In an Age of Tribalism, Bill Maher Just Did Something Radical: He Admitted He Was Wrong
25th September 2026
“I was wrong” is one of the rarest sentences in American public life. Standard practice is to double down, spin, or wait for the news cycle to move on.
So it’s worth noticing when Bill Maher said it anyway, on his own show, to his own audience, about a claim he’d made about President Donald Trump.
On a recent episode of “Real Time,” Maher walked back something he’d said the week before: that Trump was “winning almost none” of his primary endorsements.
Trump, unwilling to let the line go unanswered, texted Maher directly.
Maher checked the numbers. He found he’d spoken wrongly. The actual record, Maher said, was just nine of the 260 candidates Trump endorsed this cycle have lost—a 97% win rate. Instead of quietly letting this falsehood slide, Maher acknowledged this on the air: “I did overstate it. That wasn’t true. Overstated. There, was that so hard, to not be a d— about everything?”
The problem is that ‘being a dick about everything’ seems to be the default setting for progs—those that aren’t being a cunt about everything.