Why Stephen A. Smith and Bill Maher Can’t Stop Apologizing for Trump

Last week, Donald Trump called Stephen A. "dumb as a rock." Guess what happened next.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political scientist, political analyst, and professor in Southern California. He teaches American Government and political behavior, with a focus on political psychology, voting behavior, and political socialization. Subscribe to his Substack, The Thinking Class with Professor Ealy.

Bill Maher and Stephen A. Smith have become two of the most reliable suppliers of what I have come to call the Conservative Alibi Machine. Whenever Republicans create a disaster, undermine democratic norms, excuse corruption, or wander face-first into yet another self-inflicted scandal, Maher and Smith show up like insurance adjusters determined to explain why Democrats are actually liable for the damage.

It is a remarkable business model. Republicans light the fire. Republicans pour gasoline on the fire. Republicans stand in front of the fire insisting it is actually a freedom bonfire. Then Maher and Smith arrive to explain that Democrats should have done a better job communicating with the flames. And, somehow, they always manage to collect the check.

I have written about both of these men before — Smith across three separate pieces that documented his Asymmetric Neutrality Syndrome, his motivated reasoning, and his role as the Conservative Alibi Machine’s most decorated practitioner, and Maher most recently last week, when he spent a segment mocking Trump’s Freedom 250 concert lineup — the Vanilla Ice, Milli Vanilli, Bret Michaels fever dream of a birthday party — and then turned around days later and scolded the very artists he’d just mocked for having the nerve to drop out once they realized what they’d signed up for. I thought that piece said everything that needed to be said about a man whose entire public persona is built on mistaking confidence for clarity.

Then D.L. Hughley started talking.

On a recent episode of his show Uncertain, Hughley delivered what might be the most efficient roast of both men I have ever heard. And what made it land so hard was not just what he said. It was who was saying it. D.L. attended Bill Maher’s 40th birthday party. They were close friends. He is not some media critic taking potshots from the cheap seats. He is a man who watched someone he actually knew become, in his words, “a decidedly different dude.” That changes the weight of the criticism. When D.L. Hughley calls Bill Maher out, it does not feel like punditry. It feels like someone reading the obituary of a friendship and wondering what happened to the guy he used to know.

Then Hughley dropped a line so perfect that it practically ended the discussion before it began: “Bill Maher is “the white Stephen A. Smith.”

I am still laughing about it. Not just because it is funny, but because it explains so much.

Real Time has been on the air for more than two decades. Stephen A. Smith has been a national media figure for decades. Somehow these two spent years orbiting the same media universe without becoming attached at the hip. Then somebody finally put them in the same room and, apparently, nobody could stop it. Smith has now appeared on Real Time four times since January 2024.

Four times.

At this point, it feels less like a guest booking strategy and more like the television equivalent of two people matching on a dating app and moving in together three weeks later.

And once you see it, you cannot unsee it. You go back and watch those appearances and suddenly the similarities jump off the screen. The certainty. The self-regard. The conviction that they are the last two honest men left in a civilization overrun by cowards and idiots. Two men who pride themselves on speaking uncomfortable truths right up until someone says something uncomfortable about them.