Bill Maher Wants You to Suffer | The American Spectator

On Friday night, Bill Maher sat there, smug as ever, flashing the grin that has carried him through three decades on television. Midway through the show, the man who built his brand on skewering politicians and pricking pomposity leaned back in his chair and declared that a recession would be good for America. Why? Because, in his view, it’s the only way people will turn on Donald Trump.

He said it like he was talking about a traffic jam. Annoying, inconvenient, but nothing fatal. A brief slowdown on the road, he suggested, not a pile-up that leaves bodies on the pavement. Recessions aren’t so bad, he assured his audience. Nobody starves, nobody really suffers. Just an “adjustment,” like tightening a belt after dinner. And the audience chuckled. Because that’s what audiences do when the host winks at them. But the words stuck. Careless, callous words from a man so disconnected from real life he mistakes misery for a punchline.

Maybe nobody he knows starves. But in every recession there are people who do. Not just hunger in the stomach, but the gnawing hunger of families sliding from dignity to despair. People lose jobs. They lose their homes. They lose their families. Some lose their minds. And yes, they lose their lives. To wish for that is not a clever political jab. It’s an admission that other people’s pain is worth the entertainment. Worth the hope that a president he despises might fall.

You have to wonder if Maher remembers 2008. Not in theory, not in a stock market chart, but in the faces of men and women who carried cardboard boxes out of office towers, wondering how to pay the mortgage next month. Or in the eyes of teenagers who watched their parents’ marriages crack under the strain. Divorce lawyers thrived in those years. So did therapists and drug dealers. A whole industry of sorrow sprang up in the shadow of that “downturn.” Tell a man who hung himself in the garage that nobody starved. Tell the waitress who worked three jobs and never got her kids through college.

This is the luxury of the well-padded. Maher has a fortune of at least $140 million by conservative estimates. He can buy the dip, ride it out, keep the wine flowing while the rest of the country buckles. For him, a recession is a blip on a stock chart. For millions, it’s a wrecking ball. He knows this, of course. He’s not stupid. But knowing and caring are different things. Knowing and wishing are colder still.

And he has wished for it more than once. The line is not new. In 2019, he said the very same thing. The hope is that the pain of the many will translate into the downfall of the one. But the one he hates won’t feel it. Trump won’t line up at a food bank. Trump won’t pawn jewelry to keep the lights on. It’s the ordinary people, the same ones Maher claims to champion, who will carry the burden. That’s the ugly truth of his wish.

Some might say it’s only a throwaway line, a bit of theater for the HBO stage. But words betray the mind that speaks them. Jokes reveal the instincts we can’t quite dress up. Maher’s instinct is to gamble with other people’s lives if it gets him the ending he wants. It’s a revolting kind of elitism, cloaked in satire. He thinks he’s speaking truth to power. In reality, he’s sneering at the powerless.

This is not about Trump, not really. It’s about the contempt so many of the wealthy and comfortable feel for those beneath them. Maher’s words are a window into a class of elites who treat economic suffering like an abstraction, a line on a chart, a theory to bat around in a studio. They measure hardship in percentages, not in nights spent staring at the ceiling, wondering how to cover rent. They talk of recessions as “corrections,” “cycles,” “recalibrations” — the sanitized language of people who will never feel the bite.

But behind every tidy euphemism is a life spiraling into the abyss. Behind every downturn is a father quietly skipping meals so his children can eat. A mother counting out coins at the pharmacy, deciding which prescription she can afford and which she must go without. A teenager shelving college dreams to work at a warehouse because the family savings evaporated overnight. A man numbing himself with cheap whiskey and pills because he can’t face another day of rejection letters. These are not abstractions.

And that is why Maher matters here — not because he said something new, but because he said aloud what many in his world already believe. He is the unfiltered voice of a class that cloaks indifference in irony, cruelty in comedy. To them, misery is bearable so long as it belongs to someone else.

Maher once prided himself on being a contrarian, a man willing to say what others would not. But the contrarian has grown lazy. There’s nothing daring about sneering at suffering from behind the velvet rope. What takes courage is empathy, and empathy doesn’t come easy when your world is insulated by money. So he tosses off the wish again and again, daring the economy to break, daring millions to fall if only it delivers him the headline he craves. To wish for recession is to wish for misery. And no amount of laughter in a television studio can hide that truth.

READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:

Academia’s Most Lucrative Con

Gay No More