(Dobbs) If You Have A Nice Dinner With A Rattlesnake, It's Still A Rattlesnake

If Donald Trump has one personality in public and another in private, we know one thing: one of those is a fake.

Donald Trump is “gracious and measured.”

That did not come from Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary who worships the ground Trump walks on. It did not come from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio or Attorney General Pam Bondi or even Co-President of the United States Elon Musk. They all owe the power they now wield in Washington to Donald Trump and never hesitate to bend a knee to him and if asked what kind of man Trump is, they most likely would use words like that.

But none of them said it. The man who did is comedian Bill Maher. Bill Maher, who has used his TV show “Real Time With Bill Maher” to skewer Trump over the years. Bill Maher, who Trump has accused of suffering from “Trump Derangement Syndrome.”

Maher made his comments after dining a month ago at the White House.

It was set up by the rocker Kid Rock, who has called Trump “one of my besties.” “Nothing happens if people don’t break bread together,” he told The Hollywood Reporter, “and meet face-to-face.”

A fair point, and meet face-to-face they did. But that’s not the story. The story is what Maher said on his show afterwards about Trump.

“Just for starters, he laughs. I’d never seen him laugh in public, but he does. Including at himself. And it’s not fake.” Maher told how Trump was showing him the different presidents’ portraits in the Oval Office when Trump “pointed to the portrait of Reagan and he said to me, in all seriousness, ‘You know, the best thing about him, his hair.’ I said, ‘Well, there was also that whole bringing-down-Communism thing,’ waiting for that button next to the Diet Coke button to get pushed and I go through the trap door, but no, he laughed, he got it.”

Maybe the president played Maher for a patsy, because the comedian seemed genuinely smitten with the private Donald Trump. “I never felt I had to walk on eggshells around him, and honestly, I voted for Clinton, and Obama, and I would never feel comfortable talking with them the way I talked with Donald Trump.”

There’s really only one question to ask about all this: Then which one’s the act?

And there’s really only one thing to say to Maher: If you have a nice dinner with a rattlesnake, it’s still a rattlesnake.

The whole affair reminded me of a time in my life between television networks when I was a talk show host on a 50,000 watt radio station in Denver, a station that also carried Rush Limbaugh. Our program director went to a small dinner of major station executives where Limbaugh was the featured speaker, and she came back almost gushing about how different he was in person than the hate-spewing bigot he was on the radio. I don’t remember her exact words but “gracious and measured” could have been among them.

I would say the same to her today that I’d say to Bill Maher: If you have a nice dinner with a rattlesnake, it’s still a rattlesnake.

I covered enough presidents on and off over the years to tell you that some of them are different in private than in public, and some aren’t. With Ronald Reagan and his gregarious public personality, he was the same way in private. What you saw was what you got. The same was true of Gerald Ford whose genuine modesty, publicly and privately, was his saving grace. And of Bill Clinton, whose public charm when I first met him made me think he was a phony, but the more I saw of him, the more I realized, that was just who Bill Clinton was. He could make anyone feel like they were the only person in the room, and he meant it.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, showed a great sense of humor when I covered him up close and personal, but that was a side of the man the public rarely saw. What we saw in George W. Bush was a president who took bad advice from his aides and started a ruinous war, but a close friend of mine has mountain-biked several times with Bush and says that one-on-one, he’s the salt of the earth, the kind of guy you’d want to have a beer with.

So who is the real Donald Trump? The one who seems “gracious and measured,” or the one who insults and belittles and bullies and shows little if any concern for who he hurts?

The answer is, it doesn’t matter. If he has one personality in public and another in private, we know one thing: one of those two Donald Trumps is a fake.

Bill Maher’s monologue about his dinner with Trump inspired comedian Larry David— of “Seinfeld” and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fame— to write a short satire last week in The New York Times. It carried the title, “My Dinner With Adolf.”

“Here I was, prepared to meet Hitler,” he wrote, mocking all the way, “the one I’d seen and heard— the public Hitler. But this private Hitler was a completely different animal. And oddly enough, this one seemed more authentic, like this was the real Hitler. The whole thing had my head spinning.”

How far off is this from Bill Maher’s monologue?

“Two hours later,” David went on in his satire, “the dinner was over, and the Führer escorted me to the door. ‘I am so glad to have met you. I hope I’m no longer the monster you thought I was.’ ‘I must say, mein Führer, I’m so thankful I came. Although we disagree on many issues, it doesn’t mean that we have to hate each other.’ And with that, I gave him a Nazi salute and walked out into the night.”

The Times’s deputy opinion editor Patrick Healy framed Larry David’s column for what it was: “Larry’s piece is not equating Trump with Hitler. It is about seeing people for who they really are and not losing sight of that.”

But how can we see them for who they are when they are one thing in public and another thing in private? How can we see them for who they are when they are acting, or hiding something, or both?

To be fair to Bill Maher, he acknowledged the contradiction. “Look, I get it, it doesn’t matter who he is at a private dinner with a comedian, it matters who he is on the world stage. I’m just taking it as a positive that this person exists, because everything I’ve ever not liked about him was, I swear to God, absent, at least on this night with this guy.”

I’m glad Maher had a nice evening with Trump. But I hope he understands, if you have a nice dinner with a rattlesnake, it’s still a rattlesnake.

Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 38-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.

You can learn more at GregDobbs.net