“Real Time” host Bill Maher appeared shocked by MSNBC’s softball interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, taking a swipe at his recent guest Stephanie Ruhle.
“Working to shore up [Harris’] vulnerabilities, there has been a lot of pressure on her. She doesn’t do interviews. She doesn’t answer [questions]- so she sat for an interview. She said ‘Ok, I will answer your hardball questions.’ So she went on MSNBC,” Maher quipped during his opening monologue Friday night.
“There were not-hardball questions, but I still expected not them to be rubbing her feet,” the liberal host added, sparking laughs from his audience.
Ruhle appeared on “Real Time” just days before she landed the interview with the vice president where she defended Harris not answering tough policy questions.
“Kamala Harris is not running for perfect. She’s running against Trump,” Ruhle said to Maher. “We have two choices. And so there are some things you might not know her answer to. And in 2024, unlike 2016 for a lot of the American people, we know exactly what Trump will do, who he is and the kind of threat he is to democracy.”
The MSNBC host repeatedly fawned over Harris following her exclusive interview.Â
“What I didn’t hear from her was divisive language,” Ruhle told her MSNBC colleague Nicolle Wallace. “Imagine if I was sitting against Donald Trump, imagine the language he would be using, please! And just the fact that we were talking about collaborative inclusivity — I don’t know. Vote for her or don’t vote for her, but isn’t it great to just have a positive conversation right now?”
Ruhle admitted that Harris didn’t answer a question about how she would get the funding for her ambitious economic agenda without Congress, but quickly defended her by saying Trump would “balloon” the deficit “significantly bigger than Vice President Harris will.”
She went on to say it’s “okay” for Harris not to offer specifics about her policy proposals and shrugged off the non-answers as her simply being a “politician.”Â
“It’s complicated, right?” Ruhle exclaimed. “We’re a country of 330 million people, our economy is complicated. In the same way — is the economy good or bad? It totally depends! So tariffs, if used in the right places, can work. And one could watch that and say, ‘Well, she didn’t give a clear, direct answer.’ That’s okay, because we are not talking about clear or direct issues.”
