Love or hate Donald Trump, he is perpetually at the center of the conversation right now, as he has been since he launched his run for president a decade ago. And in an attention-based media environment, the quickest path to achieving that goal, for better and ill, is to position oneself within a Trump-filtered lens.
Bill Maher thus joined the parade of unlikely characters to break bread with the president, having sharply criticized him and even been sued by him in 2013. The maneuver prompted the usual discussion about whether Maher — who also hosted right-wing operative Steve Bannon on last week’s installment of his HBO show — was normalizing deviancy, an understandable lament only if you haven’t been following Maher’s trajectory over the last many years.