Bill Maher, still nursing a bruised ego days after comedian and Seinfeld co-creator Larry David published a satirical article eviscerating the HBO host’s decision to visit the White House, took the opportunity to complain about it once again during the Friday night episode of his political-minded talk show.
In the piece, published in The New York Times earlier this week and titled “My Dinner with Adolf,” David likens Maher’s decision to dine with President Donald Trump at the White House to a fictional radio host in 1939 deciding to accept a dinner invitation from Adolf Hitler.
Maher has vociferously defended his decision to dine with Trump in the weeks preceding and following the dinner, making grand statements about the need to engage with the other side, something Democrats have failed to do, joking that he should be called a “hero” for dining with Trump and describing the president as ”gracious and measured.”
Naturally, Maher found the suggestion he’d done anything remotely akin to dining with Hitler to be a grave insult, telling Piers Morgan in an interview, “The minute you play the Hitler card, you’ve lost the argument,” and that the comparison was “kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews.” He added that, “Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.” David is Jewish.
Maher used the same argument again on Friday night in an interview with Al Gore on his HBO show Real Time, telling the former vice president, “I just think ‘Nazi’ is a hard word to use with nuance. So, when you bring that word out—I feel like they’re the GOAT of evil, and so it just conflates your [argument].”
Maher had asked Gore about his decision to draw parallels between the Trump administration and early Nazi Germany in a speech at San Francisco’s Climate Week; Gore agreed that comparing someone to Hitler was a “big mistake,” because of his “unique form of evil,” but argued that Americans are not living up to their responsibility to the Constitution if they don’t “remain alert to warning signs that we know from history.”
Maher remained unconvinced of the efficacy of drawing such parallels, telling Gore, “I guarantee that the side of the country that voted for Trump, they hear ‘Nazi,’ and they just go, ‘Oh, you’re calling us Nazis?’ First of all, it’s a bit of a false premise, as bad as they are. And also, it just says to them, ‘Well, you just hate us.’ And one thing I’ve learned in recent years, the one thing that’s more powerful than money is hate.”
The Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, named for Holocaust survivor Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” has issued multiple red flag alerts for the Trump administration since Trump’s inauguration in January. Their most recent alert describes Trump’s March 4 address to Congress as a textbook example of “perpetrator speech”, adding, “The President’s words would not sound strange coming from the mouth of Adolf Hitler in 1933, Slobodon Milošević in 1992, or countless other past genocidal leaders.”
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