Throughout his monologue in Friday’s episode of Actual Time, Invoice Maher gave viewers what he knew they’d been ready for: his “e book report” on his current go to to the White Home. Maher, who has been essential of the president earlier than, stated he had a sit-down with Donald Trump and was stunned to search out him “gracious and measured.”
“As you understand, 12 days in the past, I had dinner with President Trump, a dinner that was arrange by my buddy Child Rock, as a result of we share a perception that there’s obtained to be one thing higher than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” Maher stated within the April 11 episode.
The comic stated Trump, who has hurled numerous insults at him over time, was pleasant and keen to pay attention in individual. “Only for starters, he laughs!” he stated. “I’ve by no means seen him snort in public. However he does, together with at himself. And it’s not pretend. Consider me, as a comic of 40 years, I do know a pretend snort once I hear it. And I thanks for them.”
One illuminating second got here as Trump gave Maher a White Home tour. “I don’t keep in mind precisely what we had been speaking about, but it surely will need to have been one thing with the 2020 election as a result of I do know he used the phrase ‘misplaced,’ and I distinctly keep in mind saying, ‘Wow, I by no means thought I’d hear you say that.’ He didn’t get mad. He’s far more self-aware than he lets on in public.”
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Maher stated he “by no means felt [he] needed to stroll on eggshells round [Trump]” and spoke to him in a approach he’d by no means really feel snug speaking to Invoice Clinton and Barack Obama, former presidents for whom Maher says he voted.
“Look, I get it. It doesn’t matter who he’s at a personal dinner with a comic; it issues who he’s on the world stage,” Maher admitted. “I’m simply taking it as a constructive that this individual exists, as a result of every thing I’ve ever not preferred about him was, I swear to God, absent, not less than on this night time with this man.”
Regardless of Trump’s willingness to pay attention, it doesn’t sound just like the POTUS conceded many factors to Maher. “At one level I stated to him, ‘You’re scaring folks. Do you actually need to be scaring your personal residents a lot?’ And I do know now you’re all saying, and what did he say to that? Actually, I don’t keep in mind. But it surely wasn’t ‘OK, I’ll cease.’”
However Maher stated the “most surreal a part of the entire night time” was when he obtained residence and noticed Trump ranting about “disgusting” and “horrible” political opponents once more on TV. “And I’m like, who’s that man?” Maher stated. “What occurred to Glinda the Good Witch? And why can’t we get the man I met to be the general public man?”
He added: “I went into the mine, and that’s what’s down there. A loopy individual doesn’t reside within the White Home. An individual who performs a loopy individual on TV so much lives there, which I do know is f***ed up. It’s simply not as f***ed up as I assumed it was.”
Maher concluded his monologue by saying that viewers can hate him for his account of the assembly however swore he wasn’t mendacity. “Trump was gracious and measured, and why he isn’t that in different settings, I don’t know, and I can’t reply, and it’s not my place to reply,” he stated. “I’m simply telling you what I noticed, and I wasn’t excessive.”
Actual Time With Invoice Maher, Fridays, 10/9c, HBO