Bill Maher Challenges Al Gore on Comparing Trump Administration to Nazis

Bill Maher took on former Vice President Al Gore after Gore stirred controversy by likening the Trump administration to the Nazis during a recent speech in San Francisco. Gore, speaking at a Climate Week event, referenced the "emergent evil" of Hitler's Third Reich, saying there were crucial lessons to be learned from that dark chapter in history.

During an interview on Maher's show, Maher didn't hold back. "Nazis is a hard word to use with nuance," he told Gore. According to Maher, bringing up Nazis is like calling someone the "GOAT of evil"—and that’s not a term you just toss around at the dinner table.

Gore defended his comments, pointing out that his comparison was more philosophical than direct. He cited German philosophers who, after World War II, studied how societies fall into moral decay. The first misstep, Gore explained, was when truth starts taking a back seat to the pursuit of power. He argued that the spread of misinformation—like blaming Ukraine for the war with Russia, denying climate change, or claiming windmills cause cancer—shows a dangerous disregard for facts, a trend he fears is gaining steam in American politics.

But Maher pushed back, warning that labeling Trump supporters as Nazis doesn’t just miss the mark—it practically guarantees they’ll tune out any further argument. He said, "When people think you hate them so much, even the money goes out the window." Maher added that the polarization has reached such heights, it’s like people can’t even sit down for a meal together anymore. Dinner invitations have apparently become just as fraught as political debates.

Maher has made it clear in the past that he’s no fan of comparing Trump and his base to Nazis. In fact, he recently called out comedian Larry David for satirizing his own meeting with Trump at the White House in a New York Times piece titled "My Dinner with Adolf." Maher’s stance is simple: "The minute you play the Hitler card, you've lost the argument." He insisted that, despite his own longstanding criticism of Trump, invoking Hitler and the Nazis is both historically insensitive and strategically self-defeating.

Wrapping things up, Maher stressed that the atrocities of Hitler and the Nazis belong to a unique and horrific chapter of history—and that comparisons should be made with extreme caution. In his words, "Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil, and we're just going to have to, I think, leave it like that."