Bill Maher's Complicated Dinner
There are better ways to bridge our political divide than getting buttered up by Trump.
Bill Maher has had a difficult few weeks. After he recounted his visit to the White House on his show Real Time, commentators swept in to accuse Maher of credulity and hypocrisy. Political consultant James Carville chided Maher for giving “legitimacy and credence” to Donald Trump, while comedian Larry David published a satirical op-ed in The New York Times titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” effectively accusing Maher of being a useful idiot.
I, too, believe Maher’s meeting with Trump was largely misguided, but for different reasons.
I don’t disagree with Maher’s points about needing to communicate across divides. I’ve made it my mission, in fact, to facilitate and encourage precisely that kind of engagement. Anyone can see that our discourse is currently deadlocked. Particularly in the last five years, terrible things have happened as a result of our inability to talk to and understand one another. I’m afraid even more terrible things will happen if we don’t correct course.
But attempting ideological bridge-building by having dinner with Trump is like trying to commune with nature by entering a lion’s den. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the actual dynamic you’re in, and who you’re in it with. As a result, you’re not just unlikely to get what you’re looking for, you’re also liable to get taken for a ride—which, it seems, is what happened to Maher.
The result is that the failure of Maher’s approach will cause many people to view bridge-building as a hopeless pursuit.
And that’s what I’m worried about.
Despite what countless naysayers will tell you, making a genuine attempt to communicate with people you disagree with, fueled by a sincere curiosity and desire to understand, isn’t a waste of time. In fact, it can do and has done a great deal to forge better paths forward in our culture. The stories of people like Derek Black, George Wallace, Megan Phelps-Roper, and many others have shown us just how far compassionate conversation, even with people we think are too far gone, can take us when we try.
That’s the state of affairs Bill Maher was trying to improve with his dinner at the White House. He’s absolutely right that we can’t just keep hurling insults and hating each other from the safety of our culture war camps, and I applaud him even if I think he missed the mark this time around.
The challenge with Trump is that attempting to find common ground with him is different from attempting to find common ground with most people. Most people, most of the time, are doing what they believe is good, right, and just—or at least justifiable, given their goals. And their goals are nearly never framed as wanting to do or cause harm. And while Trump almost certainly thinks what he’s doing is good, it’s a far narrower conception of “good” than you’re likely to find from most people. As the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman said during a recent episode of Sam Harris’ Making Sense podcast, “If the word ‘narcissism’ is to mean anything, Trump would have to be a narcissist … I’ve never seen a case study so clearly consistent with the research than that case study.”
Given his public behavior over the years, it’s difficult to imagine Trump believing anything, or feeling anything, beyond a myopic desire to self-serve. And that is why a cordial dinner with him is going to be so markedly different from engaging with the vast majority of his supporters. It’s not that Trump shouldn’t be spoken to, or that doing so can’t yield some productive results, but it requires a recognition of the dynamics at play and a clear-eyed approach to that engagement.
There seem to be only two possible explanations for what Maher saw during his White House visit, neither of which are good. The first is that the man he got to spend a couple of hours with is the real Donald Trump—a “self aware” guy who “laughs … at himself” and who you don’t need to “walk on eggshells” around.
That sounds great in isolation, but what that means in our greater political context is that the Trump the rest of us know—the man who Maher himself calls a “crazy person,” who weaponizes the legal system against his enemies, undermines free speech, flouts the Constitution, defies court orders, and jokes about deporting and jailing U.S. citizens for their speech, among other egregious behavior—is an act. Something he is willing to do, someone he is willing to be, because it benefits him.
That is terrifying.
The second possibility is that the charming, down-to-earth guy Bill Maher had dinner with was actually the act, put on so that Maher would come away from it feeling exactly the way he did.
That is also terrifying. And it doesn’t get better if you imagine the reality is some combination of the two.
Regardless of which Trump is real—the guy at that dinner, or the “crazy person” on TV—there was clearly an artifice to their meeting that Maher didn’t seem prepared to see or acknowledge. That matters. The kind of person who can remorselessly act like a “crazy person on TV,” or who in fact is that way but can switch to being, in Maher’s words, “gracious and measured” when it suits him, is a very different sort of human being than our general electorate. And that includes the wide swaths of people who voted for and support Trump.
Maher, clearly, had given into Trump’s uncanny ability to charm—the fruit of Trump’s long career in the hospitality industry. When Maher, in front of a television audience, praised the president’s “willingness to listen and accept me as a possible friend even though I’m not MAGA,” it was difficult to not feel that he had fallen for the con. Given how Trump treats his critics and enemies—including Maher himself—it’s unlikely that the impression Maher got was real. But he fell for it, and has found himself subjected to widespread ridicule as a result.
Maher’s efforts to move the needle through a dinner with Trump were a misfire, it’s true. But we shouldn’t let that cause us to abandon the project entirely. That would be the real danger, because it wouldn’t just widen the gulf between our ideological factions, it would also justify it. It would send the message that discourse is not merely deadlocked but dead, and no one sees any point in trying to revive it.
That’s unfortunate, not just for Maher but for the cause of ideological bridge-building more generally. Still, Maher’s impulse wasn’t wrong. “There’s gotta be something better than hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” he said when recounting his dinner with Trump. And he has a point. Our cultural divide is only unbridgeable if we refuse to build the bridge. There are and will always be better and worse ways—more and less effective ways—to face that challenge. But the absolute worst way is to give up trying altogether.
Angel Eduardo is senior writer and editor at FIRE (The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression).
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It’s unclear to me from this article if its author is actually familiar with what Maher said about his dinner with Trump:
“Given how Trump treats his critics and enemies—including Maher himself—it’s unlikely that the impression Maher got was real. But he fell for it, and has found himself subjected to widespread ridicule as a result.”
But here’s one of many on-point quotes from Maher’s monologue regarding his dinner with Trump:
“I'm not going to pull my punches that presidents get to propose a third term for themselves. He understood that, and without animus. That doesn't mean he's not going to try to do it.”
Maher is not an idiot, no matter how hard the Liberal herdmind tries to convince us that he is. And those are not the words of someone who fell for a con. He clearly sees who and what Trump is.
The real revelation of Maher’s dinner with Trump, rather, is the absolutely shocking tribalism not just of Leftists (which was already obvious) but even of Liberals (like the author of this column).
The single worst misfire of this entire episode, by far, is the Larry David column presenting a dinner with Hitler as analogous to Maher’s dinner with Trump. This column references that article without making what I think should be an obligatory disclaimer that it was obviously poorly conceived.
Trump is not Hitler for the simple reason that no one is Hitler. And if you can’t instantly spot the problems with David’s satire then you need to take a step back and consider the very real possibility that you are very deep in a bubble.
Perhaps the worst problem with this column is that it was published by Persuasion: a publication that launched with the same ideals that motivated Maher to go to dinner with Trump. But, as this article indicates, Persuasion is now just another partisan outlet: one that has increasingly little to do with the actual art of persuasion
Count me among those who saw Maher's monologue very differently from Mr. Eduardo. I am a longtime fan of Maher and also a proud donor to FIRE, and my takeaway was that Maher was doing exactly what both FIRE and Persuasion do: make the attempt to stop vilifying and caricaturing people.
I've worked most of my adult life with elected politicians and others in the political world, and Maher's description of Trump rang very true to me. Of course his public persona and his private one are different. Trump takes his public persona to extremes, and it's entirely natural that people take that as the "real" Donald Trump and hate it. That's his brand. But for any public figure, there is going to be some tension between public and private lives. I've seen public figures from both sides, and while the difference can be greater or lesser, there is a dynamic to being public that requires character curation. Ask anyone in the PR industry.
Maher wanted to see for himself. I can't argue with Eduardo that there was some amount of curation in that dinner, but to say that Maher wasn't prepared to "see or acknowledge" that obvious fact is to assume that Maher is unfamiliar with dealing with people's different public and private lives. He has been doing exactly that for most of his career.
Maher did what very few of us will be able to: get a glimpse of what Trump might be like absent the media and its constant mediation. Like Maher, I think Trump is a terrible president, a worse role model, but also that he may be accomplishing some good things amid the wreckage. As Maher noted, he can tell when the audience is faking their laughter, and Trump wasn't faking that, or his own self-awareness. Nor did it appear to Maher (and I trust him) that Trump was faking his reactions to Maher's many direct criticisms during the dinner.
Somewhere in there is a real person, and he has real appeal to a lot of people. It is not helpful to our politics to entirely vilify him, something at the very heart of Persuasion and persuasion. I don't think we'll ever build a bridge to the public Trump, but in characterizing him as wholly evil we can't build any bridges to the people who voted for him either. And they'll be around long after Trump is gone.
Maher has those people in mind. In many ways Public Trump is his own worst enemy. But some of the people he works with understand him, and it turns out he may be listening to some of their better advice now and then. I don't want to join those who act like they are rooting for our president to fail; I live here too and want the country to prosper. I don't see Maher's visit to the White House as a misfire at all; all he did was acknowledge that Trump has some humanity in him. That doesn't seem to me a bad thing.