It takes a special kind of solipsistic cretin to acknowledge the damage that the autocratic Trump is doing to the country before immediately giving him credit for not being an asshole to you personally for a very brief period of time.

And yet that is what Bill Maher did after having dinner with Trump, Kid Rock, and Dana White at a sort of bizarro Algonquin Roundtable.

Last week, Maher sat down with Trump – not to interview the president – but to dine with him at the White House. The result? This recap from Maher on Friday’s edition of Real Time [emphasis mine]:

I don’t have a good feeling [about Trump] and will be critical about a lot of what he’s doing. The trade war and disappearing people, ruling by decree, threatening judges, gutting the government with glee.

But I also think he now understands, I have a job to do. Or at least he did on this night because he said to me early on that he’d seen our last episode, which was the Friday before this dinner. And he said, “I thought maybe you’d be nice, but you hit me really hard.”

[…]

Trump was gracious and measured and why he isn’t that in other settings, I don’t know and I can’t answer and it’s not my place to answer.

So, Maher acknowledges that Trump is waging a destructive trade war, abducting people off the street, governing by fiat, menacing federal judges, and kneecapping government agencies. But there’s a mitigating factor for Maher here – namely that Trump was “gracious” to him for a couple of hours and recognized the talkshow host has a job to do. As for Trump’s graciousness deficit in those “other settings” – the far more consequential ones that don’t involve Bill Maher at the White House – this unfortunate fact is a matter of secondary importance in Maher’s story.

It should go without saying that the moral bar for anyone – especially the president of the United States – needs to be a hell of a lot higher than, “was nice to me for a couple of hours.” I have no doubt that Trump can be affable or even charming in person. We see occasional glimmers of this in his speeches and off-the-cuff remarks. The problem is that so much of what he says and does is downright horrifying and therefore, no, you don’t gotta hand it to him like this.