Bill Maher has spent years absorbing insults from Donald Trump over his television ratings. This week, he handed the line right back.
On his HBO show Real Time, Maher went after Trump’s audience numbers for his Republican midterm convention appearances, seizing on reporting that the president’s Wednesday primetime address on Fox News drew roughly 2.5 million viewers, a figure smaller than what Sean Hannity and Greg Gutfeld typically pull in on an ordinary night.
“Trump’s convention on Fox News got less than [Sean] Hannity and [Greg] Gutfeld get on a regular night, and I’m the low-ratings dummy?” Maher said.
The dig traces back to February, when Trump used Truth Social to take aim at Maher directly.
“Fortunately, his Television Ratings are so low that nobody will learn about his various Fake News statements about me,” Trump wrote at the time.
He went on to lump Maher in with other late-night figures he has repeatedly targeted, including Jimmy Kimmel, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert, before adding a backhanded compliment: “He is no different than Kimmel, Fallon, or Colbert but, I must admit, slightly more talented!” Trump closed the post by calling Maher “a highly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT.”
Maher didn’t dispute the numbers this time. He just pointed out where the real ratings problem seemed to be.
Part of the issue, Maher argued, was timing. Trump’s Wednesday remarks stretched on for 106 minutes, airing directly opposite the NFL season opener, a broadcast that happened to feature a rematch of the two teams from the last Super Bowl. To Maher, going up against professional football in prime time was close to inviting a ratings letdown.
“Of course. You went against football? You went against the opening two nights of football? The one thing that people still watch on television?” Maher said.
Trump didn’t see it that way. In a follow-up Truth Social post, he claimed his speech’s “overall numbers beat the NFL.” At the time the claim was made, the official ratings for the 2026 NFL season opener hadn’t yet been released.
But history isn’t on his side: the 2025 opener pulled in 28.3 million viewers, more than ten times the audience reportedly tuning in to Trump’s Fox News address.
Maher also found material in the atmosphere inside the convention hall itself, which by multiple accounts looked far less full than Trump described.
“Of course Trump had to claim that the convention hall was packed, even though, you know, if you ignore the empty seats, yes, it did look packed,” Maher said. It was reported that a number of attendees had already headed for the exits before Trump’s Wednesday speech had even wrapped up.
Then there was the pledge. Trump had the crowd repeat a scripted tribute back to him, one that veered into strange territory by the end. “I pledge, to the greatest president in the history of the United States, that loves us so much he can’t even breathe, that I will go out with my family, my friends. I’ll do it any way. I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try and ch[]at like hell, like they do.”
Maher seemed almost surprised that the moment had happened in public, on camera, without much pushback. “This really happened this week, in America, which used to be a real country,” he said.
