Bill Maher calls viewers who stopped watching after his Trump dinner 'idiots' in heated defense

Comedian Bill Maher called people who stopped watching his show after he dined with President Donald Trump "idiots" during an interview with CNN's Elex Michaelson posted on Saturday.

"First of all, the people who stopped watching my show because I had dinner with him are idiots, in my view," he said during the interview on "The Story Is with Elex Michaelson." "They just are. They're just completely emotional because they're always asking the wrong question, which is like, 'How dare you have dinner with Donald Trump?'"

Maher had dinner with the president in April 2025 and caught flak from liberals for the meeting. Trump raged at Maher in a Truth Social post over the weekend and called the dinner with the comedian a "total waste of time."

"The question should always have been, 'What did I say after I had dinner with Donald Trump?' Now, if, after I had dinner with Donald Trump, I came back to the show and was seduced by that dinner and stopped tearing him a new one every week, every time I thought he did something wrong, then you would have a case. That didn't happen," Maher said.

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He said he hasn't paused in making fun of the left when he thinks they've gone too far, and has continued to criticize the president.

"So I feel like we—having met him and sat down for three hours, you know, it was a long dinner—and the left got very mad at me for reporting it accurately, which is he's very different in person. By the way, everyone who's ever met him says the same thing," he said.

Maher told Michaelson that Trump texts him sometimes, "yelling" at him.

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"'You're still part of the lunatic left,'" Maher said, repeating a text from the president. "He watches. He gets it. Yeah. That I didn't change, but you know what? It's just better, because then I can say something back and it becomes a conversation and not just what it was."

Maher went on to say that Trump does a lot of stupid things, but also "makes people stupid."

"I felt like, OK, we had done this for 10 years, just this yelling at each other from across the barricades. It is better to talk to somebody," he said.

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Michaelson agreed and wondered what the alternative might be, asking, "A civil war?"

"It's just purely emotional. It's just so disappointing that some of the people who I think of as rational people, Donald Trump, he does a lot of stupid things. He also makes people stupid," Maher responded. "Like, again, what is the alternative? He's the president. You can't not talk to him. What is the downside?"