Bill Maher brushes off liberal critics ahead of Trump meeting
Comedian Bill Maher is planning a White House meeting with Donald Trump, facilitated by Kid Rock, despite years of political criticism.
Straight Arrow News
Bill Maher has some words for those who didn’t like what he had to say about his White House dinner with Pres. Donald Trump.
TMZ founder Harvey Levin invited his “dear friend” Maher on the 2 Angry Men podcast, which Levin hosts with criminal defense attorney Mark Geragos, for the April 17 episode. The three opened the show by asking the “Real Time with Bill Maher” host for his thoughts on criticism he’s received – including from Washington Post columnist Josh Rogin, who’d said on “Real Time” that Trump was using Maher as “a prop in a PR stunt.”
“I would say to them, as opposed to what? I had the opportunity to go to the White House and talk to the president and not give up my principles. It seems like nobody noticed that,” Maher told Levin and Geragos. “I didn’t go MAGA. I had the opportunity to talk to Donald Trump and say things to him that maybe he never hears, literally to speak truth to power. I shouldn’t take that opportunity? Again, don’t do that? OK.”
Bill Maher says he should be considered a ‘hero’ for going ‘inside the inner sanctum’ of Trump
Maher, a longtime Trump critic, later doubled down on defending the meeting, saying, “I’m not the villain here.”
“I should be a hero for being one of the people who got inside the inner sanctum and was able to say to this person – who knows how much he ever hears anything that’s not coming from the cult? – and say those things and stick to my guns,” Maher said.
Trump has gone after Maher multiple times over the years, frequently targeting him in social media posts that claimed the ratings for “Real Time,” now in its 23rd season, were suffering. Trump also filed a lawsuit against Maher in 2013 — then later dropped the case — after the TV host joked that Trump was “the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.”
However, Maher also insisted he was one of Trump’s earliest political critics and maintained that “A lot of the things he’s doing are just crazy. Threatening to send home-grown Americans to foreign prisons is just outrageous. … The cutting off of the aid to the people who are starving and dying of diseases around the world.”
What did Bill Maher say about his Trump meeting?
In the April 11 episode of “Real Time,” Maher opened the show with a 13-minute monologue detailing his meeting with Trump and Kid Rock, who’d coordinated the visit, as well as UFC CEO Dana White.
In his monologue, Maher conceded Trump is “much more self-aware than he lets on in public” but acknowledged, “It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian; it matters who he is on the world stage.” He later added, “Why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy?”
Though the March 31 meeting went well, Maher – who had derided the president’s tariff flip-flopping earlier in the monologue – maintained he will continue to hold the Trump administration to account.
“He ended his report by saying, “Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know. And I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw.”
