Joy Behar says MAGA hats ‘might as well’ have ‘swastikas’ on them

The panelist's statement received pushback later in the show from guest Bill Maher, who suggested it wasn't a great idea to paint half the country as Nazis.

At the end of the panel's discussion about a since-deleted video posted to the Trump campaign's social media that appeared to use a video template mimicking vintage newspapers from the time of World War I and II and briefly flashed a newspaper headline mentioning a "unified Reich," Behar launched into her attack on MAGA hat-wearing Americans.

"By the way out there," she said, "that hat that you keep wearing, that red hat that says 'Make America Great Again,' that tells people that you go along with this, so you might as well just put a swastika on the hat."

As the BBC reports, the Trump campaign later explained that the clip had been posted by a junior staff member, and was not an official video.

"I'm not gonna defend Donald Trump, ever, but I would never say that we should put the swastika on the cap because I think you can hate Donald Trump, [but] you can't hate everybody who likes him," Bill Maher said later on in the episode, referencing Behar's comments.

"It's half the country," he added. "I don't want to live in a country where I hate half the country, and I don't hate half the country."

"Joy is a wonderful human being and she should not be afraid that people are going to attack her because she said the thing about the swastika on the cap," Maher said later on, turning to her. "As you said to me in the break, you do not think that all the people who are for Trump are Nazis."