Bill Maher roasts Trump fans who say ‘God saved' him from sniper bullet — but did not spare Corey Comperatore
Comedian and political commentator Bill Maher took aim at Donald Trump supporters who credit God with saving the president during the July 2024 assassination attempt at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.
On Sunday's episode of the Club Random podcast, Maher questioned his guest, actor Esai Morales, on why God would spare Trump, but not Corey Comperatore, a Trump supporter and former firefighter who was killed in the incident.
'I'm religious, but I'm not religious. You know what I mean?' Morales said. 'And people go, oh, I'm spiritual as a fad, but I just know something, somebody out there in here all around loves me enough that has not allowed me to destroy myself.'
'But what do you say to the person who gets eaten, that why didn't the God love him?' Maher asked. ' You know what I mean? What about all the people who have the s****y outcome?'
'A very good point,' Morales admitted.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, 20, fired an AR-15 rifle at Trump from a rooftop during the Butler rally on July 13. He injured Trump's ear and killed Comperatore while also wounding two others. Crooks was shot and killed by a member of the Secret Service Counter Sniper Team shortly after the attack.
On the podcast, Maher dismissed claims that the Trump assassination attempt was staged. Morales admitted he briefly wondered if it might have been staged because Trump fell and then quickly got back up.
'Yeah, but OK, a bullet did go,' Maher said. 'That's my point. It couldn't have been staged. And, you know, people say, 'God saved Trump.' Where was the God for the other guy?'
This isn't the first time Maher shared his opinions on Trump's assassination attempt. A few hours after the shooting, Maher posted a video from a Minnesota stage, stating he would not make jokes about the incident.
'I unequivocally denounce [the shooting], I don't care what you think about that. Not funny,' he said at the time, 'I'm sure that there will be jokes that people will make because they hate him so much that they wished it went he other way. Not for me.'
Maher went on to call Trump 'the luckiest motherf***er that has ever walked the face of the Earth,' and wrongly assumed the then-unidentified shooter was a liberal before any motive was confirmed.
'Whoever did this, the shooter has done so much damage to the left,' Maher said. '[The left] has lost a lot moral high ground in the 'you're the violent people' and the 'liberals don't shoot people, liberals don't solve it that way.''
Before the shooting, Crooks had searched for information on Trump, Joe Biden, and other public figures, as well as gun-related websites. His parents had reported him missing hours before the rally. Investigations revealed bomb-making materials in his vehicle and home, and a remote detonator was found on his body.
But a month after the shooting, Maher found the humor in the assassination attempt, calling it 'one of my favorite days from 2024.'
'It'd be different if he [Trump] got killed. No tragedy happened — well, for one guy,' Maher said about Comperatore on Matt Friend's podcast Friend In High Places.
'A guy shoots at Trump, the guy behind him gets shot and killed — that's so Trump,' Maher continued. 'It's just so, it's just so on brand to have the other guy …. he never goes to jail. He never loses money in bankruptcy. It's always somebody else holding the bullet or the bag.'
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By 7pm, it's sold out. In addition to having great food, Dusty's is also a place where customers chip in. 'If I get too busy, people will just get up and start helping,' says Combs. 'They'll take their dishes back. They'll stock the cooler. They'll clear other people's plates. If I have to leave the bar for 20 minutes, it will take care of itself. Customers will get their own drinks. Honor system. We trust them.' When I sit at the bar with locals Gus Winterrowd, a retired farmer; Jeff Farkell, a crop consultant; and Dan Rouns, a retired farmer and previous Dusty's owner, the conversation spans topics as far-ranging as life before technology to soil samples to memories of spinning records in the disco bar upstairs. This is how we landed on the topic of the 'cancer belt'. Winterrowd tells the group he heard the term from his wife's doctor in Seattle when he asked: 'What's the deal with all the cancer in our area?' And the doctor responded: 'It's the cancer belt,' referring to the rate of illness in women in communities across the midwest to northern plains. 'She put up one hell of a fight,' says Rouns about Winterrowd's wife. 'She did anything any person could do.' At this point in the conversation, I realize that a big part of the beauty of the dive bar is that it's a place of connection, a place where real people come to know each othe in real time. Of course, such moments of gravity are balanced with humor: 'We give each other shit. Ninety-ninety percent of the time we all get along. And we don't talk politics unless we're really drunk,' says Farkell. Forty-six miles down the road from Brady on the Missouri River, in the small city of Great Falls, I'm crouched with my camera near a mannequin wearing a repurposed prom dress in a room overflowing with fabrics, threads and sequins. At center is a Singer sewing machine and at the helm, Sandra Thares, seamstress of mermaid costumes and owner of the Sip 'n Dip Lounge, a tiki retro cocktail bar. Yes, mermaid costumes. Sip 'n Dip features windows with underwater views of swimming mermaids. (Currently, there are no mermen.) As part of their employment, each mermaid receives two tails and two tops per tail – all handmade by Thares. In 1996, the first swimming mermaid was a housekeeper dressed in a green plastic tablecloth on New Year's Eve. Over time, the concept became popular and grew into a regular weekend event. It's now a defining aspect of the bar, with mermaids putting on a show six or seven times a week. Mermaid Bingo Night was added in 2024. The evening entails three rounds of bingo in which the mermaids hold up the number cards. It is, as Thares puts it, 'something to do on a cold Montana winter Monday'. Usually, everyone gets a Hawaiian lei. The prizes are not monetary but instead they are 'fabulous' rewards. No matter what is happening on any given evening, Thares says, 'I always tell people that the thing about the Sip 'n Dip is that it doesn't matter who you are, where you are from, what your background is, what your political beliefs are, none of that matters [at] the Sip' n Dip; there's always something to talk about. And no matter who you are, you make new friends.' At each dive bar that I visit, people share the details of other dive bars that I should go to. More than once, people point me in the direction of Sun River and the 'bra bar', more formally known as the Rambling Inn – a place where customers leave their bras behind to hang on the walls in exchange for free drinks. Alas, the bra theme is great fodder for good-natured double entendres regarding 'cups' and a fun starting point for lighthearted conversation. Throughout my dive bar tour, the Helsinki Bar – the last remaining building in Finn Town in the small mining community of Butte – kept calling me back. I was previously there on St Urho's Day, a Finnish holiday celebrating the fictional St Urho, when I met Fiina Heinze. Heinze is of Finnish descent, and I witnessed her crowning as the 2025 Queen of St Urho's Day amid a packed bar, jello shots and premade plastic bags filled with a mysterious mixed drink. According to Heinze, St Urho is celebrated for driving away the grasshoppers that were destroying the grape crops in Finland. The holiday is something of a whimsical Finnish rivalry to St Patrick's Day: 'It's just a day that the Finns decided to have [on] the day before St Patrick's Day. It's not a national holiday.' I think that's the thing about dive bars: in large part, they are about stories. The stories that we listen to and that we share. The stories we experience while we are there. And if you're lucky, it can mark the beginning of a new story with a lifelong partner. All this, I think, is like the dive bar itself: an expression of that imperfect, enduring and sometimes sticky thing called love.
