Iconoclast playwright David Mamet ripped HBO TV host and podcaster Bill Maher in a no holds barred discussion on politics, the 2020 elections, Joe Biden, women in sports, and more.
Joining Maher on his Club Random podcast, Mamet, who has steadily veered to the political right over the last decade or so and has been a supporter of President Donald Trump, was not prepared to let Maher slide by and in many cases the dramatist too k the fight right to Maher’s doorstep.
The pair got right to their opposition early in the podcast when Maher claimed that the so-called “insurrection” on Jan. 6, 2020, started because Trump refused to concede the election to Joe Biden. Maher said that Trump ” inspired people to riot, Mamet asked how he did that, and Maher replied, “By not conceding the election.”
“Oh, come on!” the Glen Gary-Glen Ross writer retorted. “So, he didn’t say the words ‘I concede’ and that meant people rioted?”
“It was about people who did not hear their leader say, as every other leader in this country has said after an election, ‘Okay, I lost. We welcome the new guy. We had disagreements, but now we’re all Americans,'” Maher exclaimed. “When Obama took over, George Bush stood by next to him and he said, ‘We want you to succeed, because when you succeed…’ Trump didn’t do any of that.”
“Okay. So what?” Mamet asked.
“So what? It inspires half the country to not accept the basic democratic principle that we have elections, and when you lose, you go away and then you become the loyal opposition. They’re not — they don’t see themselves as the loyal oposition…,” Maher replied.
“Look, you, like me, have built a career out of nothing except talent and a little bit a luck and a lot of hard work,” Mamert said. “But you’re full of sh*t. What I don’t understand, when you say that he did not say the words ‘I concede’ caused half the country — which you just said — to riot.”
Mamet firmly believes that the 2020 election was rigged against Donald Trump.
The conversation then turned to Joe Biden’s physical and mental incapacities when Mamet asked Maher what he thought of the question. But Maher said he didn’t think Biden was incapacitated at all.
“He wasn’t out of his mind and demented for four years,” Maher insisted. “He probably wasn’t out of his mind or demented even on the last day. He just did The View. Did the Democrats do a horrible thing in propping him up and keeping him in office and trying to run him again? Yeah, they did,” Maher said.
The pair ultimately ended their conversation on politics with the realization that there was just no way they were going to agree.
The pair also got into a discussion over whether our 16th president was a closeted gay man.
“So, what Lincoln gay?” Maher asked, to which Mamet replied, “Well, probably.”
But Mamet also pointed out that the whole issue of who is or isn’t gay has become so absurd. “It became part of an American culture, and it started with biography, to say oh who did what with his dick, right, as if that was important.”
Mamet then noted that writers who are really only interested in gay issues and not actual history decided that Lincoln’s letters to his former law partner, Joshua Speed, were somehow telling that he and Speed were gay lovers.
“[Lincoln] wrote a lot of letters to Joshua Speed which are at the Lincoln Library somewhere and they’re very loving letters, right? And so, some guys who were interested in gay history have always said ‘Oh the letters might say this or letters might say that but I’ll bet you there’s another letter where the whole thing comes out of the closet.'”
Of course, many of the claims that Lincoln was gay are based on the fact that Lincoln and Speed lived in the same residence in the 1830s ahead of Abe’s presidency. But, in those days men often resorted to living with other men because of financial concerns. Indeed, that was common up until the 1960s during our modern times. Lincoln later placed Speed’s brother, James, in his second cabinet as the U.S. Attorney General.
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