Ep. #491: Julián Castro, Chelsea Handler

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Start the clock.

And what a difference a week makes.

That's what I have to say.

Last week after the show, people were calling me.

They said, Bill, you really kind of went ape shit.

They're doubling down on Trump as a traitor even after the Mueller report came out.

Well, ape shit doesn't look so bad this week.

I mean, people would last week, they was like, come on, if Barr was shading the report, wouldn't Mueller's team say something?

Well, this week, they did say something.

So.

So unroll your eyes and go re-fuck yourself.

Yeah, Mueller's team started to leak this week.

They just say that the report was a lot worse than we thought.

And Attorney General Scissor Hands

didn't let us see the real deal.

And he's still busy redacting.

You know, by the time we see this, it's going to be covered in more black ink than the governor of Virginia in 1984.

You're right, always safe to groan first.

Anyway,

but you know, it could be that Barr winds up doing what James Comey did, remember at the end of the Hillary investigation, comes out and he says, even though Hillary didn't do anything criminal, here's every little thing Hillary did wrong.

I have a feeling Barr might do the same thing.

He might come out and say, even though what Trump did isn't criminal, here's every little thing Hillary did wrong.

I do think that could happen.

But here's some news.

Democrats finally, God, it's about time, officially have asked for Trump's tax returns.

And Trump said, could I give you a short summary from William Barr?

Now, Trump said, I would love to comply.

It's just an excuse for him, but I'm being audited.

I'm sorry, the government can't see my taxes because the government is looking at them.

This is the excuse.

I mean, if he has nothing to hide, then why not release the tax returns?

I mean, after all, a tax return is just a birth certificate for your money.

And

so

Trump did what he always does when he's in hot water.

He changes the subject to his favorite subject that gets his base going, the border.

He's all week long, I'm going to shut down the border.

And then

he heard, I'm hearing, somebody told him that would destroy our economy.

And that half a million people crossed the border every day.

That's more than all the weird Chinese ladies who are wandering around Mar-a-Lago.

You heard about that shit?

Oh my God.

Wow.

These people who won the election on security.

Yeah, a 32-year-old woman from China, obviously a spy,

got into Mar-a-Lago.

They just assumed she was the rubband tug lady.

She says she could want to use the pool.

No bathing suit.

She has four cell phones, a hard drive, and malinfected thumb drive.

Look, this is not only a threat to national security, but to all the guests who are legitimately there to bribe the president.

Did you know?

Did you know the president was here today?

In L.A.?

Okay, yes, he was here for a roundtable fundraiser, get this, which cost you to get a seat at that table $150,000.

He needs that money to defeat the elitists.

Yeah, it's amazing.

You know, he's been to this state three times.

Obama was here to L.A.

40 times, once just to take Biden to the

Brownman's Chinese theater so he could put his hands all over the cement.

Now, ladies and gentlemen,

and the cement has come forward to say it felt terrible about it, and it was crying in its car after.

No,

Biden is still at large.

Women are being urged to walk at night in pairs.

I just want to make that clear.

No, he was out.

Did you see Joe Binzee?

He finally emerged.

He came very close, so this close to saying he was about to run, but we still don't know if that's true.

We do know it's true that his hands have been part of an exploratory committee for decades.

But, you know,

but, you know, we're getting a little nitpicky.

I mean, of course, no one likes to be touched unwantingly, and women get a lot more of that than men.

But the first person who brought this up said he made her feel gross and uneasy.

Yeah, you know what makes me feel gross and uneasy?

A second Trump term.

That makes me feel very gross and uneasy.

I mean,

he's not Harvey Weinstein or R.

Kelly.

He's more like the TSA.

And it's getting ridiculous.

A woman came before today, and she was touched by one of his speeches.

All right, we've got a great show.

We have Sir Salman Rushki, Danielle Kletka, and Gideon Rose.

And here a little later, I will be speaking with our good friend Chelsea Handler who's backstage.

First up, he is the former U.S.

Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under President Obama, who's currently running for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Julian Castro.

All right.

How are you, sir?

Great to meet you.

All right.

Great to see you.

So, how's the how's the campaign for president going?

You get the field all to yourself.

I wish, I wish.

A lot of people

It's going to look crazy, the debates, right?

It's going to look like the Hollywood Squares.

I think they've managed it well because they're splitting it up, right?

So if there are 18 people, it's going to be nine and nine instead of the crazy Republican one we had.

So how do you make yourself stand out in a field like that?

Well, I mean, I'm going to try and do it without being crazy, talking crazy.

That would do it.

Yeah,

no.

You know, I've been telling folks out there, I'm one of the few folks with actual executive experience, right?

I was a cabinet secretary.

I was the mayor of the seventh largest city, San Antonio, Texas.

I represent a new generation of leadership, and even if I weren't in this race, what I hear out there is that people want a new generation of leadership.

And then I've been out there giving a strong, compelling, positive vision to people of what I would do for them and for their family.

So you started with the immigration plan.

I mean, your first stop was Puerto Rico, right?

That's right.

I went to San Juan right after I announced.

And then you announced your first policy.

It was about immigration.

My question is, why did you pick that policy?

Because it would be like if Obama, when he first came out,

his first issue was reparations or affirmative action when he was trying to say, I'm going to be the president of everybody.

It seems like that's the obvious issue for you, is immigration.

You got those people.

You got that issue.

You know, I think people also want to know

what's close to your heart.

And that's close to my heart.

I grew up with a grandmother who came over from Mexico when she was seven years old because her parents had died.

My family has lived an immigrants American dream story and it also is the issue that this president is hell-bent on using as a political ploy every time he wants to score some points with his base, right?

So what I'm telling the American people is, look, this president a year ago basically said that if we would just be cruel enough to take little children away from their parents, that that would stop more immigrants from coming to the southern border.

That cruelty failed because there are more people coming And he wants you to choose cruelty.

I want you to choose compassion.

I have a completely different vision for what we should do.

And I'm not going to shy away.

You know, I'm not going to shy away from putting forward that positive vision to...

Is that going to play as well all over the country as before this audience, though?

I mean,

is that a message that people

are going to be able to do?

Yeah, well,

every time I've run for office, you know, I have made sure that I talk, speak to issues that represent everybody.

At the same time,

this is very clearly his number one issue.

He's going to go to this issue time and time again.

He always does it.

Why does he win Latinos at a number, he won more than Romney did, like in the last election.

If we believe that, he may have won it by one or two extra points.

But why any?

Because I think there's still, like with any other community, there's a certain percentage built-in base that it's very difficult to get above.

So Obama in 2012 got about 71%.

Clinton probably got 69 or 70%, right?

However, what's going to be different in 2020 is that this guy is no longer just

a theoretical candidate.

He's the guy that threw paper towels out at Puerto Rico, that has talked about cutting off aid to Puerto Rico, has lied about how much aid has been given to Puerto Ricans,

is threatening to cut off aid to these Central American countries.

basically has created an other in immigrants.

I seriously doubt that he's going to get anywhere near 30% of the Latino vote in 2020.

And I can tell you, I believe that if I'm the nominee, that we're going to win the 11 electoral votes of Arizona, we're going to win the 29 electoral votes of Florida, and the 38 electoral votes of my home state of Texas.

Well, that's the strategy that they had last time.

It was like, you know, the Republicans can't win anymore because the demographics are against them.

And Trump went out there and went, I see white people.

So we lost Michigan, as you know, we lost Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania by less than eight states.

Okay, you mentioned those.

Can you win those states?

Oh, I can.

Those are the ones they say Joe Biden can win.

I'm going out to Michigan on April 13, I mean, Wisconsin on April 13th, and then Michigan right after that.

I think that we can, and the reason that we can is that the suburbs have abandoned Republicans under Trump.

You think about all the suburbs outside of places like Milwaukee, Detroit,

Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia.

And also, between 2012 and 2016, the African-American turnout fell from 66% to 59.5%.

I think I, as a candidate, or several of the other candidates, could get that back up into the 60s, and we can beat him.

Yeah, and his numbers never go above 40, mid-40s.

Right?

I mean, other presidents have always been higher at some point.

He's right there.

But he won last time.

And I feel like he could win this time.

He's already announced basically what his strategy is, which is to call the Democrats socialists.

Some of them call themselves socialists.

You've got to take that question everywhere.

You're going to get it.

Are you a socialist?

What is socialism to you?

How much socialism is capitalism irredeemable, as some in your party have said?

Well,

socialism is when the government controls the means of production, right?

Nobody out there, whether it's Bernie or me or any of the other candidates, is talking about the government controlling the means of production.

That's communism.

communism more than socialism.

Socialism, we have socialism already.

Socialism is Medicare, is Medicaid, is Social Security, it's the Marine Corps, it's the post office.

We have already significant public investment, right?

I don't disagree with you that we have, whether it's TRICARE or any of the things that you mentioned.

So you'll remember that Ronald Reagan in the 1960s was calling Medicare socialism.

They're going to do this every single time.

They're going to label whatever Democrats try and do to help everyday Americans as socialism.

And what we have to do is offer a strong, compelling vision of what that's going to mean for families.

So that's what I'm focusing on.

You're for Medicare for all?

I am.

And for a free college.

For tuition free college, sure.

Right.

I've read that that would cost in 10 years over $40 trillion.

See, I worry about handing this thing to Fat Donnie

because we scare a lot of America.

I mean, I think if

Democrats could get reasonable about health care, and of course we should have Medicare for all, but when Obama did his plan, what he said was, if we were starting from scratch, I'd be all for a single payer.

But we're not starting from scratch.

We're starting from a country that has had employer-based since World War II, where it's ingrained every man for himself, where you have lobbyists and money in politics, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry.

We're not starting from scratch.

People kind of like Obamacare now.

Isn't it smarter and better able to win the election by saying, I'm just going to improve that, you like it, we're going to make it better?

What I have said is that I believe that we should strengthen Medicare for the people that have it and make sure that everybody can be a part of it.

But if somebody wants to have their private health insurance plan or supplemental plan, then they should be able to do that as well.

I think that appeals to people.

You know, I think folks understand the importance of people actually having health care as opposed to just health insurance.

You know, health insurance is when you get the denial letter from the insurer telling you, you know, they ain't going to cover whatever you're asking them to cover.

Health care is when you actually get that care.

So I think that we can win that argument, especially because he's sabotaging the ACA.

And by the time we get to November of 2020, there are probably going to be a few million more people that don't have health insurance, right?

So I feel good about that argument.

Okay.

So I want to ask you what the right tone is for the Democratic Party.

I saw Joe Biden today, and he said, the first time I've ever heard a Democrat say I don't say I'm sorry.

I'm not sorry for the way I acted.

I'm not sorry for my intentions.

I like that.

I saw you on Rachel Maddow earlier in the week.

She asked you this question about Joe Biden.

You both talked about it with great gravitas.

Some people today were saying he joked about it.

He shouldn't joke about it.

I think he should joke about it.

I don't think it's that big a deal.

I disagree.

Yeah.

Okay.

And this is why I disagree because

for forever we have told women basically, essentially, just be quiet about stuff like this.

Not stuff like this, about sexual harassment.

It's not the same as sexual harassment.

I agree with you.

He did it to men too, and children.

He's a toucher.

He's a grandpa.

I agree with you that there are gradations of it.

However, in the workplace every day, in so many different contexts, women have basically had to swallow that and not be taken seriously when they say, hey, look, this kind of behavior makes me uncomfortable.

So what I said is that I understand that the vice president

didn't intend to make people uncomfortable.

At the same time, I think as men, it's incumbent upon us to also understand that it's not just your intention, it's also how your actions are making somebody feel.

They're not making up those feelings, you know?

They're not making up those feelings.

So,

you know, I think that there is a way to reconcile that.

And to me, we're going to really progress when you have workplaces that are able to take both of those two things seriously.

We're still navigating all of that in this Me Too era, but I don't think, I think it's, I think it's bullshit to say that

we're just going to, you know, no, I think it's bullshit to say that people can get away with laughing it off, you know?

I think that that's completely the wrong way to look at it.

And final question, will you do Fox News?

I've been trying to get all the Democrats to go on Fox News.

I will.

In fact, we have an invitation to do a town hall.

But first,

I got my CNN town hall hall on Thursday, April 11th.

Right.

All right.

Thank you very much.

Great luck with the campaign.

Terrific.

I appreciate you being here.

Julian Castro, let's lead our battle.

Okay, here they are.

He is the editor of Foreign Affairs magazine, Gideon Rose.

Hi, how you doing?

Doing.

And she's a senior vice president at the American Enterprise Institute and MS.

Oh, no.

Just NBC News contributor, Danielle Danielle Pletka.

Great to see you again.

Been a while.

And he's the best-selling author of The Golden House, Sir Salman Rushdie, Sir Salman Rushdie.

Hey, yay, I gotta call him sir now.

Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

Okay, as I said, what a difference a week makes.

I feel a lot better this week.

And also, since the Mueller Report came out,

and he was, first of all, we should call it the Barr Report.

We have not seen the Mueller report, the Barr Report.

That's what we know.

No bump in the polls.

Even after two weeks, after Barr said, nope, nothing to see here, not one movement upward for Donald Trump.

Just like there hasn't been a movement downward after so many things one would thought.

It seems like Americans are so locked into a partisan slugfest that Yankees fans don't become Red Sox fans if the Yankees have a bad year.

And it just stayed in the world.

Yes.

When do the Yankees have a bad year?

People have decided about Donald Trump.

I mean, that's really the issue.

They've They've decided, and they're so saturated with news about Donald Trump and the Mueller Report and Barr and everything every day.

They've decided.

But they decided he's a criminal.

Do you kind of really resent Donald Trump being compared to the New York Yankees?

As a Boston Red Songs fan, I don't resent it at all.

I take exception to that.

But actually, what has happened, yes, there hasn't been a bump, but what there has been is a lot of reports, you know, surveys which show that nobody believes that he's clear, that he's even clear.

That by a very, very large majority, people think there's some.

It's amazing how low the bar has gone in this country.

D-A-R-R.

Why do you think Russia picked the Republican Party to collude with?

Well, because as Trump said,

wait a minute.

No, no, I mean, they asked people.

They try everybody.

They try everybody.

The Chinese try everybody.

Exactly, but.

in Helsinki, Putin was asked the question,

did you favor President Trump?

Duh.

Yes, I did.

Yes, I did.

Why?

And we know.

I mean, we know.

He offered them help, and they took their help.

Why the Republican Party?

Were they more corruptible?

He's malleable.

I don't know about corruptible, but he's malleable.

It's certainly true that a lot of the things that Trump has been saying are very much the Putin agenda.

It's in Putin's favor to weaken NATO.

It's in Putin's favor to destroy the European Union.

These are his very high policy agendas.

Yes.

And Trump has been doing that.

And after the report came out, I mean, it was very clear.

No one disputes the fact that it said Russia tried and did meddle in our election.

Trump came out the next day.

He condemned the media.

He condemned the Democrats.

Not Russia.

Never Russia.

Never Russia.

They're even in Venezuela now.

This is a weird one.

This Maduro, the dictator of Venezuela, very strange creature.

One of the few dictators in the world Trump doesn't like.

He's always threatening him.

Military action is on the table.

But there's a pickle here because Trump's work wife, Putin,

is

backing Maduro.

There's no pickle in Venezuela.

I think this is an area where the Trump administration has actually done a good job.

They've lined up their allies.

They've got the Organization of American States together.

They've got a domestic opposition that they're backing.

The Russians are everywhere.

The Russians are in Syria.

The Russians are in Egypt.

The Russians are in Libya.

Of course they're in Venezuela.

We got a thing called the Monroe Doctrine that never applied to Syria.

And there are Russian troops in Venezuela now.

What would you say if there were Russian troops in Venezuela when Obama was president?

Look, here's the thing.

I think that the administration, broadly speaking, is right about Maduro.

I think he's a dictator and an asshole and needs to be got rid of.

But, you know, to call this a success for the administration is really too early for that.

Nothing's happened.

At the moment, Maduro still has the army.

He still has, you know,

he's still there in charge.

So we just have to go to the United States.

And the rest of Libya in the spring of 2011, it's easy to say somebody must go.

It's easy to back one side in the standoff.

The problem is, what happens if the guy doesn't go?

And they're Russians.

And you've got a chapping in Civil War.

Why do the Republicans always get this patriotic immunity?

I just want to know.

That's not fair.

The Russians are there because there's an opportunity there.

Do you believe that we ought to invade Venezuela to get the Russians out?

No, but if you think that's what the Monroe Doctrine says, then say so.

Well, we have done that before.

We got them out of Cuba, remember that?

We didn't invade Cuba to get the Russians.

No.

Actually, when we did, we tried.

It didn't work.

Yes, that's true.

But they asked Trump the other day, they said, you know, did you say anything to the Russians?

And he said, they know.

They know.

They know because we've sanctioned them enormously aggressively because of what they've done in Venezuela.

We put more sanctions on Russia after they were in Venezuela.

We've gone after more Russian banks after they were in Venezuela.

They know for that reason.

There's an old Soviet term for the people who play your game

without knowing the consequences, and that's useful idiots.

Yes.

Trump is a useful idiot.

I don't know how useful he is.

Okay, so

in 2017, I remember when Trump was, when the first crew was in there in the the cabinet, I remember saying, you're going to look back at these days and be thankful for these guys, Rex Tillerson, McMasters, remember that crew, even Jeff Sessions.

You know, we all didn't like them, liberals.

We were like, oh, my God, oil people and generals.

But now,

you know, William Barr,

a Stooge, that's what a Stooge is.

I'm sorry.

He's a.

He went to a high school, actually.

And he went to a good school.

He's a well-educated Stooge, but that's a Stooge.

I know.

This is what I meant.

Apparently, you're going to miss in the high school.

I didn't know this.

You're going to miss the first crew.

You're going to miss Rex Tillerson.

He's a Stooge.

The guy at the IRS.

Okay, they're never going to see the taxes because the guy at the IRS is a version of William Barr.

He's someone who auditioned for the job by saying Trump should never have to release his taxes.

The person, Carl Klein, this hack who they put in charge of personnel so that he could override the objections to people getting security clearances.

There are 25 people who have security clearances who shouldn't have, including his daughter and her husband.

So

now he wants Herman Cain

and Stephen Moore to be on the Federal Reserve.

Defend that, anyone.

The trouble with this stuff is it would be funny, except that it's not funny.

It's not funny.

I mean, Herman Cain leading the Federal Reserve is like a gaglide.

We used to make these, right?

It's beyond parody.

We used to say, and he's going to appoint Scott Bayow to the Supreme Court.

He might appoint Scott Bayo.

And that's kind of interesting because it's a second-tier move.

Because the first-tier move was to try to control things, you don't eliminate things you don't want.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Fed, to try to get them directly controlled.

But they were prevented from doing that because there's formal legal protections for some of these agencies.

So by appointing people who then just don't do anything, or you get executive capture of the institutions even without any kind of formal problems.

Same thing going to happen with the Supreme Court.

Why didn't the Democrats...

Sorry, what's going to happen with the Supreme Court?

No, no.

You end up using legitimate parliamentary maneuvers and legal things to place loyalists in a whole set of positions.

And your view is other presidents haven't done that.

Oh, please.

Not to this extreme.

I'm going to give you Stephen Moore and Herman Cain 100%.

The Supreme Court, no.

We're all familiar with the the phenomenon.

Now it's being applied.

The partisan thing of that is being applied now to everything all the way down.

No,

nobody ever did this.

Nobody ever put somebody in a job just because they were a loyalist stooge to do.

Oh, please, you don't live in Washington, my dear.

Name them.

Name them.

Name them.

Name somebody.

I think she's right.

Oh, I would say that the difference is now this is the norm and the pointing the qualified technocrat is the exception.

And the other way is the other way around.

The difference is that the other presidents weren't criminals, Nixon aside for that little Watergate thing.

They didn't need to do that.

He needs to have someone who protects him from seeing the tax.

Why wouldn't you want the tax returns?

I mean, Eric Trump said, we don't use American banks.

We get most of our funding from Russia.

Okay, the FBI had opened an investigation into whether Russia was basically running the president as an asset.

Isn't that enough connection so you would want to see what's in the wouldn't a patriot want to see the president's tax tax return we know that deutsche bank had to pay an enormous fine to the european union for laundering russian mafia money we also know that deutsche bank was the major lender to the trump organization

and that the person working at deutsche bank organizing that was the son of the recently retired supreme court judge kennedy

now gee that doesn't add up does it nothing well everything adds up too easily is the

i mean i mean we can be a little bit like the crazy people in front of the walls with all the different

threads and pictures and so forth.

I did that once, yeah.

I did that sketch already.

I mean, look, we're going to see what the report says at some point, right?

Except for the stuff that's actually classified for legitimate sources and methods reasons or legal stuff, it's going to leak at some point.

It's also a question of how, when, I think.

I mean, you know, the thing is,

just to use a publishing analogy, if you were given a full-page summary

of a 400-page text and asked to judge the text on the basis of that four page summary, you would say, I can't do that.

I can't do it.

I don't have the, I need to see the book.

You know, and we need to see the book.

Well, it's like there's a.

But

it's like there's a book, and then they made a movie out of the book, and then you only get to see the trailer.

You get to see the, yeah, you get to see the YouTube clip.

Right.

Yeah, I mean, it's absurd.

But what they can do is now, what the House can do, since the Senate is blocking the release of the full report, is that they can subpoena Mueller.

Yeah, I'd love to see it.

Get him to come and testify.

I'd love to know.

I think that may happen.

I'd love the book isn't magical realism.

Yeah, actually, I'm, you know,

wrong person to tell us.

Yeah, no, I'd love to hear what Mueller has to say about why he left.

If he ever will.

Will he ever talk?

He's like this.

I think.

Well, can't they make him?

Well, I mean, if he's under oath.

Why can't we have a 9-11 commission for this?

You know, he had a...

No, no, no, no, no.

That's a very narrow mandate he had to look for legal.

That's not the same thing as a 9-11 commission.

A 9-11 commission, excuse me, would not, you wouldn't be able to say 12 angry Democrats.

It's five, like the 9-11 Commission.

Five Republicans, five Democrats, more into finding out just what happened.

Why can't we find out what happened?

They could subpoena people.

We could do it out in the open.

Wouldn't that be a better way to go?

So we shouldn't have had a special constitution.

No, I think this would have been better, right?

You think that?

Fair enough.

Okay.

So

Javanka,

one of them had an unsecured email server.

Where did I hear that before?

Like, the guy won a whole election on that.

And the husband, the husband, like, why is he running our...

Okay.

He was on WhatsApp.

You know, lock them up, lock them up.

I mean,

it's

it's a characteristic of this entire

circus

to do the things that they accuse other people of doing

and to name other people by the names which describe them.

So lying Ted, crooked Hillary, creepy Joe, who do they apply to?

Right.

You know?

Look, this is the hypocrisy.

This is the hypocrisy of power.

This is not understanding what it was that drove Mrs.

Clinton to do this, and then suddenly being in the same circumstances and wanting the convenience of the matter.

But this isn't worth it.

I mean, his

lady who got in.

He condemned it in her.

I mean, the second White House is a club.

He's like working out of the Bonnabing Club.

I'm serious.

It's a club.

A club where people come and go.

This is the burst problem.

When I look at this, I see it as the difference between the sort of professional staff who are saddled with these.

It's like, yes, minister, is real life, right?

There's professional staff in government, and then the amateurs we elect preside over them for a few years and then go out, and a new set of amateurs come in to provide over the professional staff.

And the amateur politicians and political appointees just don't have in their gut the respect for bureaucratic procedure, intelligence classification, all things that the hard and core professionals do, the military, the intelligence community.

And we do things like give people clearances so that you won't put compromised people in office or compromisable people.

It's not that everybody who doesn't get a clearance is a spy, it's just that there's something there that is a trigger that somebody else could potentially blackmail them with.

And it's very, very tough to get in.

And you do it as a risk management tool.

So to ignore the clearance procedure is just basically bad professional, it's ignoring the advice of the professionals and running your thing like a cocky amateur.

And that will get you in trouble.

And a lot of the policy things we're doing is a very bad week.

This is, by the way, part and parcel.

This is part and parcel of the tax return issue as well,

which is this sense that the rules that apply to everybody else don't apply to me.

And that is a really bad message that the president has sent.

I've spent a certain amount of my life in third world countries,

which have had military dictatorships and very corrupt civilian dictatorships.

And let me not name them, Pakistan.

And

it's very depressing.

Come closer, man.

It's very depressing to see this country behaving like that.

And another thing that happens with dictators, I mean, this week was quite a week for the dementia watch.

I mean, the president could not pronounce the word origins.

He could not name where his father was born.

He thought his father was born in Germany.

He said windmills cause cancer.

But I thought the craziest thing he's done in the last month was this ongoing feud with John McCain.

To show a little bit of what's going on with Trump and McCain.

I was never a fan of John McCain and I never will be.

I'm not a fan.

He was horrible what he did with Repeal and Replace.

I've never

liked them much.

Hasn't been for me.

Probably never will.

It's gotten so bad that Trump and his people have now made an attack ad.

Take a look.

He's at it again.

again.

Politician John McCain says he's given a lifetime of service to his country.

But what has McCain done for us lately?

Donald Trump works with his fellow Americans while John McCain refuses to budge.

McCain voted against repealing Obamacare.

And when Trump blasted him for it, McCain's response, silence.

McCain says he's for truth, but it's been written in stone that he lies.

Tell John McCain not to turn into one of those ghosts that comes out of the TV.

Paid for by the committee who don't understand what dead means.

All right, she's a comedian, activist, best-selling author of the new book, Life Will Be the Death of Me and you too, our favorite.

Oh, she's on a sit-down comedy tour starts April 11th in Boston at the Orpheum.

Chelsea Handler is back with us.

Okay.

Hello.

Oh, no, no, no, no, no, no, we don't touch anymore.

No, no, whatever.

You think I'm going to bite in you?

Jesus Christ.

What are you couldn't say?

Sorry.

I didn't get to that.

I didn't know the new rules around here.

All right, new rules, we'll get to that too.

But I'm reading your book and I'm feeling like a bad friend because I didn't realize you were suffering so much.

Everybody took the 2016 election hard.

But I didn't know it really knocked you down like that.

And you came back stronger.

That's what the book is about.

Yeah, I had a midlife identity crisis once Trump won the election because I had never had my world

feel so unhinged, I think.

And I had to pay a psychiatrist to listen to me bitch about Donald Trump for about the first three weeks.

And then once we got past that and we got to the real stuff, I realized the parallel there was my world becoming unhinged when I was a little girl.

My brother died when I was nine years old.

I had never related the two, but for me, as I can imagine, it must have been for so many people.

it was a huge emotional trigger of everything being destabilized and I realized just how spoiled and privileged I'd been all my life to realize

to be this upset and this out of 10 every day and the outrage and the anger I just wanted to fucking fight people you know and I was like I got to go see a psychiatrist I mean there is a lot in there about what I would call white guilt that you have.

Yeah.

And what good does that do?

I mean, you're right, we're lucky.

Some people are lucky, others aren't.

That's not fair.

Life isn't fair.

Well, no, but I think you can also focus on becoming a better advocate/slash ally for people, for marginalized communities, and stop looking inside your own lane and look outside to others.

But I wonder.

But there's a lot of, you know, white so lame.

There's a lot of white people hating on themselves.

I don't think that's what, first of all, that doesn't help minorities.

I don't think they go, oh boy, that makes me feel a lot better.

She hates herself.

I just feel like we're kind of like self-flagellating ourselves and it's not helping.

It's maybe you don't, I don't, I disagree.

I think self-flagellation is good with regard to this.

I think we've misbehaved for so long that we need to get our shit together.

And I believe in, I mean, I really am trying very hard to not think about my own experience and to think about other people's experiences.

So in that vein, I think it's important to reach out and go, what was your story like?

What was your life like?

It's not like mine.

I didn't have that many struggles.

You know, I've never been hungry.

I've never been assaulted.

And I think something something that you learn through therapy, which was so valid for me, is I didn't think I had a right to be in pain because I wasn't raped.

I wasn't molested.

I didn't have anything that I deemed as worthy of being damaged.

I had a brother who died and I thought, I don't get to be in pain.

I have this great life.

I have a big career.

I can do whatever I want.

And the fact of the matter is, you have to.

But everybody has pain.

And you're.

Yeah, but I mean, like, just because you have pain, doesn't mean somebody else doesn't have pain too, or that we have to be in a competition about it.

No, I don't think it's a pain competition.

I think it's important to recognize, I think before you can be of use to other people, you do need to clear out your own injuries or clean out your own injuries.

Okay, but

when I feel shitty, I'm not going to feel bad about feeling shitty because somebody feels shittier than me.

Because somebody in the world is always going to be doing worse than me, and I still feel shitty, but I'm only in my head.

Well, then you should feel shitty.

I mean, that's your prerogative.

No, I don't want to feel shitty, and I don't want you to feel shitty.

Well, yeah, I mean, I think we're all on our own.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, whatever works for you.

I'm a more mindful citizen because of it, and I woke up.

I had an awakening.

The best part of it is that you found weed.

Well, yes.

Trump led you to

weed.

I could have told you years ago.

But Trump led you to smoking pot.

Right.

Cut down on your drinking.

What I discovered was alcohol and outrage are not a good mix.

It's like a hat on a hat.

So

I pivoted, I pivoted towards weed and cannabis and for me who's a very active kind of high-strung person i needed the cannabis was a gateway drug to meditation for me i couldn't meditate because i was always like

and then with cannabis i was like okay i think i could maybe meditate now

and then i had my awakening and i'm like wait trump we've got so many other beautiful things going on right

there is optimism there you go beautifulness like there's beautiful things happening and while terrible things happen, beautiful things are happening as well.

And I think it's important to realize.

I understand you're working on something that would take the munchy factor out of smoking pot, which would be great for me.

Right?

Yeah, well, you're not fat anymore.

Anymore.

When was I ever fat?

I only said that because I knew it would bother you.

No, you were never fat.

It would bother me if I had been fat, but I don't remember being fat.

We need to get rid of the...

Well, you used to be mean.

That's over.

Yeah, I'm not mean anymore.

Oh, kindness and love.

Catch you down.

I can see how this thing has affected you.

But come on, are you serious that there could be a strain of pot that did not make us get the munchies?

Yes, and you just have to isolate the strain because every girl doesn't want to take weed because she can't control herself or she doesn't.

Me too.

I'm not a girl.

I want that.

Well, you also have to just control yourself and say before.

I can't.

When I'm stoned, I will eat anything.

And that's the good.

The bad part is that you have this munchie thing.

The good part is you'll eat anything.

So if you only have healthy food in the house,

you know,

you're eating post-it notes and you're still going to be able to get it.

Well, that's also a good option is to clean out your house so that you can't get after stuff, you know, when it's late night.

I don't know how to order food, so I'm not going to get anything in my own house.

I have to know what you think about Joe Biden and this whole thing.

I think Joe Biden is just a grandfather, you know what I mean?

And he's old.

And like, I'm not,

I don't like.

comparing, I don't like these stories of these women coming out talking about a man smelling their hair or kissing the back of their head.

I feel like it diminishes people who have actually experienced.

What I was trying to say over there.

I feel like this is a

not really even a man-woman issue.

It's an America issue about perspective.

We have no sense of perspective.

Everything has to be DEF CON 5.

Or DEF CON 1, actually.

I mean, I sort of agree that I don't think this is comparable to,

you know, a beer-fueled, violent sexual assault, such as Supreme Supreme Court judges are allowed to do.

But we don't know whether that was a sexual assault.

Wait a sec.

Allegedly.

No, no, no, no.

Not allegedly.

We don't know if that was a sexual assault.

It was high school kids who were drunk.

It could have been.

It never sounded like it was to me.

But I think the moral of the story is it's not about the intention of the action, it's about how the person is receiving it.

And Christine Blasier wasn't lying.

Okay, she felt violent.

She wasn't.

Yes, she did, of course, and she was, like many of us were in high school.

I was also jumped by two guys in high school, and they beat the shit out of me.

Okay, it happens, you know.

I mean, you know, if I may say, I have a little experience of being sexually assaulted by a powerful politician.

In my case, it was Margaret Thatcher.

Let's hear this story.

No,

a thing that people don't know about Margaret Thatcher is that she was very touchy-feely.

I wouldn't say that I've also been sexually assaulted by Margaret Thatcher.

You know, you would sit with her and she would put her hands on you.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, I had this meeting with her in which she was like, Poe got this.

Yes.

And I thought, I'm being groped by the Prime Minister.

Yes.

People, when people know you're from TV, they do it all the time.

And I don't like it.

I am not a touchy-feely person.

I don't like anybody to touch me unless it's a woman who means business.

Margaret Thatcher, by the way.

It's true.

That's why you rebuffed my husband and I'm not sure.

Not you.

I'm kidding.

Margaret Thatcher, by the way,

spanked Christopher Hitchens.

What?

She did.

Christopher had written something she didn't like, and she met him at a party conference, and she said to him, You've been a naughty boy, haven't you?

And he said, Well, yes, Prime Minister, I suppose I have.

And she said, You better bend over.

She made him bend over, and she smacked him with a rolled-up magazine.

So, British scandals are different than American scandals.

No.

Stormy Daniels hit Trump with a rolled-up magazine.

That's the same thing.

We're all one.

Christopher didn't object or feel violated.

He fell in love with her.

Oh, wow.

It sounds like Margaret Thatcher was a sexual predator.

Okay, so

what I would like to get to two questions.

One, what can women do?

It seems like we hear a lot about these things years later.

Like, if it's a real assault or something, okay, we're not talking about that.

We're talking about the guy who was doing the Eskimo kisses and kissing the back of your head.

And I get it that it feels uncomfortable.

I wouldn't like it either.

What can women do to move this process forward to like reacting in the moment as opposed to five years later?

Can we, we, I know it's sometimes tough if the person is your boss and you always hit the burden on the women to respond.

Why can't men just say, I'm not going to be the creepy guy?

Because all men are not going to do that.

It's ridiculous.

What's the line?

What's the line?

I just reached over when you said something funny and I put my hand on your hand.

And I did not mean anything by it.

I want to just...

But you're saying, why don't we live in a world where men always are starting to act perfectly?

It's not going to happen.

Normally.

And if they don't,

one of the big problems of the Trump presidency is there used to be not just the formal structures and rules of American life, but a set of norms of what constituted decent behavior in a whole bunch of areas.

And there was progression from sort of decade to decade, generation to generation, very, very slow.

Everybody has grandparents with problematic views.

Everybody has parents with problematic views.

It fits in that beautiful thing.

In that long, slow, gradual thing.

And now we've seen the last several years it goes back.

And so the question is, what norms will exist potently?

One of these people.

First of all, I wish the media would stop using the terms of the Me Too movement.

These are not allegations.

They actually happened.

It's on tape.

They're not that serious to be allegations.

They're not victims, stepping forward, all this bullshit.

Yes, he kissed the back of somebody's head.

I'm asking, what can women do to just at that moment,

we all learn how to navigate that moment where you go, excuse me,

don't kiss the back of my head, please?

Is that too much?

Well, I would argue that that's what's happening right now.

We're empowering women to speak up when something's wrong, to say something.

Say something.

Say something.

Say something, say something.

Yes, absolutely.

A lot of women.

Well, I think, I mean, it's giving women a lot of voice to say, hey, this happened to me.

I feel power in numbers.

What the fuck has happened to the feminist movement?

Women have voices.

Why can't women turn around?

Women have been able to turn around for the last 40 years and say, Joe,

and by the way, these women didn't say that at the moment, and they couldn't have felt terribly uncomfortable.

We see it on tape.

Why not

say it in?

No, why not say it?

Why not say it in the moment?

And

because again, you know, most guys, if you do that to them, they feel hard.

They're like, they're so embarrassed.

Oh, my God.

You know, they feel almost as bad as you do.

They went over the line.

Was Joe Biden going to insist if she said don't do that?

Was he going to go, hey, bitch, I'm going to kiss the back of your head.

Whether you like it or not, you're going to get a back of the head kiss.

No.

I think he would have backed off.

This shouldn't diminish that men in power

use that against women who cannot speak up.

Correct.

But these weren't,

to my mind, having watched these, these were not situations like that.

And the problem is that on the spectrum, everything has been pushed too far over.

But there's another challenge, and that is that

I don't know how old you are, but there is a general.

You're 12.

You look very mature.

Thank you.

36.

No, but

this is a a real generational issue.

People who are 20 and 21 don't agree at it all.

No.

And they don't agree.

No, that's true.

Because they're snowflakes.

But you mean that they can't say anything in the moment when something happens?

No,

they think that Joe Biden is a disgusting old pervert.

Okay.

Yes.

But here's what, you know, some people, like, for instance, if somebody did something that I felt uncomfortable with, I'd have no issue.

But not every woman has the same experience.

Some women have had a bad experience with a guy grabbing them by the back of the head, and who knows what that triggers for them.

And that doesn't validate this or make it commensurate to rape or assault.

But I mean, we do have to be, we have to understand where people are coming from.

Right now, this whole Joe Biden thing doesn't feel like it's, he does, it feels like bullshit, you know?

Here's my final question.

Could it be good for him?

Because, no?

You just said he's a grandpa and an older.

Look,

I don't even want him to be the candidate.

But that's what this is about.

That's why he's under assault.

Because he is thinking about it.

You know what?

There's such a.

He was, listen to, you were talking about the media.

Here's Chris Kawizza on CNN talking about...

I'm sorry, did I say it wrong?

Saliza.

I'm so sorry.

Okay.

He's talking about Joe today when he walked up on stage, Joe Biden, and he made a joke.

He said, I got permission to touch this little kid, you know, hug him.

Okay.

Without speech, Biden may have made things even worse.

Making light of a situation like this feels tone-deaf, even if the crowd in the room laughed.

I love that.

Even if the crowd in the room laughed.

In other words, fuck the people and what they think.

This is the media talking now.

Biden has to know better.

This isn't a joking matter.

Yes, it is.

It's exactly what's perfect for a joking matter.

It's not that fucking serious.

Perspective.

Can we get some perspective in America?

It may not be for him to make the joke.

That's what I'm saying.

The joke's on him a little bit.

I mean, I think,

just contrary-wise, that it's not that difficult

in social situations to know whether a woman wants you to kiss the back of a bunch of people.

It's not just women, as we've been saying.

Right, I get it.

And he said, I get it.

You know, but we're humans.

Humans are going to touch each other in ways that are not always perfect, or else we're going to do what she and I did when we just walked out here.

Do we want that?

Is this really

what is going to determine American policy in 2020?

I mean, one of the things about the mind.

If the media has it, as I say, in it.

Well, that's part of the problem.

We always talk about politics, and we don't talk about government, which is what happens after the politics.

We do this thing like we were talking about the the sports.

Politics is sports.

You root for the teams, the season's over, you start the next season.

But after they get into power, they run the government, and that's really the important stuff, and that's what people should be talking about.

Well, we'll talk about that next week.

It's time for new rules now.

Ready?

Okay, new rules.

New rules, since Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted that croissants are expensive at the airport and Ted Cruz felt like he had to write a series of tweets teasing her and calling calling her a socialist.

Ted Cruz has to admit he would kill his whole family for five minutes with her shoes.

New Roll day spas have to admit that there's nothing therapeutic about putting a bunch of rocks on your back.

They just do it to keep guys like Robert Kraft from turning over.

New roll, now that Tim Ryan has announced he's running for president, he has to answer answer two questions.

Who are you?

And why did you get your picture taken at Sears?

Neural cauliflower must stop pretending to be other things.

I'm sorry, cauliflower, you're not rice, and nobody wants you in mashed potatoes or pizza crust.

It's time to accept what the doctors have told you.

You're going to be a vegetable for the rest of your life.

Neural, since Trump says windmills cause cancer, and Bernie Sanders cites the harm done by burning coal, we have to settle this with science.

Lock Bernie in the garage with this windmill,

and lock Trump in the garage with this charcoal grill, and we'll see who comes out.

It might might not be the most logical way to choose a leader, but it's better than the Electoral College.

And finally, new rule, if HBO has to put up a warning label before this show, cable news has to do it before Trump comes on.

Get that son of a bitch off the field.

Bomb the shit out of him.

Can't get a fucking screw-billed.

They're ripping the shit out of the seat.

Pussy, listen, you motherfuckers.

Kind of makes you think that sounding like a politician politician wasn't such a bad thing after all.

Someone should break it to the holdout, still waiting for Trump to become presidential, that that ship has sailed.

Not only has it sailed, the toilets are overflowing, and everyone on board has the norovirus.

You know, after the American Revolution, the founding fathers were worried that the awesome office of president would imbue its holder with too much dignity.

Problem solved.

And it's getting worse.

Trump using street language used to be a fairly rare occurrence, but lately he's decided that, for example, using the word bullshit is a perfectly normal, regular routine practice for the President of the United States.

And all of a sudden, they're trying to take you out with bullshit.

The Democrats have to now decide whether they will continue defrauding the public with ridiculous bullshit.

This is the new politics.

We heard Boolean earlier.

Better O'Rourke did it at the end of his campaign last fall, and people loved it.

I'm so fucking proud of you guys.

Now, a couple of years ago, I gave you an idea of what a future president would sound like giving the State of the Union address in our new pro-profanity environment.

Tonight, I'd like to show you what a town hall presidential debate might look like in a future presidential election.

I'm Mr.

President.

Do I need that mic to do this bit?

Okay.

Remember, I'm still the president.

Hi, Mr.

President.

I'm Justin.

My question is, since the national debt is over $37 trillion,

what is your plan to do with it?

That's a great question, Justin.

And you're right, we need to talk talk some real shit.

We have been borrowing money for too long like a bitch in heat.

And

when that happens, as you all know, the middle class takes it up the ass.

And small business owners get skull fucked.

Now, recently I completed a listening tour, and, you know, as I was hauling ass around this great nation of ours, I talked to everyone from the shit kickers in Texas to the clitlickers in San Francisco.

And one thing they all have in common is debt.

Am I right?

Debt.

I met a hard-working single mom from Ann Arbor named Cindy Walker.

Cindy works the poll and pops her pussy at the

Platinum Lady on Maple Street, and it's still not enough to make ends meet.

And when I explained to Cindy that just servicing the interest on the debt is why we don't have enough money for education or health care, she looked at me and said, Mr.

President, fuck.

That is dumber than dog shit.

Don't you ass clowns in Washington know what the fuck you're doing?

Are you so busy ramming each other that you don't ever think of the little guy?

And she's right.

I know, being in debt is like fucking a fat guy.

It's hard to get out from under it.

So,

Justin, I would say to you that we are called on to solve this problem, all of us, not just for America, but motherfuckers all over the world

need to know, can we pay our debts?

I think we can.

I'm an optimist.

You know, there's a term our 11-year-old Tyler likes to use,

BDE.

It stands for Big Dick Energy.

And I think if we as people all pull together and put put our strength together and harness the big dick energy inside of us, our better days are still ahead.

Thank you for the question, Justin.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Lyric Opera House in Baltimore on June 9th and at the Bevos Performance Hall in Grand Rapids.

Me, not the president, in Michigan, June 23rd.

I want to thank Gideon Rose, Danielle Pletkis, Hasoman Rusty, and Chelsea Handler, and Julian Castro.

Stay tuned for Robertson.

Thank you, folks.

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.