Bill Maher has branded Larry David ‘s mockery of his White House dinner with Donald Trump, in which he compared the president to Hitler, “insulting to six million dead Jews”.
Earlier this week, Curb Your Enthusiasm star David wrote a New York Times guest essay entitled “My Dinner With Adolf” – and, while the Seinfeld co-creator never mentioned Maher by name, it was clear he was referring to the Real Time host’s recent revelations about his evening at the White House.
Maher, who has long been critical of Trump and previously called for him to be impeached, was invited to dine with Trump by their mutual friend, the musician and noted Republican Kid Rock, and Maher decided to accept the invitation so he could try to soften hostilities between the pair.
“There’s gotta be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” Maher said, before revealing his surprise at the fact he enjoyed Trump’s company. He said the president was “gracious and measured”, and far different to the “crazy” man he watches on TV.
David appeared to respond with an essay that recounts a fictional fawning dinner with Adolf Hitler – the “most reviled man in history” – that parrots much of Maher’s language about his meeting with Trump.
“I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity,” David wrote in the piece.
Maher was not happy with David’s comparison, telling Piers Morgan Uncensored: “I must say, you know, come on, man – Hitler, Nazis? Nobody has been harder about – and more prescient, I must say – about Donald Trump than me. I don’t need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is.
“Just the fact that I met him in person didn’t change that, and the fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.”
Maher added: “I just think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews, you know? That should kind of be in its own place in history.”
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The comedian previously praised Trump for making him “feel comfortable” with talking candidly about any subject during the dinner, stating: “I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him.
“Honestly, I voted for Clinton and Obama, but I would never feel comfortable talking to them the way I was able to talk to Donald Trump. That’s just how it went down. Make of it what you will.”
Maher, “reporting exactly what I saw over two-and-a-half hours”, went on: “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 f***ed up. It’s just not as f***ed up as I thought it was.”
“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.”
However, Maher admitted he still has negative feelings about the president’s administration, but said that Trump gave him a “generous amount of time” and showcased “a willingness to listen and accept me as a possible friend even though I’m not MAGA”, which he said “was the point of the dinner”.
The host also hit out at those who criticised him for accepting the invitation, stating: “To all of the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you’re ridiculous.
“I have no power, I’m a f***ing comedian and he’s the most powerful leader in the world.”
He continued: “I’m not the leader of anything, except maybe a contingent of centrist-minded people who think there’s got to be a better way to run this country than hating each other every minute.”
David’s essay read: “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.
“No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’ But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere.”
David called Hitler surprisingly “quite disarming” in the imagined meet-up, stating: “I realised I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human.”
