Bill Maher Isnt High on Trump: The State of Free Speech in a New Era
BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — It was Nov. 12, and Bill Maher was about to begin his comedy act at the City National Civic in San Jose when he did something he hadn’t done in many years. He brought a drink with him to the stage; a standup roadie (tequila).
“And boy did I miss it,” he joked with me last week. “What an idiot all those years — drinking’s fun. You hear that, kids? Drinking’s fun!”
Actually, that’s not why he did it, he said during a marathon session of talking and drinking — and, in his case, a wee bit of pot smoking — that started at his house here and ended several hours later at the nearby Polo Lounge (oh, the indignities of this job).
He says he considers drinking on stage unprofessional. But that night, so soon after the election, he needed something to calm his nerves. Donald J. Trump, who Mr. Maher said “lives for vengeance,” had just won control over the most powerful instruments of the government, like the Justice Department, and, more to the point, the F.B.I. And it was dawning on Mr. Maher that “no one’s been meaner to him than me.”
Mr. Maher has a unique perspective. He resides at that most treacherous intersection where free speech meets government power and political passion, dodging traffic from left and right. He also once accused Mr. Trump of being part orangutan by birth.
But first, a refresher on how Mr. Maher became a free-speech totem in 2001 with one provocative line on his late-night ABC show, “Politically Incorrect.” He said the Sept. 11 hijackers couldn’t be called “cowards,” especially when the United States’ preferred method of attack at the time — before the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq — was to lob cruise missiles from afar (“That’s cowardly,” he said). The White House criticized him, sponsors fled and, a few months later, ABC canceled his show.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/15/business/media/bill-maher-trump.html?smid=fb-share
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Love him to pieces 
