Bill Maher
Role at the time: Comedian and host of HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, speaking on the show’s Overtime segment
Statement summary
Responding on Overtime to a question about Trump saying that the Kennedy Center is in “a virtual state of collapse,” Bill Maher said “I was just there,” that it “looked fantastic,” and that the claim it needs renovation is “a bunch of bullshit” and “just a cover story.” He said Trump “wanted his name on it,” that a judge ruled he could not put his name on it, and that Trump then covered the whole building with “a giant tarp” so that “we couldn’t see any name.”
“It looked fantastic. In fact, all weekend, I kept saying to people, what a bunch of bullshit this is that it needs renovation. Obviously, that’s just a cover story. This place is perfect looking, and the people were great.” … “He wanted his name on it, and the judge said he couldn’t put his name on it.” … “There was just a giant tarp over the whole building so that, you know, we couldn’t see any name.”
Official Real Time with Bill Maher upload of Overtime, the post-show panel conversation that follows the September 18, 2026 episode, published on the show’s YouTube channel at 11:00 p.m. EDT on September 18, 2026 (03:00 UTC on September 19). The passage is Bill Maher’s answer to a question about Trump saying the Kennedy Center is in “a virtual state of collapse.” Maher, the show’s host, is on camera for the quoted portions of this passage, apart from a brief cutaway.
Archived copy (opens in a new tab)Why we used this label
Maher answers a question about Trump’s claim that the center is collapsing by saying it looks fantastic, calling the claim that it needs renovation “a bunch of bullshit” and “just a cover story,” and attributing the dispute to Trump’s wanting his name on the building. That rejects Trump’s stated rationale that the building is collapsing and condemns the renovation as a pretext for the naming dispute. The closest competing label is “Challenged the characterization”, because he first disputes the description of the building’s condition; it loses because he goes on to attribute a motive and to mock Trump’s response to the court’s naming ruling, which criticizes the position itself.