Bill Maher Defends Trump Dinner on NPR, Says President Has No Fixed Beliefs

Q: If private talks fail to stop public attacks, what is the real value of engaging with powerful adversaries?

The value is not measured only by whether the attacks stop. It lies in gaining access, testing influence, reducing miscalculation, and keeping a channel open that may matter later. Maher’s argument reflects a basic reality of power: some leaders are highly responsive to whoever is in the room. If that is true, private engagement can still shape decisions at the margins even when public rhetoric remains hostile. Public attacks may serve image, politics, or impulse, while private conversations can affect staffing choices, priorities, tone, or what information reaches the decision-maker. There is also an intelligence value. Direct contact helps critics and rivals better understand how a powerful figure thinks, what arguments resonate, and where leverage exists. That can improve future strategy more than trading insults from a distance. Diplomacy often works this way: it rarely produces instant harmony, but it can prevent worse outcomes, clarify red lines, and create openings for later progress. At the same time, engagement has limits. If it produces no policy shift, no restraint, and is used mainly as a photo opportunity, its practical value drops sharply. Critics are right to ask whether access is being mistaken for influence. So the real test is concrete results, not symbolism. Engagement is worthwhile when it yields information, lowers risk, or creates even small opportunities to affect decisions. If it changes nothing except optics, then it is mostly theater.

3 articles · Updated · The Independent · Jul 18

July 15 on NPR’s “Newsmakers,” Bill Maher said meeting Donald Trump was worthwhile because the president can be swayed by people around him and “does change his mind sometimes.”
Maher argued critics were reacting emotionally, not logically, and rejected the idea that a White House dinner could further legitimize a sitting president who already holds the country’s highest office.
Trump, Maher said, seemed far more normal in private than in public, describing him as both impulsive and unusually candid even while calling his public outbursts a kind of performance.
Maher cast the dinner as a “Nixon to China” effort at direct communication rather than mutual insults, though he said Trump later returned to attacking him after Maher resumed his usual criticism.