Overtime – Episode #670: H.R. McMaster, John Avlon, Rich Lowry

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Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations. Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

Okay, here we are. He's the former CNN anchor who is running for Congress in New York's 1st District, John Avalon.
He was the editor-in-chief of National Review and host of the editor's podcast, Rich Lowry, and the former White House national security advisor under President Trump, whose new book, At War With Ourselves, General H.R. McMaster.
Okay, this is for everybody.

I just mentioned Hitler in the editorial. What's with Tucker Carlson embracing a revisionist historian? Does anybody remember the guy's name? I read the story today.
Tucker Carlson. He does like to push the envelope, doesn't he? He had on a guy who introduced something like one of the most important historians of today.
I'd never heard of

the guy. He's not a real historian.

Well, he

believes Winston Churchill

was the bad guy and Hitler

was the good guy.

I look people who think revisionism

is just the way to get attention.

Like, whatever you say, I can undo

it and say it's better. You know what? You think men can't get pregnant? Oh.
Stop it. Stop it.
Isn't Hitler was the bad guy? Yeah, intriguing concept. Look, this is junk history that's getting peddled, and, you know, there are people who gravitate to this, but he elevates it, and I think that's his model for him.
You know, it's his business model. He's a grifter.
He's Tucker Carlson, yeah. He's a grifter.
He's a charlatan. You know, he's a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin.
You saw him sit across from him and supposedly he's knowledgeable about history, but he bought into that whole I call it, like, did you ever see the show Drunk History? No, I loved it. Isn't that great he bought into Putin's drunk history.
Right. And this guy seems to think like Churchill's in power in Britain all on the run up to the war and he was pushing all the buttons and he was making Hitler invading.
You know, England went to him as a war leader because the war had started already because of Hitler. And I actually disagree with you.
I think Tucker's sincere in this stuff, and I think it goes to a deep disaffection that parts of the right have, unfortunately, with America at its foundations. They've come to believe the country is fundamentally corrupt, so every piece of received wisdom, and I think some narratives are wrong and should be pushed back against, but every piece of received wisdom, including that, I was going to say H.R.
McMaster, but that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures in Western history has to be questioned. Which he was.
Churchill? Yeah. Was not one of the great? Oh, of course he was.
They're questioning. But this is this weird, like, when did sort of hating America become hip on the far right? This is this mirror image sort of like feedback loop between the far right and the far left that's absolutely crazy.
The people are totally... They all meet.
I mean, the nativist far right meets the self-loathing far left. And you can't tell who says what.
They say the same thing. Well, I'll tell you what I don't like about Hitler.
Everybody else had to do that salute, and he just went like that.

I felt it was very privileged.

It was so superior.

It was so superior, exactly. I think it's important to make fun of these kind of, you know,

authoritarian, horrible people,

and this is why I think Mel Brooks' work is just so brilliant.

And Charlie Chaplin.

That's right.

Was the judge in Trump's hush money trail right to delay sentencing? Oh, yeah, that happened today until November 26th in order to avoid interfering in the election. Man, all those trials and nothing happened.
Nothing. They indicted him and they wanted to try him on a political schedule.
They literally, if they could have, they would have had him in courtrooms from March to October, a presidential candidate of the United States, and it's just not how the court system works, thank God. This thing shouldn't be sentenced now.
It was absurd. They took a misdemeanor that the statute of limitations should have expired on, and they bootstrapped it up to 34 felonies and wanted to sentence him to jail for it.
I'm not a huge Trump guy, but this I think is absurd and wrong. Look.
I... I...
The larger issue, obviously, is January 6th, right? And the problem is with the immunity decision, history is really clear. If you don't hold people accountable when they indulge in political violence, then you get more political violence.
And I'm really curious about the do you think conservatives end up supporting the constitutional amendment to overturn the immunity decision of a Democrat as president? I wonder if they will. I think the way these kind of decisions work, we saw with the independent council statute decision that Supreme Court has in Washington.
Eventually, this stuff always comes around and bites the other side. So right now, Democrats are so upset the Supreme Court has done this.
Then if Kamala Harris is elected and some Republican prosecutor somewhere in the middle of Red America wants to indict her and prosecute her for some official act, the Supreme Court will say no, and Democrats are suddenly like, wait a minute, maybe that decision wasn't so outrageous. What we've seen is this tendency on both ends of the political spectrum to score partisan points at the expense of confidence in our institutions.
Yeah, but Trump really does commit crimes. There's stuff to get that little part of it.
There are actual crimes. We're 60 days out from an election, and I think we've normalized this a little bit.

And it's far too freaking dangerous.

He really does commit crimes, is one thing.

And two, if the positions were reversed and a Democrat did this,

not only would the Republicans go after him, but they would have done it

instead of what the Democrats did.

Talk about feckless, General.

This is feckless.

You had four years to bring four trials, and we get none of them?

And it's because they were afraid of politicizing it.

Look, that's the thing, is that if Democrats did what Donald Trump did, you would be opposing him totally, and by the way, so would I. Okay, so...
And I think that's the issue. I'm so extensively on the record about January 6th.
I know you are. I'm completely appalled by it, but we're...
But you're still endorsing the president. You're not so appalled that you're not going to vote for Trump.
No, but this is a different bill. So you're not appalled.
No, no, no. Right.
No, I am appalled. But the difference is...
But you're still going to vote for him. If you vote for him, if January 6th didn't happen, you would still oppose Trump.
Because you don't like him on policy, right? No, no. No, no, no.
From where I sit... I don't.
Mostly, no. But you support Trump's policies? I said no, mostly.
Right. I think moving...
But you'd consider voting for him absent January 6th? No. Right.
Well, consider... I'm a conservative Republican.
If he conceded elections, he would not be the boogeyman that he is. He would just not be the villain he is.
That's the main thing. He politicizes the Justice Department, and he does not concede elections.
These are two very new things. Now, you can carp all you want.
Or very old what about the bullshit about, well, the Democrats say that he wasn't a legitimate president. That's different than actually trying to stay in office.
He is completely unprecedented. And it's completely disqualified to even consider him voting for.
I don't know how anyone can. We've got an election lie being used as a litmus test for party loyalty, and everyone's acting like it's normal.
It's not. It can't be.
All right, what do you think of Trump announcing plans for Elon Musk to lead a commission on government efficiency to cut regulations and spending? There is a lot in there, isn't there? Lots of work in I remember when Al Gore was going to reinvent government. Remember that? He was given that task.
Al Gore, you go reinvent government. How'd that go? Did we reinvent it? We have a lot of really dedicated civil servants but in most government agencies you could randomly kidnap people out of them, and nobody would know the difference.

The Secretary of Defense disappeared for like a week.

I think this is a good idea, though.

I mean, if you look at Elon,

he's revolutionized the

U.S. satellite program, right?

NASA has been remade by

injecting kind of this private sector

and entrepreneurial energy into it,

so I think we could use that across government.

Yeah, I mean, but to your point,

I remember, I forget who it was, maybe it was

Thank you. injecting kind of this private sector and entrepreneurial energy into it.
So I think we could use that across government. Yeah, I mean, but to your point, I remember, I forget who it was, maybe it was Bolton, somebody like that said years ago, if you took out 10 stories from the UN, would we know? Or would it might even be better? It's an America-hating word.
That's a good Hoover committee. But it is true.
And by by the way not that this is a pattern we should follow but yesterday I was driving to work and as sometimes happens here the light goes out on a major thoroughfare and everyone just coped like oh okay you go and then I go and then we just ad-libbed. I'm not saying that's how you should run the...
There's still an amazing resiliency to American civil society. Yes, totally.
But how we're a dagger drawn over politics. Most people, it doesn't matter.
They treat each other fairly and honorably and as fellow Americans. That's still a fun most part.
Yeah, but leadership's a lot of dirtbags, too. Come on.
We can't wait for the political class to do it. I don't think they're going to do it.
So I think we all need to convene discussions. Who fires themselves? That's the problem.
But let's start taking action, stepping up, building guardrails to strengthen American democracy, and take it seriously, because this is fucking important. We've got one country.
What are the panel's predictions for the debate next week? I think Trump's going to be an asshole. That's my prediction.
What do you think? I'm going out on a limb. I'm going out on a limb.
Boom. Well, you know, foreign policy doesn't decide elections usually, but foreign policy is really critical at this moment.
I believe there is this, as you mentioned earlier, this axis of aggressors that is supporting each other. They're supporting each other in ways that are unprecedented.

And I believe these cascading crises from Europe to the Middle East have a very high potential of cascading further into the Indo-Pacific before inauguration.

I think we're entering a period of maximum danger.

We have a president who sadly has diminished cognitive capacity.

We have ourselves at each other's throats.

There are a lot of people who are We have a president who sadly has diminished cognitive capacity. We have ourselves at each other's throats.
Then we're going to have a period maybe after the election. I think this Russian report is a setup for post-election because the Russians, what they really want, is most of us to doubt the result of the election.
Yes. So I think that period between election and inauguration is very dangerous.

But the next 60 days, to your point,

right? I mean, part of the goal of Russian disinformation and autocratic disinformation

is to divide our democracy,

to make it dysfunctional. And that's why that division

and dysfunction is something we need to confront.

And the stakes of the election

do determine the trajectory of the 21st century.

It is about autocracy versus

democracy at home and abroad. Okay.
But I hope you did ask those questions. What would your policy be on Iran? What were you discussing earlier? I think, Bill, it is key that the whole debate over the mics being open or closed, and it's obvious why Kamala Harris wanted them open.
If the mics had been open in the first debate, there's no way Joe Biden ever, in course of rambling answer with lots of pauses would have finally been able to say, look, we finally beat Medicare. Trump would have interrupted him like five times before he got it and saved him.
And by the way, if Trump loses to Kamala Harris, that debate victory for him in June will be the most catastrophic success in American politics. He won the debate.
Biden leaves and he gets a much tougher opponent. Yeah, they really screwed themselves.
He should not have debated Biden that early. That was dumb because Biden revealed himself.
They would have said, let's do it in October. And this is the thing.
All the people now who acknowledge, you know, Biden's not up to it. All the same people, Democrats, they'd be insisting right now, the way they did the entirety of the year, he's great, he's hailing hardy, he didn't wander off, he didn't really mess it up.
And so would you if it was your guy. What's that? And so would you if it was your guy.
Don't make it sound like... Maybe, but this was like, he's not up for the job.
I mean, he literally can't do it, and they told us he was. Speaking as an American historian, I think this was one of the most significant cover-ups in recent American history.
Talk about misinformation. To perpetuate the appearance that the president was fit.
I disagree. He's not unable to be president.
He's unable to run for president. He's unable to do a debate.
He's not a vegetable who can't think or make decisions. He just can't do the kind of thing.
And by the way, once all of a sudden it wasn't a Biden-Trump rematch, all of a sudden the whole election changes because it's about new versus old. It's about hope versus fear.
And that's been energizing people. Trump needs to connect her to the current administration, which has disastrous approval ratings and say, you're this unacceptable status quo, not the future.
But this thematic debate will have a huge role in play in Wednesday and November. Have Democrats succeeded in reclaiming the patriotic label? Well, yes.
They're working on it. Yeah, much better.
I mean, it's interesting. If you had told me before the convention that I would hear Kamala Harris say the word privilege, I would say, oh, I'm sure, and it was going to be about the usual white privilege.
No. She said, it's a privilege to be an American.
I mean, she said those kind of things that Obama used to say about, you know, only in this country is my story possible, and I'm going to tell you, it was music to my ears, because I like America. I don't care who knows it.

It is absolutely essential.

You know, I've been big

on reclaiming the American flag, because

it belongs to all of us, and it can't be a partisan

signifier, but the smartest thing Democrats have done

is take back freedom, right? It's about reproductive

freedom, it's taking back the word freedom, taking

back the flag, taking back patriotism,

and all of a sudden, actually, she's refusing to take

the bait on identity politics, and Trump

is the one who's focused on it.

Flipping the script is very healthy for her

I'm afraid of this ideology, this post-modernist, post-colonial,

neo-Marxist kind of ideology.

It robs our young people of agency.

I agree with you. I agree with you.

We talk, hey, the whole system is stacked against you,

you have to tear it down.

And so what does that leave young people with?

A toxic combination of anger and resignation.

So let's, like, restore agency.

And the ironic thing is,

this is where the whole shoot from comes.

The far right is now resembling the far left in this.

I want to say, it's hard to take to hear Tim Walz,

given his record in Minnesota,

which had nothing libertarian about it whatsoever,

to portray himself as this great champion of freedom.

It reminded me, Bill Buckley had this old line that,

liberals don't care what you do so long as it's mandatory.

And that's how Tim Walz...

The guy represented one of the most Republican districts for six terms. But once he was governor with a unified legislature behind him, all bets were off.
And it'll be the same thing with Kamala. She sounds like a moderate now.
She's flip-flopped on like ten things without explanation. But if she gets a unified Congress, she'll be the new FDR and the new LBJ.

They're all, once they're in there,

they convince themselves

they have to be transformational presidents.

That's all opposed.

The alternative being Donald Trump

is a totally different ballgame.

That's rewarding someone

who tried to overturn an election on a lie

that led to an attack on our Capitol.

That's the stark choice.

All right.

But one of the problems

Thank you. on our Capitol.
That's the stark choice. All right.
But one of the problems with the patriotism issue, I think, that we were just about to talk about with the Democrats, goes back to what we were talking about in the show with education. Yeah.
You see interviews with young people, they think, like, America is very often, like, the worst country in the world. Yeah.
And they think it's the worst time to ever be living in. Yeah.
This is just rank ignorance. Yes.
They are not, again, common sense. They don't teach the kids basic things in school.
They don't know that this is the best time to be alive. The average person alive today lives like kings did, like just a hot shower 100 years ago.
Yeah. It was a giant luxury.
The amount of entertainment we have, the amount of caloric intake we have, the speed of travel, communication, porn on the phone. But no, we do need to think about education.
Partly is we're educating students to become active citizens in a self-governing society, right? Washington says enlightened opinion is necessary to a self-governing society. So we need to actually start teaching them history.
The good, the bad, and the ugly. But we're a great country.
You've got to acknowledge, right, it's the far left that pushed this ahistorical thesis that our country was founded to preserve slavery rather than founded on principles that made that criminal institution unsustainable. I'm arguing with you, not against you.
I don't think we should replace that with a contrived happy view of history. You instantly had school districts around the country adopting that as part of the curriculum.
It's a lie about, we're the first society in history to lie about ourselves. I'm not a partisan guy.
What parties were pushing that agenda? That's, I think, where we get to the revolt of the reasonable, right? Let's start teaching Ken Burns in school. Let's start having a sense that we are imperfect people trying to form a more perfect union.
But educating folks about the full capacity of our history is a good thing. What Daniel Patrick Moynihan used to say.
He used to say, he said, do I apologize for defending a less than perfect democracy? I do not. Find me a better one.
That's how I feel. But he's right.
It is one side that did that. Yeah.
And that's the weakness on the far left. I completely agree.
Okay. And what I worry about, too, we were talking about military, right, is military service.
You know, if you teach your young people that your country is not worth defending, who's going to defend you? Right? Right. Who's going to defend you? And I think this is related to some of the recruiting issues we've had.
Just the attacks on the founding fathers, who of course were imperfect. By the way, at this time that they were doing what they did, they were not that different than anybody else in the world, including people of color in other parts of the world who had slaves.
It's not like we invented it in 16. Slavery was endemic to the human condition in all human history.
What was new

was when we began

to turn against it. The British first against the slave

trade, and then finally

We fought our most destructive war in our history to

emancipate one million of our fellow Americans. Now,

then you teach the failure of Reconstruction,

you teach the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan,

separate, but unequal,

but then... By the way, that was all the Democratic Party.
Yes, absolutely. At the time, they were conservative populists.
Right. But it explains a lot, right? If you understand Reconstruction, we need to study more, because the resistance to multiracial democracy is also a defining factor of our country.
We are a great country. I am a very patriotic guy.
The fullness of American history is what we need, because because we're the first nation founded on an idea, not a tribal identity, we need unifying stories. So we need to teach those stories, and that's where we've been screwing up.
What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney saying that he'll be voting for Kamala? Yeah, Liz Cheney said she would, and then she'd... What do you think of that? Come on.
When you lose Dick Cheney, Rich, come on, come on, man. Isn't politics funny, though? If someone had told you 20 years ago Dick Cheney would be endorsing the Democratic candidate for president, look, I get their...
They can't stand Donald Trump and not being on board with Donald Trump. I do not get conservative Republicans supporting Kamala Harris.
That does not. But hold on.
But let's work through it. It's not just about, right? It's about one person wants to strengthen NATO and all the multilateral security arrangements that have helped keep the peace for the best part, for the most part, since the Second World War.
The other wants to sell out to a lot of these autocratic countries. That's a personal, not political decision.
I think that's actually consistent. Also, I think it's healthy, because, you know, I think you get more Republicans endorsing Democrats, it makes the point that this election is about something bigger.
It's about building a broad, patriotic coalition. Look, again, the U.S.
military was stronger, not weaker, when Trump was done with his first term. And he was actually, he said a lot of dumb things about Putin,

but he supported Ukraine more than Obama did.

And he was harder on China than any prior president.

And now that position has become...

We have someone who...

I mean, this is a big part of the book.

I mean, he actually did.

He's the first one who provided defensive capabilities to the Ukrainians.

I try to tell you guys, but you don't believe it until HR says it. But then he did suspend that assistance to get dirt on the Bidens.
So, you know, you said, I wouldn't say reckless, I would say inconsistent, erratic versus fecklessness. And I do think that when you talk about coddling authoritarian regimes, look at what this administration has done with the Iranians.
I mean, the supreme leader has gotten an easy ride from the Biden administration. They didn't even want to acknowledge Iran's role in October 7th at the beginning.
They still have not really reimposed or actually enforced the sanctions against the Iranians since October 7th and with them having the whole Middle East on fire.

So I think it's a more complicated situation is what I'm saying, John. You know, you can't sometimes you can't just make these.
Hold on, HR. I love you, man.
But hold on. Like, we've got one guy saying we should we should pull out of NATO.
Right. We should not.
Putin can do whatever the hell he wants. Basically giving a yellow light to China on Taiwan.
I mean, you know, the autocratic alliance you warn about is in many cases rooting for Donald Trump because they think it leads to American division and decline. Tell me where I'm wrong.
Well, what I'm saying is there were some things, right? There's some things where Donald Trump's right. I mean, there's some things where he's right.
There's some things where he's completely erratic and inconsistent. Where does he write on? I think he's been right on energy security, for example.
I think he's been right on reciprocity and trade. He's been right on burden sharing.
But then again, with Donald Trump, he's so disruptive, right? He disrupts what needs to be disruptive sometimes, but then he goes on to disrupt himself. And he becomes kind of the antagonist in his own story.
So, I mean, so you've got a choice, right, in this election. People have to make the choice between what I would say are really self-destructive policies at times for the Biden administration on the Middle East, on the war in Israel, but really the war in the region, and kind of the erratic nature of President Trump.
But these are the questions these candidates have to be asked. What are their positions on these issues, on NATO, on Ukraine, on the war in the Middle least.
I think this, you know more than I do, but the hit on Soleimani, I think, was shocking. It wasn't a major war.
One hit, one guy. I think everyone with American blood on their hands around the world slept less easily after that hit.
And it just went to the fact that he had deterrent force. People were scared or worried about him in a way they haven't been of Joe Biden.
Look, the bipartisan sense of more American foreign policy is we should stand up against tyrants and terrorists, right? And I do believe that. And I do think that there's, we learned a lot in the wake of the Iraq war.
But the fact is, is that right now, if you're strong on national security, one party's leader seems to be trying to weaken NATO, and the other party has expanded it and strengthened it. A lot of that is working them to try to get them to spend more, but I don't see the Afghan withdrawal, does this compute at all? There's no reason Pompeo should have negotiated with the Taliban alone in Doha.
It was a conditions-based thing. Biden didn't accept anything else that Trump did, except he was supposedly forced by Trump to do a withdrawal.
It was done badly. That was totally incompetent, dishonorable disgrace.
His presidency has not recovered from it since, and our position abroad hasn't recovered from it since. And I think you can draw a direct line from that disastrous, humiliating withdrawal to the reinvasion of Ukraine in February of 2022.
I mean, I think what's weakness is the... What is, you know, provocative

is the perception of weakness.

So what I would love to hear from both candidates

is they're...

And if I may, 61 Americans were killed

when Trump was in office in Afghanistan,

13 under Biden.

So there's that.

Still luck with the campaign.

You're running as a Democrat.

I am.

Come in, says Democrat. Thank you.
Then look at home with that. Still luck with the campaign.
You're running as a Democrat. I am.
Come and say Democrat.

Thank you.

Good luck at home with that.

All right.

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