I’m deeply grateful to continue this collaboration with The Good Men Project, and appreciate them supporting my work. It’s a shame Larry David stole my thunder via the The New York Times (just kidding–LD remains a National Treasure and I adore him for using his satirical skills to such coruscating effect); if you haven’t seen his masterpiece “My Dinner with Adolf”, please enjoy it here). I wrote this piece about Bill Maher‘s pitiful capitulation in a white hot fury the morning after his episode aired; I subsequently toned it down for public consumption. I figured/hoped Maher would recognize what a laughable caricature he’s become and offer a “mea culpa,” however disingenuous. Of course, in the week since, he’s doubled down on the smugness, the obtusity, and continues to give a clinic for how to be an out of touch, financially & culturally secure sell-out.
Check social media and the usual suspects—including myself—are appalled that Bill Maher decided now was the right time to break bread with President Trump. Mission accomplished: people are outraged by the spectacle, but it’s not Maher’s questionable judgment that warrants derision. Rather, it’s his arrogance and the predictable comfort with which he’s normalizing how different this world is for the wealthy.
But there’s good news. Maher wants to reassure us the president didn’t have him arrested upon arrival. He laughed at a few jokes. He’s even able to laugh at himself! He wasn’t, Maher assures us, the same lunatic he makes himself out to be on the world stage.
How comforting. How irrelevant. How pitiful.
This could be dismissed as yet another disappointing insider selling out for relevance (remaining part of the conversation is worth almost as much as gold to certain Baby Boomers), but I’m left sadder and more unsatisfied by what Maher didn’t say. He makes sure to report that he received a full tour of the White House, working in an obligatory dig at Bill Clinton because, you know, both sides. He seems proud of the courage required to actually bring a printed list of insults Trump has uttered at his expense, and, of course, that Trump was big enough to calmly receive Maher’s take on foreign affairs (a reminder that Maher has hot takes on global matters).
Everything, in other words, about how he felt, what he saw, how Trump treated him.
No one who knows anything about Bill Maher and the ways he’s come to lean, quite comfortably, into his worst habits, will be shocked by any of this. But what needs to be pointed out is the wasted opportunity this was, what an absolute dereliction of duty for an ostensible iconoclast, a comedian, to have this moment and blow it.
What we didn’t hear was a single word about the people being disappeared to other countries without process, imprisoned without a trial. We didn’t hear anything about the books being banned at the Department of Defense. Not a word about Trump’s ham-fisted hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, a statement about how authoritarians historically respond to the arts.
I’m left wondering if Maher has spent a single minute imagining being spirited away to a prison camp. How it would feel to be summarily fired, without cause, and wonder where the next paycheck was coming from. Is Maher, who has made a career of punching down (something he shares with other wealthy, insulated yet curiously sensitive comedians like Jerry Seinfeld and Dave Chappelle), capable of fathoming cause and effect as the man he dined with reduces the economy and rule of law to rubble?
Powerful people don’t need to imagine this because they don’t have to. They don’t worry about these kinds of things happening to them because they never will. And by steadily eroding support for the Humanities, increasing numbers of toxic young bros can’t and won’t contemplate these things, because they’ve never been exposed to the kind of creativity that repels tyrants. Fewer students will read books that help them understand little of what’s happening in 2025 is new, that writers under authoritarian rule have described some of what we’re seeing, in great and painful detail.
Perhaps instead of platforming the oleaginous Steve Bannon (who, incidentally, does not lack access to a national appetite for the sewage he spews) Maher might interview any number of first-generation Americans who have fled the violence of fascist regimes. How valuable to his viewers to hear legal(!) immigrants describe what they’ve seen, and what we’re seeing. Maybe Maher could invite a grade schoolteacher (one from a Title One school might be especially appropriate, and illuminating) to discuss the challenges they face, daily, before lesson plans are even dealt with. Not click baity enough? Well, Maher could lower the bar considerably and simply speak with a painter or writer—or non-profit director—whose grants were terminated, for no reason other than anything having to do with “diversity” is now a target. He could even work in a joke about how today, in a twist too ironic for amusement, these marginalized artists are actually being canceled.
Instead of another tired joke about DEI, Maher might recall that comedians, once called court jesters, have always served a profound cultural purpose. These clowns, with wit and courage, spoke truth to power, and not for ratings. More, they have typically been our first line of defense whenever inconvenient matters of censorship or lists of state enemies surface. If he tried, Maher could probably see the books burning, but that doesn’t smell like money. Punching up on behalf of the dispossessed doesn’t provide more security or access, so he turns his nose even higher, where the air reeks of Trump’s Fight Fight Fight cologne, now retailing at a modest $199 per bottle.
