“Real Time” host Bill Maher on Friday endorsed disgraced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s mayoral race and excused his past sexual misconduct allegations, while slamming progressive opponent Zohran Mamdani as a danger for the Democratic Party.
“I think he seems like a sweet guy, Mamdani,” Maher said to laughter from the crowd. “But I would just like to say, because the election is in a couple of weeks, this is not just New York that’s on the ballot. I think the whole Democratic Party in the country is on the ballot.”
“And the whole country will be looking at this race to see which way are the Democrats going to go,” he continued. “No, Andrew Cuomo may not be that exciting and that inspirational, but for a party that said, ‘We want to get back to normal,’ he’s kind of normal.”
Maher’s guest Kate Bedingfield, who served as the White House communications director under former President Joe Biden, appeared surprised by that assessment. She disagreed, noting “some things” in Cuomo’s history actually aren’t normal at all.
An investigation from the Department of Justice released in 2024 concluded the former New York governor’s “sexually hostile work environment” affected at least 13 female state employees, one of whom said Cuomo grabbed her buttocks and put his hand up her shirt.
Those mounting accusations of sexual misconduct had led Cuomo to resign in 2021.
“Well, we did a deep dive on that because we had him on the show,” Maher told Bedingfield. “A lot of it is kind of bullshit. I mean, maybe he was a little too handsy, a little too Italian, a little too touchy, you know?”
“If you Democrats want to keep doing this, throwing guys like that under the bus, because ‘that’s not good enough’ and ‘pure enough,’ you’re going to wind up with a guy who did a little more than what Andrew Cuomo did,” he continued with a nebulous warning.
Bedingfield argued that fellow Democrats have “wrung their hands” excessively over Mamdani, who has brought “a lot of energy,” healthy discourse and a whole new coalition to the party. She said him winning in the face of fearmongering would be “a good thing.”
Maher then introduced some of that fearmongering himself.
He not only rejected that Mamdani is as popular as Bedingfield suggested, despite him currently leading in the polls by double digits, but raised the “issue” brought forth by Cuomo — that Mamdani has citizenship from Uganda, “where they kill homosexuals.”
Bedingfield asked, “So somebody who is a dual citizen can’t be mayor of New York, or…?”
Left: Evan Agostini/Invision/Associated Press; Right: Yuki Iwamura/Associated Press
Maher doubled down, claiming he would renounce his citizenship from a country whose “government policy” was to kill homosexuals. Uganda executes people who engage in same-sex acts with minors, the disabled and people over 75, per the Human Rights Watch.
Bedingfield fired back and told Maher he’s “buying into a fear framework” and the “race baiting” employed by Cuomo, who made the shockingly racist claim Thursday that Mamdani would be “cheering” on another 9/11-style attack if one occurred under his watch.
Maher tripled down by noting, just as President Donald Trump told Fox News, that Mamdani recently posed with Imam Siraj Wahhaj, a New York City mosque leader. Maher noted that he was an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Wahhaj denied any wrongdoing at the time and was never charged in the case.
Maher failed to mention that New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who was then the borough president of Brooklyn, posed with Wahhaj in 2015 while presenting him with an award. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly met with the imam himself back in 2009.
“I just don’t know if this is a great look for the party,” he said about Mamdani. “I really don’t.”
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