Larry David — co-creator of “Seinfeld” and creator/star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — penned a satirical column for The New York Times this month titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” which lampooned “Real Time” host Bill Maher’s public comments following his dinner at the White House. Maher praised President Donald Trump over things like laughing in casual, private conversation and not ranting maniacally as he is wont to do in public.
David’s satirical column seemed to reference this: “I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler, the one I’d seen and heard — the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal.”
Maher might not easily recall, but in 2009 he caused a bit of a stir by referring to America as a ‘stupid’ country.
Maher, a longtime Trump critic who says David has been a friend to him, does not seem to appreciate the joke. This can’t be a comfortable position for Maher to find himself in, and he’s insisted that his critics are, in fact, intolerant and part of the problem. “To use the Hitler thing — first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews,” Maher told Piers Morgan Thursday. “The minute you play the ‘Hitler’ card, you’ve lost the argument.”
Maher’s wrong, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. So in the style of his most recognizable routine, here are three new rules that might help him on the journey to enlightenment.
New Rule #1: If you’re going to build your image of being a take-no-prisoners, “politically incorrect,” “anti-woke,” anti-sensitivity culture comic, don’t tone-police your peers’ political satire or put Hitler jokes in a comedic no-go zone.
Maher seemed to invoke a form of “Godwin’s Law” when he told Morgan that invoking Hitler means “you’ve lost the argument.” However, Mike Godwin himself has said certain Trump-Hitler comparisons are apt — particularly his racist rhetoric about immigrants.
Maher’s also taking offense to a joke premise written by Larry David, who co-created a show with a legendary episode called “The Soup Nazi,” another show with frequent Hitler and Holocaust jokes — including a Nazi dog — and who made a controversial concentration camp joke in a “Saturday Night Live” monologue. Were all of his Hitler jokes kosher until he included Maher in one?
And really, it’s not hard to dig up many jokes Maher’s made comparing Trump to Hitler. Just days after Trump won the 2024 election, he even told a Republican guest that Trump was “Hitler-like” — and it didn’t sound like he was joking.
New Rule #2: If you’re going to justify your White House dinner with Kid Rock and Trump as “reporting” — then come out with a bigger scoop than Trump occasionally laughs in private conversations with celebrities.
Maher said he heard Trump admit in the White House that he lost the 2020 election. And, Maher added, Trump “didn’t get mad” when the comic pointed out that fact.
That’s kind of a big deal! Especially since Trump has lied about it for five years, attempted a self-coup over it and convinced almost half the country that this incredibly consequential lie is the truth. That he was “not mad” at a private dinner doesn’t matter at all. He was quite mad about losing the election, which is why he continues to poison American politics with his big lie about it to this day.
Maher claims to fearlessly speak truth to power and to be brave enough to break bread with his political adversaries. I’d ask Maher — in the event he gets another White House invite — to please, for America, politely ask his host if he’d consider doing the patriotic thing and stop misleading tens of millions of his followers and eroding trust in American elections. Then, Maher could let us know what the president says. That’s news we can use!
New Rule #3: When you get it wrong, be brave enough to admit it.
Maher, on his own show, said of Trump: “I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking it as a positive that this person exists.” With the exception of the last sentence, that’s basically the whole point of David’s column. So what’s the problem?
“There’s gotta be a better way than just hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” is a rationalization Maher has repeated several times since he was a guest of the president. He’s argued that by enjoying a superficial social engagement with Trump, he’s signaling to Trump supporters — and his own fans — that Maher is one of the good liberals searching for common ground in a divided country.
This is a straw man argument. Few people are saying “ignore Trump” or “don’t speak with Trump supporters” — the issue is whether Maher’s “reporting” served any purpose other than to soft-sell the increasingly authoritarian Trump as a normal guy in private. I mean, who cares if he is?
It was 16 years and many pounds of marijuana ago, so Maher might not easily recall, but in 2009 he caused a bit of a stir by referring to America as a “stupid” country. Because, he said, Sarah Palin — who recently had lost as the Republican vice presidential candidate in a landslide election victory for Barack Obama — might someday be elected president.
Maher said he heard Trump admit in the White House that he lost the 2020 election.
Palin’s know-nothing populism found a much more famous and charismatic vessel in Trump, who rode it to the White House twice — with a failed self-coup attempt thrown in between for good measure. The reality of Trump as a two nonconsecutive-term president far exceeds the horrors Maher feared of a Palin presidency that was never in real danger of actually happening.
Maher recently mocked Trump’s critics for lamenting the state of America after Trump won the 2024 election. But if 2009-era Bill Maher thought America was “getting dumber by the day,” as he put it, because Palin was lingering around the edges of electoral respectability, what would that Maher think of America now that’s twice elected Trump?
To Maher’s credit, he continues to describe Trump as a unique threat to the country, and said it’s not even a close comparison to the supposed threat posed by “wokeness.” He even listed a new rule at the end of his most recent show that seemed to get at almost exactly the point as David’s column, “New Rule: Republicans have to stop excusing all the dictator-y stuff that comes out of Trump’s mouth by saying ‘He’s just kidding!’”
The point of David’s column was not that Trump has committed anything comparable to Hitler’s crimes; it was to mock Trump’s useful idiots (a term Maher’s fond of using for pro-Palestinian student protesters), people with influential perches who are easily charmed by a powerful person’s flattery, as that leader amasses power, crushes dissent and scapegoats a marginalized group of people.
Maher has long lamented younger audiences “not getting” his comedy, supposedly because they’re too easily offended. I don’t get the sense that Maher’s actually in the tank for Trump or MAGA at all. But could it be possible, maybe just a little bit, that he’s the one not getting the joke here?
