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Libertarian magician Penn Jillette, appearing on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher tonight, had nothing good to say about his old TV near-boss Donald Trump. “I know Donald Trump,” said Jillette, a 2012 Celebrity Apprentice contestant, “and whatever you think about Donald Trump, he’s worse than that.”
Jillette, sans his longtime ponytail, found one nice thing to say about the president, though. “The only good thing about Donald Trump is he’s getting really nothing done,” Jillette offered. “He’s said horrible things and filling people with hate, but he’s not getting much done and that is actually good news. If he knew what he was doing he’d be terrible.”
Democrat Gavin Newsom, Lt. Governor of California, seemed to share the sentiment. “If you game this thing out and get rid of Trump,” Newsom said about the Russia investigation, “you’re left with a problem – and that’s Mike Pence.” Despite Maher’s loud objection that Pence is preferable to Trump, Newsom said the conversion-therapy-favoring Evangelical VEEP poses a bigger threat “from a legislative perspective.”
The Jillette-Newsom convergence wasn’t the only moment of unusual unity on tonight’s episode. Jillette said that after listening to Maher’s first guest, Democratic Senator Al Franken, he was struck by the realization that “a year ago I would have had a zillion things to disagree with.” It seems Trump, in at least that way, is a uniter not a divider.
Top-of-show guest Franken, for his part, spent no time rejoicing over today’s White House departure of Steve Bannon, telling Maher that “the problem with this administration is Trump, and it’s going to continue.” (Watch the Franken interview above).
“I don’t think he changes,” Franken said.
Later in the show, conservative analyst Amy Holmes decried what’s happened at Bannon’s new home, Breitbart News. She said her old friend, the website’s late founder Andrew Breitbart, “would have been appalled” by the alt-right’s co-opting of the outlet. “He himself was Jewish, and he had an adopted Asian sister,” Holmes said, at another point noting that today’s polo-shirt-wearing neo-Nazis “are the same old poison in a new bottle” that beat up Geraldo Rivera on camera all those years ago.
