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Larry David spoofed Bill Maher‘s glowing review of his White House dinner with Donald Trump with a satirical essay in The New York Times entitled, “My Dinner With Adolf.”
“I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote in his fictitious account. “But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side.”
Maher teased his March 31 dinner with Trump on social media in the days leading up to the date, with many expecting a blowout between the mouthy late-night pundit and controversial president. However, on an April 12 episode of “Real Time,” Maher gushed about the meeting, praising the president as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on.”
“Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was — I swear to God — absent, at least on this night with this guy,” Maher said. “He mostly steered the conversation to, ‘What do you think about this?’ I know: your mind is blown. So is mine.”
Maher had once been an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump of Maher. In the past, the Commander-in-Chief called the comedian a “low-life” with a show that is “dead.” Even still, the White House visit was enough to change Maher’s mind.
“A crazy person doesn’t live in the White House,” he added. “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.”
David mimicked Maher’s tone, writing, “I joked that I was surprised to see him in a tan suit because if he wore that out, it would be perceived as un-Führer-like. That amused him to no end, and 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. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”
In a companion piece, New York Times Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy detailed the origins of David’s essay.
“Larry listened to Bill Maher talk about his recent dinner with Trump,” Healy wrote. “Bill, a comedian Larry respects, said in a monologue on his Max show that he found the president to be ‘gracious and measured’ compared with the man who attacks him on Truth Social. Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”
He continued, “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 that person is capable of.”
