There are plenty of reasons why Bill Maher and John Fetterman are often praised as rare reasonable liberals by President Donald Trump’s supporters and fellow travelers.
The “Real Time” host and the Democratic junior senator from Pennsylvania both nurse grievances that they have been unfairly mistreated by “the left.” (Maher recently claimed to have been a victim of “soft-canceling” because his HBO show has never been awarded an Emmy.) They are both strident supporters of Israel’s ruling far-right government. And, as evidenced by Fetterman’s appearance Monday on Maher’s podcast, “Club Random” — where the gimmick is that the 70-year-old host openly drinks alcohol and smokes weed — they both have a tendency to bend over backward to praise Trump or otherwise whitewash some of his most inexcusable behavior.
Right off the bat, the two invoked a truly tiresome, faux-“politically homeless” bromide. Maher lamented, “Everything becomes a political battle. Everything is just an excuse to say your team is stupid and my team is great. It has nothing to do with anything.”
As an example, Maher cited the controversy over Trump building the White House ballroom and parroted the MAGA line that such a construction project is urgently needed after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner last month. Maher described the ballroom’s cost as “couch money,” and Fetterman ascribed the backlash to “TDS” (Trump derangement syndrome) — the abbreviation the lazy brain uses to dismiss any and all criticism of Trump.
Never mind the fact that Trump and the MAGA movement didn’t use security as an argument to justify tearing down the East Wing of the White House until after the attack at the correspondents’ dinner. The primary driver of outrage over the ballroom is that there are established processes for presidents to follow when making alterations to public buildings, and Trump followed none of them. Numerous laws may have been broken by his unilateral action. The judge who issued an injunction in March halting construction of the ballroom wrote plainly that “no statute comes close to giving the President the authority he claims to have.”
As for the “couch money” Maher so blithely dismisses, current estimates show Trump’s ballroom costing more than $400 million, with the GOP pushing a “security funding” package of an additional $1 billion in taxpayer funds, of which $220 million is specifically earmarked for ballroom construction. Needless to say, the word “emoluments” never came up on “Club Random.”
There are established processes for presidents to follow when making alterations to public buildings, and Trump followed none of them.
Maher, who’s still clearly smarting over Larry David’s April 2025 New York Times column that satirized his chummy White House dinner with Trump, went back to that well, defending Trump as much more polite and reasonable in private conversations with celebrities than he typically is as the public-facing nominal leader of the free world. Fetterman, for his part, described Trump as “gracious and measured … on a personal level.”
Truly fearless stuff, rising above the partisan fray.
Up next, Maher praised Trump’s “authenticity with people that no one else can possibly match,” noting the interview Trump gave to CBS News’ Norah O’Donnell, whom the president called “a disgrace.”
“It’s at the same time horrifying and also it’s kind of refreshing,” Maher said. “As someone who loves honesty and has made my career about it as much as I could … there’s some level of it where you tip your hat and you go, ‘Wow, total honesty.’” Fetterman jumped in to giggle in appreciation of the moment in November 2025 when Trump told a female reporter on Air Force One, “Quiet, piggy.”
America sure is lucky to have such brave, heterodox liberals like these fighting the good fight against a lawless, racist, misogynistic, right-wing chief executive being called mean names.
When the subject turned to Trump’s disastrous and potentially illegal war with Iran, Fetterman could barely produce a coherent sentence. For example: “What’s so disappointing to me is, where is the global nation community, you know, demanding Iran at this point … It’s like this idea, like this, every Democrat, you can’t ever let them build a bomb. We’re here at the cusp. When would you ever have that opportunity to do?”
Fetterman also managed to sound like the pro-war dead-enders of the Vietnam era, who blamed protesters and unflattering news stories for preventing America from achieving total victory over the Vietcong. “Now the Democratic Party and a lot of the media has trained the Iranian regime, it’s like, ‘We just have to hang on. One more day, one more day. We have to, because eventually people will lose their focus and just give up.’ And that’s, I think that’s the tragedy right now,” the senator said.
This is the bar Fetterman cleared to become MAGA’s favorite Democrat.
The pair spent a good amount of time bashing the far left, particularly on Israel and Palestine, but offered barely a mention of the far right, nor did they acknowledge what is plainly obvious to even many Israelis, including a former Israeli prime minister and an ex-Mossad chief — which is that the Israeli military almost certainly committed myriad war crimes in its war of vengeance on Gaza after Hamas’ atrocities on Oct. 7, 2023.
By the end of the hour-plus episode, neither the host nor the guest had successfully made much of a cogent argument on any topic, so the chat wound down as you might expect — with both of them providing rapturous back-patting in celebration of each other’s bravery.
For all their grandstanding, Maher and Fetterman’s kvetchfest only revealed how snowflake-fragile their egos are and how paper-thin their ideas can be. As I noted, Maher is still steaming over David’s “My Dinner with Adolf” column, which he continues to bring up in interviews as emblematic of the incivility of the left. But if Trump calls a female journalist “piggy” or a “disgrace,” it’s met with giggles and praise for “authenticity.”
Maher and Fetterman aren’t for everyone, but the former’s HBO show was just renewed for another two seasons, and the latter’s popularity with Trump voters is so substantial that Trump himself reportedly lobbied for the senator to switch parties. (Fetterman refused, saying he’d be a “terrible Republican.”)
The episode aptly demonstrates how Maher and Fetterman represent a troublesome sect of the non-MAGA chattering class — one represented by wealthy people who have had their feelings hurt to the point that they’re now willfully oblivious to how much they actively serve Trump’s interests.
Downplaying indefensible acts, all while clutching pearls over college protesters and “resistance” libs, isn’t brave. It’s losing the plot.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. He's a two-time winner of the Southern California Journalism Award for investigative reporting on criminal justice issues. Find him on Bluesky and Threads.