Bill Maher has tried in recent months to say nice things about anti-vaccines conspiracy theorist and secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but on Friday’s “Real Time,” he revealed those days are over.
“The knives are out for Bobby Kennedy, and I gotta say, I’m with the knives,” Maher said.
That comment came at the end of his monologue, during which he discussed a lot of recent Donald Trump-related news, which led him to joke that the president has so thoroughly wrecked things that the CDC has been renamed to just the thing the D stands for.
First though, he brought up Friday’s new jobs report, which was not good.
“There’s a new jobs report. Only 22,000 jobs. 22,000? Diddy hired more than that for a party,” Maher joked.
After the report, Maher continued, “everyone was worried about their job, especially the guy who wrote the Report.”
This was of course a reference to last month, when Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, after after the organization issued a disappointing jobs report. Trump falsely claimed that the report was “rigged,” and he’s nominated a loyalist for the job who, it was reported Friday, has a history of bigoted social media posts.
But back to Maher, who briefly brought up the ICE raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia, and then moved on to Trump’s attempt to illegally change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
“We are at war with a lot of people. We are. We’re at war with so many people. We’re changing the name of the Department of Defense at the Department of War… It was originally called the Department of War under George Washington, yeah. And then at some point we changed to the Department of Defense, so it doesn’t look like we’re looking for one. Trump going back to the Department of War. He said it sends a message that we are ‘fierce warriors.’ And then he went back to his Twitter spat with Rosie O’Donnell,” Maher joked.
Then Maher brought up the military attack on Venezuelan citizens Trump claims were drug smugglers (likely a violation of international and American law).
“They said it was involved in the drug trade. Okay? There are countries in the region that are involved in the drug trade. I’m in Mexico, obviously Colombia. I seem to remember people calling cocaine Peruvian marching powder. Okay, so. But Venezuela, not one of them. But Venezuela is our only true rival in the Miss Universe contest,” Maher joked. “We’ve won it eight times. They’ve won it seven times. This is something I think the President is very interested in. This is why he hates Venezuela so much they stole our pageant secrets, like, like, just, how do you make a 19 year old look like she’s 40?”
Then Maher brought up the meeting between several global despots during the week, as well as China’s huge military parade. “Trump tweeted out, it looks like we’ve lost India and Russia to deepest, darkest China. What do you mean? We white man,” Maher joked. “I love when he forgets he’s the president and just reacts to everything on the world stage like, oh, look what happened.”
“So to recap, China had the scariest military parade ever. And America is changing our stationary, the Department of Defense is now the Department of War. Oh, also the Justice Department will now be the Bureau of revenge. The State Department is now just Marco Rubio [at] AOL, and the Centers for Disease Control is now just disease. Oh, yeah, but the knives are out for Bobby Kennedy, and I gotta say, I’m with the knives,” Maher continued. Then he took a brief look at Kennedy’s congressional appearance this week, before starting the show proper.