Bill Maher returned to Real Time Friday night for the first time since his second White House dinner with Donald Trump, wasting little time defending his decision to once again break bread with the president.
“I know, I’m the bad guy because I go and say face-to-face to the man the things you write in articles that he’ll never read, but okay,” Maher told viewers. “You know what? Fuck you. I like these dinners.”
Maher then rattled off a lengthy list of subjects he said he challenged Trump on during the gathering, including the Supreme Court, Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump’s treatment of Barack Obama, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and the 2020 election.
The dinner, which also included Stephen A. Smith and Kid Rock, stretched for more than four hours—something Maher immediately turned into material.
“The dinner went on for four hours,” he said. “Slightly longer than the press secretary hired last week.”
Maher also offered his own assessment of Trump’s demeanor during their extended back-and-forth, conceding that if anyone behaved badly at the table, it was him.
“By the way, if anyone lacked etiquette at that dinner, it was me,” Maher said. “I brought Stephen A. Smith. He was perfect. On point… But me? Trump never lost his temper. He never yelled. He never interrupted. Me, I did.”
“I could not have been treated better if I was Russian,” he added.
Maher’s account largely tracks with what Smith has said about the evening. The ESPN host, who described the dinner as lasting four hours and 20 minutes, said Trump “didn’t run from any questions” and continued engaging when challenged.
Smith has also said Maher did much of the questioning from their side of the table and that the two men “were going at it for hours.”
Kid Rock, meanwhile, called the evening “epic” the morning after the dinner and described the four men as having “tough conversations” on subjects including Iran, Afghanistan, unemployment among Black women, HBCU funding, DEI, socialism, and communism.
Trump offered his own take, telling reporters the dinner was “very informative” and claiming Maher “likes me a lot more than people understand.”
Maher didn’t exactly dispute the second part Friday.
The relationship between the two men has ping-ponged between cordial and openly hostile over the last two decades. After Kid Rock helped arrange their first White House dinner in 2025, Maher came away describing Trump as “gracious and measured” in private, only to resume criticizing him on Real Time.
Trump responded by returning to his own attacks on Maher, at various points calling him a “MORON” and a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT,” and declaring their first dinner a “total waste of time.”
Yet another invitation eventually followed.
Whether Friday’s monologue put that promise to the test became an immediate topic when Maher welcomed former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt for the night’s opening interview.
“Am I back in the doghouse after that monologue?” Maher asked her.
“That was a tough monologue,” Leavitt replied. But she came bearing a message from her former boss.
“The president sends his regards,” she told Maher. “I told him I was coming on the show, and he said, ‘Tell him he loved that dinner, and he knows it.’”
Watch Maher’s full remarks about his dinner with Trump at the top of this post.
