Ep. #482: Ann Coulter, Michael McFaul

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.

Yeah, 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.

Thank

I know why you're happy today, everybody.

Because Trump today announced a deal to temporarily reopen the federal government for

it'll be open for three weeks, like like his casinos.

And of course, no funding for the wall.

So the thing he said he would never do, he just did.

Right, for 35 days.

He was like, there will never be a deal without wall funding.

Wall funding.

And Nancy Pelosi said, oh, yeah, hold my beer.

But

of course, Trump always has to frame everything as a win for him.

Three weeks to give the wall, maybe I'll declare, he says, an emergency.

That's his new strategy.

I'll give you three weeks to declare an emergency.

He's like the bad guy at the end of every movie, falling off a skyscraper, still yelling shit on his way down.

You may have won this round, striker, but I'm...

And Pelosi's there like, yippee-I, pussy grabber.

Let's say to this.

A couple of days ago, Trump was talking about this, and he said, I'm quoting word for it, he said, Nancy Pelosi, or as I call her, Nancy.

That's how bad she is kicking this man's ass.

His cutting nickname for her is her name.

But he hasn't been idle, Trump.

He came up with the slogan.

Did you hear that this week?

He said, build the wall, crime will fall.

It's stupid.

It's factually inaccurate.

So I came up with one.

That's so dumb, your base will come.

And Pelosi said, you won't get your wall.

I've got bigger balls.

See,

it's not that hard to run.

Oh, speaking of balls,

Trump's ban on transgender people serving in the military,

they say that can be enforced.

That's what you get when you put Brett Kavanaugh in the Supreme Court.

So that can be enforced.

And Trump's, you know, Trump has always had it out, right, for the transgender.

People wonder why.

He told us today, he said, no one wants to grab a pussy and get a surprise.

But

let's not bury what's most important in America.

Everyone is talking about the smirk heard round the world.

You saw this kid this week.

Remember this kid?

Yeah.

If you don't know what this is, if you're living under a rock, okay, here's what happened.

This was at the Lincoln Memorial.

This is on the mall, but of course at the mall in Washington, there's all kinds of people protesting.

There were three groups there that day that got into it.

There was the Black Hebrew Israelites.

There's not many of them.

There aren't.

They were in New York.

I remember.

They stand on the corner calling white people crackers.

And they finally got some attention.

They believe African Americans are the literal descendants of the Israelites in the Bible.

Except we have DNA and they're not.

They did 23 and me and it came back.

You're kidding, right?

But the black Hebrews started to mix it up with these Catholic high school kids who were there from Kentucky?

Right.

Okay.

And they were there with a big pro-life march.

And then a Native American elder playing a drum got in the middle to mediate.

And now it's a big thing.

And, you know, people are saying the kid, the kid.

I don't blame the kid, the smirking kid.

I blame lead poisoning.

And bad parenting.

And oh yeah, I blame that fucking kid.

What a little prick.

Smirk face.

Smirk face says,

please.

Like, that's not a dick move at any age to stick your face in this elderly man.

And this smirking kid says he was just trying to diffuse the situation by, really?

You know what?

Next time you get into a fight with your wife or your husband or your boyfriend or your girlfriend, try that.

Try getting two inches from their face with a shit-eating grin and see if it diffuses the situation.

If you ask me, this kid should have done what everyone does during a drum solo.

Leave.

But

really, I mean, I don't spend a lot of time, I must tell you, around Catholic school children.

But I do not get what Catholic priests see in these kids.

But big news, Roger Stone today was arrested.

Former guest.

Not trying to be mean.

Former guest.

Trump's first and greatest political booster.

He has been trying to make Donald Trump president since 1988.

He should go to jail just for that.

But I mean he is a true believer.

You know this, I bet you this political savvy crowd knows this.

He has a giant tattoo of Richard Nixon covering his entire back.

That's true.

I feel sorry for his cellmate.

I mean.

Try to keep an erection looking at that.

All right.

Listen, before we bring out Ann.

I want to introduce someone in our audience.

You know, I've been saying for the longest time, one reason this country is in such a mess is because we are politically illiterate and one reason for that is we don't teach civics anymore in school civics okay

so

14 kids in providence rhode island sued the school for not teaching them civics they said you are not preparing us to live in a democracy and one of them is here please give a big hand to ahman sesay ladies and gentlemen stand up

Okay

All right, we got a great show.

Dan Savage, Heather McGee, and Joshua Green are here.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with former Ambassador Michael McFaul.

But first up, she's a political commentator and author of Resistance is Feudal, how the Trump-Aating Left Lost Its Collective Mind.

My good friend Amy Ann Coulter is here.

Oh, that's a nice,

that's a nice liberal applause for you.

How are you?

How are you?

You are more powerful.

You're like Wonder Woman, if Wonder Woman was the villain.

But really, all over the news, I hear them talking about the Coulter veto.

Whatever Donald Trump does, if you don't say it's okay,

no good.

I promise you, the country would be run much better if I had a veto over what Donald Trump did.

Well, you kind of do.

I mean,

he was ready to go along with what they passed on the vehicle.

No, but this is,

look,

crazy that I expect a president to keep the promise he made every day for 18 months.

Right.

No, it's not just, it's the base.

That's what happened.

You had him making this.

What are you looking at?

I'm looking at this guy.

He's holding the card behind the camera, which is an interesting place to put it.

If I was Superman and could see through it,

you don't have to look at that.

I'll do all the talking.

Well, no, it's crazy.

The base is what has rebelled here, and they can take me as a stand-in for the base, but that's all I am, a member of the base.

No, well, that's very modest.

I mean, you said today, this is your tweet when Trump capitulated on the wall.

He said, good news for Herbert Walker Bush.

As of today, he is no longer the biggest wimp ever to serve as president.

So let me get this straight.

You were convinced that Donald Trump was the guy.

You voted for him, Donald Trump.

Correct.

And now

you're finding out he's a lying con man.

What was your first clue?

I mean.

Okay, this is the thing.

Not only, and you haven't even,

okay, I'm a very stupid girl, fine.

But that was actually a selling point with Trump.

I mean, you can make fun of me for also writing in Trump We Trust, E.

Floribus, awesome.

Look, we've been lied to over and over and over again by politicians, by respectable people, by people like Mitt Romney and George Bush, Obama and Clinton.

We're going to protect your jobs.

Exactly the same.

And if I could just say for a second to an audience that is not wild about me,

I think this build the wall line has become, I mean it sounds like crooked Hillary or locker up.

It isn't that.

You're being played.

This is, as Bernie Sanders said, a Koch brothers idea.

This is lots of cheap labor pouring into this country is good for employers.

It's not good for employees.

You know who wants it?

The Koch brothers.

They want it.

Rupert Murdoch wants it.

My party wants it.

Why hasn't

Trump been able to get it through the future?

But that's not the point.

The point is that the Republicans.

Because the Republicans don't want it.

It's all of mass immigration.

It's our legal immigration.

It's no e-verified.

The wall is a big part of that.

And you're being plagued to have everybody keep acting like this is some sort of racist thing.

Well, working class wages have gone down.

Middle class wages have been stagnant.

It's great for the rich.

It's good for you.

Okay, but the.

It's bad for people who work.

Okay, but the point was the wall won't stop that.

Of course it will.

Of course it won't.

Most people who come here from Mexico don't come

for the border.

They come for jobs.

They come on a plane and then just stay.

That's absolutely not true.

And if you say walls don't work, tell it to Netanyahu.

But that's a whole different thing.

It's not a different thing at all.

They built a wall to illegal immigration.

They built a wall to stop suicide bombers.

I've never, my gardener has not once tried to blow my balls.

That's not true.

No, that's not true.

That's not absolutely true.

They built two walls.

But wait, I said.

Northern side, that was the same thing.

I agree, those walls were.

The southern side was to stop African illegal immigrants coming in and taking jobs, went from a huge problem to zero illegal immigrants.

All right.

And Mexico will pay for it?

What happened to that prompt?

I wonder myself what happened, but I will say in his defense, look, in Trump's defense, he never said they would pre-pay for it.

He explained very clearly how it would be done.

He said it would be done.

Well, he didn't.

Well, now we're seeing.

No, he laid this out very clearly.

He said they would tax remittances.

Mexicans in this country, both legal and illegal, send back $25 billion every year.

Every year, that's enough for the full wall.

You put a 10% tax on that, as he recommended, and he put it in his immigration policy paper.

In 10 years, you've paid for a $25 billion wall.

Okay, but today he was talking about how we never said it was a wall from coast to coast.

That's exactly what he said.

I agree.

You know, first it was a wall, then it was a fence, then it was just, I guess, cones, you know.

No.

And then I think.

By now, it's a gentle little garden trellis.

I think maybe thoughts and prayers is what we're up to.

See if we can get thoughts and prayers to work for that.

But let me just ask about his state of mind.

He said the other day, he said, I see a lot of the Democrats, almost all of them.

This just speaks to his mind.

And this is what I want to ask you why you like this guy.

Like, he's starting with a giant lie that the Democrats, the end of the quote is, are breaking.

I see a lot of the Democrats, almost all of them, are breaking saying, look, walls are good.

Walls are good.

No Democrats are saying that.

That's exactly the opposite of their position.

Their leader said it's an immorality.

So he starts with a lie.

I see a lot of the Dems.

He's in the middle of his own sentence when he then goes, almost all of them.

You see?

He builds on his own lie from two seconds before.

He is not fucking sane.

You know.

He is not a sane person.

Really?

He convinces himself of his own reality.

That is so dangerous.

His own.

Tell me that, oh, he's so coarse, he's so vulgar, he makes things up.

No.

Yeah, well, I went into this fully clear-eyed.

Again, we liked that about him because respectable people who listened to him.

You like someone who doesn't live in reality?

Because I thought, not I, we thought that he wouldn't care what the elites thought and he'd actually keep his promises on this.

And by the way, in fact, Nancy Pelosi did say we need a barrier at the border.

Chuck Schumer did.

Obama said it over and over again.

They certainly weren't talking about that.

But they decided, no, let's suck up to Wall Street, and they want cheap nannies.

And the Republicans said, let's suck up to the Chamber of Commerce.

We want cheap nannies.

All of you are being screwed.

By the way, cheap labor isn't so bad for me.

I'm not as rich as he is, but I'm not doing badly.

My landscaping is beautiful.

There is not a bit of slime on my pool.

It's good for me, but I care about my fellow Americans

and the working class.

But

he doesn't come to my pool.

I'm sorry.

I'll make it up to you in bed tonight.

Excuse me.

Tonight I'll be Kelly Ann and you be George Conway.

We'll switch it up.

Okay.

So he also said this week, I know more about technology than anybody.

Now, this is an insane person.

I mean, how can we move forward with an insane person?

No, I find that, I find his puffering really charming.

I mean, that's hardly the stupidest thing either.

So, and if Obama did that, it would be okay.

He said he had the best words.

He said he's the most Christian person.

Wouldn't be more presidential than Lincoln.

I could go on and on.

It makes me laugh.

That's fine.

I like that about him.

Just keep your promise, and I'm right back in his camp.

Okay.

So let me ask you about the other big story today.

Roger Stone was arrested.

I would agree with you.

It was an over-the-top arrest.

But

you know, what about the lie?

You say you're okay with these fun lies.

That's not a lie.

It's puffery.

It's exaggerated.

No one says I have the best words.

No one thinks, oh, yeah, this guy must have the best words.

You're an insane

clinical narcissist.

But okay, that shouldn't be present.

But okay, give you that one.

What about lies that really matter?

Like we found out that every time he said, and we've all seen the clips on the news, where he said, I had no contacts with Russia.

Nothing.

We stayed away.

We know that that's a plain lie.

That's a kind of a consequential lie, isn't it?

Now that we know

he was

trying to build a tower in Moscow up until the election.

I don't think we know any of this, and I don't think

it matters.

I mean, Hillary Clinton paid, through her campaign, $30 million to Russian officials to get dirt on Trump.

If you know, I missed it.

That's the whole story.

No, you didn't.

It's the whole fusion GPS story.

She paid that to get Russian dirt on Trump.

If she's going to be walking around having malts, then I really don't want to hear about Trump having a deal to do it.

She didn't pay for it.

She didn't pay Russia.

She wasn't working with Russia.

He is working with a foreign anticipatory.

Of course there's evidence.

Mueller has

37.

I'm telling you how to get Trump.

He promised something for 18 months and he lied about it.

That's how you get Trump.

It's not this Russia nonsense.

You are so wasting time.

Well,

you know, I remember your boyfriend Ronald Reagan saying

Russia was an evil empire.

Mr.

Gorbachev tear down the wall.

What do you think Ronald Reagan would think right now?

I think he would think us being sold.

I'm not in the Cold War.

What is with these lunatics?

It's not the Soviet Union anymore.

But we didn't win it.

It's still.

We did win it.

But it's still Russia.

So what?

It's not the Soviet Union.

We are not living under the threat of nuclear violation.

The president is over.

Now Russia is

normally corrupted.

The president is a traitor who is in the Saudi Arabia.

Okay.

Today,

Venezuela, this is the front page of the New York Times.

Venezuela, Venezuela, okay?

Mm-hmm.

They have a guy, an opposition leader who finally stood up, and we are backing him.

And Russia warned us to back off because they're backing the dictator.

This was the Monroe Doctrine.

This is our backyard.

And Russia is now telling us to back off of what goes on in Venezuela because they know they can, because they're so emboldened.

That doesn't bother you.

You're the patriot?

Well, I'm not just the patriot, as you said.

I'm also the Donald Trump advisor, and I'm also telling him to back off, because you know what is more in our backyard than even Venezuela, Texas, Arizona, California.

Can we care about those states and what's being done to them?

It always gets back to hating Mexicans, doesn't it?

No, it doesn't.

It gets back to loving Americans.

All right.

It gets back to, look, I'm not a union

bookkeeper.

I don't work at Wendy's.

I'm not a roofer or a nationalist.

Is Trump going to declare?

They're the ones who are being screwed over.

Is Trump going to declare a national emergency?

He doesn't need to be the president.

Nobody said in three weeks, what's he going to do when they're going?

He has got to read a constitution to him.

He's the commander-in-chief.

His job is to defend the border.

Last question: a lot of people are saying you should be the one to run for president.

Would you do that?

Um, I'm against women working, so I can't.

Ann Coulter, everybody, and Coulter, let the jousting begin.

Thank you.

All right, I'm sure I won't see you later.

Yes, call me.

Okay, all right, let's meet our panel.

Okay,

boy

she's hard to get down all right he is the columnist of savage lovecast and host of the savage lovecast podcast our friend dan savage is back here

she is a distinguished senior fellow at demos action and nbc news policy analyst heather mcgee hey heather

good to see you And he's a Bloomberg Business Week national correspondent whose book Devil's Bargain is now in paperback.

Joshua Green, welcome back, Josh.

Okay.

So,

I'm so glad that part is.

Welcome back.

Thank you.

So, Donald Trump, by all accounts, had a pretty bad day today.

I mean, the FBI is rolling up his gang.

He got his nuts squashed by a woman.

That can't be all bad.

He's not getting his wall, and his poll numbers are in the toilet.

That's got to hurt the most.

Terrible ratings.

He's got terrible, terrible ratings.

My question: what country are we going to go to war to to

get our mind off this?

Because I feel like that's what he's plotting.

That's the only card he has left, is to distract us with Wag the Dog.

Venezuela.

Venezuela.

That was going to be my.

Yeah.

And what happens in three weeks when.

Nancy Pelosi hands him his ass a second time.

But meaning.

No, I mean, this is an unpopular president.

It's an unpopular wall.

It's an unpopular idea shutting down the government.

You had

Republicans saying, we don't want to do that again.

He has completely lost his leverage.

And the larger point here is that this wall is a monument to a moment in time of American racism and xenophobia and anxiety that's being ginned up by the paid bullies in the corporate media.

I'm not going to name any names of any of your other guests that have been here tonight, who

are doing this so that white Americans are pointing fingers at working class people of different races instead of the plutocrats where they belong.

Yeah, I never.

Well, she's kind of making that same point.

She's blaming the people who hire the illegals.

And by the way, Ann Coulter is for AOC's 70% tax on the rich.

I was kind of surprised at that.

Yeah, I'm very surprised by that.

Yeah, but I think the question of what Trump does now, the thing that worries people in the White House, I spent all day calling White House advisors and people about Trump, the thing that they all say to a man, and they were all men,

custody of Trump's manhood effectively passed from Ann Coulter to Nancy Pelosi today.

And we have three weeks of Trump having to watch that on television on Fox News.

And so what he does is going to depend on how they react.

No, I remember he said about Al Franken, he said he folded like a wet rag.

A phrase I had never heard heard before.

But he folded like a wet rag.

He hasn't lost that badly since the last time he was in front of a bankruptcy judge.

I mean, he got nothing.

Right.

And

he was telling people as recently as last night, spoke to Trump, and he said, I am not going to sign a continuing resolution of open government unless I get some wall money.

And he turned around and he caved.

And today they closed, or we're shutting down LaGuardia Airport, a Newark airport.

That's the pressure point that Trump caved under, was hearing from his friends who couldn't get from D.C.

to New York and back.

But you know, I often ask,

I asked somebody this last week, like,

why do the Republicans get half the vote?

What are they good at?

They're not good at national defense.

That was their big thing.

They're traitors with Russia.

Okay, they're enablers of a traitor president.

That's, you know, I just said the thing about Venezuela.

We can't even keep the fucking Russians out of their president.

They're good at demagoguery.

They're good at racism.

They're good at stoking fear.

All the stuff, everybody's like, oh, it's economic anxiety.

Oh, it's the working class.

All those first reaction to Trump's wins, all the research, all the social science research and data sets have proven that it's racist, white, dumb fucking.

That is an amazing thing.

In our anti-democratic system, we have a federal government that is weighted toward acreage and not human beings.

So

we have Republican states with two senators that have 11 people living in them and two senators for California.

That is a flaw in our country.

But they also live in a different world.

I mean, Trump's popular...

Republicans.

Trump's popularity among Republicans increased during the shutdown.

Support for the wall among Republicans increased during the shutdown.

They don't think that they're losing.

So part of the problem for Trump is the problem.

When he says something like he said yesterday, he was talking when we still had the shutdown, and he said, well, people can go to the grocery store

where you have to show ID

to buy food.

And he said, you know, your grocer will help you out.

Like, what fucking green acres, Sam Drucker world

are we living in

where you can go to your grocer and say, you know, I'm going to, can you, oh, sure.

You'll get me at planting season, Clem.

Really?

Because I would not try that at Air One because they will not slide at all.

But his inner circle are all billionaires.

I mean, Jared Kushner and Wilbur Raw.

I mean, literally billionaires.

But don't their people notice that.

Don't his fans notice that?

No, they are noticed.

They do go to the family.

To Josh's point a second ago, that there are, you know, he's more and more popular with Republicans, but there are fewer and fewer Republicans now than there were two years ago.

And the media treats them like they're half of the country, and they're just not.

And they're a dying breed in terms of millennials and it's not just that they're dying.

But they did win the election and

controlled almost all of government up until the end of the year.

They did.

But I have two words for you, voter suppression and gerrymandering.

Yeah, no, they cheat.

That's true.

And the electoral college.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

We should say that every morning while we're brushing our teeth.

Hillary Clinton won the popular vote.

And if we didn't have this anti-democratic electoral college that was designed by racists to protect slave states, we wouldn't have Donald Trump in the White House.

So

there is someone draining the swamp, and it looks like it's Robert Mueller because he keeps, I think he's got how many people, 37 now?

Indictment.

100 counts.

And 100 meetings there was between Trump and people, Trump people and Russians.

And Roger Stone, who, I love this, I guess this is in the indictment.

I don't know how they get these things, an email that he sent to a witness.

Do we know who that witness was who wasn't testifying the way Roger Stone wanted him to?

And he emailed him, you are a rat, a stoolie, prepare to die, cocksucker.

That's called witness standpoint.

Love to the family, Roger Stone.

Shoot the best people.

Now, for those of you who have not been tuning in every week on the Russia thing, Let's try to kitchen table it a little bit.

Roger Stone is sort of the conduit between WikiLeaks, who got a hold of Hillary's emails, right, gave them to the Russians, and the indictment is really about Roger Stone being in the middle of that and probably getting the order to do that from Steve Bannon.

Roger Stone, first of all,

is Trump's oldest and most trusted political advisor.

Even after he got fired, still talked to Trump all the time.

What the indictment today shows, proves, is a chain of collusion from Russia to Wikileaks and Julian Assange

to Roger Stone to Steve Bannon we know, but also to other high-ranking Trump officials.

It proves that.

It claims to.

This is why Trump was arrested.

The evidence of the United States.

He didn't do the indictment of the.

Based on, yeah, and this isn't hearsay, this is based on text messages and email.

I mean, it is all right there.

How do these people email things like prepare to die?

And they say cocksucker like it's an insult.

And I take that person.

That is a skill set.

Excuse me.

Well,

because much like Trump, a lot of these guys live in a fantasy world where, you know, look, he made it to the White House acting like a pretend tough guy.

I mean, who's to stop him in mid-act?

He made it to the White House acting like a businessman when all he does is cheat people, defraud people, and lose money.

I mean, this is what he does.

He didn't pay his contractors, so at the first opportunity when he's the head of the federal government, he stopped paying federal employees and federal contractors.

It's his M.O.

for the...

I feel like with Roger Stone, like in every kick-ass action movie, there's always like the big bad guy who's the last one that you have to kill, of course.

But then you got to like kill the henchmen.

You know, going up, you kill the main henchman, then you kill Gary Busey.

And then you kill the...

Okay, I feel like Roger Stone is Gary Busey or close.

I mean, I don't know what gets higher than Roger Stone, except like, I think, Don Jr.

And I'm waiting for Trump to be like Don Jr.

He's my son.

I met him briefly.

We were.

Which is going to be a very

short time that I knew Don Jr.

The big mystery in Mueller's indictment today, there were at least two high-level officials who talked to WikiLeaks.

One we know was Steve Bannon, but the other we know was not Steve Bannon, because Bannon wasn't on the campaign yet.

This happened in July.

It could be Don Jr.

It could be Paul Manafort.

It could be be Rick Gates.

And the language in that indictment said was instructed to go to WikiLeaks by whom?

It could be Donald Trump.

That's the mystery that everybody is waiting to see.

That's the writing on the wall.

Okay, well, you know, one of the great things we're going to be able to look back on the Trump era and be proud of is that it taught us so much about crime.

And

things I did not know.

I read this in the New York Times this week.

There is a Jewish prison.

I never knew this.

Did you see this?

Cohen's, this is Michael Cohen, is going to prison, and get, you get to request your prison.

I didn't know that either.

Cohen's prison request, Otisville, the Nirvana for Jewish offenders.

I couldn't make this.

It's in the Catskills, naturally.

It was called the Lockup of Choice for White-Collared Jewish Criminals.

Inmate Seth David said, for a Jewish person, there's no place like Otisville.

It's 120 inmates.

They're mostly doctors,

lawyers, and accountants.

I'm not making this this up.

They have a commissary that sells skull caps for $6, a kosher selection,

matzo balls, gefilte fish, seltzer.

They put out a spread like you would not believe.

I love this.

Lawrence Dressler, an inmate, says, hey, it's not Zabar's.

And it's a little overpriced, but what do you want?

It's prison.

Do we even need to do a bit about this?

Yes, we.

So we did a deep dive into this prison.

And wow, there are some, no, this is true.

Here's some other things that go on in this prison.

For example,

when an inmate drops the soap, the other inmates yell out, bend at the knees.

The big prison gang is MS-401K.

A riot can turn into wholesale slaughter, or worse, retail slaughter.

When you get the electric chair, the warden says, Would it kill you to sit down?

If you cross the line, you're looking at time in the cooler.

Cross the line again, you go back in the cooler, even closer to the air conditioning.

This is a Jewish prison.

If you misbehave badly at Otisville, you get sent up the river to Unleavenworth.

The number one thing inmates complain about is the food.

Second is the portions.

And when they toss your salad in this prison, you get the dressing on the side.

Okay, let's bring out the ambassador.

He's the former U.S.

Ambassador to Russia, an author of From Cold War to Hot Peace, an American Ambassador in Putin's Russia.

Michael McFaul is over here.

Michael,

Mr.

Ambassador.

Well, thanks for having me.

Thank you for being had because I was going to say, we look like genius is booking you on this night because all this Russian news and Roger Stone.

Oh, I just heard we don't have to think about Russia anymore.

We're done.

Exactly.

It's over.

The threat's done.

Right.

First, racism and now Russia.

It's all

coming up.

So

I saw the documentary that you are in.

I think we had the director on the show.

Right.

Active Measures.

Active Measures.

Terrific.

And really lays it out.

And you say in that something like, all the interesting things I know, I can't tell you.

And I can't tell you either.

Really?

So you know, Jack.

Even on HBO, you're not.

Even on HBO.

No, but ask me and I'll try.

Well, I mean,

what do you know about Roger Stone that is so interesting that we can't know?

Oh, I was referring to something else in there,

which is about Putin and his methods.

So the two things I know about Putin, I don't know exactly what Mr.

Trump did when he came to Russia in 2013, although I was the ambassador at the time.

But you were aware of the trip.

I was aware of the trip.

And

usually we do a briefing now that I think about it for security reasons with CEOs.

We didn't do one for.

This was with the pageant, was there?

Yes.

We made a decision that we weren't going to host a reception for the pageant.

That didn't seem appropriate,

at least for what we used to do at my house.

But we usually tell people about some things you should think about.

And you should all think about it.

Have you ever traveled to Russia?

One thing you should think about is that in Russia, they have tremendous capabilities to monitor and tape everything.

Oh, sure.

And the Ritz-Carlton, where Mr.

Trump stayed, that's a very special hotel.

Everyone is wired, right?

I mean, they're looking at everything.

That's it.

Correct.

That's why what she said about it, look, the Soviet Union has fallen.

Maybe it has, but he hasn't.

He was KGB.

He wants to rebuild the Soviet Union.

He does.

Okay.

And he wants to destroy us.

Don't forget that.

That's part and parcel of the same story.

And it's a real threat.

Let's be clear.

Like, the Soviet Union collapsed.

That was a great day.

It was a great day in my life.

But 30 years later, Russia is back and they see us as the one enemy.

And also, we never really realized, or I didn't certainly, that the animosity between the two countries went way beyond just communism versus capitalism.

It was deeper than that.

Communism did go away of sorts, although it's a quasi-communist country still, but not the dictatorship and not the animosity toward the West.

Right.

And our way of life and our way of doing things and just democracy in general.

Right.

I mean, Putin believes that we destroyed the Soviet Union.

Putin believes that we

made Russia poor.

And Putin believes, and I know because I was the poster child for this, that we interfered in his elections back in 2011 and 2012 to try to undermine him.

And that's why he sought revenge in 2016.

And he wants you.

Putin.

He does.

Unfortunately, he does.

He literally asked Trump if they would

hand you over.

The president said that was a great idea, by the way.

Everything Putin says, he says it's a great idea.

When he was in Helsinki, and they asked him, do you think the Russians meddled?

And of course he did it.

Mr.

Putin says very strongly.

And of course, when somebody says something very strongly, that's when you know it's true.

But

at one point, Putin says, I've got a great idea.

Why don't I, the criminal, work with your law enforcement people to solve who did this meddling.

And Trump goes, that's a fantastic idea.

I think that's, I'm a great deal maker, and in that.

You can't ask for a better deal than that.

Well, thank God we didn't follow through on that deal.

But I mean, it gets to the point that your point, my point, the point of this whole thing, because you guys were just talking about it earlier, right?

This notion that Russia is some kind of a benign power.

Right.

And, you know, we don't really have to think about them.

Who cares about what happens in Venezuela?

Even to those that are big sovereignty people, right?

We got to build this wall for sovereignty.

I hear that a lot, right?

Well, why shouldn't we have sovereignty over our elections?

Why don't those people care when they talk about sovereignty?

Yeah, hold on.

We didn't have that capability in 2016, and I want to fight for that sovereignty so that Americans alone choose the next president of the United States.

And what about 2020?

What do you...

Why wouldn't this crow come back to kill another chick if it worked the first time?

Well, Putin doesn't always repeat the same play, so that, you know, he may change things.

But we as a country have done virtually nothing to protect ourselves from what happened in 2016.

So basic cybersecurity for campaigns, it's not a law.

Basic rules about what kind of media that the Russian government can put

on our social platforms.

We don't have any regulation on that.

And there's one reason for it, is because President Trump refuses to recognize this as a threat, and so he blocks all those initiatives.

And it's the money at the bottom of it, right?

I mean, his own kids said, we got most of our money from Russia.

At a certain point, it's not that complicated.

He's a deadbeat.

Nobody else would lend him money except the crooked Russians.

Yes.

Right?

So he's into them.

Cut to the hookers, peeing on each other.

I don't think this is that complicated.

Well, right, it's so follow the money again.

So what I know about, I know Putin better than Trump, right?

I've known him for a long time.

It's not exactly like we're Facebook friends or anything.

Although, given what happens on Facebook these days, maybe we are.

But two things.

He uses money and compromise, right?

That's a Russian word we all learned to create leverage

inside Russia and other places.

And those two are the instruments.

Partly with those cameras at the Ritz-Carlton.

Correct.

Right.

And what do you think is on those cameras?

I don't know, but everything that happens in the Ritz-Carlton does not stay in the Ritz-Carlton.

Okay.

And this guy, this name I read this week, Carl Klein.

Yeah.

You know that, did you hear about this?

This is like one of those many stories.

Like if it was any other president, it would be a year-long story.

It gets buried.

Carl Klein, some stooge that Trump installed in the White House to cut through what is normally the process where someone has to get security clearance.

And of course, nobody in that administration could do it because they're all in bed with the Russians or some sort of foreign adversary.

So like I think 30 people?

Was it 30?

Was that the number?

30 people.

Shocking number.

Who the normal channel said, no, no, this guy does not get security clearance.

And he appoints this guy again.

I never knew this was even possible.

That you could appoint some guy just to say, fuck that, Jared Kushner gets clearance.

Well, this was whispered about two years ago.

I mean, people in the White House wondered how can somebody with those kind of financial entanglements get any kind of security clearance, and then magically he did.

And then magically other people did too.

And given the nature of the people who

were a part of this process, I mean, he had Steve Bannon on the National Security Council, right?

So this isn't exactly the sharpest minds in the military and the U.S.

intelligence

having their say in who is and isn't privy to this kind of thing.

But their whole campaign thing was about Hillary's emails, is that it was not secure, that she was a risk.

And he uses an unsecure phone and has all these fucking people in the White House who,

when they sent Jared Kushner's

form over to the CIA to get the super high clearance, the CIA said, How did he get this far?

So, this is white privilege at its height right this idea

that these

completely unqualified criminal Jared Kushner and the New York Times found didn't pay any income tax right and yet he is public servant number three who is because he's Jewish he's he's in the middle of he's the one with the prison for him

he's taking care of the Middle East crisis for us Like, he's WhatsApping with the prime, with the

Saudi Arabia.

It's unbelievable.

And, you know, my community, we look at this and we're like,

that's some white people shit.

It's not all white people.

Yeah, those don't all lump us together.

But yeah,

and speaking of that, you know, they're all, these white people are meeting in Davos.

Maybe it's over, but it was this week.

That's where all the billionaires get together.

And we learned some amazing things about wealth.

2,200 billionaires in the world, and

their wealth increased by 900 billion in 2018.

The poorest half of the world's population, so an 11% decrease.

The 26 richest billionaires are worth as much as 3.8 billion people.

26 people

semi-401k into guillotine futures.

Because it's coming.

Well, I don't know about that.

But it's interesting because when AOC said that thing about we should tax at 70%,

the first reaction, even among some Democrats, was, oh, that's crazy.

And then we found out, no, the majority of Americans agree with that.

Now, Elizabeth Warren is calling for a wealth tax.

Not just what you earn in a year, but your nest egg we're going after if it's that much.

And

what do you think?

Because that's unearned money for the the most part?

That is people who are sitting on trust funds, people who

were able to use hedge fund loopholes.

This has been a problem for as long as I've been alive.

The idea that someone who's just their entire job is to open their envelopes and see how their stocks have done is paid,

is taxed less than someone who's walking around them cleaning up after them.

And that is a problem.

We've got to look at wealth because, listen, there's an idea in this country that we're losing, that every human being has some spark of ingenuity and opportunity.

And when there's this much of a wealth divide and young people are going into debt and not being able to buy homes, we're losing out on all of that as a country.

And so it is time to redistribute.

But it's interesting.

It's overshadowed by Stone, by the shutdown, by whatever the hell Trump has done on any given day.

But this is affecting our politics and it has been.

I mean, the fallout from the financial crisis ultimately led to Donald Trump and to Bernie Sanders.

America made a bet that Trump would be the guy who would rectify this inequality.

It isn't.

But you can see that energy now shifting into the Democratic Party.

That's why I don't think we'll see guillotines, because Americans never blame rich people.

That's the tragedy of the Trump voter.

They see themselves being squeezed and they can't identify who's doing the squeeze.

They think it's immigrants and single moms who are getting, you know, the takers.

Remember the takers?

Because of the takers.

Racism of the right.

And Trump voters are

It's just that we have minority rule in this country because of voter suppression, because of gerrymandering, because of the Senate.

And that's part of what we have to address.

We have to address the inequities that are hardwired into our system that have made economic inequality so much worse.

Okay, and you do that by winning elections.

Yeah, by winning elections.

You were saying we need to win elections and you want, in the future, Americans to pick their president.

The Republican Party does not want that.

And that's why we just kicked their their ass in November.

We need to

remember that.

And the way all the things we're talking about, let's just let two things I want to say.

One, all the things we're talking about will not happen unless there's a new president.

Number two, the biggest promise, you were talking, Ann Coulter's all worried that he didn't deliver on that big promise the wall.

The real big promise he never delivered on are all those workers that she was talking about, all those people.

You know, that's my family.

I'm from Montana.

I know those people that voted for me.

He hasn't done anything for those people.

And that's what people, I think, we need to talk about moving into the next election cycle.

It's not one thing.

All this other stuff is distraction so that we can talk about it all.

But when we talk about the concrete grievances that were legitimate, he hasn't done one thing for those people.

That's what amazes me.

And the poll numbers are showing that there is...

He's probably at his lowest now.

It's like 34%.

But those people, I promise you, are not going anywhere.

That is Mrs.

Goebbels in the bunker with the cyanide,

giving the cyanide to the children because she does not want to live in a world without national socialism.

Those people are not moving.

Okay, I got your, you work at Bloomberg.

I got one more question to ask you because this pissed me off a lot.

I thought I liked Michael Bloomberg.

He's dead to me now.

He says, he's talking about marijuana.

He says,

72,000 Americans overdosed on drugs in 2017.

Yeah, none from pot.

And today, he says, we are trying to legalize another addictive narcotic.

Oh fuck, really?

An addictive narcotic, which is perhaps the stupidest thing anybody has ever done.

No, this statement is the stupidest thing anybody has ever done.

I thought Giuliani was a dumb ex-New York mayor.

I want you to quit right here on this stage.

So you're going to, I'm going to say, before I end, you're going to give me a job after

explain why this is a bad position.

If the Democrats would make this an issue, they could win elections just on legalizing pot.

We did a thing on this one.

Just the way guns are to the right wing, they love them.

It's in your home, you touch it.

It's personal.

It's not just an abstract issue.

Come out full square for

legalizing pot.

We legalized pot at the ballot box in Washington State in 2012.

The first stores opened a year and a half later.

Drug use and pot use by young people, by high school students, has not increased.

We have hundreds of millions of dollars in tax revenues to invest in Washington State.

All of the doom and gloom predictions, including, oh, if you let them make candies and pot candies and lozenges, kids will get them and we'll have zombie five-year-olds running around stoned out of the room, has not happened.

And so I don't know what Bloomberg is talking about.

And you know, they always want to leap from if you legalize pot, then you legalize heroin.

They legalized all drugs in Portugal and made it a public health issue.

And it's better.

But that's what we do, locking people up and making drugs illegal and trying to stand between people and a product they want, even if it's bad for them, does not work.

But

here's the political problem.

Here's the political problem with an anti-pot position going into 2020.

Mitch McConnell, Mitch McConnell, just came out and led the effort to legalize hemp in the farm bill.

John Boehner is working for a pot company.

Right.

If you're to the right of Republicans on the marijuana issue,

that's a tough argument to make.

Tell your boss to see me.

Can I give one dog?

Remember you did it on the show that night.

Remember, you were on that show where we choked up.

Thanks for bringing that one up.

All right.

Thank you panel.

It's time for new rules everybody.

Sorry, we'll cut that out.

All right.

New rules.

New rules.

Someone has to tell right-wing media that we got the message about how socialism is bad and the proof is Venezuela.

Socialism equals Venezuela.

Got it.

There's socialism in Venezuela.

Venezuela is socialist, and it's bad in Venezuela.

Socialist Venezuela where there are socialists in Venezuela.

I believe you, okay?

Steve Doocy hates socialism.

Now prove he can find Venezuela on a map.

New rule, there are two sides to every divorce.

An Irish woman who last year announced her marriage to a ghost now says it's over.

She says he was emotionally distant.

And if you ask him, there were days she acted like he was completely invisible.

Regardless of who's at fault, the bigger question is who gets custody of their two beautiful children?

New Roll, stop giving awards to actors for looking like crap.

Like Christian Bale in Vice and Nicole Kidman and Destroyer and Charlize Therone in Monster.

I'm not amazed they could make Christian Bale look 70.

I'm impressed that Tom Cruise falls off buildings, worships Satan, and looks 30.

New Roll, if you're going to criticize the Fox News graphic department for mistakenly displaying an obituary for Ruth Bader Ginsburg earlier this week, you must also praise them when they get one just right.

New Roll, stop saying the FCC prohibits sexualized content during NFL broadcasts.

On Sunday, we watched an entire team get fucked.

And finally, to every person on social media who's asked me since November, Bill, what do you have to say about Stan Lee?

And to every paparazzi outside a restaurant who's still shouting at me, Bill, what about the Stan Lee thing?

Okay,

your day has come.

Tonight's editorial is about Stan Lee, who, if you missed it, died in November.

And a few days later, I posted a blog that was in no way an attack on Mr.

Lee, but took the occasion of his death to express my dismay at people who think comic books are literature and superhero movies are great cinema and who in general are stuck in an everlasting childhood.

Bragging that you're all about the Marvel universe is like boasting that your mother still pins your mittens to your sleeves.

You can,

if you want,

like the exact same things you liked when you were 10.

But if you do, you need to grow up.

That was the point of my blog.

I'm not glad Stan Lee is dead.

I'm sad you're alive.

And by the way, if someone says you're being childish and you react by throwing throwing a tantrum,

you're not Iron Man.

You're irony, man.

Well, let me tell you, people were pissed about this post.

I wasn't even aware that I had ruffled so many capes

until I saw that 40,000 Twitter followers unfollowed me like that, to which I say good riddance, follow Yogi Bear.

Director Kevin Smith accused me of taking a shot when no shots are fucking necessary.

Except again, my shot wasn't at Stan Lee.

It was at, you know, grown men who still dress like kids.

One comment said that Stan Lee has inspired children to believe in something bigger than them and then added, congrats, you're a cunt on the same level that Ann Coulter is a cunt.

Boy did you pick the wrong night to tune in.

Other people tweeted things like I learned about social justice and racial tolerance by reading comic books.

Okay, but now you have pubic hair.

Read James Baldwin.

Read Toni Morrison.

Read Michael Eric Dyson.

Even a book as dumb as the Bible gets this.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child.

I understood as a child, I thought as a child.

But when I became a man, I put away childish things, including my X-Men bed sheets.

Can we stop pretending that the writing in comic books is so good?

Oh, please.

Every superhero movie is the same thing.

A person who doesn't have powers gets them, has to figure out how they work, and then has to find a glowy thing.

Justice League, glowy thing.

Iron Man, glowy thing.

Spider-Man, glowy thing.

Captain America, glowy thing.

Glowy thing, glowy thing, glowy thing.

And again.

There's nothing wrong with a man writing comic books.

There is something wrong with adults thinking they're profound.

The folks at Stan's company, Team Stan, wrote an open letter to me and said, you have a right to your opinion that comics are childish and unsophisticated.

Many said the same about Dickens, Steinbeck, Melville, and even Shakespeare.

No, they didn't.

No, no one ever said that.

No one ever said King Lear or Moby Dick was childish and unsophisticated.

If you ever read a book without pictures, you'd know that.

Team Shakespeare should write you an open letter.

Yes, Howard the Duck, Hamlet, same diff.

To thine own self be true, meet Hulk Smash.

Comics are for kids.

That's why they sell them next to the Pokemon cards and not on the aisle with the condoms and the lube.

I'm sorry, but if you're an adult playing with with superhero dolls,

I'm sorry, I mean collectible action figures,

why not go all the way and drive to work on a big wheel?

Grown-ups these days, they cling so desperately to their childhood that when they do attempt to act their age, they have a special word for it now, adulting.

Hey world, look at me.

I just made my own eye appointment.

Hashtag adulting.

Eating vegetables, adulting.

Today I wipe my own ass.

I guess I'm turning into my dad.

Marriages have been destroyed because the husbands, adult men, can't stop playing video games.

When your wife wants to have sex and you can't come to bed because you're about to level up in Fortnite,

don't be surprised when your relationship does this.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Plaza in El Paso, Texas, March 2nd.

The Pavilion in Dallas, March 16th, and the Pope Joy in Albuquerque, March 17th.

I want to thank Dan Savage, Heather McGee, Joshua Green, Michael McFull, and Coulter.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

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.