The Theater of Intimacy

How Bill Maher Normalizes the Abnormal

Bill Maher performs at Sacramento Convention Center in Sacramento / Image: Shutterstock.com

“I'm just telling you what I saw, and I wasn't high.”

With these words,

Bill Maher

concludes his monologue about dining with Donald Trump at the White House, a performance of reasonableness so seductive it deserves careful examination. What Maher offers isn't just a personal anecdote but a masterclass in what we might call The Theater of Intimacy—a dangerous companion to the Theater of Neutrality I described in my previous essay.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And Bill Maher just provided a textbook demonstration of how liberal commentators normalize authoritarian tendencies through the selective valorization of private charm over public consequences.

Sam Harris

makes a crucial observation in his recent podcast that amplifies this point: “The irony for me is that what's insane about the Trump administration is that just before he shuffled out to the Rose Garden to announce these lunatic tariffs, he was meeting with Laura Loomer about national security in the Oval Office.” This is the reality that Maher's Theater of Intimacy conceals—the profound disconnect between the "reasonable guy" at dinner and the person actively dismantling democratic governance.

The Theater of Intimacy differs fundamentally from other forms of normalization we've witnessed in recent years. Unlike the “just asking questions” approach that feigns neutrality while platforming dangerous ideas, or the “both sides” framing that creates false equivalences between democratic values and their opposition, the Theater of Intimacy operates through personal connection rather than intellectual abstraction. It doesn't claim objectivity but rather a privileged subjectivity—the insider's view, the authentic encounter, the real person behind the public persona.

This makes it particularly insidious because it bypasses rational evaluation entirely. It doesn't ask us to weigh competing arguments or consider alternative perspectives. Instead, it invites us into an imagined relationship with power—one mediated through the host who assures us they've seen the human being behind the headlines. It transforms political assessment from a matter of public consequence to one of personal impression, from ethical judgment to social intuition.

What Maher does in this monologue is far more insidious than “just asking questions.” He's performing distance while closing it. He insists he “didn't go MAGA” and will continue to criticize Trump. But simultaneously, he personalizes and humanizes Trump through anecdotes and shared laughter, leaving his audience emotionally soothed but morally unmoored. He narrates civility as if it signifies something deeper about character, marveling that “Trump was gracious and measured” as if this private demeanor somehow mitigates public abuses of power.

What's most disturbing about Maher's account, if accurate, is that it actually deepens Trump's moral culpability rather than mitigating it. Far from presenting exculpatory evidence, Maher has inadvertently revealed something even more damning: Trump knows exactly what he's doing. The attentive listener, the self-aware conversationalist, the man capable of taking criticism and laughing at himself that Maher describes isn't someone incapable of understanding the harm he causes—he's someone who understands it perfectly well and chooses it anyway.

This isn't diminished responsibility. It's heightened responsibility. It strips away the last potential moral defense—”he knows not what he does”—and replaces it with something far more troubling: he knows precisely what he does and does it nonetheless. The man who can listen thoughtfully over dinner to concerns about threatening judges and ruling by decree, who can engage civilly with criticism about scaring his own citizens, is not a man who lacks the capacity to understand these concerns. He's a man who understands them and proceeds regardless.

This is the liberal version of the “clean hands” fallacy I identified previously. Maher says, in effect: “Look, I met him. He's not crazy. I told him things. He took them in. I'll still criticize him, but I also want you to know: he was kind to me.” The implication is that this complexity means we shouldn't judge him so harshly.

But that's not moral complexity. That's ontological confusion.

Being civil in private is not a moral category that counterbalances authoritarian actions in public. Being funny at dinner does not neutralize the dismantling of democratic norms. Taking off the costume of power does not absolve the man who wore it when returning to the stage. If anything, the capacity for civility, self-awareness, and attentive listening that Maher describes makes the public cruelty, the narcissistic rage, the deliberate stoking of division more morally culpable, not less.

Consider Maher's most revealing question: “Why can't we get the guy I met to be the public guy?” This seemingly innocent query conceals a profound category error. It treats the distinction between Trump's private charm and public destructiveness as a puzzling inconsistency rather than the central feature of how charismatic authoritarianism functions. It fails to recognize that the gap between private civility and public cruelty isn't a bug—it's a feature, one that allows the exercise of power to proceed without the moral constraints that genuine empathy would impose.

We've seen this pattern before with devastating consequences. In the early 1930s, many Western journalists and intellectuals visited Nazi Germany and came away with glowing assessments of Hitler based on personal meetings. The British newspaper magnate Viscount Rothermere described Hitler as “a simple and unaffected man” and “a perfect gentleman,” asserting that Hitler was “obviously sincere” in his desire for peace. While some journalists like Dorothy Thompson saw through the façade—famously describing Hitler in her 1932 piece “I Saw Hitler!” as having “the startling insignificance of this man who has set the whole world agog” and "the very prototype of the Little Man"—many others were deceived. Charles Lindbergh, after attending the 1936 Berlin Olympics as Hitler's guest, wrote to a friend that the German leader was “undoubtedly a great man” who had “done much for Germany.”

These weren't fools or inherent fascist sympathizers. They were experienced observers of the world stage who allowed the intimacy of personal interaction to override what should have been clear-eyed moral assessment of Hitler's actual policies and public statements. The Theater of Intimacy blinded them to the reality that the charm, attentiveness, and apparent reasonableness they experienced in private meetings were not mitigating factors but manipulative tools wielded by a leader committed to destruction.

Harris directly addresses this dynamic when discussing podcast hosts who fail to recognize their responsibility: “To interview someone like Trump or Tucker Carlson, people who have a history of lying that is so clear, you can't just flip on the microphone and assume this is going to be a good faith conversation and you're now just going to amplify this person's preferred representation of themselves to your audience. That's genuinely irresponsible.”

History's most dangerous leaders have frequently been described as charming, attentive, and even warm in private settings. Their ability to create feelings of intimacy and understanding is not incidental to their accumulation of power—it's essential to it. It allows them to disarm criticism, build loyalty, and create the impression of reasonableness that shields their public actions from the moral scrutiny they deserve. The fact that they can turn this charm on and off at will doesn't mitigate their actions—it makes them more disturbing, revealing a level of calculation that negates any claim to diminished capacity.

Maher positions himself throughout as the centrist foil—the adult in the room who's “just trying to get people talking.” But this mirrors exactly the abdication of moral responsibility I described in the Theater of Neutrality. The appearance of intellectual engagement without its responsibilities has simply taken a new form: the appearance of interpersonal connection without moral discernment.

What makes this particularly dangerous is how it numbs our collective capacity for moral judgment. It tells people: “Sure, the country's falling apart—but he signed my insult sheet and laughed at my jokes.” It creates false equivalences between the weight of a private dinner and the weight of public policy. It suggests that being likable in person somehow mitigates the moral seriousness of undermining democratic institutions, when in fact it deepens it by removing ignorance or incapacity as potential excuses.

This is how the normalization of the abnormal happens—not through dramatic endorsements but through intimate portraits that detach personality from power, that treat charm as a counterweight to cruelty. It's the substitution of anecdote for analysis, of personal impression for moral assessment. It's all the more dangerous when the anecdote actually reveals a level of awareness and control that makes the public behavior more morally culpable, not less.

The deeper philosophical problem here connects directly to my exploration of coherence as prior rather than emergent. Maher's approach assumes that truth about a person emerges from direct interaction—that sitting across the dinner table provides special insight that transcends their public actions. But what if coherence exists prior to this interaction? What if understanding someone in power requires not just observing their private behavior but evaluating the larger patterns their actions create in the world?

Maher's monologue suggests that his personal experience reveals a “truth” about Trump that contradicts the public evidence. But what if the truth isn't found in either the public persona or the private charm, but in the relationship between them—in how the private charm enables the public harm? What if the coherence we should be seeking isn't about whether someone is “really” nice or “really” cruel, but about how these seemingly contradictory qualities function together in the exercise of power?

This matters because liberal democracy depends not just on procedural norms but on substantive moral judgments. When we substitute interpersonal impressions for moral assessment, we corrupt our capacity to recognize threats to democratic governance. We become so focused on whether someone seems reasonable over dinner that we lose sight of whether their actions undermine the conditions that make reasoned disagreement possible.

What Maher has done, perhaps unwittingly, is provide a case study in the liberal version of moral abdication—not through “just asking questions” but through narrating intimacy as if it counterbalances public destructiveness. It's a form of what Hannah Arendt might have recognized as the banality of normalization—the way in which personal charm and social graces can obscure moral judgment about the exercise of power.

The problem isn't that Maher met with Trump or reported on that meeting. The problem is the framework he uses to interpret that meeting—a framework that treats personal likeability as morally significant in evaluating public actions, that confuses charm with character, that mistakes listening for moral seriousness. Most troublingly, it's a framework that fails to recognize how the capacity for self-awareness and interpersonal attentiveness that Maher describes actually deepens moral culpability rather than mitigating it.

This matters because the coming months will likely bring more examples of this pattern—more instances where liberal commentators and public figures will meet with Trump, discover he can be charming in person, and use that discovery to soften their moral assessment of his public actions. Each instance will contribute to normalizing what should remain abnormal, to treating the present danger as simply another chapter in ordinary political disagreement.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And the moral assessment of those who hold power depends not on how they behave over dinner but on how their actions affect human freedom, dignity, and democracy. If anything, the capacity for civility and self-awareness that Maher describes doesn't mitigate this assessment—it deepens it by removing ignorance or incapacity as potential excuses.

The center must be held—not because it is easy, but because it is ours to hold. And holding it requires recognizing that private charm is not a moral category that offsets public harm, that being likable in person is not a counterweight to undermining democratic institutions, that the coherence we should seek is not about reconciling contradictory impressions but about recognizing how they function together in the service of power.

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” — Hannah Arendt