Most Americans were likely too distracted by 24/7 political bickering to notice a feel-good truce in a pivotal YouTube moment.
Shockingly, this is not because the parties are further apart in ideology than at any time in the past half century and symptoms of Trump Delirium Syndrome (TDS) have spawned a fresh new anti-America wokeness in the last seven years.
A review is in order.
The pop culture diagnosis simply defined the syndrome as “Trump living rent-free” in his haters’ heads. However, conservative academia researched the cognitive conflict experienced by Democrat progressives about President Trump’s unanticipated 2016 victory which essentially produced —a political identity, identified by well-publicized, bizarre symptoms of TDS, including:
Thankfully however, centrist, or generally ethical news media platforms are becoming more prominent to help triage victims of America’s anti-Trump epidemic. Healing political news hosts include libertarian Tucker Carlson, who explained that “the left now opposes open democratic debates. They demand total conformity. They use censorship and threats to keep people in line.”
A news media personality who has not buckled to conformity in three decades is Emmy-award winning, “Politically Incorrect” comedian Bill Maher, who embraces his TDS, once famously begging for recession as a way to retaliate against Trump’s strong economy. Nevertheless, Maher has been a staunch critic of the self-righteous woke generation, TDS embracing or not, who hijacked the liberal Democrat identity.
Maybe after TDS Rehab (and a Venn diagram) Maher will merge his common sense worldview with that of relevant Trump strategies such as fighting wokeness in the education sector. Maher stated recently on his HBO “Real Time” show, “[Trump] says under his administration, schools will teach students to love their country, not to hate their country like they’re taught now,”
He remarked: “I gotta say, this one doesn’t bother me so much, because this is what I see when I see these progressive kids demonstrating for Hamas, the most illiberal people in the world, that ‘oh good, we’re going to give America its comeuppance; assh*le America.’ They kind of have been indoctrinated this way.” Thus, at his core, Maher, like Trump, is passionate about fending off totalitarianism and educating Americans with historical connections.
Specifically, Maher is helping to usher in a new dimension of “public intellectual” with his “Club Random” that promotes open and honest conversation (albeit tequila-infused) during intimate YouTube get-togethers. Recently his guest was close friend Roseanne Barr.
Considering that Roseanne favors President Trump but knowing that Maher still suffers from occasional Tourette-style bursts of TDS, what did Maher and Barr say exactly that produced a fleeting moment of bipartisan happiness which likely kicked off America’s TDS-Rehab?
Here is a snippet:
Here is the full video on YouTube:
To set the context, Maher was talking about how big a deal it was when presidents (such as the Clinton administration’s action on Serbia) bomb other countries.
Here is the Closed Caption script starting at 1:105.29
Maher: …You want the people in office to be sober, that’s why I like Biden, I-I’m not opposed to him--
Barr: You think Biden’s sober?
Maher: I-I’ve not opposed him being president, but he’s going to lose, he’s going to lose to Trump, who just next to Biden looks like James Brown at the Apollo, and he’s 77, but it’s just that, just one guy, just looks—the angrier Trump gets, the more he, uh, looks invigorated. He f***in’ killed it in his mug shot.
Barr: yeah he did…
Maher: He could not have done better in that mug shot, I got to give him that.
Barr: It was great. It said it all.
Maher: Killed it, it was ex—I mean you could give any other actor you could give hundred takes--
Barr: --the Greatest Show on Earth--
Maher: --any other super model, and they couldn’t have nailed it, and he only got one take (snaps fingers) and he did that!
Barr: It was perfect.
Maher: And it was exactly the look he wanted. Andrew Sullivan said he was “trolling the Constitution” ……..is he still your boy? (Fumbling in ice bucket to make a drink)
Barr: Who?
Maher: Trump!
Barr: Oh my God, you’re not going there…now you’re trying—gonna--to pick another fist fight between us.
Maher: No…(fixing a drink). No I’m just asking, you think I give a sh*t? You think—you--it’s not going to affect my love for you. That’s the whole point—not the whole point but one of the main points of doing this thing we’re doing here, I love to talk with people who I don’t agree with….
Barr: Me too…!
Maher/Barr: (talking over each other) Yes! We should all be able to talk to each other. Exactly And still come away with—
Barr: That’s the f***in’ point…of America. Long may it wave.
The discussion ambled to a friendly debate about whose facts were correct but reached agreement about how crazy people were ‘out there.’
However, the best part of all was that Maher and Barr enjoyed some things together — not the Republican things that people love about President Trump like the closed border, and the fossil fuel economy, but the things that are emotional deal-breakers for a traditional liberal, such as Trump absolutely KILLING it with his mug shot in – just imagine--only one take!! And Trump at 77 years of age, next to Biden, looks like Jim Brown at the Apollo, which all made perfect sense if this was going to be successful TDS-Rehab for Americans because what was Brown’s signature song? “I feel good!”
Marie Hembree, M.A. Ph.D. (ABD) is an Academic Success instructor in Title One schools and an academic journalist in California completing a dissertation in the Communication discipline.
Image: Twitter screen shot