Curb Your Enthusiasm star Larry David sliced up talk-show host Bill Maher Monday for Maher’s recent defensive yet gushing dinner with Donald Trump in a New York Times guest essay entitled “My Dinner With Adolf.”
The long-time co-creator of Seinfeld never once mentions Maher’s name in the essay, but it’s obvious who the target is of his snide attack.
The piece in the Times recounts a fictional fawning dinner with Adolf Hitler – the “most reviled man in history” – in 1939 that parrots much of Maher’s language about his meeting with Trump.
“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 writes of “Adolf,” echoing Maher’s description of himself as an erstwhile Trump critic as he recounted his dinner late last month on his Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO.
“No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’ 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 — even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity,” David adds.
David calls Hitler surprisingly “quite disarming” in their imagined meet up. “I realized I’d never seen him laugh before,” he writes. “Suddenly he seemed so human.”
Maher also bragged about getting Trump to laugh. “I had never seen him laugh in public. But he does. At himself. And it’s not fake,” he gushed after their get-together.
David mocks that his Hitler turned out to be “more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”
For his part, Maher assured that he discovered a “crazy person doesn’t live in the White House, [just] 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.”
Kid Rock, who helped arrange the meeting between Maher and Trump said the talk-show host’s head (like David’s) was “spinning” after his get-together with Trump.
David concludes his essay by telling Hitler he was glad he met him, and that while they can still disagree, “we don’t have to hate each other.”
With that, he added: “I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”
