Canadian professor Jordan Peterson joined “Overtime with Bill Maher” on Friday night and had some tough questions for the panel about removing President Donald Trump from office.
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Peterson asked the panel if they thought that their efforts to remove Trump from office would more deeply polarize the country and ignite anger in the people who democratically elected Trump. The panel included Stormy Daniels’ lawyer Michael Avenatti.
“I’ve been listening to all of this about Trump and watching how these conversations go in the U.S., and I have one question about it,” Peterson said. “I mean, there are all of these people in the U.S. who are on the conservative side who are aligned with Trump for all sorts of reasons, and there’s all of this tension around his presidency and attempts to pull him out of his office for various reasons.”
“What do you think will happen if that comes to pass?” Peterson questioned. “There are all of these people who elected him and identify with him and they’re not taking this well, and… you might not think they’re very bright and all of that, and they’re backwards and all of those things, but you need to have respect for the rest of your citizens.”
Maher insisted that the calculation is different because Trump is not a “regular Republican” and routinely assaults “democratic norms.”
The New York Times’ Frank Bruni agreed that people need to be tough on Trump, but seemed to cede Peterson’s point that “we can be as tough as we’re being on the president… without telling his supporters that they’re stupid.”
“We need to talk to them with more generosity than we currently do,” Bruni admitted.