David also said he “respects” Maher.

Larry David and Bill Maher.Credit: Kevin Winter/Getty; Stefanie Keenan/VF24/WireImage

Bill Maher’s recent meeting with President Donald Trump, who’s often been the butt of his jokes, inspired a response from comedian Larry David, who published a satirical essay Monday in The New York Times titled, “My Dinner With Adolf.”

The man behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm imagined that, it was spring 1939, and that he had been invited to dine with “the world’s most reviled man, Adolf Hitler.”

“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. “No one I knew encouraged me to go. ‘He’s Hitler. He’s a monster.’”

President Donald Trump pictured in January 2024.Shannon Stapleton-Pool/Getty

David imagined that he’d gone anyway. Hitler “gave me an enthusiastic greeting that caught me off guard. Frankly, it was a warmer greeting than I normally get from my parents, and it was accompanied by a slap on my back,” he wrote. “I found the whole thing quite disarming.”

The two men went on to share jokes, and David wrote that he even related to his host. He thought that, if other people saw this side of Hitler, they might feel much differently about the “dictator.”

“Two hours later, the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door,” David wrote. “‘I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.’ ‘I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. 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.”

In a column published the same day, the opinions section deputy editor, Patrick Healy, wrote that David “respects” Maher and his piece is “about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”

Entertainment Weekly has reached out to Maher for comment.

Maher’s actual meeting with Trump occurred in March, and he reported back to his Real Time with Bill Maher audience that — as David portrayed the subject in his essay — he found the president he met with to be more relatable than he expected; in fact, the liberal-leaning host said he found Trump, a Republican, to be more of a “real person” than the Democrats he’s met with previously. He called the president “gracious and measured,” adding that he wasn’t sure why Trump isn’t that way all the time.

I know it’s so weird to say that about Donald Trump, who I’ve said a jillion times is, you know, a whiny little b—h,” the host said Sunday on his Club Random podcast. “But this was about getting past that and maybe seeing that if we met in person, we don’t hate each other as much. And we don’t.”

Watch Maher speaking about his meeting in the NSFW video above.