Bill Maher: “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House”

On Friday during his show on HBO, Bill Maher shared his thoughts on his late-March meeting with Donald Trump.

The comedian said that for the White House meeting, he brought a list of nearly 60 insults Trump had hurled at him over the years—and asked him to sign it. The president did and with a surprisingly good sense of humor. 

Maher has long been a big critic of Donald Trump, but on Friday he said he was going to report exactly what happened during their meeting, adding that unless it was "pure hatred for Trump he doesn't give a sh*t."

The comedian insisted he hadn’t gone MAGA—and to Trump’s credit, he said, the president never pressured him to.

"Look, I get it. It doesn't matter who it is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who it is on the world stage," Maher said. "I'm just taking as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I've ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent at least on this night with this guy."

Likewise, Maher said he felt he didn't need to walk on "eggshells" when speaking with Trump, something he doubted would be the case with former Democratic presidents Obama and Clinton.

The comedian told his audience that Trump comes across differently in private than he does in public.

Maher recalled that "Just for starters, he laughs. I’ve never seen him laugh in public, but he does, including to himself, and it’s not fake, believe me. As a comedian of 40 years, I know a fake laugh when I hear it."

"A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House, a person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f***ed up. It’s just not as f***ed up as I thought it was," the comedian told his audience.

Maher concluded: "That's my report. You can hate me for it, but I'm not a liar. Trump was gracious and measured. And why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know, and I can’t answer, and it’s not my place to answer. I’m just telling you what I saw,"