It’s fairly clear what prompted Larry David‘s satirical essay today for the New York Times entitled “My Dinner With Hitler.”
“Eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere,” writes David of his fictional meeting with the Führer. “I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side.”
Sound familiar?
A couple weeks weeks ago Bill Maher, whom the Times points out is “a comedian Larry respects,” visited Donald Trump for dinner at the White House.
Describing the meeting on Real Time some days later, Maher opined, “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.”
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At one point, Maher said he cracked a joke and was surprised Trump actually laughed, because he never had seen that before. He also said, “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.”
David: “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.”
Times Deputy Opinion Editor Patrick Healy wrote in a separate piece that David’s essay came in unsolicited. He also noted that “Times Opinion has a high bar for satire…and we have a really, really high bar for commenting on today’s world by invoking Hitler.”
Healy then explains, “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 argues that 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.”
You can read the whole essay here and see Maher’s “report” on his dinner with Trump below.
Twelve days ago, I had dinner with President Trump, a dinner that my friend @KidRock set up because we share the belief that there has to be something better than hurling insults from 3000 miles away. pic.twitter.com/KE2t2eyBkI
— Bill Maher (@billmaher) April 12, 2025
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