Bill Maher warned that President Donald Trump is “slow-moving” a coup that will go “a lot smoother than the last one.”
Maher—joined by journalist Frank Bruni, neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, and conservative activist Christopher Rufo—ripped into liberals for being too sensitive on the Friday broadcast of Real Time With Bill Maher on HBO.
Instead, Maher cautioned, Democrats should be focusing their energies on stopping Trump’s “slow-moving coup,” which could shut liberals out from running the federal government as Trump consolidates Republican power.
“Let me just describe some of the steps—and you tell me if I’m being paranoid,” Maher said. “First, create a masked police force. Get people used to looking at that. Normalize snatching people off the street. Get them used to looking at that. Normalize seeing the National Guard and the military on the street.”
Then, Maher added, “Start talking about crime in the capital, which has always been a fairly crime-ridden city.”
Trump deployed federal agents and the National Guard across Washington, D.C., after a local carjacking left Edward “Big Balls” Coristine, a former employee of the Department of Government Efficiency, bloodied.
“We’re not playing games,” Trump said Thursday as he thanked National Guard troops from one of D.C.’s most crime-ridden neighborhoods, the Associated Press reported. “We’re going to make it safe. And we’re going to then go on to other places.”
Trump’s use of federal force has been met with outrage by Democrats, who rebuked the Republican president’s actions as overreach.
“I’m deeply offended, as someone who’s actually worn the uniform, that he would use the lives of these men and women and the activation of these men and women as political pawns,” Maryland Gov. Wes Moore told the AP.
Yet the New York Post reported that Trump is already planning to repeat his deployment of federal forces in Chicago and New York City.
“People in Chicago … are screaming for us to come. They’re wearing red hats,” Trump said Friday in the Oval Office. “African-American ladies, beautiful ladies, they are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago. Please.’ I did great with the black vote, as you know, and they want something to happen.”
He added, “So I think Chicago will be our next [stop] and then we’ll help with New York.”
On Real Time, Maher said the militarization of U.S. cities could be how Trump puts the systems in place to maintain control of the presidential election process.
“So, you have, in the capital, a sort of permanent police presence,” Maher said. “So when an election dispute might come up, just hypothetically—I mean, I don’t want to be a big pessimist. And I’m going to pretend, for the rest of the duration, that the Democrats do have a chance of winning, and they might win the next election.”
He added, “I just don’t think they’re ever going to take power. Because this is what’s going to happen. Because I think this coup is going to go off a lot smoother than the last one.”
Rufo heralded Trump’s actions as a success, citing a drop in crime, including murder, across the city for the week.
Yet Bruni pushed back on such actions being a real sustainable solution for America, though he admitted there is too much crime in the nation’s capital.
“I don’t think one week proves anything,” he said. “I would love to meet the statistician who would extrapolate from one week and say this is a sustainable solution.”
Maher cut in to say they all seem to be missing the point.
“I am just going to reiterate the one thing I think is being passed over here,” Maher said. “He is creating an army in the nation’s capital. I just think the presence now of this army in Washington is going to have its toll taken when the next election comes around.”
The post Bill Maher Sounds Alarm on Trump’s Terrifying ‘Slow-Moving Coup’ appeared first on The Daily Beast.
