Ep. #678: Michael Douglas, John Heilemann, Sarah Isgur

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Speaker 3 Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Speaker 2 Start the clock.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 Hey,

Speaker 2 look at that. That's right.

Speaker 2 Exactly. What five?

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 I appreciate it so much.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 I appreciate that more than I can tell you. That is the right attitude.
We're still going to have fun.

Speaker 2 Okay, you know what? We had it.

Speaker 2 Please.

Speaker 2 Please, we had an election.

Speaker 2 You can sit down.

Speaker 2 That's how upset this guy is. He's not going to sit again.

Speaker 2 Well, yeah, a lot of people are freaking. You know what? I opened the window today.
The sun was still shining. The birds were still singing.
My gardener was packing from Mexico. That's different.

Speaker 2 Well, you know.

Speaker 2 Hey,

Speaker 2 I did not vote for the winner. We'll see what the winners do now.
They won. Now they have reality.
They have to deal with. You know, we'll see what they do.
See if they live up to their word.

Speaker 2 Trump says he's going to deport 12 million people. How are you going to get 12 million people back into Mexico? And today, Trump said, I'm way ahead of you.

Speaker 2 Why do you think I left so many holes in the wall?

Speaker 2 You know what?

Speaker 2 We're going to hear about both tonight on the panel and throughout the whole show, the winners, the losers. My message to the losers, losers look in the mirror.

Speaker 2 No?

Speaker 2 Well, maybe you should. Sorry.
Well, that's my feeling. Losers look in the mirror, okay? You know, for, yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 for months, Democrats have been saying, how is this even close? And they're right. It wasn't.

Speaker 2 They could not conceive of a second Trump term, but they should have. When does America ever turn down seconds? I mean, come on.

Speaker 2 Look, this is just the facts.

Speaker 2 This is just the facts. Trump won all the swings, all seven.
I mean, he ran the table. Trump won so big, today he called the Secretary of State in Georgia, and he asked him to lose him $11,000.

Speaker 2 But, you know, he has an amazing coalition. He kept the old crowd crowd that likes him.
He got a lot of new voters. He got a lot of people who say they just want to see what he'll do.

Speaker 2 I call this the get-the-cat high vote.

Speaker 2 But, I mean, he did better, like in every demographic. The exit poll said he grabbed 52% of white women.
He also got their votes.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 We're going to keep doing jokes here, okay? Right?

Speaker 2 Both sides right to the end.

Speaker 2 And you know what?

Speaker 2 I think that will be okay with them. We'll test that, but I think it will.
But you know,

Speaker 2 the liberal media, always more offended than the victim, been saying it for years. They were like, women, oh women are so upset about Donald Trump.
Women are a little stronger than you think.

Speaker 2 Women were like,

Speaker 2 women were like, whatever, I don't have to fuck them. I just want bacon.

Speaker 2 But, I mean.

Speaker 2 Women, that had to hurt for Kamala.

Speaker 2 I mean, the whole thing

Speaker 2 must have been very painful. And they say she saw the writing on the wall.
Around 10 o'clock at night on election night,

Speaker 2 she called McDonald's to see if she could get her old job.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know.

Speaker 2 But I mean, Kamala underperformed in every demographic. Although she is still polling very well among illegal immigrant inmates who want sex change opportunities.

Speaker 2 Totally on her side.

Speaker 2 Oh, well,

Speaker 2 make no mistake.

Speaker 2 This election was very much about what I've been saying here and lost a lot of fans for saying over the years that this country has had enough of the anti-common sense woke bullshit that was.

Speaker 2 They have,

Speaker 2 resoundingly.

Speaker 2 And here in L.A., Proposition 36 passed. This was the one that said shoplifting, which we'd made just a misdemeanor, is now a felony again.
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 Common sense.

Speaker 2 Yeah, people in this town, even liberal LA, said, you know what, here's an idea. Instead of locking up the toothpaste, how about we lock up the shoplifter?

Speaker 2 You know.

Speaker 2 This is not.

Speaker 2 He's a bill, you're a Republican. That doesn't make me Republican, you asshole.
That just is common sense.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 San Francisco had a very ultra-woke mayor, London Breed. Well, nope, she lost.

Speaker 2 Even the ultra-liberal people of San Francisco had enough of homelessness, public drug use, defecation in the streets. And now London Breed's pronouns are she gone.

Speaker 2 And you know what?

Speaker 2 And some of this came home to to me personally this week a little bit. I own a pot store.
Do you know that? Woody Harrelson and I. I know, big shock, huh?

Speaker 2 Woody and Bill, a pot store? Doesn't add up? No.

Speaker 2 I do. It's called The Woods.
It's on Santa Monica Boulevard. It's a fantastic store.
And it got robbed this week.

Speaker 2 Right, the day before Election Day, they just broke in the window, walked in there, and the joke's on them.

Speaker 2 You know why? Because they caught the guy.

Speaker 2 our pod is so good, he forgot to leave. All right, we've got a great show.
John Heilman and Sarah Isra are here.

Speaker 2 But first up is a two-time Oscar-winning actor and producer who narrated and produced America's Burning, which is available to stream on Apple TV and Amazon. Michael Douglas is here.
Oh my God.

Speaker 2 Michael Douglas.

Speaker 2 My lead.

Speaker 2 sitting here.

Speaker 2 Oh my god.

Speaker 2 Michael Douglas.

Speaker 2 First of all, I just have to say, you know,

Speaker 2 to have a super duper A-list celebrity here with nothing to plug, it's the only time it's ever happened, and I so appreciated it. I mean,

Speaker 2 you're just here because you love me.

Speaker 2 I am. I so thank you.
Not only do I love you, but I'm here to tell you how much my father loved you.

Speaker 2 Oh, I know that.

Speaker 2 I know he was

Speaker 2 a letters on your show, but did you ever get a letter from him?

Speaker 2 Ever. Are you kidding me? I have a trove.
I treasure them. If the house was on fire, I would grab those.
He loved your show beyond and loved you.

Speaker 2 And the last year, the last year of his life, he was pretty much bedridden. And so the only things that he would watch were Ultimate Fighting and you.

Speaker 2 Same thing.

Speaker 2 Oh no.

Speaker 2 So, you know,

Speaker 2 for a lot of you out there who may have a friend or a relative who's close to you know going for it, you know, get them to watch all the Bill Maher reruns for a happy ending. Okay.

Speaker 2 Now I loved him. When we had lunch, I was over to the house a couple of times, and he wrote me many, many notes.
And the thing is, he would write it, and because of the stroke, you couldn't read it.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 then there would be a typewritten translation. Right.
But he would include both. That's what I love.
He had a little logo at the bottom with his dimples. Yes.
He draws a little picture. Yeah.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, he must have been very proud of you because, boy, you make Nepo babies look good.

Speaker 2 More than anybody ever considered.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 The other thing I just have to share a little bit with after

Speaker 2 Tuesday night,

Speaker 2 Wednesday morning, you know,

Speaker 2 so pissed at this razor-thin race, right? It was going to be so close,

Speaker 2 you know, with all these polls and all these televisions. And it's a wipeout, which I have no idea how that could happen at all.

Speaker 2 So I go down Wednesday morning to play golf, which, you know, just to clear my mind. And I go play nine holes, and I get a hole in one.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 Wow.

Speaker 2 I know this doesn't exactly golf is not yours. No, but I

Speaker 2 do have an appreciation how rare it is to get a hole in one and what that must mean. You know, Trump says he gets one like every other time.

Speaker 2 But I believe you. You really got one.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Part three, I'm guessing this was.

Speaker 2 Well, congratulations. That's a big thing.

Speaker 2 You played the American president.

Speaker 2 If you were the American president, what would you tell people today

Speaker 2 about our country and where we are? Wow.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 it's the economy. I mean, it really, really comes down.

Speaker 2 We lost our middle class. We don't have a middle class.
But that's what your documentary is about. Yeah, yeah, you know what I mean?

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean,

Speaker 2 you don't, you know, I mean, and it's a global situation. You see in Germany and Japan, everybody from after the

Speaker 2 COVID and all of that, the inflation that rose around the world, and we seem a lot of democracies turned towards autocracies. But

Speaker 2 still doesn't justify

Speaker 2 how wrong they got it. I mean, in terms of all the polls.
But I think we desperately need to support our middle class much longer. And also,

Speaker 2 in 40 years,

Speaker 2 in 40 years, the stock market has increased, I think, 5,000%,

Speaker 2 and real earning wages have increased 14%.

Speaker 2 So 50% of the country owns stocks. And you've heard they're not complaining much right now, but those people who are going, you know, week to week with the inflation,

Speaker 2 it's killing them. And I think we really underestimated it.

Speaker 2 And the very fact now that we can talk about Republicans as being the people, the party for the people, and that we are this elitist party on the left, the Democrats, is wild. It's crazy.

Speaker 2 And yet there is truth into it. I mean, I understand why people are there.
I understand why they just want to break shit also. You know, I mean, that's what Falling Down, one of your great ones.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 2 That was.

Speaker 2 That was a, you know,

Speaker 2 if you kids are too young to remember, it was a movie about a guy who goes into McDonald's to get

Speaker 2 the

Speaker 2 burger, okay, and they don't serve it, and he's there at 11:31, and they stop serving it at 11:30, and it's just the last straw, and he goes and he goes nuts after that.

Speaker 2 And I think, wasn't Joel Schumacher the director? Joel Schumacher, director. I did a movie with him, DC Cab.

Speaker 2 There you are.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 How come I get DC cap and you get falling down?

Speaker 2 That's not fair. But I mean, all your movies, I mean, you do something or did something, and I hope you could do it again, and I have an idea for your next movie, by the way.

Speaker 2 Right. Ears.
Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 Because, you know, you were able to do something that I think they've kind of lost the skill to do, which is make a movie about something that is also entertaining.

Speaker 2 Also entertaining.

Speaker 2 Falling down is entertaining. Traffic is entertaining.

Speaker 2 One flew over the cuckoo's nest. Entertaining.
China syndrome. Wall Street.
These are entertaining movies.

Speaker 2 Disclosure. All about something.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 I'm a material guy. The first

Speaker 2 work that I got early in my life was in a suburb theater working on new plays,

Speaker 2 on new plays. And so script is everything to me, structure.
And then somewhere along the line, I just realized how ridiculously expensive it was to make two hours of entertainment.

Speaker 2 So let me try to find something that has like a good meal.

Speaker 2 You know, it's not like you just eat it and you go on, but you can kind of talk about it a little bit, or has a little food for thought afterwards, and all of that.

Speaker 2 And, you know, and I'm a bit of a news junkie, and so I kind of feel like I know what's going on, except for this year.

Speaker 2 But, okay, so here's my idea for him: him, because I could name all these movies again and several more and attach an issue that you were getting at, nuclear power, obviously with China syndrome, Wall Street was about greed and blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 2 Media.

Speaker 2 Media. I mean, one reason we're in the mess we're in is because the media landscape has changed.

Speaker 2 We're both old enough to remember when media was, I mean, a computer in your pocket, you look everything out, there were some wonderful things about it, and then it just did absolutely rat fuck kids' brains.

Speaker 2 I would love to see you make a movie about that subject. And you are not too old to play Rupert Murdoch type figure.

Speaker 2 No, no, really.

Speaker 2 That's a great subject for you and a great role.

Speaker 2 That's interesting. Network did a good job.
Network did a good job. Yeah, but that was 1976.
I know.

Speaker 2 The things it predicted, like Fox News,

Speaker 2 came about and then manifested in ways that we couldn't even imagine.

Speaker 2 Well, I am, after these elections and the judges, I'm a little offended about television news. I mean, I realize it's the most biggest profit center for all the networks.

Speaker 2 It's the cheapest thing to do with the most return in advertising dollars. And that's what I'm beginning to realize more and more about television news.

Speaker 2 And the other part of it is what we're talking about this is: can we shorten these elections?

Speaker 2 Can we stop, can we stop all the time?

Speaker 2 Two meetings, two years before the election

Speaker 2 people are running for. I mean, other European countries, they all do it in three months, four months.

Speaker 2 Or less. Or less.
We should be able to do it. And what are we at? 20 billion we spent on this year? 20 billion.
I'm just tired of politics consuming so much of our time, of our day, of our engagement.

Speaker 2 Well, it's a.

Speaker 2 It's supposedly a public service, you know, and yet we spend so much time.

Speaker 2 But I don't think you're really speaking for a lot of the people in this country.

Speaker 2 A lot of our time, and we still watch TV.

Speaker 2 Most people don't get their news from TV. A lot of the young ones, they don't have a TV.
It's like having a typewriter in your house.

Speaker 2 They get their news from TikTok. Yeah, no? How about Gen Z? They split 50

Speaker 2 on this election. Right.

Speaker 2 So, I mean, I don't think that's so much the issue as where people get their news and do they get it at all. One of the most common Google searches the day before the election was: did Biden drop out?

Speaker 2 No, no, no, no.

Speaker 2 Oh, yes. That's, yeah, right.
They were asking, you know,

Speaker 2 who's running? I heard there's an election today.

Speaker 2 Yeah, that's sad. So, anyway, I think that's a great topic for you.

Speaker 2 I would love hearing.

Speaker 2 I'll look into that. The other issue, we've got to, I couldn't read a thing if only 30% of our country people have passports.
So that means

Speaker 2 with all of you, you can stay home as much as you want, but I mean, 70% of the country can't even leave the country. So.
Well, now they want to. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Easy hard.

Speaker 2 I don't like that either. Be a patriot.
Stay here and fix it. You know, I said it a couple of years ago.

Speaker 2 We don't need a revolution. We need to fix it.
And we can. I mean, I watched your Ben Franklin thing.
It's a marvelous performance. I love the movie.
Thank you.

Speaker 2 It reminded me a lot of Spielberg's Lincoln, and it took a specific issue that was naughty, like how does Ben Franklin get France on our side? Right. And again, made it into an entertainment.

Speaker 2 Something that we could watch the process, which usually is not that interesting, but it makes it interesting. That's what good art does.
But Ben Franklin, what do you think he would say?

Speaker 2 You lived in that character for so long now. Oh, I think he'd have another drink.

Speaker 2 All right. Well, I hope you have one with me soon.
Would you? I can't tell you how much it means to me that you would come here just to talk to me.

Speaker 2 All right, Michael Douglas, watch for his movie about media coming soon.

Speaker 2 All right, let's meet our panel.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 All right. He is chief political economist for Puck and a national affairs analyst for MSNBC and NBC News.
John Heilman is back with us.

Speaker 2 Good to have you back. She's the senior editor of the Dispatch and host of the Dispatch's legal podcast, Advisory Opinion.
Sarah Isger, back with us.

Speaker 2 John Cristwell, seems like every time you're here, we do you dirty. It's hard to follow Michael Douglas.
You were here when you had to follow Howard Stern. We put you on ones with Russell Brand.

Speaker 2 It was not intentional. We love you.
I'm so glad you're back. Thank you.
I don't know why you always draw the short straw.

Speaker 2 You know, those are all but one of those people are people I respect and admire. So there you go.

Speaker 2 All right, so programming note, we we have two more shows.

Speaker 2 Now, this is important to what we're going to talk about tonight, because I want to address the winners, and then I want to address the losers. There's only winners and losers in elections.

Speaker 2 We have two more shows.

Speaker 2 Normally, this would be our last show, but we thought, well, we should stay on because it'll be a shit show after this, because there'll be all sorts of lawsuits, and the country will be in flames.

Speaker 2 Which

Speaker 2 I think, let's not bury the lead. That...

Speaker 2 The most important thing to say about this election is the reason why we're sitting here so peacefully now is because the one party that still believes in conceding elections lost.

Speaker 2 If the other guy had won, it would be a shit show now. Let's not pass over that.

Speaker 2 And I also just want to say

Speaker 2 to my friends on the right, I said it to them last week, I said it to them personally because they all have the same idea about Trump. He says a lot of shit.
Okay,

Speaker 2 now you won. We'll see if your he just says shit doctrine

Speaker 2 is real or it's not. But just stop, you won.
So have,

Speaker 2 you can afford to be magnanimous now, my right-wing friends, and understand that, you know, when we're worried about fascism, it's because he talks like a fascist. We're not plucking it from thin air.

Speaker 2 That's my message to the right.

Speaker 2 You say what?

Speaker 2 Well, I mean, to your first point,

Speaker 2 Trump was out for days, including on Election Day, saying that there are problems in Pennsylvania. So he ended up winning Pennsylvania by two points.

Speaker 2 All of a sudden, all of the problems with the election that he was going to say, this is illegitimate, it's fixed, it's rigged, they all just kind of vanish into thin air.

Speaker 2 To your point,

Speaker 2 Connell Harris and Joe Biden have both came out promptly.

Speaker 2 and forcefully and said, he won, we lost, peaceful transfer of power, power, moving on. And I think given what happened in 2020, in 2021, they have not gotten enough credit for doing that.

Speaker 2 Used to be the norm,

Speaker 2 used to not be the initiative of American politics, but to see them get out there and do that I think was pretty important. And I will say it additionally to your point, Bill,

Speaker 2 I take a lot of shit about this from people when I come out and say it, but I was glad to see Donald Trump win the popular vote.

Speaker 2 I mean, I think if I would, it was not my preference that he'd be president going forward. But if he's gonna be president going forward,

Speaker 2 not having it be that he got in through the loophole of the Electoral College where he gets 46% and still is our president.

Speaker 2 And by the way, let's just one shout for a democracy that we might wanna move toward one day where every election, the person who wins the most votes gets to be president.

Speaker 2 No matter who gets in through the Electoral College loophole,

Speaker 2 no matter who gets in with 46, 47, whether it's Democrats or Republicans, it's a bullshit system. If you get the most votes, you should be president, right? He got the most votes.

Speaker 2 He gets to be president.

Speaker 2 And to everybody who worried that he was a fascist, who heard John Kelly call him a fascist and say that he admired Adolf Hitler and heard him say that he was going to use the military against his political opponents and fantasized about seeing Liz Cheney shot in the face and fantasized about the press getting also shot in the face.

Speaker 2 Everybody who did all that. Some of that's bullshit.
And I'm not going to say that. But he said all those things.
What are you going to say, Sarah? But wait to your point, though, Bill.

Speaker 2 Wait, here's my point. He said all those things.
You're right. We'll see what he does.
But he said them all. He said them all in the heat of the campaign.
We'll see what now happens.

Speaker 2 But the great thing about him winning the popular vote majority is that everybody who was worried about all that now knows that they are in the minority. America has voted for Donald Trump.

Speaker 2 And that gives us a sense of who is worried about that stuff and who doesn't care about that stuff.

Speaker 4 I think Republicans have a real risk of also overreading what this election was. The first question you should ever ask is, did Trump win or did Harris lose?

Speaker 4 And those are not necessarily the same thing. We saw the party in power in every Western democracy so far lose support.

Speaker 2 And look, as a former...

Speaker 4 Yeah, and as a former operative, if you want to know if your campaign strategy worked, your campaign strategy was to pick up this group and this group.

Speaker 4 So you want to see rises with them, but then you shouldn't see a rise in groups that you weren't aiming for. Donald Trump increased his vote with everyone, which means it wasn't his campaign strategy.

Speaker 4 I think it was that the American people just, they voted for Joe Biden because they were promised normalcy and competency. And they didn't get either.

Speaker 4 And the most effective ad that Donald Trump ran was the they-them ad. You know, he's for you, she's for they-them.
Democrats thought that was an ad about, you know, transphobia.

Speaker 4 They missed the point entirely. It was an ad about language.

Speaker 4 That these people are more obsessed with whether you have a signature block in your email with your pronouns in it than they are about getting the economy back on track.

Speaker 4 And so that was just roundly rejected.

Speaker 2 Honestly, they did get the economy back on track. That's not...
People don't feel that way.

Speaker 2 It's bullshit that he wanted Liz Cheney shot in the face, and it's bullshit that they didn't get the economy.

Speaker 2 Let's call bullshit wherever it is tonight.

Speaker 2 The economy.

Speaker 2 What is an indictment?

Speaker 2 What I think is a tremendous indictment of Kamala Harris is that she couldn't win an election with the stock market at record highs and unemployment at record lows.

Speaker 2 Give me that hand. you should be able to win an election.

Speaker 4 She couldn't win the election because Joe Biden refused to actually be the bridge to another generation that he promised to be.

Speaker 4 And I know that you're looking at inflation numbers and saying the rate of inflation has gone down. Bacon is still twice as much as it was.
Inflation happened and it's not going away.

Speaker 2 Shut up about Bacon.

Speaker 2 You spoke about Bacon's bridge!

Speaker 2 Jesus, Bacon.

Speaker 2 Bill, you and I will have to have to just respectfully disagree. I think if we've heard presidential candidates talking about people getting shot in a

Speaker 2 way if he called for a military tribunal against her,

Speaker 2 again, he might not do it, but you don't want to normalize the notion that that's the kind of conversation. That's

Speaker 2 the kind of language that we want to have. No, but that wasn't, but you know, this is the problem with, I'm sorry, the far left, is that I'm out of the far left.

Speaker 2 They're not going to drag me into Trump derangement syndrome. It's not deranged to be upset and worried about the real things.
Like he could be a fascist. He wants to be a.
I'm very.

Speaker 2 But if you're going to think I'm going to chase every rabbit down the hole for the next four years, wait a second, for the next four years, you're wrong. I'm not going to.

Speaker 2 I'm not telling you what to do for the next four years. That's who he is.

Speaker 2 No, no, I'm just telling you, I did this once, I'm not going to do it again. You know, that's who he is.

Speaker 2 If he talks about Arnold Palmer's dick or he makes it, or he says a bad word or says something that everybody thinks like there are shithole countries, I'm not going to lose my shit about it.

Speaker 2 I'm just not. Because that is deranged.
Not asking you to do that. That's who he is.
Sure. Not asking you to do that.
But as you just said, you're worried about whether he's actually a fascist.

Speaker 2 And you're worried about, I think, I think, worried about. Those are, to me, those are illustrations of the deeper thing.

Speaker 2 You point to those examples in the context of a campaign and you say, a guy who's talking about, I'd like to use the military against my political opponents.

Speaker 2 These are all examples

Speaker 2 for that. In any case.
But Bill, but Bill,

Speaker 2 I disagree with Sarah about this.

Speaker 2 I think that the reality is that under the circumstances, what we've seen from Donald Trump over the course of the last four years, a guy who did, I think we all agree,

Speaker 2 did try to overturn a free and fair election in 2020, right? Incited a mob on the Capitol. Still has a lot of people.

Speaker 2 Is talking about and says he's going to follow through on, trying to deport 20 million

Speaker 2 illegal immigrants who are living in this country, largest mass deportation he claims in history, right? Has said all the stuff he said.

Speaker 2 He performed better in this election for whatever set of reasons. Partly, I think it's a factor of what he says.

Speaker 2 Partly because you won't talk about the other side, the people who should be looking in the mirror, the subject I'm trying to get to. We know who Trump is.
Well, that's, but this is the

Speaker 2 Sarah says it's basically the failure of Democrats. I'm saying I'm trying to give more credit to Trump.
Trump is saying things that people obviously identify with in this country.

Speaker 2 I mean, you don't win the way he won overwhelmingly across a bunch of groups like this this without having much of a turnout game on the basis of there's something that people love about Trump.

Speaker 4 Except that internationally, the same thing has happened. And Donald Trump-type figures have risen internationally as well.
You can't say that Donald Trump is a solely American phenomenon.

Speaker 4 And so I think that that's why I think that the Trump

Speaker 4 team could really overread what this election was about. They want competency.

Speaker 4 They want someone focused on the important stuff, crime, as you mentioned, instead of in San Francisco, where they were more focused on renaming the the schools than they were on reopening the schools.

Speaker 2 Yeah, all that stuff.

Speaker 2 But what I hear from the

Speaker 2 usual suspects, I'll call them on the left in the media, is just, you know, again, not looking in the mirror. It just doesn't matter.
No, they think they didn't call him Hitler loudly enough.

Speaker 2 Or that just a lot of people

Speaker 2 texted me things like, well, you know, you can't fix stupid. Sorry, that doesn't work with me.
Yeah, you're stupid because you're not thinking about the bigger picture.

Speaker 2 You're not thinking about maybe we did something wrong. Maybe we're not perfect.

Speaker 2 You know, it's like a relationship. You got dumped.
America dumped you, and they're all like,

Speaker 2 you don't know what you had.

Speaker 2 Yes, they do. They know what they had.

Speaker 2 And what they're saying is, we know what we had, and you're a mess.

Speaker 4 It's the dude who got dumped and was like, she was a lesbian anyway.

Speaker 2 Right.

Speaker 2 Mike,

Speaker 2 I'm going to ask you a question and respond to to that in part by saying this.

Speaker 2 The scale of the Democratic loss, any sane Democrat who is not sitting down right now and having a deep moment of self-scrutiny about the way in which Democrats have become the party of college-educated elites and that Donald Trump has put together an increasingly multiracial coalition of working Americans, anyone who's not asking the question, how do we need to change in the Democratic Party is out of their fucking mind.

Speaker 2 Okay?

Speaker 2 That's a very, that's a, that's a,

Speaker 2 that's a conversation every Democrat should be having, and I think many of them are starting to have. It's early.

Speaker 2 People are still shell-shocked about what happened, but the conversation is going to happen. But here's my question to people who asked that, right?

Speaker 2 Four years ago, Joe Biden beat Donald Trump, we all admit, by, what, eight, 10 million votes, right?

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 Trump gets 16% in 2016, sorry, gets 46% in 2016 and becomes president. He has a shitty 2018.
He loses to Biden in 2020. He fucks up the midterms for Republicans in 2022.

Speaker 2 He has this period of extraordinary political weakness for that entire time and then has a huge night on Tuesday. I want to give him credit for the huge night on Tuesday, but

Speaker 2 it's not like Trump's been a dominant, a colossus since the moment he walked on the stage in 2015. He had a record that was never had a majority of the people.
We're still talking about him.

Speaker 2 My question about the

Speaker 2 menu.

Speaker 2 I'm trying to ask you the question of

Speaker 2 Joe Biden won overwhelmingly in 2020. So what changed that made the Democratic Party

Speaker 2 that controlled the Senate that won in 2020

Speaker 2 in that four years? We will answer that question after a word from comedy.

Speaker 2 I thought it was very interesting at the end.

Speaker 2 The Kamala Harris campaign, their last sort of Battle of the Bulge thing, was to put this ad up, a commercial, I want to show it, where they were telling the wives of Trump supporters, you know, you don't have to vote like the husband.

Speaker 2 Show the ad because it was really quite phenomenal.

Speaker 2 You can vote any way you want,

Speaker 2 and no one will ever know.

Speaker 2 Did you make the right choice? Sure, did, honey. Remember, what happens in the booth stays in the booth.

Speaker 2 So,

Speaker 2 you know, you saw the wink. And there, we put together some signs that maybe your Trump-loving wife, Wink-Wink, really voted for Kamala.
Would you like to see the signs? Okay.

Speaker 2 She had her pussy hat under her MAGA hat. Oh, well, that's...

Speaker 2 Again, signs she may have voted for Kamala. Can I not shut this up?

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 2 She went to the polling place without her handmaid's bonnet.

Speaker 2 You have to unplug it and plug it back in again. She donated

Speaker 2 your old clothes to transgender prisoners. Well, that's

Speaker 2 a sign right there.

Speaker 2 When you forgot something at the store, she says, We're not going back.

Speaker 2 You caught her reading again. Oh, well.

Speaker 2 Her new catchphrase is: if you're so hungry, you cook something.

Speaker 2 When you ask her why she changed her hair, she says, the important thing is that my values haven't changed.

Speaker 2 For her anniversary, she wants to go to a freak-off. Well, there's...

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 it's like she's not even trying when she shoots at her case of Bud Light.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 2 Okay, so

Speaker 2 basic question here, because we talked a lot about democracy and we're all worried about it.

Speaker 2 But you can't scream about democracy and then then have a guy run the table like this and not say, well, it's a mandate, right? Is that right or wrong? Is it a mandate?

Speaker 4 Yes, the Harvard Institute of Politics student president came out with an op-ed today talking about how they weren't going to forego democracy for the sake of nonpartisanship, set aside that they might have wanted to talk to a lawyer before saying their nonprofit was now going to be a partisan organization.

Speaker 4 But the idea that you're going to be pro-democracy by not giving a voice and allowing other students to hear from speakers that belong to the party that just won through a democratic process.

Speaker 4 Like, that's where the left has a problem. They become the party of the faculty lounge.
They're so condescending. They're so arrogant.

Speaker 2 And again, not to keep the net worse, the whole point is to be exclusionary.

Speaker 4 They're not accidentally exclusionary. It's the mission statement.

Speaker 2 No, I mean, I saw Kamala was on Saturday Night Live, as the losing candidate often is.

Speaker 2 It worked so well for Hillary. Let's run that back.

Speaker 2 And it just made me think, I'm sure every single member of the Saturday Night Night Live cast was a Harris supporter. But what if one of them wasn't?

Speaker 2 What if one of those cast, what if one of those cast members was for Trump? Would they have felt comfortable saying so? I really don't think so. They would have had to keep it to themselves.

Speaker 2 That's not a good place for us to be. I remember when,

Speaker 2 and that happens even more on the left.

Speaker 2 And I remember when Elon Musk hosted, and this is well before he was a Trumper. This is three or four years.
He was just the richest man in the the world.

Speaker 2 And a number of the cast members on Saturday Night Live, like they wouldn't, they didn't want to deal with him.

Speaker 2 They didn't exactly boycott, but they made it plain. And I was thinking, really? You have Elon Musk on your show for a week.

Speaker 2 You could talk to one of the most interesting, brilliant people the world has ever produced, even about this issue that bothers you so much, that he's so rich and lots of people aren't.

Speaker 2 But no, you don't want to even deal with him. That's what I hate about the left.

Speaker 2 You're brats. You're brats and you're snobs and people don't like that.

Speaker 4 And not in the Brat Summer way.

Speaker 2 Not in a Brat Summer way. That's right.
Not Brad Summer. Look at the dating numbers.
Look how good that worked.

Speaker 4 Look at the dating numbers.

Speaker 4 Liberal women won't be friends with, won't date a conservative man.

Speaker 4 It's not good for our society if you've replaced religion with politics. And we're becoming a post-racial society, which is a good thing.

Speaker 4 But it's being replaced with this diploma divide where you have, again, this like arrogant, condescending group that says if you don't vote the way we do, you're a fascist. You're Hitler.

Speaker 4 You're Hitler-like. It's 1933 again, as Jen Rubin from the Washington Post tweeted yesterday, during the attack on Jews in Amsterdam.
She's tweeting about how it's 1933 here.

Speaker 4 Let's look at Europe for a second.

Speaker 2 In some ways, he is Hitler-like. I'm sorry, but that's just true.

Speaker 2 Not Hitler, but...

Speaker 2 Just because someone voted for Trump. He says he likes their generals.
You know, I mean, that's Hitler-like. I wish I had his generals.

Speaker 4 Because someone voted for Trump, you don't get to then ostracize them from polite society.

Speaker 2 And also, like, the problem with the left is that they don't want to deal with anyone who just likes Trump. I keep, I've been saying this for years.

Speaker 2 You can hate Trump, you can't hate everybody who likes him. It's half the country, and they're not all bad people.

Speaker 2 Politics isn't an extension of a person directly like that. Yes, it's easy for you to think you're better than Trump.
He steals from charities and suggests shooting protesters in the legs.

Speaker 2 It's not a high bar.

Speaker 2 But that's not who these people are. You know who ended the character debate in this country?

Speaker 4 It was the left with Clinton, right? I mean, they're the ones who said character didn't matter in the White House, and now suddenly they think character matters a lot.

Speaker 4 I thought character mattered the whole time.

Speaker 2 Well, Clinton has a way better character than Trump.

Speaker 2 Bill Clinton and Donald Trump?

Speaker 2 What was Bill Clinton's giant character flaw? He likes pussy. Oh.

Speaker 4 Pussy then doesn't like him back, by the way. He was accused of rape pretty incredibly.

Speaker 2 That's true. That's true.

Speaker 4 And the left told us he was the feminist president, that we were supposed to get behind him as women, because otherwise you were a traitor to your gender.

Speaker 4 And by the way, people who didn't vote for Kamala Harris, I'm seeing a lot from the left, say that it's because they're sexist. No!

Speaker 4 You don't have to vote for the woman who's only been in campaigning for three months because the dude put her in a position to fail.

Speaker 2 So don't yell at me about this.

Speaker 2 Didn't hear me say that.

Speaker 2 I would say that, you know, at the the end of this campaign, the Harris campaign spent a lot of time trying to talk to, like very publicly, to the chagrin of a lot of people on the left, try to talk to Republicans.

Speaker 2 They went around, you know, people got mad at her for spending so much time with Liz Cheney, going to places to try to talk to Republican, former Trump voting, suburban women.

Speaker 2 That was a core part of their strategy. It did not work at all.

Speaker 4 Did not give them any concessions on policy.

Speaker 2 Not tell them that. But the notion that they were just standing around calling all these people Nazis or something is bullshit.
They didn't do that. They did a different kind of strategy.

Speaker 4 Hope literally said the night before that there wouldn't be another election if Trump won. And by the way, the Trump folks said there wouldn't be another election if she won.

Speaker 2 I don't know. Billy think there's going to be another election? I don't know.
So there's maybe not.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 I mean, just like in every autocracy,

Speaker 2 there are elections, but they're not real elections. Yes, could we be there?

Speaker 2 They elect a legislature in Russia called the Duma. You can't read about it either because it's a bullshit thing.
But here's the point.

Speaker 2 You can yell at me about, I don't know why you're yelling at me about, again, Oprah Winfrey. I'm not trying to own Oprah Winfrey.

Speaker 2 I'm just trying to say I think a lot of people who are worried about the future of American democracy have that question. As do you absolutely

Speaker 2 but here's the thing that I think Bill, you're profoundly right about, which is to go back to our earlier thing.

Speaker 2 The central thing that's happened in our politics over, not forget about the Clinton era, because Clinton was in fact a Democrat who appealed to working class voters all over the country.

Speaker 2 It's how he won it. Barack Obama, in fact, appealed to a lot of white working class voters all over the country.
It's how he won his two elections.

Speaker 2 Since then, there has been a re-sorting of the parties, and the main thing that now splits the parties is this question of, do you have a college degree? Do you not?

Speaker 2 And that is a broad social, cultural, economic fact that has led to a lot of people who don't have college degrees thinking that people who do,

Speaker 2 especially Democratic electeds, Democrats on television, the left, et cetera, they feel like they're talking down to them, treating them like shit, being condescending, not just the most egregious woke stuff about pronouns.

Speaker 2 In general, they feel like coastal elites are smug and condescending and shit on them all the time.

Speaker 2 If Democrats are going to have a coalition built on college-educated Americans, which inherently isn't a bad thing, we want people to get college educations, right? That's good for people.

Speaker 2 We want them to aspire to that. But if you want to have a coalition built on that, it can't be just built on that because there aren't enough Americans who have college educations.

Speaker 2 And you're going to have to talk to working Americans. That is something Democrats out of the world.

Speaker 2 Anybody other than people who are exactly like you. It's not just this live cast that all is one thing.

Speaker 2 The guy who left NPR, remember he said it was like 87 of 88 people there were on the exact same page. Twitter before Elon took over, now it's obviously the reverse, but that was like 99% Democrat.

Speaker 2 You can't have the Harvard, you can't have all these places, the newsrooms in America, where nobody is allowed who doesn't think exactly like you,

Speaker 2 just cleaving to the one true opinion.

Speaker 4 Do you know what's amazing though? The two parties, it used to be our divide was over the role and size and scope of government, right? That's what divided the two parties.

Speaker 4 That's not the case anymore. The Republican Party no longer fights about that.
They're a populist party.

Speaker 4 And when you looked at the policy differences between the two candidates, and I know no one will believe me here, they actually weren't that different, right?

Speaker 4 He moves into the center on abortion, she moves into the center on immigration. They both love tariffs somehow.

Speaker 4 And yet, what the big difference that everyone's feeling, I think, was that they're now selling a lifestyle vibe.

Speaker 2 And you fit into one lifestyle vibe or the other, right?

Speaker 4 You're driving an F-150 and drinking beer, or you're driving a Prius and drinking wine. And yeah, guess what? The beer drinking party won.
No shit.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 The thing you said about,

Speaker 2 let's end on a,

Speaker 2 there's a positive from this. We are less racially tribal.
than we were five days ago. I think this election proved it.
Not that, I mean, he still got killed in the black vote overwhelmingly.

Speaker 2 But it's the Latino vote, not so. He won others.
Ultimate irony is

Speaker 2 the guy who started out as a politician, the rapists

Speaker 2 wins the rapist vote.

Speaker 2 Wins the.

Speaker 2 Because people, they're like, you know what? You know what people don't care about? A joke about Puerto Rico. They don't give a shit who bad bunny's voting for.

Speaker 4 He's a shot common who happens to be a politician.

Speaker 2 I would say celebrities

Speaker 2 is an albatross around your neck. You shouldn't shouldn't have a, people look at that and they go, celebrities are not like us.
They don't understand our lives.

Speaker 2 Taylor Swift, that was going to be a big thing. No.
This is a.

Speaker 2 So your point about Hispanics, Latinos in America, that got Donald Trump got, I think close to 45%,

Speaker 2 which is a lot.

Speaker 2 George W. Bush did that back in 2004.

Speaker 2 Republican Party then squandered them in a variety of ways, but now Trump seems to have gotten them back.

Speaker 2 The smartest thing I've heard about this, and it goes to one of the points that I totally agree with you about, I think some of the woke stuff matters a lot less than, like, the immigration issue, where

Speaker 2 people having a sense that the Biden administration did not care about controlling the border.

Speaker 2 Even people who wanted to be liberal and inclusive and then let a lot of immigrants in wanted to do that in a controlled way as opposed to an out-of-control way.

Speaker 2 But here's the best thing I've heard about this recently: my friend Mike Murphy, a Never Trump Republican, who said, Maybe it's time to stop calling Hispanic Americans and Latino Americans, Hispanic Americans, Latino Americans.

Speaker 2 Let's just call them Americans from now on. And definitely don't call them Latinos.

Speaker 2 You know, some

Speaker 2 again, Trump understands this country better. He just does.
Some white lady at NPR comes up with Latinx and they think that's their way.

Speaker 2 Trump understands that if you're a Mexican immigrant here, a legal one, and you're working probably a blue-collar job, who are you worried about taking your job? The guy coming across the border.

Speaker 2 So, of course, they're like, oh, I like this guy who's going to build a wall because that's the guy who's going to take my job. Basic shit.
Thank you. We've got to go to New Room.
Rule.

Speaker 2 Okay, New Rule, New York City's ethical culture of Feldston School, which encouraged students to stay home and skip classes this week if they felt too emotionally distressed by Election Day.

Speaker 2 Let's change their name to Pathetic Pussy Academy.

Speaker 2 Pathetic Christie Academy, preparing America's next generation for a hopeless addiction to Zanek.

Speaker 2 Nero, stop telling me about the health benefits of the no-nut November challenge,

Speaker 2 where for the whole month of November men pledged to not masturbate.

Speaker 2 I don't even want to know for three reasons. Okay, one, I believe that masturbation is good for the body and mind, like pickleball.

Speaker 2 Two, I bailed on the challenge on November 2nd.

Speaker 2 And three, whacking off is like baseball. I prefer the Yanks to the Dodgers.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much. I'm very proud.

Speaker 2 Very proud.

Speaker 2 New world, with all that's going on right now and all the stress, don't hit me with a headline like Putin's exploding sex toy terror plot.

Speaker 2 And it's only partly true.

Speaker 2 And the shipment was intercepted and good, because I can't think of a more embarrassing way to die than death by pocket pussy.

Speaker 2 Wow, what a world we live in.

Speaker 2 It's enough to make you think twice before sticking something up your ass.

Speaker 2 I can't believe we're on CNN also.

Speaker 2 New rule, now that Tucker Carlson says he was physically attacked by a supernatural demon that left claw marks,

Speaker 2 he must be given a special award for the most quick-thinking response to a wife asking, Where'd you get those scratch marks?

Speaker 2 Oh, oh, and honey, it must have been a demon that travels a lot.

Speaker 2 Because look, it also left a receipt in my pants from the Ramada Inn.

Speaker 2 New rules, someone has to ask the Colombia pro-Palestinian protesters who went to the emergency room complaining of nausea, abdominal pain, headaches, and irritated eyes after being sprayed with a non-toxic novelty fart spray

Speaker 2 called Liquid Ass that is completely harmless.

Speaker 2 Hey, by any chance, did you go to Pathetic Pussy Academy?

Speaker 2 And finally, new rule, now that the great garbage election of 2024 is over,

Speaker 2 let's talk about actual garbage.

Speaker 2 You know,

Speaker 2 when the aliens who are currently living amongst us

Speaker 2 and watching us slowly annihilate ourselves, when they write the history of Earthlings, they will note that this election ended with an impassioned debate about who was garbage,

Speaker 2 starting with Trump's insult comic, who said... I don't know if you guys know this, but there's literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it's called Puerto Rico.

Speaker 2 Well, then it was on. Liberals said that was racist, and the Trump's people heard that and said, oh, then I like it.

Speaker 2 But here's the thing.

Speaker 2 There actually is an island of garbage in the ocean. But the only person who mentioned it during the whole campaign was the insult comic.

Speaker 2 I don't know what AI would say if you asked it what was actually the most important issue of our time, because I don't want that nosy little bitch in my phone.

Speaker 2 But I'll just tell you the answer: the ocean. It's dying.

Speaker 2 It is dying. we're killing it, and we can't live without it.
We might, might be able to invent our way out of the mess that we've made of the atmosphere.

Speaker 2 There are promising new technologies for capturing carbon, but the oceans,

Speaker 2 that is a whole other kettle of dead fish.

Speaker 2 And this island of floating garbage that politicians dare not speak its name, it's actually two.

Speaker 2 The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which is three times the size of France, a country large enough to accommodate Gerard de Pardieu.

Speaker 2 And the Western Garbage Patch near Japan. And they're not actually islands.
There's nothing in them big enough for Kate Winslet to float on.

Speaker 2 It's not like we could fix this by sending an army of volunteers out there to pick up your intact water bottles.

Speaker 2 Truth is, no one really knows how big the garbage patches are because most of it is under the surface. Trillions of microparticles from decades of discarded plastic.

Speaker 2 Yes, of all our addictions, plastic, that is the one that is going to kill us. There's an iconic scene.
Remember this in the graduate where Benjamin gets some advice about his future?

Speaker 2 I just want to say one word to you.

Speaker 2 Just one word. Plastics.
Exactly. How do you mean? There's a great future in plastics

Speaker 2 yeah everybody laughed at that

Speaker 2 but uh

Speaker 2 turned out that guy was right plastic is in everything now our soil our food our kardashians

Speaker 2 It's in all of us. Humans now consume the equivalent of a credit card of plastic every week because we eat the fish that eat the plastic and we eat pigs and chickens that eat fish that we feed them.

Speaker 2 And no, Ozempic doesn't fix that.

Speaker 2 So I know this may seem off-topic for a week that was all about politics and so many other things, democracy and the economy and racism, sexism, all important issues.

Speaker 2 But, you know, the frog in the proverbial slow-boiling pot isn't getting any younger or cooler.

Speaker 2 Today's oceans contain only a tenth of the marlin and tuna that lived in them 80 years ago, which may be why the tuna sandwich at Subway is mostly miracle whip and hair.

Speaker 2 In the same timeframe, the amount of dead zones in the ocean, areas where the oxygen levels have fallen so low that fish that enter them suffocate and die, have increased 10 times over.

Speaker 2 You know when people say that people can do anything? It's true. We found a way to drown fish.

Speaker 2 Scientists say our oceans are dying and people think, oh, well, I'm here on land and I don't like sushi anyway.

Speaker 2 But the oceans generate 50% of the oxygen we need to breathe. and absorb 25% of our carbon emissions.
The ocean is the life support system for the planet.

Speaker 2 It's like we're on a ventilator and purposely stepping on our own hose.

Speaker 2 Oh, but Bill, I recycle. Yeah, that's a con.
It's been studied. Only 9% of the plastic ever produced has been recycled.

Speaker 2 Recycling is just a way for us to feel good about using plastic because yours never ends up in the ocean. Oh, no, yours gets turned into crocs and dildos and eco-friendly bird feeders.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 2 In reality, it goes straight from the blue bin to a recycling plant that puts it on a tanker, that shifts it to a poor country, and we let them deal with it, which they do by dumping it in a river.

Speaker 2 Hey, look, there's your Giovanni Greek yogurt.

Speaker 2 Saving the environment may not sound sexy. Greta Thunberg made sure of that.

Speaker 2 But at some point, doesn't somebody have to say something? There's only two parties, and only one even thinks the environment is a problem. But Kamala never mentioned it.

Speaker 2 Crickets, which by the way are also dying. All bad news today.

Speaker 2 I know why Republicans don't talk about the environment, because voters don't like their position on pollution, which is their for it.

Speaker 2 But Kamala threw the environment under the bus to win the fracking vote in Pennsylvania and the automobile vote in Michigan, and then didn't win either.

Speaker 2 At the presidential debate, environment came up once, and Kamala used the opportunity to brag that we've increased domestic gas production to historic levels.

Speaker 2 And Trump, of course, called Mother Nature a childless cat lady.

Speaker 2 And now we're back to that. because the Democrat lost.

Speaker 2 So good luck to us and enjoy the impossible Lobster. All right, that's our show.
I'll be at the MGM National Harbor in DC, November 17th. The CIVIC Chicago Theater in Chicago, December 6th.

Speaker 2 Hey, Club Random's on every week. It's fantastic on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast.
I want to thank John Heilman, Sarah Isger, and Michael Douglas. Now go watch Overtime on YouTube.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much, people.

Speaker 3 Catch all new episodes of Real Time Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.