Bill Maher already told JD Vance his 2028 vote was in play.
ABC sent Jon Karl to get him to walk that back on camera.
What Maher said instead sent Jon Karl into full damage control.
Maher Reads the DSA's Own Platform and Calls It Communism
Maher sat down with Karl to talk about winning the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.
Karl steered the conversation toward Maher's dinner at the White House.
Karl brought up Maher's earlier interview with Vance about election integrity.
Maher praised Vance for showing up when other guests would not.
Then he turned on his own party.
"Democrats are cowardly," Maher said.
Maher said a new radical seems to take over the party every single day.
He named the specific line he could no longer ignore.
"When we're cheering for the intifada, I'm out," Maher said.
Maher said it was not just "defund the police" anymore.
He said Democrats had moved on to "abolish the police" entirely.
Maher called that shift "nutty."
Karl tried pivoting back toward Trump instead.
Maher refused to let him off that easily.
"I'm not living in communist America," Maher shot back.
He said he had read the Democratic Socialists of America platform in its own words.
Maher pointed to DSA language calling for government takeover of key industries.
"That's communism," Maher said. "There is a definition."
Karl tried one more deflection, raising Trump's own use of executive power.
Maher agreed that was a problem too, and called it "crazy."
He still did not walk back a single word about his own party.
Democrats Have Heard This Warning Before and Ignored It
Maher is not the first lifelong Democrat to accuse his own party of drifting toward socialism.
Al Smith, the Democratic Party's 1928 presidential nominee, broke publicly with Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 over what he called the socialist direction of the New Deal.
Smith told fellow Democrats to compare their own platform against the Socialist Party platform line by line.
Party leaders brushed him off and won the next election anyway.
Ninety years later, the numbers suggest Smith was early, not wrong.
Legal scholar Jonathan Turley has tracked polling showing that seventy-three percent of self-described liberals now view socialism favorably.
Turley's research found that thirty-four percent of Democrats now choose socialism outright over capitalism.
New York City's DSA chapter has grown past fourteen thousand members and helped elect Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani once told New Yorkers to "defund" and "dismantle" the NYPD entirely.
He walked those exact words back once he actually had to govern the city.
His allies have not backed off anything.
The activist coalition that helped elect him has called NYPD officers "pigs" and "lazy cowards" in the same breath.
Maher watched all of it happen in real time from his own front row seat in Hollywood.
He decided he was done pretending it was still just a handful of activists.
Maher Didn't Need a Republican Script to See It
Bill Maher spent decades mocking Republicans from behind an HBO desk.
None of that history makes him a conservative, and nobody should pretend it does.
But that history makes his warning almost impossible for Democrats to wave away as right-wing propaganda.
Maher is not reciting a Fox News talking point handed to him by some campaign consultant.
He read the DSA platform himself, in the group's own words, and it convinced him faster than any Republican ad ever could.
Jon Karl's instinct to change the subject says plenty about how ABC wants this story handled.
Democrats can keep insisting socialism is a fringe distraction inside their coalition.
Bill Maher just told them, on camera, that one of their most loyal audiences is watching the takeover happen in real time and taking notes.
Zohran Mamdani's own allies are doing that work for free, one "pigs and lazy cowards" quote at a time.
Sources:
- Nick Arama, "Watch: Bill Maher Calls Out the Democratic Party and Communism, Teases How This May Change His Vote," RedState, July 19, 2026.
- Fox News Staff, "Bill Maher admits he could vote for JD Vance, warns 'cowardly' Democrats face socialist takeover," Fox News, July 19, 2026.
- Jorge Bonilla, "Jon Karl Repeatedly Changes the Subject as Bill Maher Denounces DSA-Dem Socialism," NewsBusters, July 19, 2026.
- WND Staff, "'Anti-capitalist movement': The Democrat Party's newfound love of socialism," WND, July 2026.
- Hudson Crozier, "Mamdani Promises To Get Along With Cops — Group That Helped Him Wants Jails Emptied," The Daily Caller.
