President Donald Trump was not “some virus from outer space,” according to “Real Time” host Bill Maher. “He came from the Republican Party.”
During the Friday panel discussion with Rick Wilson, comedian Martin Short and The Washington Post‘s Catherine Rampell, Maher explained that Democrats now all of the sudden have these new friends who are part of the Never Trump crowd.
“He’s the logical end of the Reagan Revolution,” Maher explained. “He’s not an anomaly. He’s not an aberration. All the things that were in Trumpism were there. The racial dog whistles, the anti-intellectualism, the anti-science — he’s just the end of the road for that. And so, when I hear the anti-Trumpers I applaud but at the same time I go, ‘But there’s something in there we’re not really saying.’”
Rampell said that Trump is the most Republican of any Republican who was never actually a Republican to begin with.
Short claimed that Trump is more a product of reality television than anything else and described Trump as a “self-obsessed” man. Rampell disagreed with Shart’s claim that Trump was more a performer than a Republican claiming he wants to cut poverty programs and deport immigrants, but Short said for Trump it’s all about the “win.”
“He needs to win. He is not a well man,” Short said as Wilson agreed.
Wilson agreed with Maher’s assessment that the GOP was once a party of fiscal conservatism but it has fallen to more of a “buy now and pay later” party.
“For a long time there has been a kind of fantasy bubble that we’ve existed in as a party that we’re going to have all of these externalities that suddenly pay for everything,” Wilson said. “And it’s never really been a point of great responsibility for the Republican Party to say, ‘We’re going to pay for Medicare Part D because it will do these magical things and help people and all of these external economic effects will emerge.’”
He explained that the GOP has done a lot of talking about cutting taxes and spending but they do a terrible job at it. The consistently spend more. He went on to say his party has become irresponsible and Trump is a perfect example of it.
“You want rhetoric mismatched with performance — he’s your man,” Wilson blasted.
Short claimed that the real reason Trump exists is because the United States had an African-American president for eight years and ran a woman against him.
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