Bill Maher appears to have good relations with Trumpworld.
The 70-year-old HBO host joined Kid Rock and Stephen A. Smith as a guest at President Trump’s White House dinner earlier this month, and after the dinner, Trump informed reporters that Maher’s criticisms on his late-night program were mostly silly, and that he “likes me a lot more than people realize.”
“Yeah, I did it again, bitch,” Maher said about her four-hour dinner with Trump during her opening monologue on “Real Time” Friday night. “You know what? Fuck it. I love these dinners.”
Maher then managed to get Trump’s former press secretary Carolyn Levitt, who stepped down in August, to be an interview guest on her show “Real Time.” It’s an odd pairing because Maher previously attacked Levitt on his program after the then-press secretary defended Trump by yelling, “Shut up, piggy!” Bloomberg News reporter Katherine Lucy when asked about Jeffrey Epstein aboard Air Force One. Levitt followed up on the incident by claiming, “It’s really admirable. It’s the president being candid, open and honest. It’s really nice,” prompting Maher to jokingly comment to Levitt, “Well, in that case: shut up bitch”
And so, Maher welcomed Levitt to “Real Time” on Friday night, where he mostly treated her like a child and mocked her successor, Katie Zacharias, who lasted only five days on the job.
“The President expresses his gratitude,” Leavitt told Maher. “I told him I was coming on the show and he said, ‘Tell him he loved that dinner and he knows it.'”
“I like it,” Maher admitted, before turning the talk back to Levitt. “You were the youngest to do this… so what are you going to do now?”
Levitt said she left her job to care for her two young children, ages two and six months, and then said she would start as a Fox News pundit on November 1. There’s no follow-up from Maher about the Trump-Fox News pipeline, but instead a silly rejoinder about how Trump wants to turn the White House press pool into an actual swimming pool.
Q Maher: “You know what? That’s the one thing people get mad at me for [about]…I don’t care about any of that. I love ballroom! America needs a ballroom. This is the United States of America.”
The softball questions and flattery didn’t stop there, as Maher asked Levitt about his tendency to be “sarcastic” and asked no follow-up questions when he brought up Trump’s war with Iran.
Maher had plenty of praise for Trump, saying that he “got it” and, while Levitt claimed that Trump was “much more understanding than in the past”. [president]”Joe was a mental patient,” Maher replied, “he’s much more energetic.”
It’s another reminder that Maher is not a journalist and refuses to challenge conservative guests on his show. He is very happy to have them there.