Bill Maher opened his new episode of “Real Time” Friday night by addressing Trump’s 1,300-word social media tirade against him following their White House dinner earlier this month, with the comic comparing the president to Taylor Swift.

Following a sit-down interview with Republican Senator Ted Cruz, who was busy hawking his new book on Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, Maher welcomed his panel — Jim VandeHei, the co-founder and CEO of Axios, and Kid Rock, a singer who once rapped, “Young ladies, young ladies, I like ‘em underage, see / Some say that’s statutory — but I say it’s mandatory.”

Kid Rock was present at that Oct. 15 White House dinner with Trump, Maher and ESPN pundit Stephen A Smith, and appeared to defend Maher against Trump’s series of claims in his record-breaking Truth Social post.

“He said I was drunk. I was not drunk,” claimed Maher, to which Kid Rock replied, “You were pretty high.” “We had a good time — and it was four hours, right?” asked Maher. “We had a good time,” offered Kid Rock, adding, “I had to leave early, but yes, it was… Was he talking about dinner or the whole thing?”

After their exchange over the White House dinner, Maher brought up how former president Obama campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for Senate in Michigan, who is Muslim. Maher said, “As far as this issue goes about Islam in America and candidates who are Muslim, the left is naïve and the right is hysterical.” He then quoted Trump, who said of El-Sayed, “If Abdul and the Democrats win, they will open the floodgates and welcome hordes of jihadists to our shores, creating a nightmare of violence and terror until you cannot even have a Christmas.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Maher questioned Kid Rock, who grew up on a sprawling estate in the suburbs of Michigan. Kid Rock subsequently compared El -Sayed to the 9/11 hijackers, saying, “People talk about assimilation too all the time, right? This man very much has assimilated — good education, well-spoken, even a good-looking guy — [but] you know who else assimilated very well? Those pieces of shit that flew those planes into our World Trade Centers. The Fort Hood shooter. This has happened all over the world, so it scares the hell out of me, this Islamic extremism. I don’t know, is he a wolf in sheep’s clothing, or is he just a wolf in a wolf’s clothing?”

Maher replied, “Not that it matters so much, but the 9/11 hijackers weren’t here assimilated. They were from Saudi Arabia.”

“The ones who flew the planes were from Saudi Arabia? No,” Kid Rock shot back.

In fact, 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were from Saudi Arabia, two were from the United Arab Emirates, one was from Egypt and one was from Lebanon, and the first hijackers to arrive in the U.S. came in January of 2000, so they weren’t “assimilated very well,” as the man formerly known as Robert James Ritchie so boldly claimed.

Extracted and lightly reformatted for readability. · Source: pt