“Let’s not confuse 5,000 people with 74 million,” Maher said to his audience. “Yes, even supporting the insurrection in spirit is, well, deplorable. But there’s a difference between holding illiberal beliefs and acting violently on them. At least that’s what they always told me about Islamic terrorism.”

“I keep wrestling on this show with the hard question of how do Americans, all of us, learn to share a country with assholes you can’t stand,” the host said. “I preach, and still do, you can hate Trump, but not all the people who like him. And as counterintuitive as it may seem, you can like something run by assholes without being one yourself.”