Bill Maher eviscerates Sean Penn with ultimate comeback after Hollywood star calls out his dinner with Trump
Bill Maher was baffled that Hollywood star Sean Penn would question his dinner with Donald Trump after the Oscar winner had met with the likes of Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.
Penn stunned the comedian on his Club Random podcast when he said he would have not met with the president as Maher did in April.
Maher's response: 'Really? You'll meet with f***ing Castro and Hugo Chavez, but not the President of the United States?'
Penn met with socialist Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in 2007, in Caracas, when he was considered a villain by the Bush administration.
In 2008, President Raul Castro of Cuba granted him his first interview with a non-Cuban and at one point, he met Fidel Castro while on a trip to Havana. He also visited Iraq in 2002 and Iran in 2005.
In 2016, he shocked the world, admitting to have met and interviewed Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzmán.
Maher was actually seeking the left-wing actor's approval for his dinner with Trump: 'But you do, I hope, think I did the right thing to have dinner with him.'
'Absolutely, you're so smart,' replied the Fast Times at Ridgemont High star.
'Look, this is the President of the United States, whether we like it or not, doesn't matter,' Penn continued.
'I think that when you talked about it on the show that I would have preferred that I saw his mission or his will to have the dinner, I wish I would have seen it as less successful. Because you're so smart on policy.'
Maher retorted: 'Well it was less successful because I never stopped saying all the things I've always said about him. It would have been successful if he had somehow seduced me into supporting him.'
That's when Penn said he would not have done it, in part jokingly that 'it's a long flight' but also suggesting there would be no purpose.
Penn responded to Maher's crack about having met Castro and Chavez by saying he 'saw good results come out of some of those things.'
'I just personally wouldn't trust anything that was said in the room,' Penn summed up.
Maher replied: 'It's not a matter of trusting it, it's a matter of seeing it, a matter of experiencing it, a matter of knowing it.'
He compared it to someone who didn't want to get tested medically because they might not want to know something was wrong with them. Penn ultimately agreed.
Unlike Castro and Chavez, Penn later expressed regret for the interview with El Chapo, saying his goal was to start a conversation about the war on drugs.
The acclaimed actor also accused the Mexican government of endangering his life by claiming that his meeting with El Chapo led to his eventual capture.
El Chapo was arrested the next year and eventually extradited to the United States, where he is on trial.
Maher said Donald Trump was 'gracious and measured' in what he described as a positive meeting with the president, to the point that he walked away with a cheeky gift.
Maher has always attacked Trump on his HBO show dating back over a decade, when the two were involved in a lawsuit over Maher claiming the president's father was an orangutan.
On Friday's show, he took time out exclusively to 'give you my book report on my visit to the White House,' which saw him have dinner with Trump and UFC owner Dana White.
The lefty comedian confirmed the meeting had been arranged by musician and Trump fan Kid Rock, who also attended: ' Because we share a belief that there's gotta be something better than hurling insults at each other from 3,000 miles away.'
He slammed those who saw the event as some kind of important diplomacy meeting.
'For all the people who treated this like it was some sort of summit meeting, you're ridiculous. Like I was gonna sign a treaty or something? I'm a f***ing comedian, I have no power! He's the most powerful leader in the world, I'm not the leader of anything,' Maher said.
The comic did say that he wanted to represent 'a contingent of centrist-minded people who believe there's got to be a better way of running this country than hating each other every minute.'
He confirmed that Trump was a 'different' person than he'd seen in the public eye over the last decade and even the night before, when the president publicly wondered if the meeting was even a good idea.
'The guy I met is not the person who, the night before, s***-tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how he thought this dinner was a bad idea, and what a deranged asshole I was.'
'He's much more self-aware than he lets on in public,' Maher added.
Perhaps most striking to Maher was that Trump ' laughed' and has a sense of humor about himself.
'First good sign, before I left for the capital, I had my staff collect and print out this list of almost 60 different insulting epithets that the president said about me,' Maher said.
'I brought this to the White House because I wanted him to sign it, which he did with good humor,' he added.
He joked about how the hoards of MAGA haters must be hating this: 'I know as I say that, millions of liberal sphincters just tightened.'
'I'm gonna report what happened and you decide. If that's not enough pure Trump hate for you, I don't give a f***,' Maher said unapologetically.
He said that the president did not ask him for his support and when he gifted Maher several Trump hats, he didn't ask him to take a photograph wearing them.
'I'm just taking it as a positive this person exists because everything I've ever not like about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy,' he said.
The discussion largely was one of Trump asking for Maher's thoughts on various hot political topics, which he said he was heard out on, if not agreed with.
He confronted Trump mostly that he agreed with him on several issues, like immigration, improving police morale, keeping transgender people out of women's sports and several other ideas.
'I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him,' he said.
Maher said that while he voted for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, 'I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was comfortable talking to Donald Trump.'
'I feel it's emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days,' he said, taking shots at liberals for their ineffective means of protest against the president.
The pair even joked about the orangutan lawsuit, with Maher explaining he didn't like how he discussed Barack Obama's place of birth and Maher saying the president understood.
All along, he seemed to reiterate that he wished the Trump he met would be like that all the time, asking: 'Why can't we get the guy I met to be the public guy?'
'I went into the mind and that's what's down there. A crazy person doesn't live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person lives there, which I know is f***ed up, its just not as f***ed up as I thought it was,' he said in summary.
He said that he believes that the pair will likely go back to insulting each other, joking about Trump starting 'a new list.'
However, he said that he believes Trump understands that 'I have a job to do.'
'MAGA fans, don't worry. Your boy gave me nothing, just hats and a very generous amount of time and a willingness to accept me as a possible friend even though I'm not MAGA, which was the point of the dinner,' he said.
However, late on, the two shared a moment in the Oval Office where both admitted that there were a lot of people who liked that they were meeting but a lot of people who didn't want them to meet whatsoever.
It was there that they were both in complete agreement.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Telegraph
14 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Watch out, Joe Rogan – podcasting tycoon Alex Cooper is coming for you
Alex Cooper has a strict rule when it comes to guests on her podcast. 'All I ask is people just be vulnerable and honest,' she said in an interview last year. People are not always ready to do that, she added, in which case, she turns them down. It's a formula that has served Cooper, 30, remarkably well: she has got everyone from Jane Goodall to Kamala Harris to bare their most intimate thoughts and feelings for her listeners. Gwyneth Paltrow rated her former lovers for Cooper; Jane Fonda talked about the secret bulimia she battled with in her youth (and called Cooper 'one of the best interviewers I've ever had'); Hailey Bieber divulged her favourite sexual position. For those who don't know who Cooper is, a quick rundown: she's a blonde, beautiful American podcaster who hosts the wildly successful show Call Her Daddy and became famous for a viral episode focused on her oral sex techniques. Since it launched in 2018 as a chatty, sex-positive, no-holds-barred advice show, Call Her Daddy has become the most-listened-to podcast by women, with nearly five million downloads per episode. Cooper's podcast ranks only behind The Joe Rogan Experience as Spotify's most popular podcast. In 2021, Time Magazine called her 'arguably the most successful woman in podcasting' after she signed a three-year exclusive deal with Spotify worth $60 million; last October, Forbes ranked Cooper as number eight on its Top Creators list, noting that her endeavours brought in $22 million. In August last year she signed a three-year deal with SiriusXM to replace Spotify as her distribution and advertising partner which netted her $125 million. In possibly her biggest coup – and a sign of Cooper's cultural clout – last October she uploaded an interview with Kamala Harris in the final weeks of Harris's presidential campaign. Harris did not discuss her sex life, but she did discuss her upbringing, her political career, her stance on abortion and used the interview to respond to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' suggestion that Harris's lack of biological children meant she didn't have anything to keep her humble. 'Family comes in many forms,' said Harris pointedly. 'This is not the 1950s.' So how did Cooper – once an awkward, gangly, red-haired teen who almost became a pro football player – become queen of the podcasting world? It's a story that she attempts to explain (but with her trademark ruthless control) in Call Her Alex, a new two-part documentary on Disney+. Cooper grew up in Newton, Pennsylvania, the youngest of three siblings each two years apart. Her father worked as a TV sports producer for an ice hockey team; her mother is a psychologist. 'She acted like the oldest child,' her chic mother tells the cameras. 'She was an easy baby, but once she became a toddler…' she tails off. 'She had exceptional internal motivation,' her father says. From an early age, Cooper was both behind and in front of a camera. Fascinated by her father's job, she learnt that 'when you're seeing something or have a vision, film it. Tell a story,' she explains in the documentary. Making videos – movies, music videos, dressing up in silly wigs with her friends – became one of Cooper's driving passions in life. Bullied at school for her red hair and skinny frame, scared of boys 'because of the way they treated me', Cooper found solace in film-making and her female friendships. She taught herself how to use Adobe Premier aged nine and became obsessed with editing, loving having control over the timing and the pacing. 'It was the place where I felt 100 per cent myself,' Cooper tells the cameras. The other place she could be herself was on the football field. She'd started playing soccer young; she was great at sport 'and I loved it because it was all women. I had all of these girls on my team.' Where the films tapped into her creative side, the football field was where Cooper could play out her competitive, gritty side ('I'm a competitive motherf----r', she tells the cameras). In 2013, Cooper won a full tuition sports scholarship to Boston University to play soccer. But in her second year, it all started to go wrong. Nancy Feldman, the BU women's soccer coach, 'started to fixate' on Cooper. According to Cooper, Feldman called a private meeting in which she asked Cooper if she'd had sex the previous night. Eventually, her parents asked for a meeting with the university. Nothing was admitted to; the family was asked what they wanted. Cooper quit soccer, though she retained her scholarship. Whether or not this was her turning point is not explicitly clear. But it did shift something in Cooper. She stopped playing football, but she also stopped caring what other people thought. After leaving BU, she started her own YouTube channel. One day, someone suggested she start a podcast. The subject? Women, of course – and their lives. Specifically their sex lives, in candid, intimate detail. Cooper asked her relatively new roommate Sofia Franklyn if she'd be up for doing a show together. They decided to call it Call Her Daddy – because Cooper was the Daddy. Nobody was going to push her about, and she was going to talk about sex like she owned it – like men did. After she uploaded the first episode onto her Instagram, Dave Portnoy, founder of American pop culture website Barstool Sports (known for its conservative-leaning audience) DMd her. He liked the idea of a female version of what boys talk about in the locker room. When he discovered that Cooper cut and edited the show herself, he wanted to hire her. Barstool signed Cooper and Franklyn on a three-year deal for $70,000. It was the beginning of what would be a stellar rise to fame. Call Her Alex kicks off with Cooper preparing for her first live comedy tour in 2024. What is immediately apparent are three things: first, that this is a woman who works relentlessly hard to get what she wants; second, that what she wants is to serve (and grow) her audience; and third, that her audience really, really loves Alex Cooper. The camera flashes through some of the fans at her first show, in Boston's MGM Music Hall at Fenway. 'She helped me through my first breakup,' says one, tearfully. 'I feel like whenever I'm listening to her, I'm talking to a friend,' says another. One pair of friends have 'Unwell', the name of Cooper's media company, which focuses specifically on Gen Z content, tattooed on their wrists. Everywhere, women wearing Cooper merch are laughing, talking, crying, or shrieking with excitement at getting to see their idol in the flesh. When she eventually comes on stage in her trademark tracksuit, Uggs and tousled beachy waves, and shouts 'What's Up, Daddy Gang?', the crowd – her gang – goes wild. However you feel about her language, her eye-poppingly detailed sex chat or the guests on her show, this is the secret of Cooper's success: that she loves women. They are her allies, her crowd, and she wants to fight for them: for better sex, for more empowerment, for the ability to know what to do in any given situation. It's why she doesn't shy back from asking the most explicit questions, or probing her guests. 'We've got to talk about your personal life,' she tells them. 'I know you're promoting [something], but if listeners care about you, they'll care more about your product.' She is also not afraid to share details about her own life – it's how she got Hailey Bieber to own up to her favourite sex position with popstar husband Justin. When she walks through a crowd, she talks to the women who stop her; she holds their hands; she looks into their eyes. When she goes back to visit the apartment where the podcast began and runs into the group of girls who now share it, she appears truly delighted to see and meet them – and even more so when they invite her up. She hugs them and chats to them. She is someone in whom they can see themselves. As the former CEO of Spotify puts it in the documentary, 'she cries when her audience cries; she connects.' It's why her audience is broad and spans both sides of the political spectrum. And yet Cooper is not without – or afraid of – causing controversy. In 2020 she put out an episode called An Abortion Story, where she visited an abortion centre in North Carolina, interviewing both women who worked there and protestors outside. It is a compassionate, painful, fascinating episode, but it's clear whose side Cooper is on: the women. 'Overturning Roe [vs Wade] puts every single one of us in danger,' she declared. When she interviewed Harris, she was at pains to spell out that she knows the Daddy Gang is made up of both Republicans and Democrats – and that her people had been in talks with also hosting Donald Trump on the show – ('My goal today is not to change your political affiliation,' she said), but there was intense backlash, not least because of the obvious broad agreement between the two on issues such as abortion. Her interviewing technique – which has been criticised for its generic line of questioning, lack of follow-ups, and reluctance to go for the jugular – was singularly soft on Harris, especially given she was Vice President at the time. Data from Social Blade showed she lost 5,000 followers on Instagram and just over 3,000 on the podcast's main page within a day of the interview airing, with a net loss of over 4,000 in the days after. Cooper was unapologetic. 'It was a no-brainer,' she said at the time. 'People can say they're going to cancel me all day, but they're still listening.' Whether or not she's a feminist – although she would certainly call herself one – it's abundantly clear that her mind is about more than just her USP of sex. She is explicit that she created her podcast persona; at the very start, she took control of the cover artwork, insisting it feature herself and Franklyn, knowing that way it would be far harder to replace either of them as host. Six months into the first contract with Barstool, Cooper negotiated for more money than Franklyn, arguing that she did more of the work and edited the podcast. In 2020, realising the show's potential (and how much money it was making Barstool), Cooper renegotiated a deal with Portnoy to own the share's IP, a deal that Franklyn didn't want to take. Undeterred, Cooper cut her free. 'I'd realised the Daddy Gang was bigger than both of us.' If feminism means building a brand around yourself as a strong, liberated, sexually emancipated woman, Cooper has nailed it. And yet watching the documentary, that shy, awkward teen keeps popping her head out too – which is perhaps what saves her from herself. It would be easy to dislike Alex Cooper: she is brash, filthy-mouthed and utterly shameless. But she is trying, she says, 'to make women feel liberated, respected, seen, heard. To not be quiet, speak your mind, bulldoze through doors.' Cooper has bulldozed through a fair few herself. And she doesn't look set to stop. Call Her Alex is streaming on Disney+
Daily Mail
15 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Miami Heat star Tyler Herro shares astonishing conspiracy theory on livestream, leaving fans stunned
Retired Red Sox slugger Carl Everett denied the existence of dinosaurs and NBA star Kyrie Irving briefly considered the flat-earth debate in 2017, but Miami Heat guard Tyler Herro may them both beat: He doesn't believe in history. Specifically, the 25-year-old University of Kentucky product questions anything before 1950 as well as select events over the ensuing years, such as the 1969 moon landing and Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point performance in 1962. 'I don't even know what Wilt looked like, played like,' Herro told Twitch streamers Adin Ross and N3on about the Philadelphia Warriors legend's single-game scoring record. Herro isn't the first to question the legitimacy of Chamberlain's century-mark effort against the New York Knicks in Hershey, Pennsylvania. Officially, only 4,124 fans were in attendance that night and there is no film of the 169-147 Warriors win. The only keepsakes from the historic performance are the scorebook, a few articles and the famed photo of a 25-year-old Chamberlain holding up some paper with '100' scribbled across in dark pencil. Similarly, Herro isn't the only person to question Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon – a conspiracy theory that is currently enjoying renewed popularity. Where Herro really differs from other supposed truthers is the scope of his disbelief. Asked if he believes anything that happened two centuries earlier, Herro left the social media influencers stunned. Tyler Herro says he doesn't believe in history before 1950 😕 — Underdog (@Underdog) June 13, 2025 'Hell no,' he said. 'What about the moon landing?' N3on asked. 'Nah, I don't believe in that,' Herro continued. 'I don't believe in anything that happened before 1950.' Herro also took issue with Columbus' famed voyage to the Americas. But rather than arguing that countless other groups discovered the 'new world' prior to Columbus setting sail in 1492, Herro instead questioned the date. 'For real, like, how do we know? When did he come to the land or whatever?' Herro asked. 'They said 1492?' N30n, a 20-year-old influencer and not a history expert, immediately agreed, saying there is 'no way of really knowing.' In addition to Columbus' own journal and letters, other contemporaneous records of his journeys exist, such as the Book of Privileges detailing his specific agreements with the Spanish court. In the end, Herro did not seem interested in hearing about the existence of history, primary sources, or even books. When one person in the online chat tried to explain that historians can document facts and those records are then passed down to later generations, the Heat star shut down the conversation.
The Guardian
15 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Americans don't see US supreme court as politically neutral, poll finds
Americans are divided on major issues that the US supreme court is due to rule on in the coming weeks, but most agree on one thing: neither Republicans nor Democrats see the nation's top judicial body as politically neutral, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll. Just 20% of respondents to the poll agreed that the supreme court is politically neutral while 58% disagreed – and the rest either said they did not know or did not respond. Among people who described themselves as Democrats, only 10% agreed it was politically neutral and 74% disagreed, while among Republicans 29% agreed and 54% disagreed. The two-day poll, which closed on Thursday, was based on responses from 1,136 US adults. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The court has issued major rulings in recent years including in cases rolling back abortion rights, expanding gun rights, recognizing presidential immunity from prosecution for official acts, rejecting race-conscious collegiate admissions and curbing the power of federal agencies. Its 6-3 conservative majority includes three justices appointed by Donald Trump during his first presidency. In the poll, a minority of respondents – 44% – expressed a favorable view of the court, including 67% of Republicans and 26% of Democrats. The supreme court's popularity has declined since its June 2022 decision to overturn the 1973 Roe v Wade ruling that had legalized abortion nationwide. Fifty-seven per cent of respondents in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted at the end of 2021 expressed a favorable opinion of the court. By the end of June 2022, that figure had fallen to 43%. The justices are expected to issue rulings in major cases in the coming weeks as they near the end of their current term that began in October. Among these cases are one on the legality of Tennessee's Republican-backed law banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors and one involving Trump's executive order restricting automatic birthright citizenship, part of his hardline approach to immigration. Fifty-three per cent of respondents in the new poll said they supported 'laws that prevent transgender children under the age of 18 from getting medical treatment related to gender identity and gender transitioning'. Another 28% opposed such laws and the rest were unsure or did not answer the question. Among Republicans, support for such laws was at 57% and opposition at 28%, while among Democrats support was at 23% and opposition at 54%. During December arguments in the case, the court's conservative justices signaled their willingness to uphold the law. After Trump signed his birthright citizenship directive in January, 22 states as well as immigrant rights advocates and pregnant immigrants sued, arguing that it was a violation of citizenship language in the US constitution's 14th amendment. In the poll, only 24% of all respondents supported ending birthright citizenship and 52% – most – opposed Trump on the issue. Among Democrats, 5% supported ending it, with 84% opposed. Among Republicans, 43% supported ending it, with 24% opposed. The rest said they were unsure or did not respond to the question. The court also by the end of June is expected to issue a ruling on the legality of a Texas law that requires people to verify their age online before accessing pornographic websites. The poll found strong support for such laws. Among all respondents, 70% were in support and 14% opposed. Among Democrats, 65% supported and 18% opposed, while among Republicans 80% supported and 7% opposed. During January arguments in the case, the justices seemed to agree that states can try to keep adult material from minors but also voiced concern over burdens imposed on adults to view constitutionally protected material.
