The pinned tweet sitting atop Donald Trump’s Twitter account Monday night is a 30-second clip from the 10th season premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm, which ran on HBO over three weeks ago.
“TOUGH GUYS FOR TRUMP!” the president of the United States wrote above a bootleg video of the scene, which finds Larry David driving his electric BMW through the streets of Los Angeles and nearly running an angry biker off the road.
“What the fuck are you doing?” the biker asks as Larry panics. “Motherfucker! What the fuck? What are you trying to do, man?” After four more F-bombs from the biker, Larry rolls down his window and says, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you.”
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The punchline comes when he puts on a red “Make America Great Again” hat and the biker gives him a smile and says, “Just be more careful next time, OK?”
But what the out-of-context clip fails to capture is the much larger joke of the episode. If Trump had watched the whole thing, he would realize that Larry is using the MAGA hat as a “great people repellent,” something to help him get out of lunch with a guy who annoys him or to make sure no one takes the seat next to him at the sushi bar.
The bit with the biker is actually the moment the joke gets flipped on its head. Not only does the hat repel most people in David’s Hollywood circle, it also attracts maniacs on motorcycles who would otherwise want to violently attack him.
Later in the episode, as he’s explaining the idea to his manager Jeff, Larry jokes, “Look, when you’re a celebrity, you can do anything you want”—poking fun at Trump’s infamous Access Hollywood tape wherein the then-reality-show host bragged about sexually-assaulting women.
And yet there are still those, like the president, who somehow think that Larry David the real person, Larry David the Curb Your Enthusiasm character, or both are actually joining the MAGA crowd.
There are more than a few hints about how David really feels about the president, going back to the Saturday Night Live episode Trump hosted back in the fall of 2015. During his monologue, David, who had already started playing Bernie Sanders on the show at that point, interrupted him to yell, “You’re a racist!” David has also made a number of comments in support of Sanders, saying of the Democratic candidate, “it will be great for the country… terrible for me.” (His money, however, has gone to Pete Buttigieg in the form as a max $2,800 donation last year.)
And just a few weeks ago, David addressed the MAGA hat premiere in an interview at the 92Y in New York. When interviewer Michael Kay asked the Seinfeld co-creator if he was worried about “alienating” Curb fans who happened to also be Trump supporters with the storyline, David shook his head and proclaimed, “Alienate yourselves!”
“Go, alienate, you have my blessing!” he added before offering up a more straightforward answer: “No, I could give a fuck!”
For more, listen to Curb Your Enthusiasm star Jeff Garlin on The Last Laugh podcast.
