Commentary: Shaming Bill Maher and Saquon Barkley will backfire on the Democrats

Jonathan Zimmerman, Chicago Tribune on May 6, 2025

Published in Op Eds

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

I’m a college professor and a liberal Democrat. It won’t surprise you to learn that I also despise Donald J. Trump.

But let’s imagine, for a moment, that I wanted Trump and his MAGA acolytes to prosper and thrive in the 2026 midterm elections and forever thereafter.

I’d cancel Bill Maher and Saquon Barkley.

That’s what many of my fellow Democrats did, after Maher dined with Trump at the White House and Barkley played golf with him. The blogosphere lit up with left-wing vitriol against Maher, a comedian who has been highly critical of Trump for many years. No matter, the haters said: Maher got “played” by the president, who will seem less sinister in light of their meeting.

Ditto for Barkley, who went to the White House with other members of the Philadelphia Eagles while several players — including Super Bowl MVP Jalen Hurts — passed on the invitation. But Barkely also hit the links with the president, then hitched a ride with him on Air Force One to the Eagles reception.

That earned him a torrent of abuse on social media, where people called Barkley — who is Black — an “Uncle Tom” and a “token.” Barkley replied that he had also golfed with Trump’s first predecessor, Barack Obama, and that Barkley had “respect” for the office of the presidency.

But that just made the critics bray more loudly, of course. Trump deserves no respect, they said, and anyone suggesting otherwise was complicit in his evil actions.

Again, I heartily agree with their views of Trump. But I’m already voting Democrat in 2026, just like they are. The people we need to convince are independents and Republicans.

And these voters will be aggravated — not persuaded — by the attacks on Maher and Barkley. Even Larry David’s funny (OK, very funny) takedown of his fellow comedian Maher — in which David imagines enjoying a pleasant dinner with Hitler— will estrange the people we need to enlist.

The theory seems to be that if we shame them enough, they’ll come over to our side: “Hey, someone is likening me to Hitler! I’d better change how I vote!” But the truth is precisely the opposite, of course. When people are shamed, they don’t roll over and concede; instead, they put up their dukes and fight.

And nobody — literally, nobody — likes a scold. That’s the big theme of a recent essay in the New Yorker by Andrew Marantz, which should be required reading for any Democrat who wants to reclaim Congress and the White House.

As Marantz points out, Trump lost young men by 15 percentage points in 2020 and won them by 14 points four years later — a nearly 30-point swing. And that’s not simply because he was running against a man, Joe Biden, in 2020 and a woman, Kamala Harris, in 2024.

It’s because these voters perceive Democrats as “hall monitors” who “tone-police” the public sphere, Marantz explains. Most of this demographic agrees with Democratic policies around taxes, the environment and more. But they reject the smug and censorious vibe of the party, which makes people feel they must pass a set of purity tests to enter the holy sanctum.

Never mind that Trump has become the Censor-in-Chief, arresting international students for protesting the war in Gaza and forcing academics to scrub their grants of words such as “diversity” and “women.” If the voters think Democrats are judging them, we’re going to lose.

And that’s why the canceling of Maher and Barkley is such a loser for us. Indeed, as Maher told his studio audience after his dinner with Trump, it’s “emblematic of why the Democrats are so unpopular these days.”

We have to change that, right now. Of course, we should keep hammering on Trump’s policies, which have wrought so much hell since he returned to office. But we also need to drop our goody-good pretenses, which are a guaranteed turnoff to big swaths of Americans.

In a 2021 survey by The Hill and HarrisX, 79% of Republicans and 64% of independents said cancel culture “unfairly punishes people for their past actions.” If you want to bring those people into our column, lay off Maher and Barkley. Every time you condemn them, you create another vote for you know who.

Is that what you want?

____

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the advisory board of the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest.

___