I met Glinda the Good Trump: Bill Maher on President’s dual personality

Comedian Bill Maher is no stranger to roasting President Donald Trump on his HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher,” but after a private dinner with him on March 31, he is questioning whether the man he met is the same one behind the podiums and Twitter rants.

Maher, who finally opened up about the encounter on the April 11 episode of his show, described the meeting with Trump, arranged by friend and musician Kid Rock, as warm, candid, and disarming.

“What I’m gonna do is report exactly what happened. You decide what you think about it,” Maher told his audience during the opening monologue. “I swear to God, everything I’ve ever not liked about him was absent,” he added.

The private dinner, held at the White House, and also attended by UFC CEO Dana White, revealed a version of Trump which Maher never expected: Humorous, thoughtful, and “shockingly self-aware”.

In a move only Maher could pull off, the comedian brought to the party a printed list of “almost 60 different insulting epithets” Trump had hurled at him over the years and also got him to sign it with a smile.

“Things like, stupid, dummy, low life, sleazebag, stone cold crazy. Fired like a dog. His show is dead,” Maher recalled. “I brought this to the White House because I wanted him to sign it, which he did—with good humour,” he revealed.

While Maher joked that “millions of liberal sphincters just tightened,” he stood by his account. “If that’s not enough pure Trump hate for you, I don’t give a f***,” he said unapologetically.

The real shock came not from what Trump said, but how he said it.

“When I got there, that (mean tweet) guy wasn’t living there,” Maher said, noting that Trump laughed easily and even at himself. “And it’s not fake. Believe me, as a comedian of 40 years, I know a fake laugh when I hear it,” he insisted on his show.

Kid Rock had warned Maher that Trump would dominate the conversation, but to his surprise, the President was engaging and inquisitive. “He mostly steered the conversation to, ‘What do you think about this?’” Maher said. “So meet up in person. Maybe it’ll be different. Spoiler alert: It was,” he added.

Maher admitted he was more at ease chatting with Trump than he ever would be with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton.

“I voted Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk with Donald Trump,” Maher said. “That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will. Me, I feel it’s emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days,” he added.

Even when Maher pointed out to Trump that was “low” of him to have fuelled the Obama birth conspiracy, he responded not with expected aggression or defensiveness, but with a smile. “Just a little smile as if to say, ‘Yeah, I get it,’” Maher said.

The most surreal moment for Maher came when he returned home and watched 60 Minutes, only to see the familiar combative Trump on screen.

“He’s ranting, ‘Disgusting.’ ‘You’re a terrible person.’ And I’m like, who’s that guy? What happened to Glinda the Good Witch?” Maher wondered. “Why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy?,” he said on the show.

All said, Maher didn’t excuse Trump’s public persona but highlighted the dual personality: “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****d up. It’s just not as f****d up as I thought it was,” Maher concluded.