Bill Maher addressed the shooting at a rally for Donald Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, on Saturday, July 13, in which the presidential candidate was injured in what the FBI is investigating as an assassination attempt.
“I unequivocally denounce [the shooting], I don’t care what you think about that,” Maher said at the start of his comedy show that evening in Minneapolis, Minnesota. “Not funny. I’m sure that there will be jokes that people will make because they hate him so much, about they wished it went the other way. Not for me.”
That afternoon, a shooter fired multiple shots toward Trump during the rally, leaving the politician bloodied. Trump later said on a Truth Social post that a shot had pierced his right ear. According to The New York Times, a spectator was also killed in the shooting, and the Secret Service said its personnel had killed the suspected shooter, identified as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks of Bethel Park, Pennsylvania.
The opening of my comedy show last night a few hours after the shooting if anyone wants to know my thoughts…. pic.twitter.com/bMov0INLEr
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) July 14, 2024
“Whoever did this, whoever was the shooter has done so much damage to the left,” Maher said during his show Saturday evening. “[The left] has lost a lot moral high ground in the ‘you’re the violent people’ and the ‘liberals don’t shoot people, liberals don’t solve it that way’ [argument].”
(The motives behind Saturday’s attack are unclear, as are Crooks’ political leanings. Crooks was registered to vote as a Republican, but a $15 donation in the name of Thomas Crooks was made to a Democratic-aligned political action committee in 2021, according to CNN.)
Maher continued: “The 2025 Project, that is the sort of plank of the Republican Party … the guy who wrote that, he said, ‘This is our new plank.’ He said, ‘This is our new revolution for America,’ which I’ve heard a thousand times … Everybody says there’s a new revolution. But they don’t always say what this guy said, which is, he added, ‘It’ll be bloodless, as long as the liberals let it happen.’ OK, that’s not cool either. This s**t has got to stop, because none of this violence happens in a vacuum.”
The Real Time host added that he’s glad that Trump is OK, and he called the former star of The Apprentice “the luckiest motherf**ker that has ever walked the face of the Earth.”
He went on: “MAGA nation finally has its full martyr. They loved it when he went to jail, the mugshot. I gotta say, he’s insane and a criminal. But that mugshot? F**king nailed it. Perfect. And he [reacted to the shooting] like he rehearsed it! Take one! Take one! There will be idiot conspiracy theorists who will say, ‘Oh yeah, they planned it.’ … He gets grazed, and the other guy gets [killed] — that’s so Trump. But you know, it’s going to work for him. I can see the memes now. … Biden can’t get through a debate, and a bullet can’t stop Donald Trump. It almost doesn’t matter who the Democrats put up now.”