President Donald Trump and comedian Bill Maher have rekindled their long-running feud, restarting a back-and-forth that has critics calling it dramatic, and supporters cheering it as entertainment.
The two men, aged 80 and 70 respectively, have spent more than a decade cultivating a fraught frenemy dynamic that mixes cordial encounters with pointed taunts.
The billionaire politician and the stand-up comic have shared meals on occasion, yet they have also spent time trading insults in public forums and on social media.
Maher returned to his critique of Trump on his late-night program Real Time, delivering an opening monologue that skewered the GOP leader with a flurry of one-liners.
Foremost among his targets was Trump’s recent White House state dinner with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Washington, D.C.
“Trump believes Xi doesn’t care about their friendship; it’s all personal,” Maher told the studio audience during the segment.
The 2026 Mark Twain Prize for American Humor recipient proceeded to recount Trump ushering Xi through the White House’s renovations during what Maher described as Trump 2.0.
Maher quipped, “Does he realize that China can build entire cities in a week? And he’s showing him the new driveway. It’s like teaching Gordon Ramsay how to reheat pizza.”
In the past two years, Trump has not only pursued a facelift for the White House complex but has also set out to transform the D.C. landscape with a series of vanity construction projects.
His so‑called beautification drive allegedly included painting the floor of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, applying 23.75-karat gold leaf to bronze statues, and planning a 250-foot-tall arch to crown the cityscape:
“The latest fixation is an arch, and it’s urgent—like, yesterday,” Maher joked, then mimicked the president’s voice: “Fortunately, my buddy President Xi understands that we don’t have an arch. Not having one is practically criminal.”
Maher followed with a pointed punchline aimed at the man currently occupying the Oval Office: “If anyone knows about arch-criminals, it’s Donald Trump.”
Trump evidently caught wind of Maher’s remarks about him on Real Time over the weekend. A fresh Truth Social post appeared around 8 a.m. Eastern on Sept. 28, aimed squarely at his rival.
The president resorted to one of his standard rebuttals against a media figure, insisting that the show’s viewership had declined significantly.
“Bill Maher’s ratings are so low that you’d hardly believe the show can stay on the air. In many respects it’s SAD, because, truthfully, I do like him,” Trump posted.
Additionally, he had a message for his own party, writing, “Republicans should stop treating him as a mouthpiece, though. It makes them look so weak and foolish.”
Maher’s remarks sparked a wave of online reactions. For instance, one X user admitted, “Okay, Bill, I’ll give you credit for that one—that’s pretty funny.”
A like-minded commenter simply tweeted, “Brilliant.” Another account on the platform declared, “I love Bill Maher.”
Yet Trump’s MAGA base did not stand by silently.
“We thought you were making progress on your TDS… shame,” wrote one Trump supporter who accused Maher of suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.
A fellow MAGA member insisted, “Fire your writers, Bill; they keep recycling the same tired jokes.”
The latest installment of Real Time wasn’t a pure takedown of Trump, either. Maher also offered a note of cautious praise for the businessman-turned-politician.
He described the president as a “badass” for potentially contributing to a decline in crime rates in the United States as part of his closing “New Rule” segment.
One reader on X replied to Maher’s compliment with surprise: “That really caught me off guard coming from him,” commenting on Maher praising Trump as a ‘FAFO’ and a ‘no more Mr. Nice Guy’ leader.
The friction between Maher and Trump stretches back to the birther controversies of the 2010s. What began as on-air jabs eventually escalated into legal confrontations.
During the era when Trump was the host of The Apprentice, he advocated the idea that Barack Obama might not have been born in the United States, a conspiracy that Maher mocked publicly.
In response, Maher joked that he would donate $5 million to charity if Trump produced a birth certificate proving he was not the product of an improbable union of his mother and an orangutan, a quip that sparked a costly lawsuit from Trump—$5 million in a civil suit against the comedian.
The feud cooled briefly when Maher dined with the then‑inaugurated president at the White House in March 2025, an encounter that Maher later described candidly.
“I voted for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but I’d never felt as comfortable speaking to them as I did with Donald Trump,” Maher said after that intimate White House evening.
He also described Trump as “gracious and measured,” a characterization that drew sharp criticism from some on the left.
