Useful Information from a Lefty

I’ll explain the relevance of this headline later. It’s actually reciprocal…

My view of this post is that it’s a Public Service Announcement. Many will be tempted not to view Bill Maher’s Trip Report on his visit with Trump at the White House, figuring they already know what they need to know about both of them. This would be a mistake. It’s a fascinating video that really does contain useful information about Trump. Here it is. Watch it before you proceed to my own commentary on it.

Don’t take the so-called Video Plus Comments link at CFP. Anti-Trump filibustering.

I think it’s a worthwhile addition to the public debate about Donald Trump. Maher has encountered the Common Touch that has made Trump so successful in his life. He does connect with people individually. He looks them in the eye. He really does listen to what they say to him. His sense of humor is real and it can both take a joke on himself and tell one on himself. He’s the one who made his hair a punchline by talking about it so much and he uses that punchline with an infectious smile. Maher’s testimony that Trump’s personal demeanor, including his laughter, are not faked but real is credible for the reason he cites: he is a professional comedian who knows a phony laugh when he hears it. 

Maher also gives himself away in his characterizations of Trump’s public persona. His most incredible revelation is that he (at least thinks he) has never seen or heard Trump laugh in public appearances. Which means he never bothered watching anything but cherry-picked (by his staff?) clips of Trump’s hundreds of campaign rallies. These provide their own abundant evidence of all the personal attributes that were surprising to Maher during his visit. A man who halts a rally in mid-paragraph because he has observed a woman faint in the audience and needs medical attention. A man who repeatedly singles out individual unelected members of his audience during his speeches to celebrate their costumes, their loyalty, their shouted one-liners. A man who ends each rally by dancing the self-deprecatory “old white guy dance” and so transformed it from a contemptuous trope to a viral funfest. (Self-deprecatory? You bet. He even makes a habit of telling us Melania finds his dancing “embarrassing”.)

Beyond the rallies, it would seem Maher missed all kinds of clues about the personal Donald Trump. Uncounted acts of personal charity throughout his life, discovered by, not promoted to, mass media. His interactions with regular people in restaurants, fire departments, disaster sites, wheee he doesn’t fly in for a photo-op but goes out his way to listen to individual tales of heartbreak. Somehow Maher missed the goofy turn as a McDonald’s fry cook, the garbage truck stunt where he joked about his own physical  difficulty climbing into the giant cab. The times Trump bent to pick up something dropped by a uniformed Marine One guard… Like so many of his lefty colleagues, Maher has looked at Trump and seen only what he wanted, expected, needed to see. He simply wasn’t proof against the one-one-one experience. What he was expecting:

Maher’s Trump: Stupid, lazy, meretricious, phony.

If Maher is wrong about the public persona, why should we regard his perspective on the private persona as worthwhile? Because we see its import in a way Maher can’t and never will. The angry, aggressive, take-no-prisoners Trump is the most usual first step in a successful Trump negotiation process. You know. The Art of the Deal. You start with your biggest,:most seemingly impossible ask/demand. Then you see how much of it you can actually get. The fact that Trump is so accessible and responsive in person is the second step in his negotiations. He is disarming. Maher was disarmed. 

I give him credit for being honest. And for being a shrewd observer of the authenticity less astute media types might have explained away to themselves and to us.

Which is the appropriate place for me to be honest about my own continuing dislike of Bill Maher. I’ve been on his case for a very long time. The graphic up top dates back to 2006, and concludes with this assessment of the guy:



Was I being fair? As fair as he routinely is in his comedy. But in the interest of full disclosure, I’ll concede Maher has made me mad partly because I also went to Cornell (as did my Dad, my sister, and a first cousin). I was a grad student at the business school, whereas Maher was an undergraduate in the College of Arts and Sciences. The three most famous Cornellians on the punditry circuit are Maher, Ann Coulter, and Keith Olbermann, which I have always found embarrassing. To one degree or another, they’re all whack-jobs and are frequently made fun of. Thing is, Maher and I do have something in common. In college we were both double majors in English and history. Why I came to resent him the more I observed his public persona. I did occasional updates of his act on my Facebook page in the 2022 timeframe, as presidential,primary campaigns started heating up.

By then he had started to display a curious fracturing of his on-air persona. A kind of revolving door smart-dumb-smart-dumb thing, where he was all in for Biden and Kamala on some shows, but deadly accurate about the failures of Democrst police’s and strategies on other shows. Sometimes both faces on the same show. I began to regard him as a possible sufferer of schizo-affective disorder.










He made a joke of the death of Steve Irwin, the iconic herpetologist killed by a freak Manta-Ray strike to the heart. He made a joke of the first Trump assassination attempt. He has no taste, but he’s old enough to know that Presidential assassinations are not grist for topical humor. 

This is a good place to recall how Maher began his video Trip Report. He confronted Trump with a list of 60 or so awful things Trump had said about Maher. And he’s arrogant enough to think such a list put Trump on a back foot when he himself actually joked about enjoying the attempted assassination of the man whose hospitality he is enjoying in the White House. 

Why and how do you think Trump interacts with Kim Jong Un, Putin, and Xi? He’s authentic, yes. He’s also a politician operating at a level of unbelievable dimension and scope. Something else Bill Maher will never see. Maybe not us either. But at least we can get a glimpse out of the corner of Maher’s eye…

____________________________________

Below the Fold…


Bill Maher and the Cornell Connection:

Instapunk.com, 2006: Outing Bill Maher

Instapunk.com, 2006, Answering La Malkin

Instapunk.com, 2006: The Dumbest Talking Head


Trump as Politician: 


Instapunk Returns, Mar 2019: Saying What No One Else Wants to Say


Instapunk Returns, Jan 2025: The Bloody Truths of Foreign Policy


 



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