Posted in: HBO, Max, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: Bill Maher, cnn, opinion, trump

Was Bill Maher Visit Part of WBD CEO Zaslav's Larger Trump Outreach?

Was Bill Maher's White House visit just one part of Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav's overall outreach to the Trump Administration?

"Let me first say that to all the people who treated this like it was some sort of summit meeting, 'You're ridiculous. Like I was going to sign a treaty or something? I have no power. I'm a fucking comedian," shared HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher host Bill Maher on his late-night show, offering his book report on how his Kid Rock-arranged meeting with POtuS Donald Trump at The White House went. This is the same Maher who gets paid a whole lot of money by Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zaslav to be more than just a "fucking comedian," someone who has enough "power" to draw in a ton of viewers every week. Put a pin in that because we're going to come back to that.

"The guy I met is not the guy who, the night before the dinner, shit-tweeted a bunch of nasty crap about how this dinner was a bad idea and what a deranged asshole I was. Just for starters, he laughs. I've never seen him laugh in public. But he does, including at himself. He's not fake," Maher continued, calling someone "not fake" even though only seconds before he offered an example of how "fake" Trump is – either when he was hate-tweeting or playing nice-nice with Maher.

"Look, I get it. It doesn't matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I'm just taking it as a positive that this person exists. Because everything I've ever not liked about him was — I swear to God — absent, at least on this night with this guy." Maher added. "A crazy person doesn't live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up. It's just not as fucked up as I thought it was."

Were we surprised to get the report card from Maher that we did? Nope. The bar that was set was so low that – short of him literally throwing his own poop at everyone else in The Oval Office – there was no way that Trump wasn't going to clear it. I mean, Kid Rock's integrity was on the line here, people! So, it was a win for Trump because it made him look good, and it was a win for Maher because he can keep promoting himself as a "centrist" while making sure he's still getting the invites to the parties on both sides of the aisle. But was Maher's visit also part of a bigger play on Zaslav's part to play nice with the Trump Administration?

A profile of Zaslav by Michael Wolff for New York magazine claims that the multimedia company confirmed that a WBD representative reached out recently "to the Trump orbit seeking advice about how the company might advantageously interact with the White House and improve its Trump-age odor." Some of the responses included possibly giving Donald Trump Jr. "a hunting and fishing show on the Discovery Channel" and CNN hosting "more pro-Trump voices" – with Amazon bigwig Jeff Bezos's recent $40M investment in a documentary about Melania Trump.

"Michael Wolff is a lying sack of shit and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain," responded Steven Cheung, White House Communications Director, when asked for a comment on the reporting by The Hollywood Reporter.

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