Ep. #522: Rachel Bitecofer, Brian Cox

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series, Real Time with Bill Ma.

Start the clock.

Thank you, I appreciate that.

Ladies and gentlemen, I appreciate that.

Due to the

I love you too.

I appreciate it.

Thank you, man.

Due to the virus, I will not be running through the audience high-fiving.

I was kidding.

I never did that pantering bullshit ever.

But I do appreciate you being here for crying out loud.

I mean, there's a lot of people.

There's people all over this country who are canceling going to shows.

I don't know what it'd be like to have to do a show if nobody was here.

It'd be so awkward to have to pump in the sound of liberals pretending to be outraged at me.

But just so you know, California has officially declared a state of emergency about the coronavirus.

But Disneyland is still open.

Really?

So

pack yourself in with strangers from all over the world

and write a log,

a ride literally called Splash Mountain.

But don't touch your face.

This explains their new slogan, Disneyland.

It will leave you breathless.

But I tell you that for me,

that's nothing.

Nothing.

A little pop before the show.

It's all that.

The big lesson for me is that being asked not to touch your face really makes you want to touch your face.

Notice that, I mean, Jesus fucking Christ, could they get off this face?

Think every day, don't touch, don't touch this, don't touch your face.

It's like my face me too'd my hand.

They got me crazy.

Yesterday I made a sandwich with my elbows.

Jesus.

Get a grip, people.

The experts this week said, yeah, the way not to touch your face, they said, keep your hands busy.

This is just what teenage boys need to hear.

What are you doing in there?

I'm warding off the coronavirus.

Also, you know, it's just panic.

Whenever there's a threat,

I understand this, toilet paper.

Right?

First thing to sell out because people are scared shitless.

It's terrible.

No,

you can't even get it in stores now.

There's even a new song about it by that band, Panic at the Costco.

but don't worry about it because Donald Trump MD

Trump University School of Medicine

is on the case this man is a fountain of misinformation this week he said it's okay for people infected with the virus to go to work

Which raises the question, can you get it from pulling stuff out of your ass?

Is that the way you get the virus?

Because, oh, oh,

that's my face.

And

also, Trump said he had a hunch.

He said he had a hunch that the virus wasn't as bad as the World Health Organization says.

So on the one side, you have the World Health Organization.

On the other side, you have a guy who stared at an eclipse.

But I tell you, politics, whoa,

right?

The difference a week makes.

We were here.

We were here

one week ago.

There were seven people in the Democratic primary.

Now it is a two-man race between Bernie Sanders, a Democratic socialist, and Joe Biden, the guy from the naked gun movies.

So

boy, don't tell Biden that he's fallen and he can't get up because

this guy keeps coming at you.

I mean, you know, you know that he's been running for president since 1988.

I'm serious.

1988, 1988, air supply was a banned.

Now it's what Joe needs when he

Gets to the top of the stairs.

Okay, all right.

But the big story, Bernie, Bernie's young voters did not show up.

The smell of victory was old spice, not Axe Body Spray.

Yeah, kids, I guess kids are kids, you know.

After the polls closed on Tuesday, trending on Twitter was a hashtag, oh, that was today?

So there's talk.

I think this is crazy.

I don't think it's going to happen.

There is talk that Bernie and Biden might team up for a 156-year-old ticket.

They already have the slogan, four more months.

All right, we got a great show.

Anthony Scaramucci, Ross Belford, and Caitlin Flanagan are here.

And later we will be speaking with the incredibly talented Brian Cox.

But first up, she's an analyst and a senior fellow at the Nisconnen Center in Washington, D.C.

here tonight as our election specialist.

Please welcome Rachel Bittercoffer.

Rachel, we bow now.

We bow.

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay.

Bittercoffer.

I married that monstrosity, so you'll have to forgive me.

Okay.

Just saying, in the middle of a pandemic.

I know.

It's a great joke.

It's a weird name to have in a pandemic.

Yeah, Bittercoffer.

Okay, we'll go past that.

But you are.

no mask.

You are sort of the it girl for prognosticators.

I think that's amazing because you got 2018 in a way that nobody else did.

What did you get right that everybody else kind of got wrong?

Well, I mean, thank you.

And actually, what I got right was understanding that this time period we're living in with hyper-polarization and all the extreme partisanship that we have has really changed electoral behavior.

And what we were, I was expecting to see is a massive backlash to Donald Trump getting elected.

Luckily for me, I had 2017 in Virginia to kind of pilot my theory watching.

And in that election, everyone thought it was going to be this competitive race between the Democrat and the Republican.

And I was telling the whole state, oh, it's going to be this blowout.

You're going to see this demographic muscle for the first time really flex in northern Virginia.

It's going to transform the state.

And that's exactly what happened.

So in 2018, I was lucky I had that experience to build off of.

So it's because it's just Trump hate.

Oh, yes, it's absolutely Trump hate.

There's no other issue.

Yeah, so yes, it's not.

So if I had James Corville sitting here, I would grab him by the shoulders and say, it's Trump stupid, right?

It's not the economy.

And, you know, basically what we look at.

It's not health care.

They said that was the big issue.

Think about why Democrats were getting their asses kicked in 2010 and 2014.

It's because they were fat and happy in the White House.

The Democratic Party is just god-awful at messaging, right?

The Republican Party tells their voters, you must vote because the fate of the world hangs on you voting.

And Democrats like to send their voters like these big, thick policy briefs that are like 20 pages long.

Yes.

So nobody gives a shit about it, right?

And so I understood that like taking away

that comfort was going to be a major change in the electorate.

Yeah.

Right.

I mean, it is amazing to me the way Trump can tell you what he's going to do.

I saw him this week on Fox.

And he will show the clip.

Brett Baer asked him, like, would you rather face Bernie or Biden?

Right.

Here's what he said.

So mentally, I'm all set for Bernie.

Communist, I had everything down.

He's act communist.

I was all set.

I mean, who gives it away like that?

You know, he's like the relief pitcher.

He's like, I'm going to throw this 100-mile-an-hour fastball.

Yeah, yeah.

You know it's coming.

Yes.

I know I'm throwing it, and you still can't hit it.

He's saying I'm going to call him a communist.

No, no, I know.

He like reads the line.

I mean that said, I like wake up every day and I'm like, okay, how can I make the Democratic Party not walk into a obvious trap?

It's like this rat trap sitting there with cheese.

And I have to convince them every day, hey, you know, a major component of the GOP playbook for 2020 is going to be to capitalize on whatever side loses, the moderates or the progressives, and then target them with propaganda to get get them to either vote third party or to not show up and vote, right?

And so now, of course, we know it's probably going to be the progressives that are targeted, but you're right.

He's very obvious about what the strategy is going to be.

And it's all about who leaves the House, basically, right?

It's not about who's the candidates, who's voting.

But really appealing to the base, which make that's Trump's strategy.

Right.

And it's not so much the base as the coalition, right?

So, when people hear base, I think they think about progressive voters.

And when I'm talking about, I'm talking about Latinos and African Americans, women, college-educated women, young people.

So, that wider coalition that may be Democrats, but they may be left-leaning independents, getting them to show up and to vote, which is really critical because ultimately, in the polarized era, if a competitive election is playing out, what's going to determine the party that wins it is the partisan composition of the electorate on election day.

And who's worse?

I read somewhere that 15% of Republicans, but 20% of Democrats, believe that the country would be better off if great numbers of the other party just died.

Yeah,

this is actually some fantastic research by two political science colleagues of mine, Liliana Mason and Nathan Calmo.

I really suggest people look at it.

And it talks about negative partisanship.

Mine is looking at voting behavior and negative partisanship.

They are looking at the willingness for people to actually inflict bodily harm on each other based on partisanship.

It is disturbing.

It's disturbing also that more Democrats felt that way than Republicans.

I thought we were the number of people.

Well, you know why?

Ultimately, right now we're in this time period where Democrats are particularly angsty.

So if we had asked, I am certain that they had done that survey experiment during Obama, it may have been

a different outcome.

And they would want us to die.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's

but no, but it's very concerned.

It's like, you know, we're having these conversations on Morning Joe and on Chuck Todd's show, and it's like

Trump's election never happened.

Like it was some normal thing that America would elect somebody like Donald Trump.

Trump broke every metric of electability of what a president should be able to meet in terms of holding and winning that office.

And then like the, I think there was a time period where people recognized that was weird, and then they just moved on and decided to normalize it, right?

But clearly, we are not in a normal time period because we see our institutions failing.

We see the Trump presidency and the way it's stretching out institutional norms and pervading the law enforcement agencies

the way it has in the past.

I mean the Democratic side this year reminded me of, you remember 2012 on the Republican side when it was, they wound up with Mitt Romney.

They did.

But they shopped around.

Yes, they did.

Remember that?

Herman Kane.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And Michelle Bachman was leading.

And Gingrich and Rick Peck.

Everybody got a turn.

I feel like

it was that way with Joe Biden.

There was really some big differences, though.

I mean, number one, there really wasn't ever, aside from Bernie and Biden, a clear time period.

Elizabeth Warren eclipsed Sanders in the invisible primary, which was something I had anticipated happening.

But free tip if you ever run for office, no $23 trillion detailed plans, okay?

Just don't do that because that's a really bad idea.

But Biden idea Biden was the

one at the beginning.

Right, right.

And then he went down and other people went up.

That's actually fairly typical for one of these party primaries.

But what we saw, I mean, I just cannot possibly illustrate enough.

In 2016, we saw a social movement emerge within a party, the Never Trump movement.

That is not normal, right?

The Never Trump movement that I work with, those are all the founders of intellectual conservatism, and they have been excised from the Republican Party.

They are no longer in their own party that they established, right?

And they made a critical mistake, though, because they could not get everybody together and winnow down before Super Tuesday.

Now, with the Democrats, the math was a fact.

If they waited till after Super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders probably would have had what he needed in terms of delegates to either force a plurality to the convention or to win it outright.

So getting together in a coordinated way, doing that winnowing on Monday night, and then getting that Clyburn endorsement and all that momentum, that was a level of coordination that the usually incompetent Democratic Party really shocked me to see.

And I think that they

give them a hand, right?

Good job.

I mean, they did it, right?

So I assume your prediction is the Democrat will win the election?

Yeah, so my forecast since July has been a little bit more than that.

It's not lighting still.

You know that, though.

Well, yeah, well, we can talk about that next show.

But yeah,

I had said that only Bernie Sanders would be a risk to my model.

And the reason is because, you know, going from I'm running as a fiscal conservative Democrat, which is a bad way to run, it's a weakness run, doesn't mean you should rip off all your clothes, coat your body in glitter, and go naked, you know, skinny dipping with a socialist.

Like, there's gray area in between, right?

And, you know, I think what would have happened under a Sanders nomination is that the Republicans would have been able to trick Democrats into running against their own party nominee.

Sure.

And then that upsets my model because the model is a boat that's

rowing in one direction.

So, all right.

Thank you so much.

You got this shit down.

Hey, Val.

Thank you, Rachel.

Let's meet our panel.

Hello.

Hello, everybody.

Okay, here's our panel.

We're not going to touch each other.

He's the former White House Communications Director under President Trump and the founder of Skybridge Capital.

Now, one of us, Anthony Scaramucci, is over here.

Mooch!

That's Mooch, Anaboo.

He's a New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success.

Ross Doubt that.

Ross, how are you doing?

Thanks.

And she's the staff writer for the Atlantic and author of Girl Land, Caitlin Flanagan back with us.

How you doing?

Okay, so

don't forget to send us your questions for night's overtime, which we're going to answer them after the show on YouTube.

So Friday, when we're on live, it is news dump time.

So about an hour before we came on, found out Trump has dumped Mulvaney.

And sent him to Ireland.

And sent him to Samrox.

He's going to be the special

envoy to Ireland.

That's like shit canning him to beyond, and I'm a Flanagan.

I mean, we have,

what is he going to do?

But he was like the all-purpose jackknife guy.

Wasn't he the Swiss Army knife guy?

Didn't he do all these jobs?

So why now?

What happened now?

You've been shit-canned by the Trump administration, Tony.

You must have some insight into what happened here.

Publicly thank General Kelly for helping my career.

Listen, I would say that

That was a long time coming.

I think that his biggest mistake was the press conference conference where he said,

we did this, get used to it, get over it, that sort of thing.

But the secondary mistake really is that

he is in that jigsaw puzzle of obstruction of justice.

And so, you know, it could be 2021 where people are looking back at people like William Barr and Mick Melvaney and saying, okay, what were those guys exactly doing during that period of time in the White House?

So there's a lot of different reasons to get rid of them.

But by then, he'll be in Ireland.

No one will be able to find him.

He'll be the only survivor.

of this, you know, because that's how the president operates.

Once he hits you with the bus, it's like he barely even knew you.

How did he call it into the administration?

So he won't even remember Mulvaney's name in about two weeks.

So speaking of getting shit canned, a friend of mine lost his job this week, Chris Matthews.

Wanted to give him a shout out because I will miss him and a lot of other people do too.

And, you know, I thought we would talk about it because it's about, you know, MSNBC used to run this thing.

This is who we are.

Well, I didn't like who you were this week.

And I don't think a lot of people who work there like this either.

And I think this cancel culture is a cancer on progressivism.

Liberals always have to fight a two-front war.

Republicans only have to fight the Democrats.

Democrats have to fight the Republicans and each other.

Your own lunatic.

I just want to go through some of the horrible things that Chris Matthews did.

First, he made an analogy.

I'm going to read it fast because I don't even understand what the insult was.

He was talking about Bernie Sanders' lead lead in Nevada.

I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940, and the general calls up Churchill and says, it's over.

And Churchill says, how can it be?

You've got the greatest army in Europe.

How can it be over?

Obviously, he's a Nazi.

But he apologized for that, so I hope the victims got some closure.

First mistake, apologize.

Then

he mistook Jamie Harrison, who we've had on the show, for Senator Tim Scott.

They're both African Americans.

He thought one was the other, so plainly he's a Klansman.

Then he, oh, this is terrible.

He was interviewing Elizabeth Warren about what Mike Bloomberg said to a woman about, you know, maybe you should, he said it was a joke or maybe he didn't say it about you should kill it, you know.

And Chris says to Elizabeth Warren, you believe that the former mayor of New York said that to a pregnant employee, but you believe, you believe he's that kind of person?

You believe he's lying?

I just want to make sure you're clear about this.

Why would he lie?

Just to protect himself?

Again, they said he was mean to her.

First of all, I got fired for doing what I do on a show called Politically Incorrect.

This show was called Hardball.

This just sounds like every question Chris has asked.

And I hated being interviewed by Chris, because he would ask you a question, you'd start to answer, and then he'd keep talking.

because he had so many thoughts.

I'd like some more people on TV with thoughts.

A lot of people couldn't interrupt themselves because they don't have a thought that the producer isn't putting in their ear.

And then his final thing was: yes, he said some things that are kind of creepy to women.

You know, I just, it's, you know, guys are married for a million years, they want to flirt for two seconds.

You know, he

said to somebody, Laura Bassett,

four years ago,

she's in makeup.

He said, why haven't I fallen in love with you yet?

Yes, it is creepy, but she said, I was afraid to name him at the time for fear of retaliation.

I'm not afraid anymore.

Thank you, Rosa Parks.

I mean,

Jesus fucking Christ.

I guess my question is, do you understand why Democrats lose?

Yes.

Because we empower all this lunacy and it's a very serious thing that's gone on here because if every woman, if we are now empowered to take a flamethrower to every mosquito, then we've become the thing we hate.

You know?

What a great way to put it.

And, you know, it's not funny when a man loses his job and it's not funny when a man loses his career.

And I mean, you're saying it's creepy.

How fragile can one woman be?

She's a freelancer at home, gets a big invitation to go on TV, very excited.

She goes over, it's 30 minutes later, someone tells her she's beautiful, she freaks out,

she like loses all her vocabulary on air, so she compensates.

And they still have her back on because she probably looks good on camera.

It's a visual medium.

Right.

And then, again, she gets a compliment.

I mean, I know it's generational, things have changed, and I'm of the generation.

Is she a compliment victim or a compliment survivor?

I want to think.

I feel like there's a generational issue with the World War II thing, though, too, right?

Where if you know, and I'm going to stereotype stereotype in a different way here, but if you know any American man over the age of 60, you know that if they're going to make an analogy, it's going to have something to do with World War II, the Maginot line, Stalingrad, Hitler, and if we set a rule that no man can make

World War II analogies, it's going to be careful culture times a thousand.

You're right.

It's all right.

The biggest surprise to me was the way Mayor Bloomberg fell into the trap of the tribal politics when Senator Warren turned to him and asked him about the NDAs.

If he had just looked at her and said, okay, listen, we are splitting ourselves as Democrats.

Let's unite.

Those women, please don't turn them into infants.

They did sign those agreements.

Of course, I could look into them and I will.

But we made a mistake and we paid them and they were adults signing those agreements.

I think he would have had a much better debate and it would have ended up differently.

And Chris did apologize for all of this.

And he said, you know, the way I talk to women, it's not right now and it wasn't right then,

which is gracious of him.

But I find it such a cheap way to look enlightened that people do nowadays.

Like, I'm not doing this thing that you did then.

Yeah, but if you were around then, you would have.

I saw Scott Pelley on 60 Minutes berating Bloomberg about his blowjob joke.

Really, Scott Pelley?

Like in 1980, you never made a blowjob joke?

Probably did, but it was about a machine, bro.

He said the machine could give the blowjob.

It wasn't about a person.

So, okay.

What's the machine just asking?

No, he said that my Bloomberg terminal can do everything for you, including giving you a blowjob.

Yes, it's.

I don't know.

That machine would have been a lot more money in my office.

Okay.

Speaking of overreactions,

I got to talk about this virus.

I didn't want to talk.

I'm over this virus.

I haven't had it.

What I'm saying is I'm sick.

I don't mean that either.

I'm sick of the virus, but not from the virus.

At this point, I just fucking want to get it.

So we don't have to talk about it or worry about touching my face anymore.

Just

go on a cruise.

Just go on a cruise.

Two weeks, you'll get it.

It'll be over.

And, you know, then six months later, you'll be allowed to be able to get it.

I'm going to let him off the cruise.

They were

like Herpes in the 80s, where it was just like...

Right.

Right.

No, no, tell me more.

We'll move on.

But I mean, the way they talk about it on the news, and I quoted Jimmy Breslin last week who who said, the main point of television is to get you to watch more television.

They make it sound like if you're within six feet of anyone who has it, just get your affairs in order.

But is it really this?

This is, I really don't know because I have your attitude, but you say it's a bad thing.

It is bad.

It's bad.

I mean, here's what's bad.

What's bad is the response, right?

So basically,

we have examples around the world.

You know, you look at South Korea and Hong Kong, and you can see that with a good response, you get it under control.

But the American response, and it's partially Trump, but it's up and down the bureaucracy.

It's state and federal.

It's the CDC not getting the tests going.

South Korea is testing tens of thousands of people and we don't even know how many people we've tested.

We're like, well,

but I'm just talking about the disease itself.

Now, it could be something really, really virulent.

But as I said last week at the top of the show with our expert, the response is to have a good immune system, and it's really the only response.

Well, we aren't all, you know, born with it, like you, Bill.

Well, I mean, actually, almost all of us are born with it, and I'm not born with anything magical that anybody else doesn't have, and I've had many bad things.

I just never missed a show.

Nice.

But I just want to read, okay.

The regular flu, just the normal flu, has killed 517 people just in California this season.

Now, if that was on TV every day, I assume we'd be freaking out if there was a ticker at the bottom of the screen.

14 people in the whole United States, last year's flu killed 61,000 people.

People die.

That's what happens in life.

I'm sorry.

And I mean, I hate it when Trump talks like the guy at the end of the bar, which is what he does.

So when he said, I have a hunch, it's not, it's like, oh, please, do you have to speak like this?

But you know what?

I know what he means, because Y2K was going to end the world and the fires in Kuwait were going to end the world.

And the BP oil spill was going to end the world, and every other fucking flu we've ever had.

But I was told I had to keep global warming in the number one slot.

Okay, global warming, global warming.

And then get rid of Trump, get rid of Trump, get rid of Trump, I can't do PTV, and now I'm supposed to put this brand new one in the

new one in the middle of the day.

I'm going back to freaking out about Trump being a dictator, really, because that's.

How many voted, by the way, Tuesday?

Okay, well, you know, I just want to say

there are a lot of things on the ballot.

California pioneered this idea of ballot propositions.

We own that.

You know, we put, we will vote on anything.

We voted on whether porn stars had to wear condoms.

And lost the porn business.

And yes, you're right.

So now, every state does this.

We got a hold of some of the ones that were on the ballot Tuesday.

Would you like to hear some?

Because

people are going nuts with this.

Here in California, we had Prop 85, which says, if a drunk person gets into your car because they think you're an Uber, you get to keep them.

That was on the ballot.

Alabama passed Prop 22, which said jerky can no longer be manufactured in the same facilities that make belts.

Wow, that was on the ballot.

Colorado passed Prop 420, which makes it illegal to keep telling everyone how high you are when you're the bus driver.

Utah passed Prop 12, creating Mitt Romney Day, which honors acts of courage that don't make any difference.

Here in California, we had Prop 56, which requires a permit to stand outside of Starbucks with a snake.

No way, I can't get through that one.

Alabama passed Measure B, which makes it illegal to marry your second cousin a second time.

These are terrible.

Alabama passed Prop 2, which requires you to wear shoes when you go

shit kicking.

I think I have the flu.

I'm sorry.

California passed Prop 61 mandates a seven-day waiting period between movies about creepy dogs.

Arkansas passed measure S, which makes bestiality illegal except in cases where the wife's away or the internet is

California Prop 8, this is a good one, requires landlords to replace the phrase bachelor apartment with the more gender-neutral overpriced shithole

all right i have been a fan of my next guest for a long time he is the golden globe winning actor who currently stars in hbo succession please welcome brian cock

okay

there you go you got it

All right, it was cold.

So great to meet you.

It's lovely to meet you.

I didn't meet you many, many years ago, but you probably don't remember.

I don't.

I was stoned.

I was so stoned.

You were, actually.

I remember, I could feel the waft coming across me.

Yeah.

It was, I did a thing called Nuremberg, and I won an Emmy, and you sat behind me.

I was just going to, it's so funny, I was going to say to you, I first became aware of you

from when you played Goring.

Yeah, that's right, yeah, yeah.

And then that had to be like 25 years ago.

That was a long time ago.

Something like that.

And I swear to God, I said,

that is a riveting actor.

And when you got this part on succession, and look, I'm a fan of Netflix.

I've said this before.

I know those guys, and I certainly may need them someday.

So

I don't ever want to piss them off.

No, but I love Netflix.

But like, Netflix has a thousand shows.

Oh, yeah, I want to see that.

HBO always has one show where, like, I am so dying to see that one.

And your show is that show.

Sorry for touching you with that.

No, no, you.

You can touch me as much as you like.

I agree with you about this whole thing.

Yeah, it's crazy.

But

just because I don't want to touch my face,

that's making me crazy.

I can't touch anybody.

And, you know, I know they've said the character in succession is Murdoch, but it seems more Trump to me because

even though he's more intelligent than Trump.

Way more intelligent.

Way more intelligent than Trump.

But what they have in common is that you hate him for what he does, but there is something that people like about balls.

The sheer balls.

It must be fun to play a guy, first of all, to be a leading man at your age.

At my age.

But especially when you're a man.

Become a sex symbol.

Really?

You're getting laid on that.

No, no, no.

You know, you have to send it to me.

So funny, I was doing a thing and presenting for the new season, and my wife was sitting next to somebody out in the audience.

And I came on, and this woman who was sitting next to my wife, she said, oh, that Brian Cox, he's so hot.

There you go.

And then my wife said, thank you.

I agree.

And she was so embarrassed.

Oh, I'm so sorry.

No,

it's a great role.

You know, you have to wait

nearly 60 years before you get a role like that.

And it's fantastic.

But again, I got to say, HBO, like you think about James Gandalfini

in Sopranos.

or Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire.

Nobody else would cast

Yeah, would cast these people.

But they're riveting and they are sexy.

That's amazing.

So, okay.

So you, I read, left home at 11?

No, no, no, that's exaggeration.

I left home at

just, I was on the cusp of my 15th birthday.

I was on 14.

Still ridiculous.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, in America, I mean, we don't let them, like, go to school.

Well, I never left home.

I just went to work.

That was all.

Oh.

I got very bad information.

No, no, no, I don't know.

Well, actually, my home left me because of family circumstances, so I was pretty on my own.

But and that's the Scottish way?

It's the way of poverty.

Actually, that's what it's about.

And that made you a socialist?

Of course.

Yeah.

Yeah, of course.

I'm part of it.

You know.

And yeah, and

yeah, and subsequently,

well, really a social democrat.

And subsequently, I...

Thank you.

And subsequently, a supporter of my country, Scotland, which is...

As a separate country.

As a separate country.

Because it's been...

Which is...

I mean...

Because it's been treated like a ship pile for long enough.

So it was my ancestors, Ireland.

Well, I'm a Mi'kmaq, which is an Irish Scotland.

Well, we're the same people.

We are the same.

We are.

And we have that.

We have all those memories in our DNA.

I don't think people realize that when the English conquered your country and my old country,

they were conquering countries where people did not speak English.

That's right.

Isn't that like they think they were kind of a kindred spirit anyway?

That's right.

The Irish didn't speak English in 1850.

No.

And the Scots, I still can't understand them.

No, no, no.

Really?

No.

It's a different language.

Absolutely.

No, it's,

I mean, you know, it came to me because when I grew up, when I was a kid, and I used to, I live on a place, I grew up in a town called Dundee, which is my hometown.

And I I used to look at the

River Tay, and I used to, I couldn't wait to get across it.

And I did get across it.

And then when I, now,

in that, and those days, it was North Britain.

That's what it was, because we had been through two wars so that we'd never, and the Scots had been like cannon fodder, particularly in the First World War.

And the Second World War, it was, you know, it was pretty even steaming all around.

But we had not found ourselves, and our country had been taken away from us at an earlier time when we lost our parliament and then we had you know the famous Culloden and all of that but our independence had gone and we've always been treated very feudally and that still goes on you have a great accent because there's a hint of it yeah but not enough to go what the fuck is he talking about you know

but yeah so But let me ask you about this.

You must have went through Brexit.

Horrible.

Okay.

But I feel like Brexit was a harbinger of what was going to happen in this country.

And

we didn't pay attention because

it was soon after the Donald Trump got elected.

And it was,

you know, and you have Boris Johnson, who looks like Donald Trump.

We have.

And he's a liar.

Yeah, very much like.

I mean, the world is ruled by liars.

Well, it always, that's

Yahoo in Israel.

Liar.

Russia, liar.

Okay, politicians are generally liars.

It's to a degree.

Well, occasionally you get a good one.

You know, occasionally you do come along.

A good liar or a good politician?

Both.

Okay.

A good politician.

But what I'm asking you is,

you just, the Labor Party just lost a tremendous election.

They ran a guy named Jeremy Corbyn.

Looks to show the picture.

He looks just like Bernie Sanders.

And he is a seven, he's a 70-something socialist.

And they thought, oh, you know what?

The working class is going to love this guy.

He was promising the same thing as Bernie Sanders is promising.

Big social programs, taxes on the rich to pay for it, and the working class saw it as pie in the sky and said, no thanks, you lost the worst defeat since 1935.

It's terrible, but then that's also partly to do with the whole Little Englander mentality.

And also a mentality which, oh, by the way, I better take these bloody glasses off.

Sorry about that.

I mean, what happened, it's an interesting thing.

I mean, his policies were interesting policies, but he has the charisma of a failed geography teacher.

Which one are we talking about?

Both.

Well, actually, Trump wouldn't understand anything about geography,

but I'm talking about Corbyn.

But what I think was really interesting is that his policies weren't bad.

They were good policies.

But the problem was he couldn't sell them.

And the problem was that we are so under the...

It's so interesting.

You see, what happened?

You know, areas which were totally socialist for totally for such a long long time areas by the way by the way in which in the last ten years due to austerity particularly in that area from the Tories the death rate of women increased

it increased women were dying at a much earlier age than they had done previously and that's because of Conservative austerity.

And that is what and it was crazy to me that they didn't they didn't bite on the bullet.

They didn't say, oh, let's go with it.

Let's go with it.

Because the geography teacher couldn't sell it.

Let me bring this back to our panel and our candidate who was similar, which is Bernie Sanders.

And I noticed Lawrence O'Donnell keeps pointing out that Bernie Sanders actually has lost half his support from 2016.

He was at like 50%.

Now, there were more people in the race, so there were more choices, but still, people went to someone else.

Does this guy have

to be aware of that?

Well,

it's partially the campaign he ran, though.

I mean, Sanders.

Well, so like Trump, right, Sanders had 25 or 30 percent of the Democratic Party that, you know, just wasn't happy with the state of the country, wanted to rebel.

And there was a sales pitch then that he needed to make to the rest of the party that basically said, you can vote for me even if you're not a revolutionary.

My core voters want the revolution, but it's safe to vote for me otherwise.

And there was a window after he won Nevada where he could have come out and given a version of that speech, and instead he got bogged down relitigating the Castro regime.

And then it turned, you know, because the Democrats

were still a readable.

He didn't move that much.

There were other people in the moderate lane who crowded it, and it looked more skewed than it was, but he always has this like 25%.

So Bernie.

He's got that sort of almost sacred language of when the Democratic Party really was the party of the working man and woman.

He's talking about the union and he's talking about the working person and he's talking about the power of the strike and the power of the boycott.

And this is really powerful language that I don't know if our current landscape would, if that would work or not, but in America, the word socialist, even if it's Democratic socialist, that's so opposed to who we are and who we ever are.

But can i interrupt please please but i i i i just think that you americans you americans i'm sorry i'm also dual citizen so

called myself uh you really uh don't understand the word socialist

well that's true you really do not you just simply do not understand you see it as a sort of you know it's like the witches of salem you know that's a very simple but that's generational so i mean when you yeah but it's not generational it's gone on

generational

generation.

I mean, in Serena, Sanders is proposing.

Sanders would say, I just want to be like Denmark.

But if you actually added up the cost of everything he was proposing, it was more socialist than Denmark.

To come to the United States, the Prime Minister, rather, and say we're not a socialist country.

I think Brian is on to something that the Democrats really better pay attention to.

The Bernie Sanders rallies are identical to the Trump rallies.

And when I was on the Trump campaign, you could see the economic desperation of those people.

And I went to three or four Bernie Sanders campaigns, and the same thing.

So, the message for Joe Biden: if you win the nomination, you have to go to the area that Mr.

Cox is describing, you know, metaphorically here in the United States that resembles Scotland or those areas that you're describing.

Because if you go to those areas, somebody like Joe Biden can express himself in a certain way to capture the imagination of those people.

And I bet you he can move blue-collar Trump supporters over.

Time and again, it's an area which is both.

time and again it's an area which is both exploited and ignored hand in hand and you see this.

This is why the zeitgeist of what happened in with Brexit and what happened here it's the it's the same thing.

It's the same thing and the working man or the working woman is treated in a particular way and they say fuck it I've had it.

You know, I'm going to go for Trump because Trump's, he's a businessman.

He knows what he's doing.

And they say it here, fuck it, I'm going to go for Johnson.

Well, Johnson's giving them a whole load of lies.

And this to me is what's so extraordinary about the now that we live in.

Why are we, I mean, you said about liars, but there have never been so many obvious liars as they are at the moment.

Yeah, they don't care anymore.

Well, they don't.

But I'm also a little, I gotta say, I'm...

I'm tired about people bitching when they don't get their way in a completely democratic process.

Now, we wound up with two 78-year-old white guys, but they talk about it like it was taken away from you.

You desperately want someone to be the bad guy here.

Like, oh my God, this was done to me.

It wasn't done to me.

You did it to yourself.

This is the Democratic Party.

You have, this is the party of women.

This is the party of minorities.

They all got to vote, and this is who they picked.

So what is this?

And if Elizabeth Warren was, you know, lost because of sexism, so that means 70% of the Democratic Party are sexist.

They think everybody and the Republican is.

So how has anything happened?

Women have had all these achievements.

It's just like some tiny little remnant of people?

Right.

And let me.

We're so childish.

I'm a Democrat.

We're just children.

Thank you.

And let me just review.

Okay, there were two black candidates who could have been great.

Andrew Gillam and Stacey Adrams chose not to run.

Three black candidates, Harris, Booker, and Duval Patrick, rejected

by the the Democrats.

It wasn't a sabotage.

One Latino, Castro, a Samoan who's still in the race, Gabbard,

an Asian, Yang, four women candidates, Gillibrand, Williamson, Warren, and Klobuchar.

Not Gillibrand.

Yeah, I'm not a fan either.

And a gay guy.

Another issue.

The tribe spoke.

I don't know why.

Joe Biden, not my first choice either.

But they're voting for stability bill.

And what they have to do is you've got to get some of the infusion of what you're describing.

That pain, I saw that pain.

And I grew up in a blue-collar family, but I made my way and I got a little distant from it.

And I had an epiphany when I went back into the campaign, into areas of the country where the factory had moved and the people were getting two jobs, but they were very low-quality jobs.

And it was anger.

Trump represented the avatar of their anger.

He was the finger in the eye of the establishment for those people.

And

you have to figure that out on the other side if you want to beat them.

But I think it was Yang who was such a visionary, and we need to keep listening to him because he's the one who's saying he's kind of like Al Gore 20 years ago talking about global warming.

You're right.

And people didn't want to really take that in.

Yang, no, but see.

You're talking about with the robots.

He's saying it's about automation.

No, but it's not.

So look,

I love Yang, right?

I love Yang.

We interviewed him at the Times.

I think in certain ways, you know, he's got the spirit of let's get out of the sort of two-party binary, let's have new ideas.

But fundamentally, and this is the core problem with the whole Western world right now,

we're afraid of automation, but in fact, we don't have any, we aren't automating jobs.

Productivity growth is low.

We aren't having major technological change.

Yang is talking about a world that's dynamic and changing too fast for people to keep up.

But really,

what are we talking about?

Have you ever seen a picture of an Amazon warehouse?

There's not a human on the floor.

What are you talking about?

We're not automating jobs.

There is a big shift shift in automation from 1970 through the early 2000s.

The Amazon stuff isn't that dramatic.

The main measure of technology's impact on the economy is productivity growth.

And in Europe and the U.S., productivity growth is flat.

Our technological change is all iPhones and nothing else.

And Yang is talking about a world that people think they're living in, but really,

really, we live in Joe Biden's world.

We live in sustainable decadence.

You're missing one major thing.

The Western politicians decided not to make any any hard choices.

They went with global coordinated monetary policy for 11 years.

So they lowered the interest rates to the floor.

Those men and women you are talking about are savers.

They have no savings rate to speak of.

The asset prices went up for the people that are running firms like in secession, but none of the middle class workers, none of the lower middle class workers could catch up.

And that's where the thing is.

And so if you had really responsible politicians, they would invest in infrastructure, invest in education, and retooling the society, and then also speak the truth.

It's a 10, 15-year project.

It's not a two-minute cable news project or a two-year election cycle project.

And if they did that, you could change the landscape.

But they're just so easy with the monetary policy, Bill, and it's really crippled us in the West.

What?

No, I don't think that's a good idea.

No, I don't think that's not right either.

No,

monetary easing is, again, it's a sign that.

Show is coming alive.

Monetary easing.

monetary this is this is it forget i mean you know people like logan roy they like succession but they're really here for monetary easing and

and no that it's true that that's a substitute right for real growth and real innovation which we don't have but it's actually the best that we can do because we don't you know the u.s economy is filled with rich companies sitting on money that don't know what to invest in i don't agree with that with the right tax and social policy and the right leadership okay we know now that one man or one woman can make a huge difference.

Look at the disaster job that Trump is making.

Well, look.

So I'm saying

I'll do the policy.

You run for president together while we're going to be the vice president.

All right, thank you, panel.

Time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

Okay.

New rules, someone must tell this angry newborn baby

that he's not allowed allowed to be this angry yet.

I'm no doctor, but if a baby comes out and makes this face, put him back in.

He's not done.

This look does not say miracle of life.

It says, I'm born now.

You're welcome.

Now give me my phone.

Neural, the woman who found, the women who found out that they were biological sisters after 17 years of friendship, must admit they could have figured this out a lot earlier.

Sure, looking nearly identical was probably a coincidence, but was no one suspicious when you kept showing up to the same family reunion every year?

Neural, now that the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die, is being pushed back seven months because of the coronavirus, they need to change the title to November is a Better Time to Die.

New Rul, just admit it, this picture of a little doggy licking Joe Biden's ear is the most adorable thing you've seen all week.

He got so excited he started peeing and that really frightened the dog.

New rules, I shouldn't have to say this, but given the extent of the virus in Iran, stop licking licking the shrines

because this isn't helping.

Although, ladies, try to find a man who loves you the way this guy loves that shrine.

And finally, new rule Democratic candidates have to stop telling me who they will not take money from.

Money from bad people?

I don't care if they're bad.

I just want to know if their money is good.

Democrats always living in the world that ought to be rather than the one that is.

My campaign is funded by the people.

Well great, but I got some bad news for you.

The people are broke.

Bernie Sanders does the best among Democrats, raising $46 million in February, but in the same period the Republicans raised 86 million, some of it from Americans.

Because Trump will take money from anyone.

Super PACs, corporate lobbyists, drug dealers, Russian mobsters, foreign dictators.

He will and has stolen money from his own charities.

Meanwhile, Democrats are competing to see not who can attract the most most donors, but to see who can refuse the most

because they're pure, pure losers.

Bernie Sanders brags that he accepts no money from corporate PACs, super PACs, fossil fuels, insurance, drug companies.

No, siree.

If you want to give Sanders money, you had better be able to prove you don't have any.

Elizabeth Warren once boasted that a college student came up to her and said they had a total of $6 to their name but wanted to give Warren three.

And she took it.

She took half from a person who had $6.

This isn't purity.

It's vanity.

It's unilateral disarmament.

It's bringing a hug to a gunfight.

In 2008, nobody took more money from Wall Street than Obama.

And then he got elected and passed the biggest Wall Street reform in generations.

He made Elizabeth Warren's plan, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a reality.

So, when he ran for re-election, Wall Street was pissed.

and did not give him nearly as much.

But he took what they gave and then he fucked them again.

This is how you play the game.

Call him impure, a corporatist, a moderate.

Fact is, he did more to rein in Wall Street than all the peacocking comment board socialists combined.

And I don't care which old white guy we wheel into the Oval Office.

If Trump can take money from criminals and foreign governments, you can take it from Aetna.

And here's a little secret about economics.

When you take money from bad people, it's money that they, the bad people, don't have.

You see?

It's not a donation at all.

It's a fine.

But Democrats, they don't just reject money, they return it.

Warren and Corey Booker gave back their donations from Harvey Weinstein.

Why?

The money didn't rape anybody.

Because it's money.

It doesn't know where it came from.

For fuck's sake, it's money, not cal

Bernie loves to say, my average donation is $18.

But that's also a donor class.

Half the adults in this country live around the poverty level.

They can't afford to be part of this feel-good grassroots fundraising system, so none of it is pure.

The only fair solution is complete public financing of campaigns.

But until that happens,

Get off your high horse about wine caves and billionaires who want to help.

Purists keep saying, you can't buy an election.

I say against Trump, please do.

Not to sound like a trophy wife, but

Mike Bloomberg's money is very attractive to me.

He's promised to spend billions on whoever is the Democratic nominee.

That's a really good offer.

Even if you hate him, think of it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to watch the world's ninth richest man spend a fortune to elect a socialist.

Oh, but wait, Bernie says if he's the nominee, he's not taking a dime from Bloomberg.

Really?

Really, in an election we have all agreed is existential, you couldn't use a billion-dollar war chest.

Bloomberg's money wasn't dirty when it was changing gun politics or getting tons of women elected

or taking on climate change.

He spent $40 million on 24 house races in 2018 and the Democrats won 21 of them.

So maybe stop badgering the guy every five minutes because he told a blowjob joke in 1980.

Be nice.

He's paying or offering to for the election.

Let him, just so I don't have to see any more of these mass text messages from candidates acting like they know me.

Hey, Bill,

get the fuck out of here.

You don't know me like that.

I got one from Biden the other day that just said, Hey, you up?

So, you say some of the people donating to Democrats are bad.

I say, here's how we know they're good, because they're giving you money to beat this guy.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Borgata in Atlantic City, April 10th, at the Dr.

Felton Center in Orlando, April 25th.

I want to thank Anthony Scaramucci, Ross Doutha, Caitlin Vladigan, Brian Cox, Wentzel, Beneker.

Stay tuned for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you.

Catch all new episodes of Real 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.