The above photo is courtesy of the White House and shows Trump dancing at this year’s White House Easter Egg Roll. No doubt this demonstrates he can’t be all bad since, you know, dancing! Pay no attention to the disappearances and the trade wars! He’s just so wacky! This bit of pre-post snark will become clearer as you read.
While I will confess to having been aware of Bill Maher since his ABC show, Politically Incorrect, on ABC back in the day, I have only paid him passing attention over the decades. I am aware of his HBO show, Real Time With Bill Maher, that I have rarely watched despite the intersection of political junkie and comedy nerd that is represents. I will confess to having long found Maher to be insufferable, regardless of whether he agreed with me or not. He has long struck me as someone who thinks that making jokes about politics actually makes him an actual expert on the subject.
I have written, as best my memory and Google can tell me, precious little about Maher. I am fairly certain that the following, from a post I wrote on cancel culture back in 2022, is the most words I have dedicated to him.
An example of cancelation linked to speech that comes to mind (but is far older than the term “cancel culture”) is when Bill Maher said on his ABC show, Politically Incorrect, about the 9/11 hijackers: “We have been the cowards. Lobbing cruise missiles from 2,000 miles away. That’s cowardly. Staying in the airplane when it hits the building. Say what you want about it. Not cowardly. You’re right.” This led to his firing, as it was not a, well, politically correct thing is to say in the aftermath of 9/11. He lost that job in the middle of 2002 and was never heard from again, hence underscoring the power of cancellation before we had the term.
Just kidding, he started a new show with HBO the next year, which is still in production (and wherein he frequently inveighs against cancel culture).
Google reminds me that I quipped that Maher might be a bit of narcissist on Twitter about a year ago.
That self-importance kind of figures into this post. I had noted a few days ago that Larry David was trending on Twitter, and I noted at the time that it had something to do with Maher dining with Trump and that David had written something for the NYT in response. I was reminded of this this morning, and so I read David’s essay, which is here: Larry David: My Dinner With Adolf.
However, before one reads that essay, it would likely be useful to watch Maher’s “book report” on his dinner with Donald, which can be viewed on Instagram or YouTube.
I think it is worth your time if you want to assess the situation. I also think it is important (and the reason that I am even writing this post) because it shows, yet again, the ways in which an authoritarian can be normalized, and in a way that makes it easier for some segments of the general public to therefore rationalize away truly awful behavior.
A transcript can also be found via USAT, Bill Maher’s full monologue on his Donald Trump meeting: Read the transcript.
Maher ultimately notes that while he does not agree with Trump in a variety of topics, and will continue to say so, he was surprised at how nice Trump was to him.
To Maher’s credit he does note the following.
Look, 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, because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.
I would note, however, that it does matter for that comedian to then take to their large stage and help make Trump seem normal.
There is a lot of fawning in Maher’s report.
I’ve had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected, people who don’t look you in the eye, people who really don’t listen because they just want to get to their next thing, people whose response to things you say just doesn’t track. Like, what? None of that with him. And he mostly steered the conversations: ‘So what do you think about this?’ I know. Your mind is blown. So is mine.
There were so many moments when I hit him with a joke or contradicted something and no problem. At dinner, he was asking me about the nuclear situation in Iran in a very genuine, ‘Hey, I think you’re a smart guy. I want your opinion’ sort of way.
This made me think of the many times I have read people note that Trump often seems taken with the last person he talks to. The notion that a real estate developer/politician/reality TV star/lifelong celebrity would be charming in some capacity at a dinner should surprise no one, and it really has little saliency to much of, well, anything.
Maher continues.
The most surreal part of the whole night was when I got home. I flew back right after the dinner, and I’m in bed watching ’60 Minutes’ from the night before. And there’s Trump in one of their stories, standing at a podium in a room that looked to me like one of the rooms and places we’d just been in. And he’s ranting, ‘Disgusting, you’re a terrible person.’ And I’m like, who’s that guy? What happened to Glinda the Good Witch? And why can’t we get the guy I met to be the public guy?
Because the public guy is the one that matters. And, moreover, the private guy is still making all the decisions that are a problem. Again, being nice at dinner is irrelevant. And yet, Maher continues immediately after the above paragraph.
And I’m not saying it’s our responsibility to do that. It’s not. I’m just reporting exactly what I saw over two and a half hours. I went into the mine, and that’s what’s down there. 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 (expletive) up. It’s just not as (expletive) up as I thought it was.
Setting aside the exact efficacy of the category, “crazy person,” the fact of the matter is that having dinner with someone is not enough to determine whether they fit in that category or not. I suspect most truly horrible people can be charming at dinner now and again, especially in a context wherein they hold all the cards (you know, like hosting a comedian at the White House when you are POTUS).
Maher is not doing anyone any favors telling his audience that Trump only “plays a crazy person on TV.” It is just more normalization of a person doing a lot of very bad things. Beyond that, why is the assumption that Trump is “playing” crazy, but is actually nice? Maybe he was “playing a nice person at dinner”? Or, maybe, people are complicated and they can both be gracious hosts and also heartless abusers of human rights?
The notion that a two-and-a-half-hour dinner is enough to balance off all the “crazy person” is an odd stance, to put it mildly.
One of the most basic lessons I learned as an undergraduate political science major oh those many years ago was, pay attention to what politicians do, not what they say.
Talk is, as they say, cheap.
And Maher even acknowledges the following (emphasis mine).
Because I don’t have a good feeling and will be critical about a lot of what he’s doing: the trade war and disappearing people, ruling by decree, threatening judges, gutting the government with glee. But I also think he now understands I have a job to do, or at least he did on this night because he said to me early on that he’d seen our last episode, which was the Friday before this dinner And he said, ‘I thought maybe you’d be nice, but you’d hit me really hard.’ I did, because I’m not going to pull my punches that presidents get to propose a third term for themselves. He understood that, and without animus. That doesn’t mean he’s not going try to do it.
Ok, so before I comment on the bolded portion, Maher seems to be treating all this like, well, Trump has his job and I have mine, so what’s the big deal? (Spoiler alert: I don’t think Trump is spending a lot of time thinking about Bill Maher, dinner, or no). Look, that worked for Dana Carvey and George H. W. Bush (i.e., a president appreciating being made fun of by a comedian).
Maher makes it sound like he and Trump are like Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog, doing their jobs when they are on the clock, but really just working stiffs doin’ their jobs. I mean, it’s a livin’! Amiright?
But let me turn to, at minimum, “disappearing people.” Trump can have dinner with one comedian a night for the rest of his term, and be nice to them all, and that doesn’t make “disappearing people” just part of the gig and therefore grist for Maher’s comedy “punches.”
I’m sorry, but disappearing people is, again, a human rights abuse and is contrary to the Constitutional order and the rule of law. This is not just some topic one can have a light-hearted disagreement about.
Lauching trade wars that cause trillions of dollar in wealth to evaporate, all the while threatening economic contraction (including people’s jobs and therefore ability to care or themselves) is not just a punchline.
“[G]utting the government with glee” is a destructive action that will cause real harm and not just grist for the monologue mill.
Threatening to stay for a third term is a challenge to the constitutional order, and one that anyone who studies Latin America knows is a classic dictator move. It’s not just some wacky thing the president mentioned.
I am willing to bet that Augusto Pinochet could be a gracious host at dinner. That hypothetical graciousness would not have unkilled thousands of Chileans.
And the fact that Donald Trump laughed at some of Bill Maher’s jokes doesn’t change the fact that over a hundred persons were rendered to a Salvadoran torture prison for life without due process of law.
I do not expect Bill Maher to be an avatar of wisdom, but it is nonetheless frustrating to watch someone with his platform give Trump this much cover. It does, however, confirm my assessment of Maher’s intellect and self-absorption. Although maybe he is really super-smart and humble at a private dinner!
Again, here’s David’s essay, which I think is an effective satirical piece and makes a similar point with more humor than I did.
(Amusingly, the Times felt the need to explain why they published the David essay. I guess they didn’t want us all confused. They clearly feel a bit sensitive about using the H-word, although I suspect they also knew a Larry David piece would draw a lot of eyeballs: Opinion Today: Larry David Imagines a Private Dinner With Hitler).
