After initial reports were dismissed by Team Trump as “fake news” (or perhaps premature news), Politico’s Daniel Lippman reports comedian and HBO Real Time host Bill Maher will receive the Mark Twain Prize from the Trump-Kennedy Center prize in June in a show made for Netflix in one of the center’s last public events before it shuts down for a planned two-year renovation.
Trump spokesman Steven Cheung tweeted “Literally FAKE NEWS” when The Atlantic published an initial scoop.
“Anonymous sources with half-baked information leaked to The Atlantic before conversations were finalized,” an anonymous source told Politico. “There was nothing to confirm at the time and it is not appropriate to get ahead of any settled agreement between multiple parties involved.”
Maher stoked controversy on the Left for having dinner with the president last year, but Trump hasn’t been kind to Maher since. Maher hasn’t gone MAGA on anyone, with whoppers like comparing Alex Pretti’s death at the hands of ICE in Minneapolis to the Holocaust. But Maher has also a fierce critic of wokeness, and called out Jimmy Kimmel and his wife for their intolerance of pro-Trump opinion, even within their own family. He called out the mass killing of Christians in Nigeria as a blind spot for the Left.
“Thank you to the Mark Twain people: I just had the award explained to me, and apparently it’s like an Emmy, except I win,” Maher said in a statement, according to Politico. “I’d just like to say that it is indeed humbling to get anything named for a man who’s been thrown out of as many school libraries as Mark Twain.”
Maher has received 42 Emmy nominations throughout his career, most for his talk show, but he’s destined to lose to Jon Stewart and now to John Oliver in the category. His only win, in 2014, was as an executive producer of Vice on HBO.
