Comedian Bill Maher insists he’s OK with Larry David writing a scathing piece spoofing Maher’s recent meeting with President Donald Trump, but he thinks his fellow comedian needs to apologize.
Not to him, of course, but to the millions of Jews who died in the Holocaust during World War II.
Maher visited the White House recently to meet Trump and described the president as “gracious and measured.”
In reaction to Maher’s praise of Trump, David wrote a piece titled “My Dinner With Hitler” that the New York Times published on Monday.
The piece is set in 1939 and is written from the standpoint of someone critical of Adolf Hitler who decides to meet with him, just to get the Führer’s side.
Maher’s name is never mentioned, but the piece subtly burns him by turning the nice things the comedian said about Trump into nice comments about the Nazi leader.
David’s piece ends, “Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean we have to hate each other. And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked right out into the night.”
David’s piece has been praised for its brutal satire, but Maher found it easy to curb his enthusiasm for the piece when Piers Morgan asked him about it on Thursday.
Morgan began by noting that Maher and David are supposedly friends, which led Maher to admit, “This wasn’t my favorite moment of our friendship.”
Maher seemed to want to avoid giving David any more oxygen, but he couldn’t help taking a swipe at his comedy colleague.
“So I don’t want to get too much into that, but I think the minute you play the Hitler card, you’ve lost the argument,” Maher said.
Maher continued to gripe about having his meeting with Trump conflated with Hitler and the Nazis and then claimed no one has protested the president harder than he has.
“Nobody has been harder about and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me,” Maher said. “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 I reported honestly is not a sin either.”
Maher then griped about David’s comparison of Trump to Hitler, saying, “I just think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews. You know, like, that should kind of be in its own place in history.”
He then attempted to argue that Hitler comparisons have no place in 21st-century American politics.
“It’s just, look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place,” Maher said. “He is the GOAT of evil. And we’re just going to have to, I think, leave it like that. So, you know, did I think that was appropriate? No, but people have the right to this.”