Bill Maher calls Larry David’s satire of his Trump dinner ‘kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews’

Bill Maher has responded to Larry David’s satirical essay in the New York Times that compared Maher’s glowing account of having dinner with Donald Trump to dining with Adolf Hitler. Maher, a vocal critic of Trump in the past, had dinner with the US president and a group of his high-profile supporters, including their mutual friend Kid Rock, on 31 March. On an episode of his talkshow Real Time on 11 April, Maher described Trump as “gracious” and “much more self-aware than he lets on”, saying: “Everything I’ve ever not liked about him was – I swear to God – absent, at least on this night with this guy.” The New York Times then published a satirical piece written by the Curb Your Enthusiasm creator, a first-person account from a critic of Hitler who accepts a dinner invitation from the Führer and ends up deciding “we’re not that different, after all”. “I had been a vocal critic of his on the radio from the beginning, pretty much predicting everything he was going to do on the road to dictatorship,” David wrote. “But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere. I knew I couldn’t change his views, but we need to talk to the other side – even if it has invaded and annexed other countries and committed unspeakable crimes against humanity.” Appearing on Piers Morgan’s talkshow Uncensored on Thursday, Maher said: “First of all, it’s kind of insulting to 6 million dead Jews … It’s an argument you kind of lost just to start it. Look, maybe it’s not completely logically fair, but Hitler has really kind of got to stay in his own place. He is the GOAT of evil.” Maher told Morgan he considered David a friend, and didn’t know about the piece until his publicist told him it had been published. “This wasn’t my favourite moment of our friendship,” he said. “Nobody has been harder, and more prescient, I must say, about Donald Trump than me. 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. The fact that I reported honestly is not a sin either.” Maher told Morgan he didn’t want to “make this constantly personal with me and Larry”, saying: “We might be friends again.” “I can take a shot and I can also take it when people disagree with me. That’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it. “Again, the irony: let’s go back to what my original thing was. There’s got to be a better way than hurling insults and not talking to people. If I can talk to Trump, I can talk to Larry David too.”