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A couple of weeks back, HBO content machine Bill Maher followed his contrarian muse on one of its more extravagant whims, and ended up having dinner with Donald Trump. (Kid Rock was also there, which seems like the sort of meeting of the minds that should invoke some kind of Designated Survivor clause, but they apparently just barreled through.) Maher recounted the dinner to his Real Time audience shortly after, revealing that, actually, Trump is capable of acting like a human being when he doesn’t have a phone in his hands, and has had his proper calories, and isn’t actively working to deport people or eliminate trans rights or silence press critics or any of the other stuff he uses the power of the White House to do on an extremely regular basis. “I went into the mine, and that’s what’s down there,” Maher reported ,with his usual “What if everyone in the world is a dumb asshole except for me?” persona. “A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there, which I know is fucked up. It’s just not as fucked up as I thought it was.”
Amazingly, this soothing gesture did not soothe everybody, including Maher’s fellow HBO alum Larry David, who penned an absolutely scorching New York Times piece entitled “My Dinner With Adolf” that raked Maher’s “But he was nice to me in person!” statements over the coals. (“Two hours later,” David concludes the piece, “The dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. ‘I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.’ ‘I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.’ And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”) This, turns out, has hurt Maher’s feelings, something he expressed to, who else, fellow Trump associate Piers Morgan in an interview this week.
“To use the Hitler thing— first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews,” Maher said, noting that he considers David a friend. “This wasn’t my favorite moment of our friendship, but…” Morgan, being Morgan, attempted to draw Maher deeper into making attacks, citing critics who’ve gone after David for being silent on the conflicts in Gaza. But Maher mostly blows that off, simply asserting that he still thinks he did the right thing by talking to Trump. (Maher uses the Hitler critique to neatly sidestep David’s actual point, which is that these kinds of “Why can’t we all sit down and engage with each other as people?” pieces have the effect of invoking tolerance for sometimes deeply, and dangerously, intolerant points of view, but at least he’s smart enough not to go for the obvious Piers bait.)
[via Deadline]
