{"id":362892,"date":"2026-03-28T15:31:18","date_gmt":"2026-03-28T15:31:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/362892\/"},"modified":"2026-03-28T15:31:18","modified_gmt":"2026-03-28T15:31:18","slug":"bill-maher-says-he-respects-trump-for-attempting-to-block-his-kennedy-center-honor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/362892\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Maher says he \u2018respects\u2019 Trump for attempting to block his Kennedy Center honor"},"content":{"rendered":"

Bill Maher was surprisingly amenable when it came to the White House attempting to block his prestigious Kennedy Center award.<\/a><\/p>\n

The comedian will receive the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in a ceremony to be aired on Netflix in June. <\/a>The Atlantic first reported the news last week, though President Trump\u2019s officials at the time<\/a> blasted the report as \u201cfake news.\u201d<\/p>\n

On Friday\u2019s episode of Real Time With Bill Maher<\/a>, the 70-year-old host addressed the drama, joking, \u201cWe have reached a compromise. I am going to get [the award] and then I\u2019m going to give it to him.\u201d<\/p>\n

However, he went on to play down the drama, saying, \u201cI just want things to work out. I\u2019m not looking for a fight, and I\u2019m not mad that he did this.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued, \u201cMe and the president, we have a complicated relationship\u2026 this has been going on a long time, so him trying to block me from getting it? I respect the move.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Bill<\/p>\n

Bill Maher joked about the drama surrounding his Kennedy Center honor on Friday\u2019s episode of \u2018Real Time\u2019 (HBO)<\/p>\n

\"Maher<\/p>\n

Maher and Trump have had a tumultuous relationship over the years (Getty)<\/p>\n

\u201cGet it off your chest, big man,\u201d Maher added.<\/p>\n

Days after press secretary Karoline Leavitt denied that Maher would receive the honor, the White House appeared to make a U-turn on the decision.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis was false reporting at the time of the Atlantic\u2019s reporting, but the situation changed after further conversations took place between the Trump-Kennedy Center and event organizers over the past week,\u201d a government spokesperson said Thursday.<\/p>\n

The ceremony is due to be one of the last public events before the institution shuts down for two years for renovations at Trump\u2019s direction.<\/p>\n

The president has come under fire for his intervention in the center\u2019s affairs, having already ordered it renamed the \u201cTrump-Kennedy Center,\u201d prompting many performances to be cancelled and legal action to be launched.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor nearly three decades, the Mark Twain Prize has celebrated some of the greatest minds in comedy,\u201d Roma Daravi, the Kennedy Center’s vice president of public relations, said in a statement shared with The Associated Press.<\/p>\n

\u201cFor even longer, Bill has been influencing American discourse \u2014 one politically incorrect joke at a time.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a separate statement, Maher said: \u201cThank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it\u2019s like an Emmy, except I win.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who\u2019s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Previous recipients of the prize include Maher\u2019s fellow talk show hosts David Letterman and Conan O\u2019Brien, Eddie Murphy, Kevin Hart and Adam Sandler.<\/p>\n

Maher and Trump have had a tumultuous relationship, with the comedian describing the president as \u201cgracious and measured\u201d after attending a dinner at the White House with him in 2025.<\/p>\n

However, in a post on Truth Social last month, Trump turned on Maher, calling him a \u201chighly overrated LIGHTWEIGHT,\u201d adding that \u201cit was a total waste of time for me to have this jerk at the White House.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bill Maher was surprisingly amenable when it came to the White House attempting to block his prestigious Kennedy…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362893,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[14376,146,85,46,43799,175197,175196,1009,14377,20191,7421],"class_list":["post-362892","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-bill-maher","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-kennedy-center","tag-kennedy-center-honor","tag-mark-twain","tag-president-trump","tag-real-time-with-bill-maher","tag-tumultuous-relationship","tag-white-house"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362892","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362892"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362892\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362893"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}