Comedian Larry David parodied HBO host Bill Maher’s cordial dinner with President Donald Trump in a New York Times satire piece describing an “authentic” and “human” dinner with Adolf Hitler.
The “Real Time” host angered many members of the liberal media by not only meeting with the president but describing him as “gracious and measured” despite their political differences.
“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 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,” Maher said earlier this month.
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He added, “I’ve had so many conversations with prominent people who are much less connected, people who don’t look you in the eye, people don’t really listen because they just want to get to their next thing… None of that was him, and he mostly steered the conversation to ‘What do you think about this?’ I know, your mind is blown. So is mine.”
David’s article on Monday took a similar approach, depicting a fictional dinner between himself and Hitler in 1939 and reflecting that “if only the world could see this side of him, people might have a completely different opinion.”
“Suddenly he seemed so human,” David wrote. “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. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”
New York Times Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy defended the paper’s decision to publish the story in the Opinion Today newsletter, despite its “really high bar for commenting on today’s world by invoking Hitler.” He argued the article was not about comparing Trump to Hitler but about “seeing someone for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”
“Larry David, in a provocation of his own, is arguing that during a single dinner or a private meeting, anyone can be human, and it means nothing in the end about what they’re capable of,” Healy wrote.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Maher’s publicist for a comment.
Washington Post columnist León Krauze wrote a similar piece last week comparing Maher’s comments about Trump to flattery others have given to Adolf Hitler, Fidel Castro, Joseph Stalin and Mao Zedong over their private interactions.
“By agreeing to meet with Trump, allowing himself to be privately charmed by a charismatic leader and then sharing his softened new take on the president, Bill Maher has made the task of holding Trump accountable that much more difficult,” Krauze concluded.