HBO’s Bill Maher kicked off Real Times’s 2026 run on Friday by claiming that Renee Good’s shooting “was an execution on the street” and lamented to Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy that President Trump won’t use his “cult leader” status to push “comprehensive immigration reform” now that he has proved “he’s the tough guy.” For his part, Kennedy was able to clear up that if you want to reform immigration, then Democrats need to come up with something other than “amnesty, amnesty, amnesty.”
Maher declared that “it is actually a good opportunity for him because he is that kind of guy. That is one of his strengths, I think. It is a cult, I'm sorry but MAGA is a bit of a cult… And a cult leader can change on a dime, as he often does. So, he could be the one because he has been so awful on this issue with— I mean, that woman—that was an execution on the street. I'm sorry, but it was."
Reaching for analogy, Maher put a photo of the aftermath of Good’s shooting side-by-side with the 1968 “Saigon Execution” photograph that showed South Vietnamese Chief of National Police Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting Viet Cong prisoner Nguyen Van Lem in the head, “When I sought, you know what I thought of? Because we are old enough to remember this? Show the picture. Okay, that is it. I'm going to describe this first because this is from the 60s. Remember Vietnam? The Tet Offensive and that ugly picture that we saw after? Show the picture. This is—everybody our age knows this. That's the first thing that flashed in my mind.”
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