To the Editor:
Re “My Dinner With Adolf,” by Larry David (Opinion guest essay, April 25):
Larry David’s spoof draws a provocative analogy between Bill Maher’s recent meeting with President Trump and a hypothetical dinner with Hitler. It’s clever — and clarifying. But it’s also incomplete.
By Mr. Maher’s own account, he pushed back on Mr. Trump over election denialism, Iran and birtherism — views that the president likely doesn’t often hear in his echo chamber. That matters. In authoritarian systems, culpability often lies less with the despot than with the chorus of enablers around him. Mr. Maher’s willingness to dissent in that room shouldn’t be discounted.
Still, Mr. David makes a sharp point: Personal charm — even in monstrous men — proves nothing. One needn’t meet a demagogue to grasp his nature. Mr. Trump’s predictably affable performance with Mr. Maher told us little. And Mr. Maher’s instincts, however noble, risk confusing engagement with legitimization.
Yes, we should talk across divides. But those efforts are best reserved for people at least open to change or compromise, not for those committed to manipulating and destroying the conversation itself.
Ruben Turok
Culver City, Calif.
To the Editor:
I thoroughly enjoyed Larry David’s satire and, understanding his exaggerated sense of humor, I won’t feign indignation at the implicit comparison of President Trump to Adolf Hitler. However, I would like to make a defense of Bill Maher.
If we take Mr. Maher at his word, his mission was to engage in dialogue with someone he strongly disagrees with and report back exactly what happened. The public can then decide for itself what to make of it.
What Mr. Maher discovered was that a “crazy person doesn’t live in the White House. A person who plays a crazy person on TV a lot lives there.”
If that’s true, it’s a relief in one sense. If I’m a passenger in a car, I’d rather have a driver who’s pretending to be drunk than one who actually is. But in another sense, this revelation is far more damning of Mr. Trump’s character; it shows he has no principles. If Mr. Trump is simply acting unhinged to rile up his base or distract the media, it suggests not madness, but cynicism.
What’s more dangerous: a leader who truly believes false information — or one who knowingly manipulates it for personal power?
The answer is clear. The performance artist is more dangerous than the misguided true believer — because while the latter may be wrong, the former knows better and simply doesn’t care.
Heywood Reynolds
Washington
The writer is the editor of Marginalia Magazine and an editorial cartoonist.
To the Editor:
Larry David’s satirical dinner with Hitler misses the mark that Bill Maher hit in his experience with President Trump by the breadth of a universe. While Mr. Maher humanized the president, and did so with respect and understanding, Mr. David’s imaginary dinner with Adolf Hitler was ill timed and disrespectful to all who suffered from Hitler’s terror.
Setting his piece in 1939, Mr. David fails to comment on Kristallnacht, which occurred in early November 1938, when more than 90 Jews were killed, more than 7,000 businesses destroyed, more than 1,100 synagogues set afire and 30,000 Jewish men sent to concentration camps. Soon after, Hitler threatened to annihilate world Jewry in his Reichstag speech on Jan. 30, 1939. Then, Germany illegally invaded Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939.
In the face of these actions, Mr. David spoofs on a dinner with Hitler that ends with him giving his host the Nazi salute. It is unfortunate that Mr. David, who is often a brilliant comedian and observer of life, lost his way on this one.
Alan A. Winter
Far Hills, N.J.
The writer is an author, with Herbert J. Stern, of the historical novels “Wolf” and “Sins of the Fathers.”
To the Editor:
Larry David’s dinner with Adolf Hitler calls to mind Mel Brooks’s movie “The Producers,” which also used satire to comment on Nazism.
Thirty years after that film, I began a project at a college to make a pilgrimage to Auschwitz and then work to restore in some modest way the Jewish cemeteries left abandoned and neglected because there were no longer Jews living there. I did this for 14 years. Each time, my mourning and enormous sense of loss for my people deepened.
I find nothing funny, nothing to humanize, regardless of the genre, about Hitler, and I can no longer watch “The Producers,” regardless of the season.
(Rabbi) Edward S. Boraz
Mobile, Ala.
To the Editor:
Larry David’s essay draws a sharp line between satire and complicity — and it’s long overdue. His comparison to prewar journalism about Hitler is chillingly apt. In 1937, The New York Times published a fawning piece about Hitler’s domestic life, praising his taste in décor and his love of dogs, as if that made the growing authoritarianism less terrifying.
Today, we see the same dangerous impulse at work when media figures like Bill Maher gush over Donald Trump’s hospitality, ignoring indictments, insurrection and blatant authoritarian rhetoric. This isn’t harmless banter; it’s image rehab for a man who’s still actively threatening democratic norms.
We cannot afford to soft-pedal authoritarianism just because it comes wrapped in a linen napkin and served on gold-plated flatware. The press has a responsibility to remember its own history — and not to repeat it.
Oli Schraner
Cloverdale, Calif.
To the Editor:
Larry David’s brief article about his imagined dinner with a “so human” Adolf Hitler spoke volumes about Bill Maher’s summation of his actual dinner with Donald Trump.
While I really enjoy Mr. Maher’s program in general, in his relating his experience of his dinner with Mr. Trump, he neglected to point out that anyone has the ability to act gracious during a brief social engagement, but it is a person’s actions on a day-to-day basis that reveal the true nature of the man.
Claire Di Meola
Hoboken, N.J.
‘A Defining Moment for the Legal Profession’
To the Editor:
Re “Legal Titans Gave In to Trump’s Demands. Now He Wants More” (news article, April 17):
The executive orders targeting law firms are manifestly illegal, as four federal judges have already held. Those judges recognized that President Trump’s goal is not only to persecute his adversaries but also to chill all lawyers from taking on cases and causes that he disfavors. Without lawyers to take on those cases, courts will be unable to stop or even slow his illegal actions.
This is a defining moment for the legal profession. Some firms apparently believed that they could hand the bully their lunch money just once and be done with it. But that’s not how Faustian bargains work. Mr. Trump will be coming back to those firms, again and again, to demand further surrender and degradation.
All of us will be judged by what we did — and did not do — in this moment. It’s not too late for these lawyers to reverse course and to defend the best values of our profession.
Ben Wizner
New York
The writer is the director of the A.C.L.U.’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.
What I Want
To the Editor:
I don’t want Canada or Greenland or the Panama Canal.
I want PBS, Social Security, NPR, Medicare, the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian.
I want democracy.
Mel Tansill
Catonsville, Md.
