UPDATE, with video The “dirty little secret” that explains how the Party of Reagan morphed into the Party of Putin is a four-letter word, Bill Maher said tonight: Race.

“Russia,” Maher said during his New Rules segment on HBO’s Real Time With Bill Maher, “is one of the last places on earth to say, ‘F*ck diversity. We’re here. We’re white. Get used to it.’ “

Attempting to explain how 87% of Republicans (according to a recent poll) are fine with Russia’s president Vladimir Putin visiting the White House, Maher chalked it up to racism, and even quoted a tweet from his old pal Ann Coulter.

“Last year Ann Coulter tweeted that ‘In 20 years, Russia will be the only country that is recognizably European.’ As far back as 2013 Matt Drudge called Putin the leader of the free world. David Duke called Russia the key to white survival.

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“Today’s Republicans, what’s left of them, do not like the melting pot,” he said. “And Russia? That pot don’t melt.”

Making jokes about White Russians (“Let’s see, I want to get drunk but I also want a glass of milk”) and Russian basketball players (“the team that played against the Globetrotters”), Maher compared racial diversity (or lack thereof) in Russia to that of Western Europe.

“At the recent World Cup,” he said, “the French national team didn’t look like the Old France, it looked like the New France. Germany let in a million Syrians. The Fatherland is now the Brotherland.

“You know how many Syrian refugees Russia has taken in? Two. Martin Sheen has more refugees in his poolhouse.”

Ending the bit with a bite, Maher concluded, “A Barack Obama does not become the president of Russia. Wingnuts used to accuse Obama of being a foreign agent who took over America, but when a foreign power actually did take over America and it was the proudly white one, their response was ‘come right on in.’

“To the members of the Grand Old Party, Russia meddling in our elections isn’t a breach of national security, it’s just white people helping white people. Or what Republicans call governing.”

Watch video of the New Rules segment above, and here are a couple Real Time tweets from the episode:

"The infamous pee tape was finally found: it’s a high definition video of a press conference in Helsinki, and it’s irrefutable evidence of a Russian ho. And his name is Donald Trump." – @BillMaher #RealTime pic.twitter.com/HkjZpmIetJ — Real Time (@RealTimers) August 4, 2018