Bill Maher would desperately like someone to “explain Herschel Walker” to him. On Friday night, the Real Time with Bill Maher host took not just the controversial football player-turned-senatorial candidate to task, but the Republican party that allowed his candidacy to happen, too. Maher pointed out how there have been lots of think pieces written over the last month about how backing a guy like Walker means Republicans “have lost all sense of integrity.” To which Maher’s response is: “Really? Just now?”
“Of course I could make a long string of jokes about how unfit for office Walker is,” Maher said, “and I think I will.” As he explained:
Where to begin? Well, first of all, he’s just a f**king idiot on a scale almost impossible to parody. Although we did once present his book, called Herschel Walker, Science Talker. Because he says things like, ‘If man descended from apes, why are there still apes?’
Then there’s the lying, and the crazy, and the violence. Not only did he write a book about having 12 different personalities — he wrote it with two other people.
He admits that he used to play Russian roulette. He used to threaten to blow his wife’s brains out a lot. And seems to have never met a family member he hasn’t threatened to kill. He threatened to kill his girlfriend and he stalked a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader — but that was just to get Ron DeSantis her boots.
Maher went on to suggest that one of Walker’s personalities might be Dr. Oz, given the body mist he tried to sell that he claimed would cure COVID. He also described the Donald Trump-backed candidate as “very pro-family — just not his,” given Walker’s own son’s recent comment about his dad having four kids with four different women and not being “in the house raising one of them.”
The big question for Maher, though, is why Republicans are continuing to push Walker on voters. “The easy answer is they’re deplorables, ignorant and bad, and yes there is some of that,” he said, though he refuses to “write off half the country” that easily. The way Maher sees it is that, “Part of the appeal of a Herschel Walker or a Donald Trump — or any number of egregious a**holes Republicans have backed — is, in their mind, the worse a candidate is, the more it says to Democrats: Do you see how much we don’t like what you’re selling?”
You can watch his full deep dive above.