More than a year after meeting President Donald Trump for dinner at the White House — a year in which he and Trump has continued a war of words — Bill Maher is giving his take on the POTUS’s personality.
“He’s so more self-aware than he lets on in public,” Maher said in a new episode of NPR’s Newsmakers. “Absolutely. So much more self-aware, not belligerent. And by the way, everybody who meets him says the same thing.”
But the Real Time pundit also said Trump “is a crazy person” in the extent that he “blurts out whatever is on his mind often.”
He went on: “It’s funny, [Trump is] both, at the same time, the most full of s*** person and also the most honest. You know, I saw him … doing an interview very much like this recently with somebody, and he didn’t like something she said, and he just went, ‘You’re a terrible person.’”
(Maher may have been referring to Trump’s response to ABC News’ Mary Bruce questioning him about the Epstein files at a White House press conference. In that moment, Trump told Bruce, “You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”)
“Now, that’s just not how we act,” Maher added. “Even though, to be honest, I’ve thought that. … But just, there is something different about the mind that does that. Yeah, he just speaks his interior monologue, which is just, you know, that is a certain type of mental disorder. But it seems to come out when he feels in any way attacked, which is, like, outside of his comfort zone.”
In the Newsmakers interview, Maher also addressed to the backlash to his unexpected dinner with Trump.
“Nobody has been harder on Donald Trump,” Maher claimed. “That’s why the dinner happened to begin with. It was sort of a Nixon to China thing, you know? Let’s just talk to each other instead of hurling insults. Well, he’s back to hurling assaults because I never once changed my tune when I got back to work. I [never] said I would.”
And in Maher’s mind, the president needs more critics in his milieu. “He’s got a lot of friends, you know?” the comedian explained. “He doesn’t read the briefing books. He does everything by ‘People are saying…’ Be one of the people saying. Be one of those people who talk to him. Because he does look you in the eye and listen, and he does change his mind sometimes because he has no fixed beliefs. They need more people like this, me, talking to them, not less.”