Comedian Bill Maher used this week’s tragic passing of late Pope Francis to launch a brutal comedic assault on the Trump administration Friday night.
“Pope Francis was the first pope from South America,” the comedian riffed during his opening monologue. “So his body will rest in repose in the Vatican for eight days, and then ICE will toss him in a van and ship him to El Salvador.”
Perhaps a little sore from the massive backlash to his adulatory dinner with President Donald Trump earlier this month—not least with his description of the president as “gracious and measured,” which prompted a vicious New York Times takedown from fellow comedian Larry David on Monday—Maher didn’t let up, taking further potshots at the Vice President JD Vance.
“[The Pope] was 88 years old, had just finished a 38-day stay in the hospital, got a lung infection and pneumonia, met JD for half an hour and keeled right over,” he said, referring to Vance’s unfortunately timed meeting with the Holy Father only the day before his death.
Maher also noted that his Friday show was being broadcast less than five days short of the 100-day benchmark for Trump’s second presidency.
“It’s always a big thing when the president has his first 100 days,” he said, adding that “time really flies when you’re in the fetal position.”
Nor were his jibes reserved for the president and vice president. Maher further tore into Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth after news broke earlier this week that he had bypassed government security protocols by installing the Signal messaging platform on his office computer at the Pentagon.
“And of course Trump, he’s gotta deal with all the kooky cabinet members he put in office, you know, the TV personalities,” Maher said. “Have you heard about crazy Pete Hegseth? What a scad!”
Hegseth’s latest blunder represents a heaping of scandal upon scandal, coming less than a month after The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, was inadvertently added to another group on the app in which the Defense Secretary and other top-ranking Trump administration officials discussed highly sensitive details of “imminent war plans” in Yemen.
It later emerged Hegseth had also shared plans with two family members and his attorney via yet another secret group chat on the app, with the intense and mounting public backlash now prompting rumors the former Fox News host may soon find himself on the way out from his coveted post at the White House.
“He was caught sharing top secret information–well, he did it again!“ Maher said. ”He shared attack plans with his wife, his brother, his lawyer!”
He further castigated Hegseth for suggesting that playing fast-and-loose with sensitive information on ongoing military operations was “no big deal,” adding that “the brother and the lawyer can be completely trusted, and the wife doesn’t believe anything he says anyway.”
Not everyone was delighted by the comedian’s choice of themes in this week’s broadcast of his eponymous HBO show though, with his riffs on the death of Pope Francis in particular prompting something of a outcry on social media from users who described his jokes as “cringe,” “distasteful” and “not funny at all.”
“I’ve never had issues with [Bill Maher] ever,” as one person posted on X. “I rarely post or comment on anything anywhere. But this was disappointingly distasteful especially for him [sic].”
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