A Message to Larry David: Curb Your Derangement – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

Larry David is a legend. The irritable neurotic behind Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm turned petulance into a form of performance art. He gave awkward silence a pulse. His misanthropy is somehow warm. His genius lies in the discomfort. But in his latest op-ed for the New York Times, titled “My Dinner With Adolf,” David overreaches. Way over.

The piece, a satirical riff on Bill Maher’s recent dinner with President Trump, imagines a Jewish critic having a charming, disarming meal with Adolf Hitler. The tone is classic David — deadpan, absurd, snarky. But the comparison isn’t just distasteful. It’s entirely self-defeating. By invoking Hitler, David attempted to sharpen the critique. He failed. (RELATED: Enough with Leftist Fantasy — Hitler Is Really Dead, and He Should Finally Be Buried)

The Holocaust isn’t a metaphor. Hitler isn’t a meme. Six million dead Jews, plus millions more murdered across Europe, aren’t props for a punchline. Yet, in David’s hands, they become set dressing for a sketch about Trump’s charm offensive.

The point he’s trying to make is that private likability doesn’t absolve public harm. It’s a fair point. However, once you start goose-stepping around the Holocaust to make it, the moral high ground crumbles immediately.

And here, I suggest, is the deeper problem: the invocation of Hitler always backfires. It transforms conversation into emotionally charged theater. It eliminates nuance. It hands your critics a gift-wrapped reason to dismiss everything else you say. Even the Times, in its own editorial note, felt compelled to clarify that David wasn’t really comparing Trump to Hitler. When your satire needs a trigger warning from the editorial board, maybe, just maybe, it missed the mark.

Like many in Hollywood, David is furious, absolutely furious that someone they once considered “one of them” (Bill Maher) could sit down with Trump and come away seeing a man instead of a monster. And Maher didn’t just sit down. He publicly praised Trump’s demeanor. That triggered a kind of cultural autoimmune response, a reflexive, self-sabotaging lashing out designed less to engage than to punish. (RELATED: The Left Should Learn From Bill Maher)

David decided to mock Maher not directly, not through a convincing argument, but through the lens of the worst human being in modern history. That’s not brave. It’s lazy. Lazy in its comparison. Lazy in its dependence on historical atrocity to score a contemporary moral point. Lazy in the way it signals righteousness rather than risks persuasion.

David’s larger message — don’t be seduced by personality — would’ve landed harder had he chosen literally any other historical figure. Richard Nixon. Joseph McCarthy. Even J. Edgar Hoover. All controversial men. But none were responsible for mechanized genocide. Hitler is not a symbol. He is a singularity. To invoke him is to end the conversation before it begins. David wasn’t offering constructive criticism. He was instigating a purity ritual,  one that demands no thought, only blind allegiance.

That’s why the piece was so celebrated on the left. Not because it was brave. But because it told a certain crowd exactly what they wanted to hear — this is the boundary. This is the line. Step over it, even for a dinner, and we’ll frame you not just as a misguided friend, but as a collaborator with a tyrant.

This was a warning shot — a message not just to Maher, but to anyone tempted to treat Trump as an actual human being. Don’t normalize him. Don’t humanize him.

But what David obviously misses or actively ignores is that humanizing someone is not the same as endorsing them. Maher wasn’t praising Trump’s policies; he was reporting what he experienced, what he saw with his own two eyes. The man across the table, he said, was calm, measured, and capable of real conversation. That observation might challenge some assumptions. It might even be inconvenient for millions. But reducing it to a Nazi parody is cultural tantrum disguised as moral clarity, a refusal to reckon with reality unless it conforms to a preapproved script.

And this brings us to the painful, all-too-obvious irony. Larry David, the man who once gave us the Soup Nazi, an emblem of absurd authoritarianism taken to extremes, now pens op-eds warning that Donald Trump is quite literally Hitler. David built a career on ambiguity. Curb Your Enthusiasm was sharp because it found comedy in contradiction, like Larry berating a man for cutting in line only to realize he’d done the same thing minutes earlier. It was a show that thrived on absurdities, not absolutes. But now, David demands ideological obedience. Trump isn’t viewed as a political opponent. Instead, he’s seen as a one-man Reich.

This is how political culture erodes — not just through blatant lies, but through an escalating inability to grapple with gray areas. The left has always been known to devour its own. If it ever wishes to reconnect with normal, everyday Americans, it must learn to curb these cannibalistic impulses.

READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:

Bill Maher Thinks Factory Work Is Dead. He’s Dead Wrong

Bernie Sanders: The Socialist Who Scammed America

Is Adam Sandler America’s Finest Actor?