Bill Maher is the Fray
On the Theater of Intimacy, ten months later
On Valentine’s Day morning, Donald Trump woke up and rage-posted Bill Maher on Truth Social.
He said the dinner was a waste of time. He said Maher was nervous and scared, no confidence. He said Maher immediately wanted a vodka. He called him a jerk, a lightweight, a man with low ratings. He accused him of Trump derangement syndrome. He said the whole thing, the entire evening, the dinner that Maher had described to his audience as a revelation — gracious, measured, the real man behind the headlines — was nothing. Less than nothing. A performance for a mark who didn’t know he was the mark.
Maher found out Saturday morning. Valentine’s Day. The day the Theater of Intimacy ended.
Except it didn’t.
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Last year, I wrote in a piece titled “The Theater of Intimacy”: Maher’s White House dinner monologue was not merely a personal anecdote but a dangerous form of normalization — one that operated not through intellectual abstraction but through the performance of personal connection. I suggested that the private civility Trump displayed did not mitigate his public conduct. I pressed, more precisely, that it deepened his moral culpability, because a man who can listen attentively over dinner to concerns about threatening judges and ruling by decree, who can engage with self-awareness and even humor, is not a man who doesn’t understand what he’s doing. He is a man who understands it perfectly and does it anyway.
I said, at the time, that Maher had perhaps unwittingly provided a case study in how charming authoritarians work. I extended that mercy because the error seemed, at least on the surface, like the error of an intelligent man who let his experience override his analysis. He went in. He was charmed. He reported it honestly. He was wrong about what it meant.
I’m done with “perhaps unwittingly.”
