Maher on Trump’s second term: ‘I’m not gonna pre-hate anything’

Comedian Bill Maher declared, with the second Trump administration set to enter the White House later this month, he is not “gonna pre-hate anything,” saying in an interview that he will “hope for the best.” But if something “serious” occurs, he will discuss it on air.

“I’m not going to chase every rabbit down the hole like I did the first term,” Maher said during his Friday appearance on CNN’s “The Lead" about President-elect Trump.

“He’s a kooky guy who says a lot of kooky things, and I’m just not going to pre-hate anything. I’m just going to hope for the best, and then when something serious happens, I’ll comment on that,” he told CNN anchor Jake Tapper.

Maher, a vocal critic of Trump, has previously said that things may get worse for voters if the Republican candidate triumphs in the 2024 presidential election. The comedian predicted he would lose to Vice President Harris in November last year. Trump ended up winning and sweeping all seven battleground states.

Following the election, he was critical of Democrats, saying the party lost both chambers of Congress and the White House, in part, because of their “aggressively anti-common sense agenda.”

Maher said on Friday that he will do a monologue every week during his HBO “Real Time” show, discussing Trump’s recent ideas, including talk about buying Greenland and making Canada the country's 51st state.

“That’s perfect for comedy, but I’m not going to take it seriously,” he said on CNN.

Maher also doubled down on his previous claims that President Biden is too old to serve as commander-in-chief and that he needed to exit the 2024 presidential race sooner to allow for an open Democratic National Convention.

“I felt like I had standing to make that case because I had for so many years been the only person on television who was consistently railing against ageism. I have been saying for years ageism is the last allowable prejudice that we can have in this country,” Maher stated on Friday.

“You can always do the age jokes, you can always rail on people for being too old and it was as I said, a case-by-case basis. Some people at 70 act like they are 100 years old and some are like 40-year-old,” he added. “But this was a case, ok, where Biden was too old.”

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