Bill Maher took aim at President Donald Trump’s trip to China in his opening monologue on Real Time With Bill Maher, turning the summit into a joke about takeout, red carpets and a president who likes to be flattered. Maher said he could tell China was “better now” because he ordered takeout and the menu told him to “go ahead, make some substitutions.”
He said Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping seemed to avoid most demands at the summit, joking that the two sides had “a lot of issues between them” but that they were mostly sidestepped. Maher said Xi told his translator to tell Trump not to catch feelings, and added that Trump had once said of Xi, “if you went to Hollywood you couldn’t find in central casting a better guy for it.”
The monologue landed on a familiar image of Trump as a man drawn to ceremony. Maher said China knows what Trump likes, calling out “the pomp, and the parades, and the red carpet,” and said there were “thousands of children waving American flags” at the summit. He also said Xi “bargained like someone who knows he holds the cards now,” while China served orange chicken as a subtle dig.
Maher tied the joke to the larger stakes in U.S.-China relations, saying he was glad the leaders of “these two powerful countries with nuclear weapons” were not fighting but that the relationship had become “a little personal.” He linked the summit to Trump’s earlier retreat in the trade war, saying China knew how to play to him after that backdown. The comic also said Elon Musk and the CEO of Apple were at the summit, folding business figures into the same spectacle of state power and dealmaking.
He ended by raising a different issue: Trump’s own trading. Maher said the 79-year-old president had bought and sold millions of dollars in stock this year in companies that do business with the government, then asked, “We’re just doing that out front now?” It was the sharpest turn in a monologue built on mockery, and it pushed the bit beyond foreign-policy theater into the question of how openly power and money are now mixed.
For Trump, the summit was supposed to project strength abroad. Maher’s version of it was less about diplomacy than about leverage, image and the people standing near the stage. The joke worked because the setting was familiar and the stakes were real: two countries still locked in competition, and a White House that, in Maher’s telling, is still easy to flatter.
