During the June 26, 2026 episode of Real Time With Bill Maher, the comedian and show host, who is 70, sat down with Vice President JD Vance, 41, where he asked him questions concerning a broad range of important issues, including the ever red-hot topic of illegal immigration and how the Trump administration has addressed the problem.
“We like it that you closed the border. That needed to be done,” Maher went on to admit, before offering some rather sharp criticism. “The people who were here, the way you treated — I’m talking about your administration, you were not there yourself — but ICE, all that s***. Too rough, too mean, too unnecessary.” Maher had a few additional thoughts on the issue before allowing Vance to comment.
“You’d go a long way toward getting people who are just completely shut the door to you and your administration if you’d just own that. You guys went too far. You went too far, and you should own it like you did childless cat ladies,” Maher continued. However, Vance, having a sharp mind and intellect, quickly flipped things around on Maher and on the plethora of leftists who have expressed their support for open borders.
“Here is the basic problem with that, Bill, is you cannot do any deportations without law enforcement. And you can’t do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that don’t look good when they’re recorded like that,” Vance said, according to TV Insider. “If you take a guy that’s committed murder, and you go and arrest that guy, sometimes that person is going to resist arrest.”
“Sometimes, if you take a video of it and it’s out of context and you don’t appreciate why that person is being arrested in the first place, it looks pretty icky if you take that out-of-context video clip. What I worry about is when people say you can’t ever do immigration enforcement if it produces a bad video clip, what they’re really saying is you can’t ever actually do immigration enforcement,” the vice president explained.
“Law enforcement deporting people is never an easy process, so I appreciate your argument that we’ve gone too far, but we couldn’t do nothing. And I don’t think there was an easy way to do this,” he concluded his answer to Maher’s challenge. Maher then stated that he believes there is a middle ground and that it bothers him that individuals on both sides never seem to find that road down the center.
“There’s a middle ground. The other thing that bothers us about stuff like that is that nothing ever lands in the middle, which is what I’m always trying to get people to do,” Maher said. Vance then wisecracked, “I thought you were a crazy liberal,” to which the late-night host replied, “Cause you don’t watch the show.” Vance said he did, in fact, tune in to watch the program. “I actually do watch the show,” Vance insisted. “I laughed my a** off backstage, that was a good monologue. Even though you were making fun of me, I liked it.”
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Featured Image: screenshot from embedded video