Larry David doesn’t sound happy about Bill Maher’s dinner with President Donald Trump.
The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star, 77, published a satirical essay in The New York Times on April 21 that appeared to be a response to Maher’s recent meeting with the president at the White House.
USA TODAY has reached out to representatives for Maher and David for comment.
The fictional piece was written from the perspective of a person who had dinner with Adolf Hitler in 1939 and came away impressed that the Nazi leader was so personable, despite having been a “vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning.”
David, who is Jewish, never mentioned Maher or Trump in the article, but the language he used closely mirrored the way the “Real Time” host spoke about his dinner with Trump.
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“I found the whole thing quite disarming,” David’s essay read. “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.”
He 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.”
Maher similarly said on his HBO show “Real Time” that the “guy I met is not the” same Trump that the public sees. He described Trump as “gracious” and “measured” during their dinner and said he was surprised to find that the president has a sense of humor.
“I’d never seen him laugh in public, but he does, including at himself,” Maher said.
In David’s essay, the author writes about deciding to meet with Hitler because “hate gets us nowhere” and “we need to talk to the other side,” echoing Maher’s comments that “there’s got to be a better way of running this country than hating each other every minute.”
In a
separate article, The New York Times’ deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy explained why the outlet published David’s essay that invokes Hitler, despite the fact that “callbacks to history can be offensive, imprecise or in terrible taste when you are leveraging genocidal dictators to make a point.”
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“Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing someone for who they really are and not losing sight of that,” Healy wrote, adding that David, who “listened to Bill Maher talk about his recent dinner with Trump,” 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.”
In the comments on David’s essay, readers were quick to point out the link to Maher’s Trump meeting. “I’m generally not a big fan of Larry David’s humor, but this piece made a good point,” one comment said. “People are complex, but being able to tell a joke or appreciate a good meal do not negate sociopathic behavior.”
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Another reader wrote that they saw the essay as a “commentary on millions of people,” including David’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-star Cheryl Hines, who is married to Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “Brilliant satire and I found it validating,” the comment said.
Maher visited the White House to meet with Trump in March for a dinner that was set up by Kid Rock. In a subsequent “Real Time” monologue, the comedian concluded that Trump is “much more self-aware than he lets on in public,” though Maher assured his liberal fans that he “didn’t go MAGA.”
“Look, I get it: It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian,” Maher said. “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.”
David is a vocal critic of Trump and told CNN in 2024 that “you can’t go a day without thinking about what he’s done to this country.”
“He’s such a little baby that he’s thrown 250 years of democracy out the window by not accepting the results of an (election),” the “Seinfeld” co-creator said. “It’s so crazy. He’s such a sociopath. … He’s such a sick man.”
