I was already enjoying Marc Maron's recent podcast with writer-director Tony Gilroy, who was on, one assumes, because of the new “Star Wars” thing on the Disney channel, “Andor,” which he created, wrote, executive-produced, and which I've heard is good. But Maron doesn't care much for the “Star Wars” thing; he wanted to talk about “Michael Clayton,” which Gilroy wrote and directed back in 2007, and which Maron is obsessed with. That's fun. There are no weeds too deep for Marc Maron on “Michael Clayton.” You could tell he was having a great time talking about it.

But we also get Gilroy's story—how his dad was a playwright, etc., how he write this and the other, including “The Devil's Advocate,” with Al Pacino, Keanu Reeves and Charlize Theron, and what exactly was the hook in that film that finally worked for him as a screenwriter. Also the insanity of it. Its bigness. Al Pacino eating up scenes. He and Marc are laughing about it when we get this exchange:

Gilroy: Oh my god, and the Trump shit.

Maron: Yeah. [Pause] Was he in there?

Gilroy: Fuck, man, that's his apartment. The killer real-estate dude, the killer real-estate molester, we shot in his apartment, Trump's apartment. We needed the ugliest, most garish, horrifying, real-estate developer apartment you could possibly have, and Trump threw his apartment at us.

Maron: That's right. Ohhh....

Gilroy: And we didn't have to—if you look at the movie, that's his fucking shitbag apartment, with all the Versailles gilt, and then the high-rise windows. It's just so perfect. And he came by the set every day. 

Maron: Really?

Gilroy: Oh yeah. Poke around. 

Maron: What was your impression of him? At that time. Obviously the apartment's the apartment, but--

Gilroy: Look, he was a clown. I grew up in New York. I'd been in New York since 1979, I sat at a table in the China Club with he and Bo Dietl. I'd been around him. Just a fucking clown. You know, just that clown.

Maron: Grifter.

Gilroy: Grifter-clown, kind of loser-outsider. A pretend rich guy. Because, you know, if you live in New York, and I'd been there all this time, and the kids go to school, you're really around titans. 

Maron: Sure. Yeah, yeah.

Gilroy: There's some really big arterial power and money. He was not any part of that. 

Maron: And they looked at him like, “Look at this guy.” 

Gilroy: He's lint.

Maron: So you had a deal with him on Devil's Advocate.

Gilroy: He would come by. He would come by on the way down to the office or wherever, peek by, try to see Charlize or whatever the thing he was trying to do. Everyone's laughing at him. Laughing at his apartment. 

Maron: It's so funny he was part of the “Devil” movie. Of course he was. 

A few thoughts.

One, Gilroy sounds a little like Sidney Pollack's character in “Michael Clayton”: I know where the power lies and how the game is played, and these other schmucks don't. And one of those schmucks is the former president.

Two, I love that Maron is interviewer enough to just ask the open-ended question “What was your impression of him?” He's talking about the great villain in Maron's and my life, but he doesn't impose any of that on the question. He pulls back and opens it up. That's the way to do it.

Three is simply a question: Does Donald Trump hear the laughter? Does he do what he does to silence the laughter? Did we all go through the horrors of the last six years, and however many years going forward, because the Tony Gilroys of the world laughed at this dumb, dumpy real estate developer? 

When I first heard this exchange, I wanted to get it in front of all of those idiots who continue to see Trump as a great man, a great businessman, a moral examplar. The 74 million absolute idiots that voted for him. Listening again as I transcribed the above, I realized it was probably the only moment in the last six years where I felt anything close to a pang of empathy for him.