On Friday night's broadcast of HBO's Real Time, host Bill Maher said he watched the cable news reaction to President Donald Trump's upcoming meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un and ripped liberals for "reflexively hating on this." He reminded the left that candidate Obama proposed this exact type of meeting "and they loved it." Then he said, "f*ck you," you don't live on the west coast where a nuclear weapon would hit fast.



Maher said the meeting could be the results of Trump's tough talk and sanctions.



He also knocked the 'no president has ever done this' and 'Well, we'll just be giving Kim the respect he and his family has always craved' arguments.











"Yeah, and they all failed," he said of prior presidents' handling of the North Korea situation. "So I'm going to file this one under, 'so crazy it just might work.'"



Maher asked liberals, "So what? So what if it works?"



"This could be the one thing that Trump, honestly, is uniquely qualified to pull off," Maher said in his monologue. "Because Kim [Jong-un] and him, Rocket Man and Rainman, are mirror images. In a weird way, they respect and like each other. Trump said he's a smart cookie. They have the same interests -- flattery, celebrity, tyranny. They both have daddy issues and overeating issues and problematic family members and inexplicable hair. They both love missile parades and they both lie on their golf scores and one day you see staff members working for them and the next day they disappear."



"Who is the one American that Kim likes? Dennis Rodman. Well, Trump is the closest thing we're going to get to President Dennis Rodman," the HBO host joked.



"Another stupid argument I heard on TV last night, 'Well, we'll just be giving Kim the respect he and his family has always craved.' So what? So what if it works?" Maher asked.



"If you hate Trump so much -- I do -- this might even be happening because of Donald Trump. Because of his tough talk. It could be because of the sanctions. It could have been because of the Olympics," he said.



Maher continued the discussion when he moved to the panel segment. He again reminded people that Obama supported open talks with rogue states and provided the quote. Maher also criticized tribal politics "where everything has to be either the 'blue team' or the 'red team.'"







"I'm sure that a lot of people weren't thinking that is what I was going to say about Trump and North Korea because, you know, we live in this tribal world where everything has to be either the 'blue team' or the 'red team,'" Maher began. "And, look, this deal may blow up before we even finish talking about it right now."



"I just want to read Obama's quote from 2008 and remind people where he was because he was asked in a debate if he would meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, without preconditions. And he said I would," Maher said before reading the quote.



Then-Senator Obama's quote from 2008:





"I would. And the reason is this, that the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them -- which has been the guiding diplomatic principle of this administration (Bush administration) -- is ridiculous."

"And Hillary cackled. And the State Department tut-tutted and everybody said bad. But the base loved it. And he won the primary. And it may have helped him win the general election. And if was good enough for him I think it's good enough now," Maher said.Guest panelist Ana Navarro, who identifies as a conservative, went to the left of Maher and argued the meeting will not be serious."I think there is a sense of urgency that makes it -- let's explore whatever solution there is. That being said, the idea of Donald Trump negotiating with Kim, what are they going to do, put their buttons on the table and see who has a bigger button?" Navarro asked."That's the bluster part of it," Maher responded. "It's not unprecedented in the history of diplomacy for the peach breakthrough to come after the two guys have their whose-dick-is-longer shouting match at each other.""They should go in there and have a 'yo mama contest' -- 'Yo mama is so ugly.' Get at each other with insults. But this entire thing has been going in crescendo with North Korea. It's gotten worse increasingly. There is a sense of what more can happen," Navarro later conceded."We've had three consecutive administrations that everytime North Korea saber-rattled we paid them money, we gave them food. And now we've got a president through, you can say it's incompetence, or something different, or whatever. He said not going to do it this time and suddenly they want to come have a face to face meeting. Give it to him. I started to say what is the worst that could happen but we know what is the worst that could happen is but let's try something different," conservative commentator Erick Erickson said."But the worst has already happened except for the bomb actually exploding," Maher reacted. "It kind of reminds me of, you know when we talk about mass shootings and somebody says, it's a liberal talking point, and I'm certainly not for arming people, but they say if somebody else was in that room with a gun it would have made it worse. Really? Really? It could have gotten worse than just the guy who is a nut spraying the room. It can't get any worse."