'This cannot go on': Bill Maher hopes Trump will face a federal prosecution before his next 'coup attempt'

Political comedian Bill Maher doesn’t mince words when laying out the reasons why the United States’ 2024 election worries him so much. The host of “Real Time” on HBO has been predicting that former President Donald Trump will run for president in 2024, receive the GOP nomination, refuse to concede if he loses and make another coup d’état attempt — only this time, Maher warns, he will be better equipped to pull it off than he was in 2020.

In that type of scenario, Maher fears a full-blown constitutional crisis combined with violence and unrest. Inauguration Day 2025, Maher told CNN in 2021, would be a good time to be on vacation in London.

One thing that could derail a 2024 campaign from Trump, according to Maher, is a criminal indictment. But during an interview with ITK on Thursday, September 22, Maher warned that such a prosecution would likely result in violence from Trump supporters — although allowing another coup attempt in 2024/2025 could result in violence as well.

READ MORE: Donald Trump will never concede': Bill Maher warns that GOP is 'much better' equipped for a 2024 'coup'

When asked about the potential for violence if Trump is criminally prosecuted, Maher responded, “There’s always a risk of everything with anything controversial and anything important…. You’re going to gin up the other side to an unbelievable degree, and there is going to be violence…. But the alternative is worse. You can’t allow someone to try a coup.”

Before the 2020 presidential election, Trump’s defenders accused Maher of “Trump derangement syndrome” when he predicted that Trump would refuse to concede if he lost the election. But sure enough, just as Maher predicted, Trump lost the election and refused to concede.

Maher told ITK, “I mean, this country can’t even do a coup right. In other countries, when there’s a coup and it fails, there are repercussions: jail or, in many places, worse. I’m not suggesting worse for Donald Trump, but I am suggesting that if you try a coup — I mean, for f***s sake, he still hasn’t conceded the last election. And he’s plotting to do it again, as I’ve been saying for years.”

The “Real Time” host also lambasted Trump for storing classified government documents at Mar-a-Lago, which, he believes, merits a federal prosecution. The Washington Post has reported that some of the documents that FBI agents were looking for when they executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago on Monday, August 8 included highly classified documents pertaining to nuclear weapons.

READ MORE: Bill Maher: Republican campaign ads show that Americans are 'mind-numbingly stupid'

“You can’t steal nuclear secrets and put them in the shed with the croquet equipment,” Maher told ITK. “What the f*** are we talking about here?.... This guy cannot run again. And he has to be held accountable for what he did the last time. This cannot go on. Enough of this nonsense of: We only count elections when we win them.”

Although he leans liberal, Maher has a major libertarian streak and hasn’t been shy about slamming part of the Democratic Party over what he views as their “woke baggage.” Maher has long been a scathing critic of “woke” and “politically correct” language, and he believes that terms like “Latinx” and “pregnant people” hurt the liberal cause by making Democrats sound silly and pretentious.

Maher told ITK, “I am happy that everybody else is too cowardly on the left to call out their own people when they’re plainly crazy about stuff. And it leaves more comedy for me because I go where the comedy is. If you’re going to be ridiculous, I’m going to call you out… I do get a lot of coverage on Fox News now, but they will only talk about like the 10 percent of the show where I say something rotten about the left — always deserved, I think — and they’ll leave out the 90 percent where I’m criticizing Trump and the Republicans. The people who watch my show understand.”

READ MORE: Bill Maher warns: Republicans running in 2022 midterms make the 2010 ‘kooks’ and ‘extremists’ look tame