“They made a Faustian deal with the racist devil years ago and now those chickens are coming home to roost,” he said of the party bracing for the prospect of having Trump as its presidential nominee, while also mocking House Speaker Paul Ryan for claiming that the GOP “does not prey on peoples’ prejudices.”
“What about voter ID laws?” Maher asked. “What about once defending the guy who gets shot, the black guy, instead of the cop. Who are they kidding? This is the party they are and Trump is just the latest.”Conservative author Matt Lewis tried to argue that Trump did not represent the party as a whole, pointing to Ryan, Sen. Marco Rubio and himself as people who represent a “solutions-based” conservative philosophy.
VIDEO COURTESY OF HBO
Trump, Lewis said, was the product of a dumbing down of the GOP, who had injected “white identity politics” into his platform.
Maher scoffed at Lewis’ argument, saying that Trump’s ideas are actually “very not new.”
“It was called the Southern Strategy when Nixon did it,” Maher argued. “Reagan started his campaign in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It’s always been a winking campaign to get white people, mostly, who have a resentment to vote racially. Let’s not pretend this is new.”“I would say that the Republican Party — at least if you look at the people who are running for president — are much more diverse,” Lewis fired back.
“The two Hispanics want to put other Hispanics on cattle carts and throw them out of the country,” Maher replied.
Blogger-In-Chief
