The Dictatorship
Bill Maher still doesn’t get the joke
Larry David — co-creator of “Seinfeld” and creator/star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” — penned a satirical column for The New York Times this month titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” which lampooned “Real Time” host Bill Maher’s public comments following his dinner at the White House. Maher praised President Donald Trump over things like laughing in casual, private conversation and not ranting maniacally as he is wont to do in public.
David’s satirical column seemed to reference this: “I realized I’d never seen him laugh before. Suddenly he seemed so human. 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.”
Maher might not easily recall, but in 2009 he caused a bit of a stir by referring to America as a ‘stupid’ country.
Maher, a longtime Trump critic who says David has been a friend to him, does not seem to appreciate the joke. This can’t be a comfortable position for Maher to find himself in, and he’s insisted that his critics are, in fact, intolerant and part of the problem. “To use the Hitler thing — first of all, I think it’s kind of insulting to six million dead Jews,” Maher told Piers Morgan Thursday. “The minute you play the ‘Hitler’ card, you’ve lost the argument.”Maher’s wrong, but not necessarily for the reasons you might think. So in the style of his most recognizable routine, here are three new rules that might help him on the journey to enlightenment.
New Rule #1: If you’re going to build your image of being a take-no-prisoners, “politically incorrect,” “anti-woke,” anti-sensitivity culture comic, don’t tone-police your peers’ political satire or put Hitler jokes in a comedic no-go zone.
Maher seemed to invoke a form of “Godwin’s Law” when he told Morgan that invoking Hitler means “you’ve lost the argument.” However, Mike Godwin himself has said certain Trump-Hitler comparisons are apt — particularly his racist rhetoric about immigrants.
Maher’s also taking offense to a joke premise written by Larry Davidwho co-created a show with a legendary episode called “The Soup Nazi,” another show with frequent Hitler and Holocaust jokes — including a Nazi dog — and who made a controversial concentration camp joke in a “Saturday Night Live” monologue. Were all of his Hitler jokes kosher until he included Maher in one?
And really, it’s not hard to dig up many jokes Maher’s made comparing Trump to Hitler. Just days after Trump won the 2024 electionhe even told a Republican guest that Trump was “Hitler-like” — and it didn’t sound like he was joking.
New Rule #2: If you’re going to justify your White House dinner with Kid Rock and Trump as “reporting” — then come out with a bigger scoop than Trump occasionally laughs in private conversations with celebrities. Maher said he heard Trump admit in the White House that he lost the 2020 election. And, Maher added, Trump “didn’t get mad” when the comic pointed out that fact.
That’s kind of a big deal! Especially since Trump has lied about it for five years, attempted a self-coup over it and convinced almost half the country that this incredibly consequential lie is the truth. That he was “not mad” at a private dinner doesn’t matter at all. He was quite mad about losing the election, which is why he continues to poison American politics with his big lie about it to this day.
Maher claims to fearlessly speak truth to power and to be brave enough to break bread with his political adversaries. I’d ask Maher — in the event he gets another White House invite — to please, for America, politely ask his host if he’d consider doing the patriotic thing and stop misleading tens of millions of his followers and eroding trust in American elections. Then, Maher could let us know what the president says. That’s news we can use!
New Rule #3: When you get it wrong, be brave enough to admit it. Maher, on his own showsaid of Trump: “I get it. It doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian. It matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking it as a positive that this person exists.” With the exception of the last sentence, that’s basically the whole point of David’s column. So what’s the problem?
“There’s gotta be a better way than just hurling insults from 3,000 miles away,” is a rationalization Maher has repeated several times since he was a guest of the president. He’s argued that by enjoying a superficial social engagement with Trump, he’s signaling to Trump supporters — and his own fans — that Maher is one of the good liberals searching for common ground in a divided country.
This is a straw man argument. Few people are saying “ignore Trump” or “don’t speak with Trump supporters” — the issue is whether Maher’s “reporting” served any purpose other than to soft-sell the increasingly authoritarian Trump as a normal guy in private. I mean, who cares if he is?
It was 16 years and many pounds of marijuana ago, so Maher might not easily recall, but in 2009 he caused a bit of a stir by referring to America as a “stupid” country. Because, he said, Sarah Palin — who recently had lost as the Republican vice presidential candidate in a landslide election victory for Barack Obama — might someday be elected president.
Maher said he heard Trump admit in the White House that he lost the 2020 election.
Palin’s know-nothing populism found a much more famous and charismatic vessel in Trump, who rode it to the White House twice — with a failed self-coup attempt thrown in between for good measure. The reality of Trump as a two nonconsecutive-term president far exceeds the horrors Maher feared of a Palin presidency that was never in real danger of actually happening. Maher recently mocked Trump’s critics for lamenting the state of America after Trump won the 2024 election. But if 2009-era Bill Maher thought America was “getting dumber by the day,” as he put it, because Palin was lingering around the edges of electoral respectability, what would that Maher think of America now that’s twice elected Trump?
To Maher’s credit, he continues to describe Trump as a unique threat to the country, and said it’s not even a close comparison to the supposed threat posed by “wokeness.” He even listed a new rule at the end of his most recent show that seemed to get at almost exactly the point as David’s column, “New Rule: Republicans have to stop excusing all the dictator-y stuff that comes out of Trump’s mouth by saying ‘He’s just kidding!’”
The point of David’s column was not that Trump has committed anything comparable to Hitler’s crimes; it was to mock Trump’s useful idiots (a term Maher’s fond of using for pro-Palestinian student protesters), people with influential perches who are easily charmed by a powerful person’s flattery, as that leader amasses power, crushes dissent and scapegoats a marginalized group of people.
Maher has long lamented younger audiences “not getting” his comedy, supposedly because they’re too easily offended. I don’t get the sense that Maher’s actually in the tank for Trump or MAGA at all. But could it be possible, maybe just a little bit, that he’s the one not getting the joke here?
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and writer for BLN Daily. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider.
Rep. Julia Letlow won Louisiana’s Republican Senate primary runoff Saturday, defeating former Rep. John Fleming.
Her win comes as a victory for President Donald Trump, who has endorsed her repeatedly throughout the race — including before she was even officially running.
Letlow made history in 2021 when she became the first Republican woman to represent Louisiana in Congress. In that special election, she won the seat that her late husband, Luke Letlow, had won prior to dying of complications related to Covid-19 in December 2020.
Letlow had no political experience prior to running for her late husband’s seat. She holds a doctorate in communication from the University of South Florida and worked as an administrator for Tulane University and the University of Louisiana, according to her LinkedIn page. Nonetheless, she won the special election House race with nearly 65% of the vote.
In Congress, she has served on the appropriations and education committees, and has been a reliably MAGA Republican.
Letlow’s win also comes as a rebuke to Fleming, who loaned himself more than $11 million, according to the Federal Election Commission, and tried running for the same seat in 2016 only to finish in fifth place in the nonpartisan primary. (Letlow did not loan her campaign any money, and took in more than $5.35 million compared to Fleming’s more than $12.1 million, FEC filings show.)
Trump has played a key role in the race. In addition to backing Letlow early on, the president also helped tank Republican incumbent Sen. Bill Cassidy’s re-election campaign in last month’s primary, based on the senator’s record of bucking his party and voting in favor of Trump’s second impeachment. In the primaryLetlow earned nearly 45% of the vote, giving her a healthy lead over both Fleming, who received about 28% of the vote, and Cassidy, who earned nearly 25%.
Ahead of Saturday’s runoff, polling showed Letlow and Fleming in a close race, with Letlow retaining a small lead in several polls.
Letlow will now proceed to the November general election to face off against the Democratic nominee, farmer Jamie Davis, who came out on top in tonight’s Democratic primary runoff.
The state has not sent a Democrat to the Senate since 2008, when Mary Landrieu won her last term in office.
Julianne McShane is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW who also covers the politics of abortion and reproductive rights. You can send her tips from a non-work device on Signal at jmcshane.19 or follow her on X or Bluesky.
Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligencehas stirred fear by choosing as his chief of staff a GOP election lawyer who oversaw a poll watching program that included Jack Posobiec and other conservative conspiracy theorists. The lawyer, Christina Norton, also appears to have no experience working in the intelligence community.
“It is horrifying,” a former senior U.S. intelligence official told MS NOW Saturday. “Not only does Norton have absolutely no background, experience or expertise in national security or intelligence, but her principal qualifications appear to be loyalty to Pulte and an embrace of absurd election-interference conspiracies.”
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., who has been a vocal critic of Pulte, also raised concerns about election integrity on Sunday while taking shots at the director of national intelligence and the office itself.
“We should eliminate the DNI, and we should eliminate Pulte from the DNI until that happens,” he said on BLN, adding, “I am concerned that we’re gonna continue to cast doubt on elections in November and erode what has been a 250-year tradition of a peaceful transition of power.”
Pulte’s choice of Norton is also likely to increase concerns among Democrats that President Donald Trump intends to use the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to interfere in the midterm elections. Pulte, a loyalist with no intelligence experience, has used his current position as head of federal mortgage agencies to refer political rivals of the president for federal criminal prosecution.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., told MS NOW on Sunday that the choice “just confirms” that the “only job qualification is absolute political loyalty and devotion to Donald Trump.” But he expressed faith in the judicial system during an appearance on “The Weekend,” noting that “right now we have federal courts across the land that are rejecting their various attempts to take over the election process. Nine different federal courts have rejected the claim that the president, by executive order, can compel the states in the union to turn over all of their voter lists to Donald Trump and to the White House.”
The New York Times first reported Norton’s appointment.
The former senior intelligence official, who requested anonymity due to concerns of retaliation, told MS NOW the choice also “signals as clearly as could be that Pulte has been put at ODNI to misuse the awesome power of the U.S. intelligence community to interfere in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Norton, reached by MS NOW by telephone, declined to comment and referred questions to an ODNI spokesperson. The spokesperson declined to comment on Norton but defended Pulte’s tenure.
“Acting Director Pulte and his team are focused on carrying out President Trump’s national security priorities while faithfully executing ODNI’s statutory mission,” the spokesperson told MS NOW. “We are leading the Intelligence Community to provide President Trump with elite, apolitical intelligence that keeps America safe.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., appearing on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” Sunday, said his objection to Pulte is “that he used personal information to target a political enemy of the president,” a reference to New York Attorney General Letitia James.
“You should not be using the force of government to crash upon somebody just because the person in charge does not like them or finds them inconvenient. The fact that Bill did that is disqualifying for someone to be the director of national intelligence,” Cassidy said.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said on Friday that Congress would ensure that the ODNI under Pulte will “report on legitimate foreign threats to elections, not Donald Trump’s imaginary ones.”
Himes warned that, “Trump was explicit when he appointed Bill Pulte to a job he had no qualifications for that he had elections in mind.”
Trump has said in interviews with the news media that he would like to see Pulte shrink the size of the ODNI and investigate election fraud. Pulte’s predecessor, Tulsi Gabbard, participated in investigations in Georgia and Puerto Rico to find proof of Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
Democrats and some former intelligence officials say they worry that Pulte may try to falsely claim that his office has found evidence that foreign governments are secretly funding Democratic candidates in the midterms.
Pulte could falsely claim foreign actors have hacked U.S. voting machines, they say, and altered vote totals in favor of Democrats during the midterms. Or Trump could instruct Pulte to be present if FBI agents seize ballots and election records in November as they did earlier this year in Fulton County, Georgia.
Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, warned in a statement on Friday that Pulte should not use his position to spread Trump’s false election conspiracy theories.
“The mission of ODNI is to identify and counter foreign threats, not to import election denialism into the Intelligence Community,” Warner said. “Americans have every reason to fear that this administration is once again eroding the wall between our intelligence agencies and domestic elections.”
David Rohde is the senior national security reporter for MS NOW and a two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting. Previously he was the senior executive editor for national security and law for NBC News.
Having lived with Donald Trump’s infamous and baseless insult against them — “they’re eating the dogs … they’re eating the cats” — Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are bracing for a far bigger injury.
More than 10,000 Haitians across Ohio and hundreds of thousands more around the country who had Temporary Protected Status now face the imminent prospect of deportation. The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can halt those legal protections for Haitians and Syrians and resume forcing them to leave.
Justice Samuel Alito’s opinionfor the court’s Republican-appointed majority curbed the power of courts to review government decisions to terminate protections under the TPS program.
“They side with him on everything that he says or everything that he does, which means there is no check and balance,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, a town Trump catapulted into a maelstrom of misinformation about immigrants when he was running to retake the White House in 2024.
“The president has that freeway in front of him to do whatever he wants to do, unfortunately, and most of the time to a minority group of people,” added Dorsainvil, who has lived in the United States since 2020.
In a country rife with political and economic instability, Haitians returning from the U.S. are in danger of being killed or kidnapped, said Dorsainvil’s colleague at the Haitian Support Center, Rose Thamar Joseph.
“There is this perception in Haiti that if you are living here in the United States, you have money, so you are living your good life, so sending people back to Haiti will put them in real danger,” Joseph said.
Staying in the U.S. without legal status creates a different crisis.
“We received calls this morning from people saying that, unfortunately, starting on July 1, they won’t be able to go to work anymore,” Joseph said Friday.
Joseph predicted that families would be separated during the deportation process.
“We know that there will be separation,” she said. “A lot of those parents with TPS … they have kids who were born in the United States, so we know that it will happen, not for everybody, not for all the families, but it will happen,” she said.
The oncoming nightmare for the Haitian community in Springfield was, in many ways, predictable after Trump notoriously targeted them on the debate stage against then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the fall of 2024.
“They are eating the dogs. The people that came in, they are eating the cats. They’re eating – they are eating the pets of the people that live there,” Trump said without a shred of evidence, greatly amplifying an unfounded rumor that had been confined to smaller corners of social media.
That rhetoric continued Trump’s track record of racist languageparticularly when it comes to immigration, including during his first White House stint when he referred during his first to Haiti and other majority non-white nations as “shithole” countries.
Dorsainvil argued that the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday proved his beliefs are institutionalized, calling it “a validation of all those bad rhetorics of the president against us.”
Asked by MS NOW if those with TPS should expect to be deported, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said, “Well, of course. If you no longer have status in this country, then you’re supposed to be deported.”
Miller, the architect of the administration’s immigration policy, went on to single out the Haitian population by name.
But the outcry against the court’s ruling blurs party lines in Ohio.
“Changing the immigration status of these individuals is not in the best interest of the United States nor Ohio,” Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said.
Springfield’s Republican mayorRob Rue, has denounced Trump’s misinformation about his community as dangerous from the start.
“Many of the individuals affected by this decision are our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers, and parents,” Rue said in a statement after the ruling came down. “They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods, and have become part of the fabric of Springfield.”
Alex Tabet is a reporter for MS NOW.
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