Overtime – Episode #691: Steve Bannon, Piers Morgan, Josh Rogin

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

All right, he was the White House Chief Strategist and now hosts the Wall Room podcast, Steve Bannon. He's Global Security Analyst for Washington Post Intelligence and author of Chaos Under Heaven, Josh Rosen.
And he hosts Piers Morgan Uncensored on YouTube, Piers Morgan. All right, here are the questions from the people.
What does the panel think about reports that the Trump administration plans to hold a military parade on the 250th anniversary of the Army's founding, which also happens to be Trump's birthday? Oh, goody, tanks in the street, huh? Is that a good thing, do you think? I think it's fantastic, though. Government efficiency at work, right? That's what we're spending our defense dollars on, is parading a bunch of tanks.
It's a way to inspire people, as you know, Josh, young men and women, to join the military, to see the pageantry like they do in France with Macron, that great July 14th, Bastille Day. Was there tanks in the street? There were tanks.

We do it in the UK all the time.

Tanks in the street.

It's always been surprising to me you don't do it.

Kim Jong-un loves it.

Russia does it too.

Putin, Xi Jinping.

Bill, what do you think?

I don't want America

to get used to the sight of tanks in the street.

That's what I don't think.

Because once you're seeing, it becomes normalized. What's behind the church-going revival in the UK, particularly among Gen Z? Is that true? If you saw the state of our country right now, there's a lot to go and pray about.
There'll be nothing more sinister than that. That's it?

I don't know, I think about it.

You can't.

You can't stump me on that.

Kids are getting more religious, is that what's going on?

I don't know.

I didn't actually know that was a fact,

but church going generally has been going down.

My daughter's two, her only religion is bluey.

Thank God I don't have kids. What does the panel think of Jeff Bezos' company, Blue Origin, sending an all-female crew and, yes, Katy Perry and Lauren Chan says, and Gayle King, I know them all, love them all, hope they're all safe, I'm sure they will be, to space next week.
Is there any scientific merit to this mission? Yes. But you know what? I just think people that knock any form of exploration.
You know, when I was born in 65, the first thing I can really remember as an existent human being was the excitement around the rockets going up, right? And then it sort of stopped. And you kind of thought, well, I we going backwards? I mean, exploration, space travel, the bold frontiers.
Well, Katy Perry is not exploring space. No, I know.
I know. I know, but I wouldn't go up there, would you? Would you go up there? Absolutely not.
I wouldn't do it in a million years, so I admire the balls. No.
We should be cheering them on. No, I'm sure it'll be safe, but it's just...
I wouldn't go skydiving either. No, I agree with it.
There's just no reason. Jeff Bezos is my boss, and I support him.
You toady little crawler. I see.
All the lectures you gave us out here. I'm going to get tired today.
I'm not going to get tired today. That's the trouble you see.
The trouble is, Josh, you get close to them and then you start to take over. Guess what, America? We're all part of the same hypocrisy.
Including Steve, including myself. Keep me out of it.
Yeah. Too late.
You're in it. You're in it.
You're in it. Yeah, no we here.
I'm not asking a question. Mike Huckabee, you remember him? Yes, sir.
He is now the ambassador to Israel. Mike Huckabee, we've had him on the show.
If you don't remember, he was the governor of Arkansas. You know, a very religious man.
And I'm sure they're sending him to Israel because he's a great friend of Israel. I have a problem with this.
You know why people like that are friends with Israel? Because when you know who comes back... Right.
The Jews have got to rule Earth under hell, right? That's the idea. Or they all die.
Or they all die. Either way, it's not really a great deal.
Jesus saves 144,000 Jews. Right.
That's not a lot of Jews. I don't think I'm going to be on that.
I don't think I'm going to make the cut, to be honest with you. I'm not a very observant.
That's why super-duper Christians love Israel. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm just saying.
And now he's... Okay.
Low-flow showers. Trump is...
I'm with Trump on this one, yeah. No one likes a low-flow shower.
That's an 80-20 issue. That's good politics, as far as I'm concerned.
And daylight savings time. That one I like.
That one I like to be light in the evening. I'm not a morning person.
For all the morning people out there, forget you. But getting rid of it, don't we have more light in the winter? Yeah.
So that's what we want. If we get rid of daylight savings time, it gets dark early.
No, no, no, no. What we do now is when it starts to get dark, we move it the wrong way.
And now it's dark at like four in the afternoon. It's stupid.
That's what he's, I think, trying to get rid of. And the penny.
Yeah. He's right about all these things, I think.
Well, it's just good politics to pick up. No taxes on tips, all these little things that it's somewhat of a distraction from the ongoing and raise taxes on the wealthy.
He said it last week. Is that coming? It's coming.
But what about the tax cut for the wealthy? Isn't that coming? No, no, no. It's It's going to be extended.
He's not going to extend the tax cuts for the wealthy. He's got no tax on tips, no tax on Social Security, and no tax on overtime.
So you're saying all the donors are about to get a tax hike? They're already screaming. But he said he told the Senate that he's open to, extending the tax cuts, not extending them.
Oh, open to. No, no, no.
But he's already, I think, and Scott Besson, the Secretary of the Treasury, I think, is working on this, not to extend it to the upper bracket or make a new bracket at a million dollars. And you think Congress is going to pass that, knowing who they get their money from? They do whatever he tells them to do.
If President Trump comes in and says to do it, he'll do it. Okay, so the Steve Bannon plan is that Republicans are going to abandon the donor class, and then what's going to happen in 2020? Where else are they going to go? We've got total leverage over them.
Where else are they going to go? Well, there's another election coming up. In the midterms and the thing, but where else are they going to go? If you don't restore the economic viabilities, the working class and the middle class, and you have to do that by sealing the border, right, so it's not flooded with illegal alien labor, Number two is the tariffs will bring manufacturing jobs back.
And the third is that working class and middle class people need a tax cut. They need no tax on tips, no tax on overtime, and most importantly, no tax on Social Security.
That's another $500 billion a year we have to come with. And that's right, by the way, it's going to be a huge fight.
But the Democrats and progressives had control in 2021 in those first hundred days. And they put up a note taxing the billionaires and it didn't even get out of committee.
President Trump and the MAGA movement will raise taxes on the wealthy. All right.
Let me ask you another question. Do you believe that when the tariffs cause huge inflation that the lower middle class are going to reward the Republicans for that? They're not going to.
When all the prices go up? Because in 1890, when we had tariffs, the Republicans lost the House and the presidency because of the prices. You should know this, Josh, but anybody, because when we raised the tariffs on China in 18, the prices came down.
We didn't have any inflation in 19, and we had the highest tariffs we ever put on China. Hey, how about that dire wolf? We brought back the dire wolf.
If they broke... Direwolf.
That was a good one.

We brought back the direwolf.

They brought back a species called the direwolf that was extinct.

Using DNA, they had in a fossil.

What could go wrong?

Well, I don't know.

Yeah, they're going to do the woolly mammoth next, you know.

I think they made a movie about this. Don't knock it until in a hundred years they bring back Bill Maher from a fossil.

I think they'll grow that a bit.

They made a movie once about bringing back extinct species and the risk of it.

It's called Jurassic Park, maybe you've all seen it.

Maybe we shouldn't screw with science that much.

Well, but it's not a dinosaur, it's a wolf dinosaur it's a wolf yeah but we know what it looks like

and and bobby kennedy says it tastes like chicken

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