The “Curb Your Enthusiasm” star’s fictional account of a visitor who spends a night with Adolf Hitler in spring 1939 is stuffed with parallels to Maher’s genteel recollection of his White Home go to on March 31.
The piece, positioned within the Occasions’ opinion part, kicks off with the kind of justifications Maher made in a monologue on his present “Real Time” earlier this month. The protagonist in David’s essay self-identifies as somebody who has all the time been a staunch critic of Hitler and provides themself a self-satisfied pat on the again 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 simply months earlier than the official begin of World Struggle II. “But eventually I concluded that hate gets us nowhere.”
Allen Berezovsky through Getty Pictures
On the Reich Chancellery, the visitor is met by a “few of the Führer’s most vocal supporters”: Holocaust architect Heinrich Himmler, Nazi navy chief Hermann Göring, propagandist Leni Riefenstahl and England’s Duke of Windsor, the previous king with thinly veiled Nazi sympathies. (Maher was joined by a much less historic pair of tablemates: Trump’s movie star acolytes Child Rock and Dana White.)
When Hitler walks into the room, David’s character says he’s charmed by the Nazi’s heat, echoing Maher’s description of Trump as a “gracious and measured” host.
As in Maher’s tackle Trump, the character remarks on how he’s by no means seen the chief giggle and the way surprisingly inquisitive he appears towards his company.
“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 visitor’s time on the Chancellery involves a detailed.
He walks away pondering, “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.
Taylor Hill through Getty Pictures
Maher has been accused of being Trump’s pawn since recounting his nice time with the president earlier this month. Democratic pundit James Carville stated Maher, whom he known as a pal, was a “supremely naive man,” whereas left-leaning journalist Keith Olbermann accused the comedian of “prostituting himself.”
The previous “Politically Incorrect” host dismissed the refrain of criticism as “clickbait” throughout final 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.”
Learn the full model of David’s “My Dinner With Adolf” at The New York Occasions.
