Bill Maher welcomed Vice President JD Vance to Real Time on Friday night, making Vance the first sitting vice president to appear on the HBO talk show. While he was ostensibly there to promote his new book, Communion, the conversation quickly shifted to the issues dominating the headlines, including Iran, immigration, and the 2020 election.
Maher wasted little time diving into foreign policy, asking Vance why Americans should have confidence in the administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran.
“You’re negotiating for America. I’m rooting for America… Why is this different? Why isn’t it bulls**t this time?”
Vance argued the U.S. is negotiating from a position of strength, pointing to falling oil prices and insisting Iran’s nuclear capabilities have been crippled.
“If they’re willing to change, we’re willing to change too; if they’re not willing to change, we still fundamentally have all the cards and I think that’s a good place to be.”
Maher wasn’t buying it.
“But their nuclear program isn’t destroyed.”
When Vance pushed back — asking, “What part of it is not destroyed?” before arguing that “the thing that you have to destroy is their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed” — Maher questioned how the administration could be so certain.
“How do we know that? All the time it was, we gotta get in there and we gotta get the dust. And we didn’t get in there, so how do we get the dust?”
Vance doubled down, again characterizing Iran’s nuclear program as “functionally destroyed,” though he did not offer evidence during the interview to support that claim.
Maher later turned the conversation toward the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, urging Vance to acknowledge that ICE enforcement had, at times, gone too far.
“ICE, all that s**t. Too rough. Too mean. Too unnecessary,” Maher said. “I’m not asking you to apologize… I’m just saying, you’d go a long way toward getting people who [have] just completely shut the door to you and your administration if you guys would just own that — that you guys went too far. You went too far, and you should own that like you owned ‘childless cat ladies.’”
Vance declined to make that concession, instead defending the administration’s approach by arguing that difficult situations are inevitable during large-scale law enforcement operations.
“You can’t do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that are recorded like that… I don’t think there was an easy way to do this.”
As the interview neared its conclusion, Maher offered what amounted to an olive branch, saying he could envision supporting a future Republican presidential nominee over a democratic socialist — but only if the GOP stopped insisting every electoral defeat was the result of fraud.
“If this is where the Democratic Party is going… this obsession with Israel, with the Jew-hating, with they don’t believe in capitalism, no prisons, if this is where they’re going, my vote is in play,” Maher told Vance. “It’s either going to be you or Rubio. Here’s my dealbreaker for your side: Under Trump, you guys have two outcomes that an election can be, either we win or they cheated. That shit has to stop. And that means the person who has to stop it will be you, or Marco. Can you tell me you will do that?”
Rather than directly answer the question, Vance pivoted to his criticism of how technology companies handled political content during the 2020 campaign.
“OK, Bill, so this is where I’m probably going to lose ya here,” Vance replied. “I don’t think we should not concede elections, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on… The biggest criticism I had of the 2020 election is that you had technology companies that were quite literally censoring negative information about the left and promoting negative information about the right.”
Maher wasn’t impressed, ending the exchange with a sarcastic sendoff.
“Well, you’re going to get a big pat on the back when you go back to the White House.”
Although Maher hit many of the administration’s most controversial flashpoints throughout the interview, Vance rarely strayed from the White House’s messaging, sidestepping several opportunities to directly answer the host’s questions while remaining firmly on script.
Real Time with Bill Maher airs Fridays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.
