Bill Maher claims Trump is a 'criminal' but can't name his 'crimes'

Longtime comedian and HBO host Bill Maher drew ridicule after he stumbled over his own words, unable to define alleged crimes committed by Donald Trump just after he had accused the former president of being a "criminal." 

Maher's musings about Trump came on a Saturday episode of the Joe Rogan Experience during which he and Joe Rogan discussed both Joe Biden and the former president.

At one point in the discussion, after Rogan told Maher that he dislikes both Joe Biden's old age and poor condition of physical and mental health, Maher answered that while he agrees that Trump may have aged better, "he's a criminal. And he's crazy. Crazy and stupid are two different things."

Rogan asked Maher to elaborate, to which he replied, "Stupid is like, uh, Frederick Douglass is alive. Or, uh, the stealth bomber is literally invisible. Um, or nobody knew health care was hard to solve. That's just stupid. He's very stupid."

"Crazy, is like, it's important that the crowd at my inauguration was the biggest ever and I'm going to make an issue of this for the first two weeks of my presidency despite photographic evidence to the contrary. Or I'm going to steal these documents that I don't even know what they are and I don't care and I'm going to put them next to the toilet at Mar-a-Lago and then I'm going to fight you to take them back, or not conceding the election. Those things are crazy."

He continued, adding, "Or thinking I can somehow charm Kim Jong Un in Korea, although that might be stupid, sometimes it crosses the line between both. But he's both stupid and crazy. And he's a criminal..."

Maher then attempted to speak on the details of Trump's alleged criminal acts. This was where things began to go south for the HBO host.

"[Trump's] charged with actual crimes," Maher argued, before delivering a confused monologue shortly thereafter. "Criminal intent to obscure, uh, to, uh I forget what the actual name of the, uh, law is, but criminal intent to basically steal the election or to coerce people in the states from, umm, I forget what it is. And then there's one-uh forgery, which is - has to do with the electoral scheme. Uh, criminal intent... That's that's the slate of electors, he was putting forward the fake slate of electors."

Rogan then jumped in to read out the various charges Trump has received as part of his trial in Georgia. Maher responded by bashing Trump further.

Trump "tried every possible way to steal this election," Maher declared. "He tried to do it through the courts. He tried to do it through state legislatures. He tried to do it through intimidating Mike Pence. He tried to do it through the justice department. They talked about seizing voting machines. They talked about the using the army. I mean, you can't really believe that this guy is not worse than Joe Biden."

"I mean, I agree, Biden is not a great president," Maher said in the conclusion of this rant. "And the Hunter Biden stuff is a stinky conspiracy. It's not a conspiracy, it's a stinky scandal that stinks to the high heavens. If you think that that in any way compares to what Trump tried to do. You just cannot tell unlike things apart."

Later on in the show, Maher falsely attributed a quote to Donald Trump when he claimed that there is a record of him saying "I don't want people to know I lost this election." 

This falsehood was highlighted on X, where a user explained that Trump's quote about not wanting people to know he had lost was in regard to a 2020 election lawsuit, not the presidential race itself.