Ep. #528: Eric Holder, Bret Stephens

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Thank you, thank you, you, thank you.

Oh my gosh, Georgie, again, what a

thank you, what a great audience we have.

And hey, we made it to May.

I think that's an accomplishment.

It's May 1st for those of you still clinging to the concept of time.

I tell you, every morning I go in the bathroom, I sit on the toilet and think, different shit, same day.

Yeah, I am so sorry I ever dared that guy in Wuhan to eat that bat.

Worst bar bet ever.

I'm going in.

But here's some kind of good news.

Trump's approval rating is way down, which means that America may finally have reached turd immunity.

And yeah, he's not popular.

You know who else is not popular this week?

Mike Pence.

Not popular.

Went to the Mayo Clinic.

Everyone is wearing a mask.

Of course, it's the Mayo Clinic or everywhere.

And he did not have a mask.

Mike Pence said, no, it's okay.

I've been tested.

And besides, they're called barefaced lies.

Trump was very upset this week because the New York Times printed this article that said that he spends,

certainly doesn't sound like the Trump I know, spends all morning in bed watching television and eating French fries.

And Mark Meadows,

Mark Meadows, his chief of staff, said, that is some bullshit right there.

That is fake news.

This man barely spends 10 minutes for lunch.

And he says, I can prove it, and I've got the tape.

Yeah, don't don't fuck with lunch.

Trump this week, that's I love you know the War Powers Act, which is at his disposal.

He could use it for, you know, masks, ventilators, testing.

He used it this week to make sure that the meat packing plants were kept open.

Because meat, now it's personal.

You step on Donald Trump's meat hose and shit just got real.

But here's something

kind of good.

Dr.

Fauci says in his words that he is very optimistic about this experimental new drug called remdesivir, I think it's the pronunciation, close, okay, remdesivir, whatever it is, Trump says, you know what, there's another drug I know about that's even newer and better.

In fact, it's so new, it just goes by the name Formula 409.

Yes, I.

This incomparably stupid man actually suggested, and he's the president of the United States, I don't know if you know that, actually suggested this week that people ingest cleaning disinfectants and his voters started calling poison control centers to see if that was okay

deplorables they're the unbleachable

so

it was interesting that this is the week then that Hillary chose to

endorse Joe Biden and all I could think of was really

what took you this long?

I mean,

he hasn't even had an opponent for a month.

Yeah, Hillary said it was a close decision, but at the end of the day, she broke for the guy who doesn't urge angry mobs to lock her up.

But look, things are changing in America.

States are starting to open up for business again.

Georgia leading the way.

They have opened up the tattoo parlors and the beauty salons in the South, what they call the high-tech sector.

And it's good to see that in Georgia, things are becoming normal again.

And when I say becoming normal, I mean being able to get a tattoo of Jesus wrestling a snake.

So if you're in Georgia, oh, and bowling alleys in Georgia, if you're in Georgia, bowling alleys are open, barbershops, and tattoo parlors, because what could be safer businesses than ones involving razors, needles, and sticking your fingers in other people's balls.

All right, we got a great show tonight.

We have Eric Holder, Gret Stevens, and Matt Taifi.

Let's get right to it.

Okay, my first guest, honored to have him, the former Attorney General under President Obama, who's now chair of the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.

Eric Holder, great to see you, Mr.

Attorney General.

Thanks for doing this.

Good to see you too, Bill.

Well,

so, you know, one of the problems I find with the pandemic is that it's very hard to have a conversation even with

anybody about anything else.

It's the only issue that people talk about.

And I think we are losing sight of the fact we're six months from an election,

which I know you are trying to make sure comes out.

fair and square.

Is that what your committee is all about, or is it a fancy way of saying gerrymandering?

Well, we want to try to combat what happened in 2011 when the Republicans really gerrymandered to a degree that we've not seen in recent memory.

But we also focused on this presidential election and the elections more generally in November to try to make sure that everybody who wants to cast a ballot in November has the ability to do so and can do so in a safe way.

Again, our focus is on gerrymandering, but we don't want to just fight for structures that we want to put in place and then

have an election in November that doesn't go well and that will scuttle all of the work that we're doing.

So we've really kind of broadened what it is we are doing, fighting for a fair, safe election in November, as well as concentrating, continue to concentrate on our anti-gerrymandering efforts.

So you think there is a scenario where that election does go well?

Because

I don't see any scenario where it does, because as I've been saying for years now, I don't think Trump,

I cannot picture that man gracefully conceding and walking away.

And I keep asking Democrats, you're probably the one with the most law enforcement experience.

I've ever asked this, what do you do if he says it was rigged, blah, blah, blah, it's not safe for me to leave, whatever bullshit he's going to come up with, and refuses to leave?

I want to know what the plan is.

Well, you know, I think he will certainly say when he loses that it was rigged, that it was unfair.

He'll come up with all kinds of reasons why he will cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election.

And I'm really worried about what happens between November, his defeat, and when he actually leaves office in January.

That, I think, is the period we should be focused on.

He'll still have presidential power, and God only knows how he'll use it.

On the day of the inauguration, I actually think that he will leave.

And if he doesn't leave, the United States Marshal Service, the Metropolitan Police Department here in Washington, D.C.,

the Secret Service, all have the ability to pull him out of the White House and we'll get on with the inauguration and the presidency of Joe Biden.

They have the ability.

I don't, do they have the will?

I mean, you mentioned the police department.

Police love his dirty drawers.

You really think they're going to pull him out of the White House?

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, it's interesting because I think people in law enforcement positions,

people with the power to do those kinds of things, will really, as I always say, they'll check to the power.

And the power will move on the inauguration day.

And my guess would be that all the people, all the organizations that have that capacity will do the right thing, the constitutional thing, and listen to the orders of the new president and understand that there has been, again, a peaceful transition of power, regardless of what it is that Trump might want to do.

Okay, well, Color, you more optimistic than I am.

I don't see him that

two months you're describing between the election and the inauguration day.

He's just going to be ranting and raving, and his people are going to be in the streets.

Okay, but we'll move on.

So, New York State canceled their primary.

16 states have postponed them.

This is rather unprecedented.

I wonder if you think this is a dangerous precedent.

We Americans have voted through everything, Civil War, Spanish flu, depression.

Canceling an election, I think, is a, well, what do you think?

Well, I think postponing these elections makes sense to do them at a time when people are less vulnerable to the pandemic, coming up with alternative ways that people can cast a ballot.

So we don't have a repeat of what we had in wisconsin when people had to stand in line for extended periods of time to cast a vote and we know now that in wisconsin at least 30 people have come down with the virus that can be directly traced to their having to stand in line i'm sure that number is going to grow but canceling that's not something that i think we ought to do now i understand that what happened in new york was they just simply canceled the uh the primary uh with regard that the presidential primary i'm there with the result we already know what it is but the rest of what is supposed to occur on primary day in New York is, I understand it, going to continue to go on.

So I would be not in favor of canceling things, but I do understand how there might be the need to postpone and then put in place alternative means so that people can vote safely.

Okay.

You mentioned that we already know the outcome, and that's true.

It's Joe Biden, who you're very familiar with, served in the same administration, of course.

A couple of months ago, an allegation was made against him, a sexual allegation from someone named Tara Reed.

I thought it was the chicken shark NATO, but it's a completely different one.

And

at first, I thought it was ridiculous that it would go away and no one would pay any attention to it, but it's being paid attention to.

I wonder if you would share your thoughts on that and what he should do and the

appropriateness at this moment when we're in such a crisis in America of of having this injected into a campaign at all.

Well, I mean, it's interesting that the people who are trying to fan this thing are the very people who support Donald Trump and, of course, who say nothing about the allegations that have been raised, I think, very credibly

against Trump for a number of women over a great long period of time.

I mean, all of these allegations have to be taken seriously.

People who raise them should be treated sensitively.

I've known Joe Biden for 20, 25 years.

What has been described is inconsistent with the person who I've come to know and who I've worked with.

I think the media is doing the correct job looking at the allegations, finding out a variety of things.

The vice president has denied that it actually did occur.

And as I said, his denial is consistent with the Joe Biden that I know.

Okay.

So

Joe Biden is for decriminalization, but not legalization of marijuana.

This issue really sticks in my craw, and not for the obvious reasons people are going to say that too.

But I just think, as a national issue, I've said for quite a while, I think it would be our version of guns for the right, something that would bring out single-issue voters.

It's something very personal.

I think you could win elections with it by putting it on the ballot.

I don't understand, first of all, I don't understand the difference between, I do understand technically between decriminalization and legalization, but why not encourage Joe Biden to come out full-throatedly for legalization?

I think this is something he doesn't excite younger voters

as someone who was in charge of this issue for a long time.

What is your feeling on this?

Well, I think our laws need to catch up with where the American people are.

And I suspect, you know, I think all the polling tends to show that the American people support legalization of marijuana.

There's also another reason why I think we need to be moving in that direction.

And that's because of the harm, the disproportionate harm that was done to communities of color, where people, again, use marijuana same degree that white folks do, and yet people of color go to jail at a rate of more than four times their white counterparts.

And so there are substantive reasons why I think we need to move towards legalization.

I think it probably, as you say, would probably be something that will garner a pretty substantial amount of support.

I think not only from young people, maybe young people in particular, but I think really across the spectrum.

So I think our laws need to move in that direction.

It's one of the reasons reasons why when I was Attorney General and Colorado and Washington moved towards legalization in those states, I held back the federal authority that I had to try to fight that to allow those states to experiment.

And I think based on the experiments that we've seen in Washington and Colorado, this nation ought to be ready to move towards legalization.

Sounds wise to me.

You toyed with running this past cycle.

You decided against it.

Why?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

um you always hear people say this but it really is true you don't decide it in a vacuum you have to decide it along with uh your family and uh i thought i'd make a good candidate and could run a successful campaign i think people in this household uh thought the same but i didn't have i didn't have five votes here i only had one out of out of the five they did where they had had enough of their father their husband being attorney general and um so based on the reactions that i got from them i decided uh not to not to put my hat in the ring.

Well, I vote that you should next time.

So there's that vote.

I know I'm not in the house, but okay.

Thank you for joining me.

I'll come live with you.

Yeah, I could use the company right about now.

Thank you very much for doing this and for what you're doing there on the committee.

Important work.

Thank you.

Always good to see you.

Okay, Eric Holder.

All right, my next guest is a New York York Times columnist and MSNBC contributor.

Please welcome our friend from back in the studio, Brett Stevens, is at his home in New York City.

How are you doing, Brett?

Good to see you there.

Hail.

I am perfectly fine right here in New York.

Good.

So you wrote about the city you live in, the city I lived in twice, the city I still love.

I certainly have a lot of friends back there, my sisters back there.

Feel for that city.

The point of your column this week, though, was that the devastation of New York is atypical from the rest of the country and the rest of the country should therefore not have to play by the same rules.

Is that about right?

Yeah, that's exactly it.

I mean, look at Westchester County, just north of the city.

It's a commuter county.

It has suffered more deaths than the entire state of Texas.

Nassau or Suffolk County on Long Island, they've suffered more deaths than the entire state state of California.

So obviously the combination of factors, but especially population density in New York City, makes it just

a completely different situation from the rest of America.

And so it means that New York has to be sort of thought of and treated differently than, say,

the middle of the country.

Or, I mean, I'm in LA.

I read

in your column that the death rate is 16 times in New York what it is in LA per 100,000 people, which I guess is because of density, right?

And we don't ride subways and we're not in elevators as much.

Well, I mean, that's the moment you stop to think about it, it's obvious, right?

I don't, I don't,

when I used to go to work, I didn't go to work in a car.

I jammed into a subway with 100 other people or however many people per car.

I jammed into elevators

to get to my office.

So all of that is just completely completely different from LA.

LA is the second largest city in

the country,

but it's just a very different story.

And so if you're treating everyone in a kind of one-size-fits-all

approach, you're going to make some very large mistakes because

it's simply a different type of

situation

from the standpoint of

the spread of disease in one part of the country than the other.

To me, this kind of seemed like a fairly obvious, not even a controversial point, but not all of my readers felt the same way.

No, I'm sure they didn't.

There's a lot of groupthink.

And I'm glad, you know,

Tom Friedman was writing about Sweden, as many people are now.

And I noticed at the end of the column, he felt the need to say, I'm writing about Sweden, not because I'm saying it has the magic answer, but because I think we should debate all sides of this.

I'm like, yeah, do we really have to say that now?

But yes, we do.

That's the atmosphere we're in.

And we should debate all sides.

So let's talk about Sweden.

It's the hot new country for how they're handling it, which is different.

They're going for herd immunity,

which at the end of the day, I think we're going to find out you have to have to defeat this thing anyway.

I don't know if we have the time with the state of our economy to wait for vaccines and all the testing.

It would be wonderful if we had a competent president and a brilliant electorate, and the people were in great physical shape to begin with, and the vaccine was right around the corner.

We don't have any of that.

Well, that's right.

And the thinking was: well, you can sort of stop the economy for, I don't know, two or three weeks, and suddenly a miracle is going to present itself in the form of an effective therapy or a vaccine.

And we can treat, and we could have treated this episode as kind of an extended sabbatical or a vacation, but we might not get a vaccine, never mind, in 18 months.

It could be many, many years.

There is only so long you can ask people effectively not to breathe, not to go to work, not to draw a salary without creating a problem which is vastly larger, even the disease itself.

And I'm not some kind of COVID denier.

I'm not a booster, as you well know, for the administration, but we can't simply shut off our brains here.

People say, well, Sweden has done much worse than its neighbors, Norway and Finland, which is true.

It's also done about the same as Ireland,

which is in lockdown, and it's done much better than France and Britain.

So I'm glad the Swedes are providing us with a model of an alternative approach to this problem.

And at some point, we have to move from a strategy of trying to protect everyone, Bill, which I don't think is going to work.

It might have bought us some time, but it's not going to work, to looking at vulnerable populations, the elderly people

who are immunocompromised, have other health issues, and focus our efforts on them

without wrecking unbelievable damage on the country in the process.

Right, because I wonder that if we've sat home here for two months, as most of the country has, and they say, well, it might come back in the fall, and it probably will, because by staying home, we haven't achieved that herd immunity.

So

to me, where the rubber reach the road now is what do people say about this fall?

If it comes back, do you lock down the economy again?

I'd love to hear one politician say, no, I'm sorry, but we did it once, and we may have already screwed the pooch on the economy with that one time.

But we just can't do it again.

We have to think of something else or try something else.

We just have to.

We have to be strong.

Well, I think that's, you know, one reaction I have had to my column, which kind of staggers me, is people say you're putting the economy over people's lives.

And that's just false.

The economy means food on the table for your family.

The economy is essential for human health and well-being.

We're not weighing lives versus the economy.

We're weighing lives versus lives, one form of hardship against another.

And the idea that we're going to repeat this exercise in November and December as we move into flu season, if in fact this thing is seasonal, we're not really sure

yet, seems to me like a recipe for a catastrophe that will haunt us for a century.

I mean, have people looked at 30 million jobless Americans, the figures that are coming in?

It's staggering, and I think it should...

should be frightening to people who care about public health as more than just a matter of COVID.

Well,

excuse me if I'm repeating something you may have said a minute ago because you went

out of the sound there for me because we are of course using ancient

or very modern, no, not your fault.

You know, again, I'm not,

well, I'll just get to the point.

It was in the front page of your paper today.

30% GDP contraction.

is what they're looking for in the next quarter.

They just got the results from this one, which isn't as bad as they said, but this one is a piece of cake, even though if you look at this one in normal times, you go, oh my God,

we are going into a horrible recession.

This is the easy quarter.

It's the next one.

I mean, we're looking, as you said, about numbers.

I don't get it.

I think the world has gone mad if they think that everyone can be out of work at the same time.

And yeah,

we weren't prepared for this to begin with.

People don't have that kind of money, and they're not getting it from the government.

And look, you know, there's no end of blame to be assigned to the Trump administration, to all kinds of people.

But you actually,

that aside, you have to sort of think ahead and say,

if the Great Depression is what gave us the rise of fascism and a certain chancellor in Germany, what is the next Great Depression going to do to

our politics?

We were already moving in a populist and neo-authoritarian direction when the economy was relatively good.

What happens when you have tens of billions of people who are out of work

and desperate, not just economically, but also politically?

So people have to start thinking about the balance of risk.

That's something no one likes to contemplate because they say, well, if you choose one,

if you balance it in one way, people are going to suffer and people are going to die.

And that is almost certainly true.

But there are risks to simply pretending that we can hold our breath forever and not hurt ourselves.

Right now, this is a strategy out of the Vietnam War.

We're trying to destroy the village in order to save it.

And I don't remember that ending very well.

Right.

I read a headline in, I think it was NBC News.

It said, starving, angry, and cannibalistic, America's rats are getting desperate

because there's less food

everywhere.

And I thought, oh my god,

this could be a harbinger.

People are going to get desperate and starving, and I hope not cannibalistic.

But let me ask you one final question about that, and I'll let you go.

So we used to argue about the environment.

And I never understood how somebody who I like so much and who wrote so many things, and not being a liberal, and I'm mostly a liberal, I agreed with.

But on the environment, I never could quite get you to where I wanted you to be.

Has this changed your opinion on that at all?

On which part of the environment?

I'm in favor of?

Well, that we better treat the environment way better than we have, or else we're the ones who are going to die from it.

Well, actually, believe it or not, maybe there's a giant failure of communication on my part.

I've always believed that.

I grew up in Mexico City, where the environment is

pretty horrible and you see the consequences of that.

I think we got to treat Mother Nature with a great deal of respect, but I think we're also learning that productive, healthy economies and robust scientific establishments are also a big part of helping ourselves coexist well with the environment.

So, look, I think this is going to scramble our politics in a lot of ways.

And one thing that I should say, and I think any honest person should say, is that if we all emerge from this situation with the same convictions that we've had before, it means we're just not thinking.

And so this has prompted new thinking on my part.

I'm sure it has on yours.

But we need to maybe move out of all of our respective ideological boxes because what just happened was 1929.

Things have changed.

And if your thinking doesn't adapt,

you have

problems of your own in addition to the problems of the world.

Okay.

Well, I appreciate you coming on.

Not that you really had anywhere else to go.

Here I am.

Here I'll stay.

I know.

It's so easy to get guests these days.

Hey, are you available?

Am I available?

Of course, everyone's available, but you're always a great guest.

I thank you.

I'll see you in the studio soon, I hope.

Thanks, Bill.

Be well.

Okay.

Okay, well, with the election only six months away, we thought it would be a good time to shed a little light on Joe Biden, upon whom all our hopes are resting.

And, you know, Joe's been running for president for a very long time and has been on the public scene since, well, before anyone can remember.

And yet a lot of people don't know everything about Joe Biden.

So we thought it'd be a great day to do 24 things you don't know, 24 things you don't know about Joe Biden.

Okay, for example, I was asked to social distance even before the virus.

My defense whenever I suddenly fall fall asleep is, it's five o'clock somewhere.

Sometimes I'll walk into a room and completely forget why I'm running for president.

My first idea for a campaign slogan was, I'm on her.

When they told me I got Hillary's endorsement, I thought they meant Sir Edmund Hillary.

I like to think of myself as a cross between JFK and your second husband.

About 45 seconds into into a sentence, even I'm asking, where is this going?

Bernie Sanders and I don't agree on everything, but we are united in our belief that they screw the lids on pickle jars way too tight.

They call me Amtrak Joe because I love riding trains and also because I'm usually late and I smell like pea.

You think I'm in cognitive decline?

You should see the other guy.

Okay, he is a contributing editor editor for Rolling Stone and co-host of Rolling Stone's podcast, Useful Idiots, Matt Taibbi.

Matt, how you doing?

Hope your sequestering's going good.

I'm doing well, Bill.

Thank you very much.

Yourself?

How's it going?

Oh, I love it here all by myself.

Anyway,

so I want to talk about the money.

I was just chatting with Brett Stevens, and we were talking about the news today that GDP is going to contract by over 30% next quarter.

Just crazy numbers.

And of course, we've written a lot of checks so far.

And you'd be a perfect one to talk about this.

You wrote so eloquently about the bailouts in 2008.

I was once talking to somebody who does not follow politics too closely.

And I said, you know, Matt Taipi, you should read his book.

And he said, The Vampire Squid Guy?

So

what is the Vampire Squid?

Is the Vampire Squid

back in play here?

Is that what's going on?

Yeah, a little bit.

I mean, it's the basic conception of this bailout package is very similar to what they did in 2008.

Obviously, there's a main street component to the rescue.

They're giving away some money to actual human beings this time.

But the significantly larger part of the rescue package, you know, the roughly $4 trillion they're going to spend through the Fed, that's mostly all going to propping up the financial markets in Wall Street.

And it's with the same basic concept they used last time, except more radical this time.

They're buying junk bonds instead of just mortgages this time as well.

So

it's bigger, but the same thing.

It always seems like it's trickled down.

We never

give money to people directly.

And I guess you shouldn't expect anything different from people like Steve Mnuchin is the Treasury Secretary, right?

And he's in charge of the whole thing.

And this is what I know about him.

He's the guy who took his trophy wife to to get a picture a selfie with the money at fort knox you know he he's what they call him the adult in the room you know in the trump administration are you confident in a guy like that running a show this big

yeah you're you're absolutely right about it being a uh a trickle-down that's that's that's the concept right like um you know last time around we had all this pain after the financial crisis where we had millions of people who were in foreclosure we could have with about a trillion and a half dollars paid off every subprime mortgage in existence and basically solved the problem, but they instead spent about 10 times that bailing out Wall Street.

And this time around,

the concept is basically the same.

Let's just throw a ton of money at the capital markets and eventually it'll work its way down to regular people.

But I'm not sure that's going to work.

And it didn't work terribly well last time.

It didn't even seem to work its way around to smaller companies.

the big problem with the small business uh bailout so far was that it went to big business there was a a a corporate bailout of 500 billion one of the bills and i read you know the democrats say well we got oversight in there it's one guy his name is bharat ramamurti he must be busy one guy to over to oversee 500 billion dollars

your thoughts

for a while he was the only person and all all he had, he didn't even have an office.

He just had

an unverified Twitter account.

And

I actually DM'd him on Twitter and I was like, did you get anything else yet?

Do you have more than an office?

Do you have supplies?

And he says, nope.

He actually answered.

They've since added Donna Shalela.

She's also part of the oversight committee, but there really isn't anybody.

overseeing this amount of money.

You have to be an absolute expert in this kind of stuff

to even have a chance at catching the fraud that's going to happen.

Here, I talked to the last bailout inspector who said we should expect tens of billions of loss to fraud with these programs.

And why don't these?

I get it why the mom and pop store needs money right away, perhaps.

You know, you're running on a small margin, a grocer or something, but why do these big companies, I mean, they don't have any rainy day fund?

You're a billion, multi-billion dollar companies, they got nothing in the kitty.

They need something, they can't go a week?

Well, I think the real scandal here is the amount of money that these companies have spent on stock buybacks over the last

decade or so.

Wall Street has flooded corporate America with easy money ever since the last bailout.

And you take an industry like the airlines and they've you know, the top four airlines have spent something like $50 billion in the last eight years on stock buybacks, which is money that just went straight to their shareholders in the form of distributions.

And that's money they don't have now for this rainy day, this very rainy day that they're in.

So this enormous amount of money that we're pumping into all these companies from and banks and financial companies.

A lot of it is because the money's gone.

It's been taken by the shareholders

as soon as they had the opportunity to do so.

And so I think that's something if ordinary people understood that better, they'd be a lot more angry.

And as a guy who has never been afraid to criticize both sides,

wouldn't you agree that if a Democrat was president, they never would have voted this kind of money.

They would have fought it.

The Republicans would have been playing their we can't go into debt game.

No?

It's possible.

I think the amount

that they're going to spend and the conception of this is probably a little bit more radical than the Democrats might have countenanced.

It's certainly bigger than what they did last time.

Although, you know, to be honest, the bailout last time was done in two parts.

One part was done under Bush, and the second part was done under Obama.

And they basically agreed on that.

Although, I think you're right.

I think this time around,

this is an enormous bailout, and it's going to continue to get bigger.

And it's probably true that it wouldn't have been this big

under Democrats.

When the crisis started, I remember thinking, oh, I hope we don't get sucked into being politicized even about this.

Do we really have to have a woke contest about this?

And of course, we do.

It wouldn't be America if we didn't have a woke contest about everything.

And I was talking to Brett about Sweden, and everyone's talking about Sweden now.

And I find this is a good example of it because forever, Sweden and the Nordic countries have been what the far left has pointed to: with we got to be more like them.

Sweden, they do everything great great in Sweden.

We want to be more like the Swedes.

But now the Swedes are kind of acting like a red state with the virus.

And it's like, I don't know, I thought Sweden was great.

What do you think about Sweden, what they're doing?

Well, I think what's so interesting is the coverage of it is just astounding because they cannot get away from the narrative of this red-blue argument.

Like, they can't just tell us whether or not Sweden's approach is working.

They have to couch every headline.

They're always saying things like conservatives see hope in progressive Sweden.

And then if you read the body of the article, it will say something like, yes, it's working, but what the right wing doesn't understand is that this culture depends upon a strong belief in the role of the state and society.

In other words,

they're couching the whole story as

what the important thing is is whether conservatives are right or wrong about Sweden.

Whereas that's not what's important.

What's important is, you know, is their program working or not?

And I think that's been a problem throughout this crisis.

We cannot excise Donald Trump and the Trump argument from anything that we talk about with

this crisis, whether it's hydroxychloroquine or the WHO or whatever.

And that's a real problem.

Yes.

And I wish, as infuriating as it is to see what he does every week, and he tops himself, I mean, this week with the drinking the Clorox, just the.

You know, if I wrote that in a sketch three years ago, no one would buy it.

If I said it about George W.

Bush, who was known to be the dumb president, it still wouldn't have flown.

Okay.

So, but he's not going away.

I feel like people need to just accept that, because you can't do anything.

It's the given.

It's the net in tennis.

You know, it's going to be there.

And

you're right about this.

If he says something, even though he is a crazy person, if he says we should get back to work, our answer can't be dependent on, well, he said it.

it has to be wrong.

Yeah, it's we're reverse engineering our attitudes on all these things, right?

So like you take something like hydroxychloroquine.

When I first heard about this drug and I looked at the news stories, as soon as I saw that it was, that it was referred to in headlines as the drug touted by Trump, I knew that it was going to be impossible to get any real information in the American news media about it because the Fox slash yelly collar people were going to say that it worked and the people on the other side were going to say that it was a conspiracy theory.

You literally have to go to foreign news sources to try to figure out whether this drug actually works or not, because that's the important question, not whether Trump is right or wrong here.

And it's the same with a lot of issues

that are important in this pandemic crisis.

But Trump has to be at the center of every part of our reporting.

And I think that's been a major blow to our business.

Yes, and

he puts himself there.

It's very very hard.

Of course.

It's very hard to ignore that.

The meeting they had about two weeks ago, and again, this is so indicative of where we are because it didn't really get picked up very much.

But he had a meeting with the business leaders to tell them how he was going to give them free money,

naturally co-chaired by his daughter, which everyone just accepts, who he introduces by saying that she created 15 million jobs, which would be 10%

of the jobs in America.

And this this isn't considered normal.

That's what you have to realize is this is what, okay, I'm not going to go into another rant about it, but we're going to have to find a way to solve this around that, not through it, because it's not going anywhere.

All right, let me ask you this.

Mitch McConnell said, and he said it a few times, I think he's always ranting about what he says is stop blue state bailouts.

What does he mean by that?

Because I don't speak, you know, that Fox News thing where they get the code words.

What do you read that as?

I think what he's talking about is a preferential tax treatment that's been debated in Congress, where

the issue has to do with how you treat

the tax treatment of things, people like nannies.

And there are certain tax breaks that

have been argued for by the Democratic leadership that would disproportionately help people who are wealthy and live in, let's just say, coastal blue states.

And that's been something that the right wing has pushed back on.

But who knows what Mitch McConnell's talking about in a larger sense?

I think from a net perspective,

there's more money coming out of states like New York and California, obviously, than there is going into it.

So it doesn't really make any sense.

Right.

Well, you make a lot of sense, always, about the economy and other things.

You look like you're doing okay there.

uh hope it ends soon and uh thank you for doing it matt always great to see you likewise thanks a lot bill and good luck to you okay

okay now it's time for new rules

okay here they are new rule legal weed sellers must cut down on the packaging You know, putting a joint in a plastic tube inside a cardboard box with a cellophane wrapper is not environmentally friendly or stoner friendly.

You have to quit smoking weed just to open your weed.

If I want to get high on something hard to open, I'll drink wine.

New rules, stop speculating about whether or not Kim Jong-un is dead.

It doesn't matter that he's not exactly the picture of health or that we haven't seen him in public in weeks or that we have no plan in the event he is dead.

I'm sorry, I'm thinking of Biden.

New rules, if this is the future of basketball, NBA players must admit they wasted a lot of money on tattoos.

Neural, you don't have to tell me what Quibby is.

I was sort of interested for a second, but it passed.

Let me guess.

Some assholes with NBAs raised a lot of money for an app that wastes teenagers' time.

Yeah, my second guess, just going by the name, tiny country in the Middle East that lends money to Jared.

New rule, the Muslims going to mosques in Pakistan, the Christians holding services in the South, and the Orthodox Jews having funerals in Brooklyn have to agree that whichever faith loses the fewest members to COVID-19

is the one true religion.

And the other two have to go away.

Finally, finally, we can settle this once and for all.

Although I'm not going to pretend it makes up for canceling March Madness.

And finally, new rule, the next time we have a worldwide pandemic, we have to come up with a better solution than everyone becomes Howie Mandel.

You know Howie, I know Howie.

Who doesn't love Howie?

The world's most famous germaphobe who was social distancing before it was cool.

Well, now of course everybody's making the joke that Howie Mandel had it right all along.

No, Howie would be the first to tell you you he has a disease, OCD, that fucks up your life.

He can't touch a doorknob or wear shoes with laces because they might touch the ground.

When he excuses himself to go to the bathroom, it's to clean it.

No wonder he says, it was always a curse.

That behavior didn't allow me to date or go out with anybody when I was young or really even have friends.

He also said, I'm always on the verge of death in my head.

I worry that the past two months of quarantine have given people the idea that the way for humans to win our million-year war with microbes is to avoid them completely.

And I'm here to tell you, you can't.

The key to beating COVID isn't dining through glass or never going to a concert or a ballgame again.

It's your immune system.

You hear people say COVID-19 is a new virus, so the immune system doesn't know how to handle it.

Bullshit, of course it does.

That's why the vast majority of people who've had it either recovered or didn't even know they had it.

What do you think did that?

The human immune system.

Now, there are people with immune systems that can't do the job, and we should make it a priority to protect those people.

But compulsively washing, being scared of your own hands,

that can't become the new normal.

In his later years, when he was peeing into jars and wearing Kleenex boxes for shoes, we pitied Howard Hughes because it was pitiful.

In the 70s, they made a TV movie with John Travolta about a sick kid called the boy in the plastic bubble.

And let me tell you, if they start selling these things on Amazon,

we're in trouble.

I see there's a hot new item for sale online, disinfecting shoe mats, because COVID can get on your your feet.

Yes, it can get everywhere.

Microbes are ubiquitous.

You can keep discovering new places to scare people into buying protection for, but we're solving the problem from the wrong end.

This is a health problem.

We can't sanitize the universe.

Governors should declare keeping our bodies in good health an essential job, because that's the only way we are going to win this.

We've all read the articles.

Your sink has 500,000 bacteria per square inch.

Your toothbrush has feces on it.

E.

coli has been found in makeup.

Carpets,

bedding, the remote, cutting boards.

The average pillow has 350,000 bacteria colonies.

They're filled with more shit than the guy selling them.

Your phone.

has 10 times the bacteria of your toilet, which your dog drinks out of and then licks you.

I could see right over there, right now, one of my dogs lying on the driveway like a dead fucking fly,

the driveway where cars with God knows what on their tires pull in, and then that idiot rolls in it.

And the other one,

I don't know where he is, which means he's into something worse.

Sometimes I see a dead mouse in the driveway.

I don't have a cat.

Something here killed it.

I'm not pointing fingers, but there's only the three of us.

My point is, God knows what is all over your pets and in their mouth, and then you invite them on the bed and they try to French kiss you and sometimes succeed.

And some people don't even fight it.

But what's the point of a pet if you're not going to pet it?

It's in the name.

And what's the point of life if you can't live it?

Have you ever had sex in a hotel?

Did you wash your hands first?

Well, the last couple didn't either.

And yet you're still alive because your immune system said, we got this.

So this weekend, do something nice for your immune system.

Go outside, that mysterious land beyond your curtains where the grub hub drivers live.

and get some fresh air and vitamin D and break a sweat doing something besides eating hot chicken.

Because at the end of the day, you can't keep all the pathogens out.

It would be as silly as thinking you could stop immigration with a wall.

Okay, that's our show.

I want to thank my guests Eric Holder, Brett Stevens, and Matt Taibbi.

We'll be back next week from the yard.

Good night.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand.

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