Bill Maher mocked President Donald Trump’s go-to defense for his tariff policies: how many dolls little girls will be able to get.
The liberal HBO host made the jibe on his show Friday night, just weeks after sitting down for dinner with his old foe Trump at the White House, with Maher subsequently branding the president ‘gracious and measured.’
At the end of a cabinet meeting on April 30, Trump first used the doll defense to beat back criticism that his tariffs will soon leave retail shelves empty.
‘Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls, you know? And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally,’ he told reporters.
In the days since, Trump has brought up dolls a number of times, which Maher clearly found humorous, as he could barely keep a straight face throughout his monologue.
‘He’s obsessed with how many dolls we get to have. He said, ‘consumers don’t need 30 dolls,’ Maher said. ‘What is it with the dolls? Three times, three times in the last week now, three times he has defended his tariffs talking about dolls.’
‘First off, “Maybe children will have to have two dolls,” and then a couple of days later he said, “They’re gonna have three or four dolls.”’
‘And then he bumped it up the next day, five dolls. Yes, that’s our deal-maker-in-chief losing an imaginary negotiation with children,’ Maher joked.
Maher has already laid into the president over his ‘s**tshow’ first 100 days in office in an April 29 interview with The Free Press.
‘But after 100 days, there are probably 100 things to legitimately hate,’ he said, before stating a lengthy list of grievances toward the president.
He called DOGE ‘inefficient,’ said Trump was ‘disappearing people,’ getting into fights with judges, cutting aid money that was ‘killing people overseas’ and accused him of causing a market collapse.
‘And I want to emphasize: None of my disapproval for any of this comes from reflexive Republican opposition. On all these issues, it’s just objectively bad. And they know that, too,’ Maher concluded.
Many liberals and leftists expressed worry that Maher was flirting with going softer on Trump after his dinner with him, but that appears to have been a misplaced concern.
Nonetheless, Maher did describe Trump in positive terms after their meeting, which was arranged by MAGA-supporting country singer Kid Rock, who is their mutual friend.
Maher 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 a**hole 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 hordes of MAGA haters would be appalled: ‘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.
Maher 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.
The pair even joked about a lawsuit Trump filed against Maher in 2013 after he called him an orangutan on ‘The Tonight Show’ with Jay Leno.
Maher said he would donate $5 million to a charity if Trump could prove he wasn’t ‘the spawn of his mother having sex with an orangutan.’
‘I’m not saying it’s true. I hope it’s not true, but unless he comes up with proof … I’m willing to offer $5 million to Donald Trump that he can donate to a charity of his choice,’ Maher said at the time.
The comments were a clear jab at Trump for routinely questioning President Barack Obama’s citizenship status.
Maher’s comments also stemmed from the fact that Trump had offered $5 million to a charity of Obama’s choice if he publicly released his college transcripts and his birth certificate.
When Trump provided a birth certificate proving he didn’t descend from an ape and Maher didn’t pay up, the future president sued the comic for the $5 million he was owed.
Ultimately, Trump dropped the lawsuit after many legal experts said Maher’s offer was facetious and made in jest.