Comedian Bill Maher went off on Sean Penn, who was a guest on his “Club Random” podcast uploaded to YouTube on Sunday, for his refusal to dine with President Donald Trump despite having met with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and Venezuelan Marxist President Hugo Chavez.
During their conversation, Maher said, “But you do, I hope, think I did the right thing to have dinner with him.”
“Absolutely, you’re so smart,” Penn said, but then clarified he would not accept a dinner invitation from Trump.
“Really, you meet with f***ing Castro and Hugo Chavez, but not the President of the United States?” Maher shot back.
“I saw good results come out of some of those things,” Penn said of meeting with the controversial world leaders. “I just personally wouldn’t trust anything that was said in the room [with Trump], including the personality.”
“It’s like saying, ‘I don’t want this medical test because I don’t want to know.’ I want to know,” Maher replied.
Penn also said he wished Maher’s dinner with Trump had not been perceived as “successful.”
“Well, it was less successful because I never stopped saying all the things I’ve always said about him,” Maher responded. “It would’ve been successful if he had somehow seduced me into supporting him, so it wasn’t successful.”
Maher has been under attack from leftists for dining with Trump. He said earlier this year that while he “didn’t go MAGA,” all of the things he disliked about Trump’s more public persona had been “absent” when they met in person.
“And I know as I say that, millions of liberal sphincters just tightened. ‘Oh, my God, Bill, you gonna say something nice about him?’ What I’m gonna do is report exactly what happened. You decide what you think about it, and if that’s not enough pure Trump hate for you, I don’t give a f***,” Maher said of the meeting, as The Daily Wire previously reported.
“I don’t remember exactly what we were talking about, but it must have been something with the 2020 election because I know he used the word ‘lost,’ and I distinctly remember saying, ‘Wow, I never thought I’d hear you say that,’” Maher added. “He didn’t get mad. He’s much more self-aware than he lets on in public.”
“Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was — I swear to God — absent, at least on this night with this guy,” the “Real Time” host said. “He mostly steered the conversation to, ‘What do you think about this?’ I know: your mind is blown. So is mine.”
“A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” he added. “A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is f***ed up. It’s just not as f***ed up as I thought it was.”