Trump’s right. Bill Maher is a man without a party — or a point

Donald Trump is bad at a lot of things — negotiations, concealing criminal behavior, standing normal — but he’s not bad at everything. As much as it might bug some of us to admit it, there are a few areas where the president excels. He has an incredible gift for crafting earworms, and his Queens cadence and variable-volume delivery has wriggled its way into American speech patterns. He’s skilled at crafting funny putdowns, pithy nicknames and jabs that hit what his rival politicians are sensitive about and exploit the pressure points of expensive, futile campaigns.   

But Trump’s greatest skill is his ability to sniff out a loser. The son of a slumlord coming from the outer boroughs, he was starting with two strikes against him when he attempted to make a jump into Manhattan’s high society. If he wanted to join the rarefied air of the sons and daughters of The 400, he couldn’t be seen associated with anyone who would count as a mark against his judgment. Trump developed a sharp sense of who was on the wane and on the rise, and he worked hard to only mingle with the ascendant. 

It worked. His surname became synonymous with big-money deals, success and opulence despite a string of bankruptcies, casino closures and failed direct-to-consumer businesses. Trump kept away from maiden horses, in part because he ate dirt so often. So you can trust that when he calls Bill Maher a “complete and total loser,” he knows what he’s talking about. 

Trump railed against the host of HBO’s “Real Time” on Sunday night in a Truth Social post that expanded beyond essay length. He bashed Maher for his ratings and accused the host of lying about Trump’s approval rating. He pushed back against Maher’s criticism of the war in Iran. Most cuttingly, the reality TV veteran accused Maher of leaning heavily on canned applause and a laugh track to sell the idea that he’s funny.

“[Maher] lies about everything,” the president wrote, “and I believe he lied to me when I asked him, with all the applause and laughter he gets after almost everything he says, about things that aren’t funny or even any good, what Laughter Machine does he use?”

Maher prodded Trump in a monologue last Friday after attending a White House dinner alongside Kid Rock and ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith. The host made a note of Trump’s plummeting approval ratings and recent commentary on men’s physiques at his rallies. “It’s just a little odd that Trump keeps gushing about men’s bodies, and how handsome they are, and their jawlines, and their asses, their physiques,” Maher said. “I’m a little hurt. I was there for dinner for four hours last week, and not a peep. Nothing.”

On Truth Social, Trump accused Maher of turning up looking bedraggled and drunk for the controversial dinner at the “seductive and beautiful” White House. The president said that he “learned nothing” from Maher, but he clearly hoped the host would leave with a more favorable outlook on the MAGA movement. Afterward, Trump said Maher returned to his set and his “laughing machine” and offered slightly tamer critiques in the days that followed, before the host supposedly turned on him for the cameras.

“He reverted back to his former self, and his old ways,” Trump wrote. “What he spouts isn’t what he believes. He has to cater to his base, which is mostly composed of Losers, and people who don’t like working.” 

In true Trump fashion, the post was lengthy and melodramatic. But at the heart of his burn-book slams, he did hit on a real question: Who is Bill Maher for? 

The snarky libertarian has the carriage of an overeducated yuppie. Despite his frequent protestations, his smarm and suits pushed him to one side of the country’s rigid two-party binary. (He didn’t name his first show “Politically Incorrect” to rile the GOP, after all.) Maher’s outrage over the War on Terror and 2002 cancellation by ABC jammed him into an awkwardly fitting box of “liberal cause celebre.” As neoconservatives pushed an uberpatriotic theocracy in the aughts, his bad faith documentaries, which were aimed at evangelicals, kept up the illusion that he was on the side of progressives. But Maher has never been a lefty, or even particularly committed to any beliefs beyond his freedom to smoke weed.

In recent years, he’s crowed to anyone still listening that he’s open to MAGA’s overtures. He’s frequently come out on the side of reactionaries when the question centers around gender nonconforming people or Islamophobia. Outside of his dinner at the White House, Maher has railed against progressive candidates and offered his vote to Republicans, provided they tone down their rhetoric around the Big Lie. 

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That particular problem is unsolvable, at least as long as Trump is alive and in power. While the president’s popularity might be waning with voters, he still has the ability to sink Republicans who cross him. That leaves Maher in an unenviable position, inching toward a conservative party that could take or leave him. He’s gotten crankier and more prone to cribbing Fox News talking points at a time where the center of the Democratic Party is rushing to the left. His constant trashing of rising progressive stars will be hard to forget if the expected blue wave materializes in the Nov. 3 midterms. 

All this means that the proud libertarian has found himself with fewer friends than ever. Cozying up to Trump only got him publicly mocked by the president as a “hopeless guy” and a “coward.” The liberal commentariat reacted negatively to Maher’s first dinner with Trump in 2025, with Keith Olbermann claiming that the comedian had always been a “shameless opportunist.” This year, Michigan’s Democratic Senate nominee Dr. Abdul El-Sayed called out Maher’s history of religious intolerance.

With Trump realizing that Maher’s not worth the effort to woo and the next generation of party stars outright hostile to him, it’s unclear what role Maher has to play. “Aren’t these flyover states stupid?” isn’t enough of a stance to warrant having the mic when the current administration is disappearing people off the street. Maher’s punch-left, pat-right comedy has been stale for years, but he’s still insisting he’s owed a platform. He’s a blunt comic whose rotation of tired jokes have left him with no one to pass his joint to. 

Perhaps Trump summed up the problem of Maher best, in a barb buried deep in his Sunday night tirade. Maher clearly views himself as a bold truth-teller, willing to take on both the empty-headed conservatives and the too woke progressives. Trump’s approval-obsessed brain looks at a guy who has alienated anyone who might support him and only sees one thing: “You’re not transformative,” he said. “You’re a loser!”