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
Thanks for the comments, Leo. I am quite familiar with what Maher said during his show about that dinner, and that’s why I wrote what I did.
He framed the entire thing as an attempt by him to bridge build and join the effort to heal our divided discourse. And as I said in the piece, I applaud that effort.
I also said nothing about Maher suddenly becoming a Trump sycophant. I expect him to continue to criticize Trump as he has. That’s not the point I was making. Nor was I calling Maher an idiot. I don’t think he is.
You’re also wrong that my piece was some knee-jerk tribal reaction from a blindly tribal liberal. Nothing of the sort. I even said in the piece that I’m not advocating against talking to Trump, nor am I saying doing so couldn’t bear fruit. You just have to recognize who you’re sitting down with, because it matters.
And if you frame a dinner with Trump as an attempt to build bridges in our culture, you’re misunderstanding.
"He framed the entire thing as an attempt by him to bridge build and join the effort to heal our divided discourse."
That is an absurd mischaracterization. Here are Maher's own words from his monologue on the Trump dinner: "And let me first say that to all the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you are ridiculous." Indeed.
"Nor was I calling Maher an idiot. I don’t think he is."
When you state that someone fell for a con, there's a strong implication that they're an idiot.
"You just have to recognize who you’re sitting down with"
Maher obviously understood who he was sitting down with. That's abundantly clear.
You insist that you are familiar with the content of Maher's monologue. Fine. So you know the content. But you do not understand it.
I have not said it was a summit meeting or anything like it. It was Maher having dinner with Donald Trump, and one of the reasons he gave for doing so was that our discourse is perilously divided and "we can't just keep on hurling insults at each other from 3,000 miles away." And like I said, I agree with that and applaud the effort, I just think he missed the mark in this case.
Plenty of very smart people fall for cons, or get swept up by charming people. I do not think Maher is an idiot and never implied that. You read it that way, but you're mistaken.
And no, I don't think it's abundantly clear that Maher understood who he was sitting down with. Maher said "He's not a crazy person, but he plays one on TV." In my view that is, at best, an understatement. And that's what I was commenting on. That doesn't mean Maher is an idiot, it just means I think his efforts here didn't succeed as a result of misunderstanding the fundamental dynamic. This wasn't him having dinner with James Woods. It's a fundamentally different sort of person, and that needs to be recognized if you want to make any kind of headway.
I can appreciate that you disagree, but you don't seem to see what it is I'm actually arguing.
Smart people fall for cons all the time. The idea that anyone who can be conned is an “idiot” betrays a frame of mind that sees everything in a simplistic binary, everything is either good or bad or smart or dumb. The terror of being seen as a “sucker” or falling for a con is what makes people most susceptible to actual cons—remember, “con” is short for “confidence,” and all kinds of people are impressed by confidence.
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.
I appreciate the response, David. I think "tension" is an understatement when it comes to the stark difference between Trump's public persona and behavior and the guy Maher had dinner with—and that's my point.
As I said in the piece, I'm not against engaging with Trump himself, and I do not subscribe to the opinion that doing such a thing can't be fruitful. I am also not characterizing him as wholly evil. I never said any such thing. But if you think hanging out with Trump and having a good time is the same as building bridges with his supporters, it's just not the case in my opinion, for the reasons I laid out.
I share misgivings about what Maher did and especially in some of the precise ways he framed his take-aways. In particular, I don't think he should have said in effect, "I've seen the real Trump, and he's not so nuts." Because he couldn't possibly make that sort of judgment based on just the one meeting. That did lead many to think Maher got snowed, got charmed, that he was a dupe. And that's unfortunate. But I don't buy it. My evidence is basically everything else Maher says and does.
I think Eduardo mischaracterizes Maher's outreach mission. His audience for this gesture -- and I think that's a good word for it -- wasn't really Trump. It was those not inclined to see Trump as quite as horrible as we are, which comprises part of his heterodox audience and a significant portion of persuadable voters. The gesture and his "book report" about it were meant to establish his own credibility with that crowd. He put this in almost so many words in his most recent episode, where he said at the conclusion of his New Rules segment, a withering takedown of GOP cowardice in failing to stand up to Trump: "I was honest about [my meeting with Trump], and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, now okay, you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls! Wait, that's not.... What I mean is, it's your turn. You know things aren't going well, and the first hundred days has been a shit show. Show me you can be honest about that. Show me you're not just a MAGA cultist."
He was trying to show that he doesn't have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I can sit down with the guy and say something nice. If I can transcend my still very strong differences with Trump to do that -- much as Obama shared some yuks with Trump at Carter's funeral, as, one supposes, Michelle and many others seethed -- and show that I'm not, in effect, an anti-MAGA cultist, you all should be able to do the same in reverse.
In short, I think his intention was less to build a bridge to Trump himself but rather to build bridges to a wider less-Trump-allergic audience, even as he very much continues his "day job," as he put it, "of tearing Trump a new asshole." This is on-brand for Maher, who has long had on guests from all across the political spectrum, some seen as beyond the pale.
He flubbed some of the particulars, but I did not think it was wrong of him to make the visit, much as I had no objection to Obama's behavior or Joe and Mika's.
One revealing exchange about Maher's purpose here came in his great interview of Al Gore in that most recent episode. He challenged Gore on a Nazi comparison he had made in a recent speech. Nazi comparisons are in season. They are of course provoked by Trump's outrageous behavior, and Gore defended himself well, but Maher doesn't like it. He thinks such rhetoric signals to the other side that we "hate" them, and that this is not a path forward. Criticize, and criticize strongly, as he does every week, but Nazi comparisons don't help and, of course, they're not remotely true, even now. I think there's some wisdom there.
Thanks Jake. I don't disagree with you about Maher's intentions. I just think he framed them improperly, and in the process made it seem as though he didn't understand what exactly he was doing by hanging with Trump and having a good time with him. As I said in the piece: it's not that you shouldn't engage with Trump, and it's not that something fruitful can't come out of it, but you have to understand what you're doing and who you're doing it with. Trump is a fundamentally different kind of person, and that requires a fundamentally different approach. They're not the same, but Maher made it seem as though they were.
It is as futile to try to build bridges with Trump as it would be to do so with Putin or XI or that madman in Pyong Yang. Trump isn’t interesting in building bridges. He’s interested solely in whatever gets him what he wants. He’ll try charm, of course, knowing how influential Maher is. But if Maher doesn’t prove malleable, Trump will go the other way - threats, intimidation, belittling, or setting Kash Patel on him for some imagined ‘irregularity’.
I understand the bridge-building concept. As a long term teacher and administrator, I’ve done more than my share of building them. But that presupposes an openness to doing so. Trump has no such interest.
I agree that hurling insults at Trump and his supporters is quite as futile. If Trumpism is to be defeated (as opposed to merely being driven underground, say by an election loss or legal action) it will have to be from the inside. Like the 1949 collection of essays entitled The God that Failed, a description of the disillusionment of communism, Trumpists much come of their own accord to see that it is, in the end a path to futility and destruction rather than a way to ‘Make America Great Again’. Trump himself must come to be seen as a failed prophet by his own supporters.
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
Thanks for the comments, Leo. I am quite familiar with what Maher said during his show about that dinner, and that’s why I wrote what I did.
He framed the entire thing as an attempt by him to bridge build and join the effort to heal our divided discourse. And as I said in the piece, I applaud that effort.
I also said nothing about Maher suddenly becoming a Trump sycophant. I expect him to continue to criticize Trump as he has. That’s not the point I was making. Nor was I calling Maher an idiot. I don’t think he is.
You’re also wrong that my piece was some knee-jerk tribal reaction from a blindly tribal liberal. Nothing of the sort. I even said in the piece that I’m not advocating against talking to Trump, nor am I saying doing so couldn’t bear fruit. You just have to recognize who you’re sitting down with, because it matters.
And if you frame a dinner with Trump as an attempt to build bridges in our culture, you’re misunderstanding.
"He framed the entire thing as an attempt by him to bridge build and join the effort to heal our divided discourse."
That is an absurd mischaracterization. Here are Maher's own words from his monologue on the Trump dinner: "And let me first say that to all the people who treated this like it was some kind of summit meeting, you are ridiculous." Indeed.
"Nor was I calling Maher an idiot. I don’t think he is."
When you state that someone fell for a con, there's a strong implication that they're an idiot.
"You just have to recognize who you’re sitting down with"
Maher obviously understood who he was sitting down with. That's abundantly clear.
You insist that you are familiar with the content of Maher's monologue. Fine. So you know the content. But you do not understand it.
I have not said it was a summit meeting or anything like it. It was Maher having dinner with Donald Trump, and one of the reasons he gave for doing so was that our discourse is perilously divided and "we can't just keep on hurling insults at each other from 3,000 miles away." And like I said, I agree with that and applaud the effort, I just think he missed the mark in this case.
Plenty of very smart people fall for cons, or get swept up by charming people. I do not think Maher is an idiot and never implied that. You read it that way, but you're mistaken.
And no, I don't think it's abundantly clear that Maher understood who he was sitting down with. Maher said "He's not a crazy person, but he plays one on TV." In my view that is, at best, an understatement. And that's what I was commenting on. That doesn't mean Maher is an idiot, it just means I think his efforts here didn't succeed as a result of misunderstanding the fundamental dynamic. This wasn't him having dinner with James Woods. It's a fundamentally different sort of person, and that needs to be recognized if you want to make any kind of headway.
I can appreciate that you disagree, but you don't seem to see what it is I'm actually arguing.
Smart people fall for cons all the time. The idea that anyone who can be conned is an “idiot” betrays a frame of mind that sees everything in a simplistic binary, everything is either good or bad or smart or dumb. The terror of being seen as a “sucker” or falling for a con is what makes people most susceptible to actual cons—remember, “con” is short for “confidence,” and all kinds of people are impressed by confidence.
Someone is blind here... and it's not Maher.
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.
I appreciate the response, David. I think "tension" is an understatement when it comes to the stark difference between Trump's public persona and behavior and the guy Maher had dinner with—and that's my point.
As I said in the piece, I'm not against engaging with Trump himself, and I do not subscribe to the opinion that doing such a thing can't be fruitful. I am also not characterizing him as wholly evil. I never said any such thing. But if you think hanging out with Trump and having a good time is the same as building bridges with his supporters, it's just not the case in my opinion, for the reasons I laid out.
I share misgivings about what Maher did and especially in some of the precise ways he framed his take-aways. In particular, I don't think he should have said in effect, "I've seen the real Trump, and he's not so nuts." Because he couldn't possibly make that sort of judgment based on just the one meeting. That did lead many to think Maher got snowed, got charmed, that he was a dupe. And that's unfortunate. But I don't buy it. My evidence is basically everything else Maher says and does.
I think Eduardo mischaracterizes Maher's outreach mission. His audience for this gesture -- and I think that's a good word for it -- wasn't really Trump. It was those not inclined to see Trump as quite as horrible as we are, which comprises part of his heterodox audience and a significant portion of persuadable voters. The gesture and his "book report" about it were meant to establish his own credibility with that crowd. He put this in almost so many words in his most recent episode, where he said at the conclusion of his New Rules segment, a withering takedown of GOP cowardice in failing to stand up to Trump: "I was honest about [my meeting with Trump], and that gives me standing to say to conservatives, now okay, you appreciated my honesty and balls, now I want to see your balls! Wait, that's not.... What I mean is, it's your turn. You know things aren't going well, and the first hundred days has been a shit show. Show me you can be honest about that. Show me you're not just a MAGA cultist."
He was trying to show that he doesn't have Trump Derangement Syndrome. I can sit down with the guy and say something nice. If I can transcend my still very strong differences with Trump to do that -- much as Obama shared some yuks with Trump at Carter's funeral, as, one supposes, Michelle and many others seethed -- and show that I'm not, in effect, an anti-MAGA cultist, you all should be able to do the same in reverse.
In short, I think his intention was less to build a bridge to Trump himself but rather to build bridges to a wider less-Trump-allergic audience, even as he very much continues his "day job," as he put it, "of tearing Trump a new asshole." This is on-brand for Maher, who has long had on guests from all across the political spectrum, some seen as beyond the pale.
He flubbed some of the particulars, but I did not think it was wrong of him to make the visit, much as I had no objection to Obama's behavior or Joe and Mika's.
One revealing exchange about Maher's purpose here came in his great interview of Al Gore in that most recent episode. He challenged Gore on a Nazi comparison he had made in a recent speech. Nazi comparisons are in season. They are of course provoked by Trump's outrageous behavior, and Gore defended himself well, but Maher doesn't like it. He thinks such rhetoric signals to the other side that we "hate" them, and that this is not a path forward. Criticize, and criticize strongly, as he does every week, but Nazi comparisons don't help and, of course, they're not remotely true, even now. I think there's some wisdom there.
Thanks Jake. I don't disagree with you about Maher's intentions. I just think he framed them improperly, and in the process made it seem as though he didn't understand what exactly he was doing by hanging with Trump and having a good time with him. As I said in the piece: it's not that you shouldn't engage with Trump, and it's not that something fruitful can't come out of it, but you have to understand what you're doing and who you're doing it with. Trump is a fundamentally different kind of person, and that requires a fundamentally different approach. They're not the same, but Maher made it seem as though they were.
It is as futile to try to build bridges with Trump as it would be to do so with Putin or XI or that madman in Pyong Yang. Trump isn’t interesting in building bridges. He’s interested solely in whatever gets him what he wants. He’ll try charm, of course, knowing how influential Maher is. But if Maher doesn’t prove malleable, Trump will go the other way - threats, intimidation, belittling, or setting Kash Patel on him for some imagined ‘irregularity’.
I understand the bridge-building concept. As a long term teacher and administrator, I’ve done more than my share of building them. But that presupposes an openness to doing so. Trump has no such interest.
I agree that hurling insults at Trump and his supporters is quite as futile. If Trumpism is to be defeated (as opposed to merely being driven underground, say by an election loss or legal action) it will have to be from the inside. Like the 1949 collection of essays entitled The God that Failed, a description of the disillusionment of communism, Trumpists much come of their own accord to see that it is, in the end a path to futility and destruction rather than a way to ‘Make America Great Again’. Trump himself must come to be seen as a failed prophet by his own supporters.
Great article, hope Maher reads it.
Loved this! Mahalo nui from Hawaii!🤙