President Trump tore into Fox News on Saturday, demanding the conservative network stop booking Bill Maher after its hosts spent an evening segment praising the comedian for grilling California Gov. Gavin Newsom on his state’s troubles.
The 79-year-old president fired off a sprawling Truth Social post on Saturday evening, May 2 — roughly 30 minutes after “The Big Weekend Show” aired a segment dissecting Maher’s Friday night sit-down with Newsom on HBO’s “Real Time.” Trump appeared to be watching in real time as Fox personalities handed his political adversaries something resembling a compliment.
“Fox should stop putting this person on. He’s not representing us. You look weak, stupid, and ineffective, and I hate seeing that. DON’T USE BILL MAHER ANY LONGER AS A REPRESENTATIVE OF YOU!” Trump wrote, capping the rant with a swipe at his other late-night nemesis: “Bill Maher is a MORON, though slightly more talented than Jimmy Kimmel.”
The Segment That Set Him Off
The Fox segment that ignited the president’s fury featured Dr. Marc Siegel, the network’s senior medical analyst, and co-host Tomi Lahren walking viewers through Maher’s interrogation of Newsom on California’s economic failures. A chyron reading “The Truth Hurts” flashed beneath a clip of the 70-year-old Maher pressing the 58-year-old governor on gas prices, rents and the troubled high-speed rail project.
“I mean the train. Gavin, you got to get rid of the train. I say this as a friend, you got to let that train go,” Maher told Newsom — a reference to a project that lost roughly $4 billion in federal grants in July 2025 after the Trump administration pulled funding. Lahren branded the project a “boondoggle” and said she “loved” the way Maher “called him out.”
The rail project’s projected cost has since ballooned to $231 billion, and the first operating segment may not open until 2032. Although construction on the Central Valley stretch is partially complete — with more than 50 structures built and roughly 70 miles of rail bed laid — the full Los Angeles-to-San Francisco line remains far from reality.
A Familiar White House Grievance
Trump used the post to relitigate his much-discussed dinner with Maher at the White House in early 2025, painting the comedian — recently named the next recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Mark Twain Prize for American Humor — as rattled and out of his depth in the Oval Office. He claimed Maher was “nervous, scared,” and that the comedian’s first words were a request for a drink, calling the moment “endearing but, at the same time, absolutely pathetic.”
The president has long signaled discomfort with the right’s occasional embrace of Maher. He previously urged Republicans to stop using the HBO host to “show how the Left is coming over our way.” On Valentine’s Day this year he unleashed a similarly blistering post calling Maher a “jerk,” a “highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT” and a sufferer of “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” This latest broadside arrived against that backdrop.
Newsom’s “Mirror” Defense
Inside the interview itself, Maher pushed Newsom hard on the governor’s increasingly Trump-like online persona. Newsom is currently suing Fox News for $787 million, and Maher pointed out the irony: among the Democrats potentially eyeing 2028, Newsom appears to be the one borrowing most directly from Trump’s playbook of trolling and litigation.
Newsom didn’t push back. “I’m trying to put a mirror up to Donald Trump,” the governor said. He also went after Trump directly, accusing him of being unwilling to “unite this country in any way, shape, or form” and describing the current political climate as “the sewer we’re now living in because of Donald Trump.”
But Maher refused to let Newsom skate on California’s record. When the governor responded with a giddy “good!” to the suggestion that critics would attack his stats, Maher countered: “Are they gonna say ‘good’ about gas prices? Are they gonna say ‘good’ about how high the rents are?” Lahren later seized on that exchange to highlight what she described as a “smug” Newsom getting cornered.
Trump’s California Indictment
Most of Trump’s marathon Truth Social post read like a prosecutorial brief against Newsom — whom the president, as is his habit, called “Newscum.” Trump claimed the governor had taken Maher “over the coals” because the comedian was “defenseless, and totally deficient,” lacking either the knowledge or the nerve to push back.
He ticked through what he framed as Newsom’s failures: homelessness across Los Angeles and San Francisco, the rail project he called “Billions of Dollars over budget,” and the roughly 25,000 homes destroyed by fire earlier this year. Trump credited EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin with rescuing the rebuilding effort, writing, “If it weren’t for our Superstar EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, and me, they wouldn’t have any homes being built right now!”
He also argued California is hemorrhaging residents, claiming that “for the first time in History, more people are leaving than coming.” The Jimmy Kimmel mention near the end of the post was a callback to the late-night host’s recent Melania Trump “expectant widow” joke, which both the president and the first lady have publicly condemned.
What began as a Saturday evening panel discussion on a friendly network ended with the president publicly lashing the cable channel that has spent a decade as his most reliable megaphone — all because two Fox hosts agreed, briefly, with a comedian Trump cannot stand.
