Bill Maher made a bold confession about Donald Trump‘s best political move while also sending a blunt message to those whose “entire personality” is hating the POTUS.
During an interview with The Free Press published on YouTube on December 22, the Real Time With Bill Maher host, 69, discussed Trump’s achievements and missteps during a conversation with interviewer Maya Sulkin.
The journalist asked how Maher thinks the U.S. political scene arrived at a juncture where “conspiracy theories thrive online, where Trump is president, where the world is so politically divided.” She wondered if people were “freaking out over nothing,” or if it was truly a “moment in time that people should be concerned about.”
To that, Maher replied, “Some of both,” before pointing out a plaque of Trump’s 56 insults about Maher that the POTUS signed. “I earned every one of those. So I think I have a lot of credentials, as understanding the situation we’re in, unprecedented-wise, with him as president.”
He continued, “On the other hand, I just really have no use for people whose whole personality is Donald Trump and how much they hate Trump… It’s like, ‘Oh, shut the f*** up.’ You know what, first of all, it’s all people whose lives he hasn’t really affected at all. He has affected a lot of lives, some of them very badly.”
That’s when Maher admitted that Trump, 79, has had “some ideas that were not wrong.” He clarified, “I rarely back the method he chooses to carry them out. But identifying certain problems that were festering. Yeah, he’s done some of that.”
When asked what the best thing Trump has done, Maher replied, “The best thing he’s done was the Middle East deal — bombing Iran, backing Israel, and not pretending like, ‘Oh, well, everybody in the Middle East, they have equal arguments.’”
However, Maher also admitted that he has more concern over the extreme right than the extreme left when it comes to politics.
“They’re undemocratic. I don’t know that they’re at all committed to giving up power,” the late-night host explained. “The right thinks the left has gone so insane. And I could tell you why they’re not completely wrong about that. I could list 12 easily that are so anti-common sense — so counterintuitive, it seems like they just want to embrace the counterintuitive — that makes the right-wing say, ‘Even if we have to forgo democracy, these people cannot take power.’ That’s a very scary place to be, when they’re like, ‘Democracy? No, not the most important thing.’”
Real Time with Bill Maher, Season 24, Premieres, Friday, January 23, 2026, HBO