The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star’s fictional account of a guest who spends an evening with Adolf Hitler in spring 1939 is full of parallels to Maher’s genteel recollection of his White House visit on March 31.
The piece, placed in the Times’ opinion section, kicks off with the type of justifications Maher made in a monologue on his show “Real Time” earlier this month. The protagonist in David’s essay self-identifies as someone who has always been a staunch critic of Hitler and gives themself a self-satisfied pat on the back for predicting the horrors the führer would inflict.
“No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster,’” begins the piece, set just months before the official start of World War II. “But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere.”
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At the Reich Chancellery, the guest is met by a “few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters”: Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler, Nazi military leader Hermann Göring, propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and England’s Duke of Windsor, the former king with thinly veiled Nazi sympathies. (Maher was joined by a less historic pair of tablemates: Trump’s celebrity acolytes Kid Rock and Dana White.)
When Hitler walks into the room, David’s character says he is charmed by the Nazi’s warmth, echoing Maher’s description of Trump as a “gracious and measured” host.
As in Maher’s take on Trump, the character remarks on how he’s never seen the leader laugh and how surprisingly inquisitive he seems toward his guests.
“Suddenly he seemed so human,” he says. “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.”
After chumming it up over a two-hour meal, the guest’s time at the Chancellery comes to a close.
He walks away thinking, “Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.”
“And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night,” the essay concludes.
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Maher has been accused of being Trump’s pawn since recounting his pleasant time with the president earlier this month. Democratic pundit James Carville said Maher, whom he called a friend, was a “supremely naive man,” while left-leaning journalist Keith Olbermann accused the comic of “prostituting himself.”
The former “Politically Incorrect” host dismissed the chorus of criticism as “clickbait” during last week’s episode of “Real Time,” telling viewers, “People seem to gloss over the fact that I went in there, I didn’t surrender to him.”
Read the full version of David’s “My Dinner With Adolf” at The New York Times.
Read the full article here
