After the show, Maher looked tired as he plowed through some whitefish. I sat quietly in a chair while he ate. He broke the silence.
"After what you said, I listened, and they laughed just as hard at the Islam stuff as anything else," he said with a smile.
He told me that he'd read the Marine Le Pen op-ed we'd discussed on the plane. Its author, Ross Douthat, he said, had been on Real Time.
"It's not exactly what I said last night," Maher admitted in a hesitant tone. "I don't know much about her." Maher seemed to be on the verge of correcting the record, but stopped himself. "I'm not saying I'm a fan, but liberals have decided she's Hitler. I don't know if that's true and I feel like I honestly keep an open mind."
He eyed me up and down.
"Party matters. It matters that her father was a Nazi. But it also matters that family going against family is the rarest form of bravery. I remember the Unabomber's brother." He trailed off before making explicit a moral equivalence between Marine Le Pen—who broke with her dad for what appeared to be politically expedient reasons—and Ted Kaczynski's brother, who turned in his terrorist sibling to the FBI.
Instead, Maher zeroed in on the disgust for Le Pen that I'd displayed the night before. "You didn't have an argument," he told me. "You had a reaction."
I wanted to tell Maher that my "reaction" was based in part on the knowledge that Le Pen had recently said the French were not to blame for shipping Jews to death camps during World War II. (That crime belonged to the Vichy regime, an illegitimate government, she said, neglecting to mention that it was staffed at every level by French citizens.) But I was exhausted and the room was soon full of people, including the grateful beneficiaries of Maher's philanthropy.
Maher returned to the subject in the van on the way back to the airport. "I just want you to keep an open mind until you really know. Just don't jump on a team—everything in this country is team," he said. "Look, she may turn out to be fucking Hitler in garters, but it's unfair to ask her to suffer the sins of her father."
I tried to argue that Le Pen's nationalist rhetoric was worrisome, but Maher cut me off.
"Nationalist, it's just a word," he said with disdain. "We get all freaked out because they say 'Death to America' in Iran, but Persian people will tell you that it doesn't really, actually mean what you think it does."
It was at this point that I realized Maher's Doubting Thomas ideology is, in its way, as rigid as any dogma, a reflexive contrarianism that works spectacularly well for him right up until it convinces him that it's okay for a white person to call himself a "house nigger." He can be just as dependent on slogans and talking points as the politicians he skewers on his show. And here, perhaps, was another important difference between him and his peers. Unlike John Oliver, who did seventeen minutes on the French election, Maher clearly had not done his homework about the most important European election of this century so far.
We got on the plane. There was talk of Barbra Streisand's birthday party, which Maher attended, but his thoughts returned to Le Pen.
"Look, I'm not her fan," he said, adjusting a baseball cap. "I'm just keeping an open mind and not swimming with the tide."
