donor retreats lately where liberal strategists hold idea-thons, where they try to figure out why they keep losing elections. You know, apart from using words like idea-thon. And now one idea that’s getting a lot of attention is the Dems need to find their Joe Rogan, a liberal Joe Rogan, because that’s why Kamala lost. Most Republicans have a podcast. Okay, maybe. Or you could consider this. Instead of conjuring up a new Joe Rogan, ask yourself why you lost the old one. Because he used to be on your side. He smokes pot on the air. I don’t think he’s that much of a far-right ideologue. I don’t think his mind is completely inflexible. His neck, yes, but not his mind. And he’s expressed unease with some things Trump is doing, as has a certain disgruntled former employee named Elon Musk, who, like Joe, is another guy who five years ago was thought of as a liberal, but got driven into the other camp by bad attitudes and bad ideas, a reversal I completely understand, although I would never emulate. I also see the woke mind virus. I just don’t jump from frying pans into fires. But I watched the evolution of both these guys. This didn’t happen overnight. In 2022, before he owned Twitter, Elon tweeted this chart depicting how he felt about the liberal side having shifted so much that it left a basically liberal centrist like him now labeled a conservative. I related. I related to the kind of mean girl shit you get from the cool kids in Wokeville when you’re perceived that way. They tried real hard to cancel Rogan a few years ago. And when Elon hosted Saturday Night Live in 2021, well before he was a Trumper, some of the cast members gave him the cold shoulder for the sin of being rich. You think people don’t remember when you do this shit to them that it’s not going to have blowback? Now, me, again, you don’t have to win me back because I never left. But all the guys in America like Joe and Elon, yeah, you do have to win them back. The good news is you can. Elon has gone from saying, I love Donald Trump as much as a straight man can love another man to a week ago saying, I’m a little stuck in a bind here, I don’t want to speak against the administration, but I also don’t want to take responsibility for everything they’re doing. And now I have proof he’s in the Epstein files. OK, I think we call that a gettable voter, someone who’s mulling a change. Maybe this will put quietness to the nonsense that Elon and Rogan, too, went to the dark side. I hear that all the time. They went to the dark. Yeah, like they got that The Last of Us fungal infection and became zombies. No, they just got driven away because that’s how politics works these days. One side gets elected precisely because the other side was just in power and pushed their agenda way too far and drove people in the opposite direction. The pendulum swings back and forth with people not voting for anything, but just to get rid of the latest extremist assholes who tried to remake America in their image instead of just governing. Well, right now, it’s the Republicans who are the very definition of drunk with power and also sometimes just drunk. But the drunk with power part, that’s what Democrats should pay attention to because you know who’s easy to beat in a fight? A drunk. Really, I’ve done it. Now, I was also drunk, so it was a draw. But the point is, Trump owns the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president. Only 39% approve of his handling of the economy, which was always his forte. You know, it’s not like anyone was asking for tariffs. Do you think the bros and the bras, you think they want to pay $ 150 more for a PlayStation? You think they want the government to ban abortion and ban pornography and do lots of other far-right stuff that’s in the Project 2025 blueprint? Please, their project for 2025 is trying to get laid. Yeah, it’s not just Democrats who aren’t really digging Trump, too. Adding trillions more dead is not sitting well, and even the likes of Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiro have called out the corruption. Even the deporting of illegals, which America generally supports, is pissing people off now. I read a story last week about this town of Kennet, Missouri, where just about everyone voted for Trump. But now it’s pissed because ICE removed their favorite waitress, a beloved local mother of three named Carol Hue, currently facing deportation back to Hong Kong. One local woman said, No one voted to deport moms. We were all under the impression we were just getting rid of the gangs. This is Carol. Yeah. Well, yeah. When you elect a bull to run through the china shop, sometimes the china that gets broken is you. Republicans have taken full advantage of how snobby and out of touch Democrats have become to claim the title of party of the working class. But Trump’s big, beautiful budget cuts Medicaid by $ 723 billion. Steve Bannon says a lot of MAGA is on Medicaid. Yeah, it is. Forty-two percent of MAGA voters say Medicaid is important to them. Let’s see if they miss it.
