“Real Time” host Bill Maher said he was considering quitting his political talk show because he couldn’t handle another Donald Trump presidency.
“I’m s—ting my pants. I may quit,” Maher told his guest, actress and activist Jane Fonda, on his “Club Random” podcast on Sunday. “Because I don’t want to do another [Trump term].”
Maher boasted how he had warned Trump was a “con man” before the rest of the left started calling the President-elect a “threat to democracy.”
“I did all the Trump stuff before anybody,” he continued. “I’ve done it…I’m bored with it.”
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Fonda asked Maher if he could pivot to something else and not cover Trump instead.
“The show is the politics. There is no other thing!” Maher replied. “And he’s going to dominate the news like he always does.”
Maher and Fonda went on to clash several times in the podcast over their disagreements about the prominence and problems the far-left posed to the Democratic Party.
Maher, who has characterized himself as an “old school” liberal, argued with the far-left Fonda about regulations in California, gender ideology in schools, racism in America and how to address climate change.
Fonda, who has been arrested for her climate activism, insisted that strong environmental regulations were needed because “we live in a soup of toxic chemicals” and “if we don’t regulate it, we’re all going to die of cancer.”
“That’s true,” Maher said, before arguing that many regulations were also not necessary.
“You really don’t believe the state we live in California is lacking regulations. There’s over 300,000 regulations,” he said.
“Well, maybe they’re needed,” Fonda replied.Â
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After sharing how he had to have three inspections in order to install a new garage door in his house, Maher complained California was over-regulated and over-taxed with “no checks on that sort of extreme leftism.”
Fonda disagreed, saying she didn’t know California had this reputation.
“I don’t for a minute consider California a state that is extreme leftist. Not at all. Not any way,” she said.Â
The pair continued to spar after Maher called the NAACP “far left” for issuing a travel advisory to Florida for Black Americans last year, after Gov. Ron DeSantis banned funding for diversity, equity and inclusion programs at Florida’s public universities.
“There’s stories like that, that just makes people roll their eyes and go, ‘Are you people nuts?’” he said before giving another example of progressives claiming men can “get pregnant.”Â
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“I understand that a trans woman can get pregnant. That’s different than a man getting pregnant. And the way they sort of like insist on blurring that line is if that’s some sort of reasonable social cause as opposed to just being for having full rights, respect and protection for trans people?” he said.
“I’ve never heard about men getting pregnant,” Fonda shot back, saying Maher’s was blowing out of proportion the “miniscule” amount of influence the far left had on the culture.
They also clashed over their ideas on how to address climate change, with Fonda warning that Americans needed to cut all our emissions in half immediately to avoid an impending climate crisis. She argued that solar and wind, not “digging, fracking and mining,” were the real solutions to solving this crisis.
But Maher was critical of Fonda’s suggestions, saying that radical clean energy measures were unlikely to get passed by lawmakers and that doomsday predictions about the end of the earth being near had come and passed several times before.
After several rounds of disagreement on political issues, Fonda told Maher she didn’t believe they had a lot in common.Â
“Your worldview is just so totally different than mine,” she said.
