Comedian Bill Maher took aim at President Donald Trump over the president’s two-week deadline for deciding whether the U.S. should wade into the mounting conflict between Israel and Iran.
“Two weeks, talk about a cliffhanger,” Maher joked on his eponymous talk show.
The comedian noted that the question of adding a fifth conflict—in addition to the War in Gaza as well as the Yemeni, Somali, and Syrian Civil wars–to the list of United States military engagements in the Middle East had driven a bitter wedge in Trump’s support base.
“Half of [MAGA] want to bomb Iran. They always did, and half of them want to just stay out of all foreign wars,” Maher said Friday. “Everybody just wishes that it was something morally clear-cut, like deporting five-year-olds.”
Tensions in the region have escalated dramatically in recent weeks, with Israel and Iran trading missile strikes after Israel launched a series of bombings in what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government described as an effort to cripple the Islamic Republic’s growing nuclear capabilities.
Trump, like Netanyahu, has insisted Iran already has access to nuclear weapons. Those claims directly contradict reports from the U.S. intelligence community that say the authoritarian Islamist state is still at least three years off developing an atomic bomb.
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had previously backed those reports. She later changed her tune, stating Iran could develop nuclear weapons “within weeks” after Trump delivered a scathing public rebuke and told her she was “wrong.”
Maher further noted that the facility in Iran that appears most capable of developing weapons of mass destruction is located inside a mountain, posing logistical challenges for Israeli strikes.
“Listen to this, America is the only country that has a bomb that can reach [the facility], and it weighs 30,000 pounds and can only be flown there by Tom Cruise,” he said. “To make it even more of a cliffhanger, we can’t just give the bomb to Israel, because we also are the only country that has the plane that can deliver this f**king thing.”
