Overtime - Episode #479: Bob Woodward, Sarah Silverman, Katty Kay, Cornell Belcher, Bret Stephens

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

Yeah, he's not my job.

Bob Woodward and Caddy Kay, a question for you.

How important is it for the press to band together when reporters like Jim Acosta are attacked by the administration?

It is.

You know, we've got reporters this week who have worked in China and Uzbekistan who are giving advice to reporters working working in America.

I mean, that tells you something about the world we're in, right?

Where they are having to say, okay, this is how you handle this sort of situation where press freedom is getting eroded.

And the one thing, a piece of advice from the reporter in China was the aim of the government will be to try to divide you, because if they can divide the press corps, then they can play one-off against each other and they weaken them.

But I think that we're taking the bait in the press, and Trump is just throwing it out on the table and saying, you know, you're the enemy of the people, and then we get all steamy and emotionally unhinged about it.

Now, the way to work together is when the New York Times or the BBC have a great story for the Washington Post to follow it and dig and get specifics and make the case for the truth.

And that means lots of work.

And let's face it, we've become lazy.

And we have to stop becoming lazy.

Yeah.

And vote and vote in the Washington Post following the Times rather than the other way around.

Just cutting that out.

I actually thought he was going to say for the New York Times and the BBC to give stories to I thought that's where we were heading.

But it's about the quality of information.

The New York Times had a great story on Trump's taxes and how the real estate market in New York City works.

And we wrote one story about it.

We should do more.

We should have got his tax returns.

I should have got his tax returns.

I feel guilty

every day about not getting his tax returns.

It's so important not to be baited by every tweet because Trump is playing the press.

And that is his skill.

You talked about his, Sarah talked about him as the ideal eight-year-old.

I see him as like a cunning 12-year-old.

I mean, maybe that's a subject for debate.

But he's the classic

eighth grade bully, and he knows exactly where to poke someone, where it hurts.

McCain said something so smart before he died.

He said, you can't be the car alarm that's constantly going off.

Pick your battles, pick them wisely.

Okay, this is for Bill and Sarah.

At the same time.

Oh, sorry.

Well, at the same time,

I think it's about

pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing the way he does.

He repeats and repeats and repeats.

and there is something about writing multiple stories and pushing and pushing and pushing and being that car alarm.

I'm guessing I'm not a

car alarm who goes off.

Right.

Because that's when people stop even noticing.

And the risk is that audiences tune off, everybody thinks, oh, this is normal because we heard this 15 times yesterday and every tweet gets reported.

And the trouble is while you're distracted report, it's really hard to cover Trump because every day there are 15, my jaw is on the the floor things that you could be covering, and you don't have time to go down to the border and look what's happening with families and see how many people are being deported and go around the country and find out what's happening under this administration.

And Bill talked about the dictator playbook, and the great line attributed to Stalin is: the death of one person is a tragedy, and the death of a million is a statistic.

One lie will haunt Bill Clinton into his grave, but a million Trump lies, you can't remember a single one of them.

But if I may,

we let important stories go by, like the tax cut.

The tax cut is one of the great deceits of all time.

It's designed that, you know,

there were six people who made the tax cut.

Four people from Congress, two people, the Treasury Secretary from Goldman Sachs and Gary Cohen, who was the president of Goldman Sachs.

They sat around a table, and I think they had to go in and wipe the drool off the table because these people were so happy to have all this money that they can give to rich people.

And they took the corporate tax rate from 35%

to 21%.

Trump was disappointed.

He wanted to take it to 15%.

And everyone got a tax break, but the working people's tax break expires, but the corporate tax break does not.

And why are we letting this kind of, oh, well, that happened.

And essentially, Trump ran on saying, oh, isn't it great this wonderful tax cut?

It has given us a wonderful economy.

Well, if you know, talk to economists left, center, and right, we now have an additional $1 trillion

deficit because of this.

Somebody's going to have to pay for that.

And that's what the Republican classic candidate would say.

Remember these kind of Republicans when we were just about the debt and we can't be running up the debt?

That's what a Republican classic guy would say.

Russia, right?

The enemy.

And literally, there are four of them left in Washington.

Exactly.

Can I say one quick thing on the media and sort of the propaganda and how it's working?

And it ties back into your conversation about millennials.

So I sit in folks groups with a lot of millennials,

and it's working.

They are tuning out of mainstream news because they don't want to hear it anymore.

And I was sitting with some millennials about two months ago, and they didn't know who Mueller was.

They don't know anything about the investigation, right?

So it's a disconnect.

And then, of course, to your point, then they don't vote.

So what Trump is doing is diabolic, but it is actually working.

Yeah, that's the problem.

Well, it's the people within the ears of a sog whistle are, they say things that they don't even,

they say we like Russia just to be,

I mean, it's just

to make the libtards cry.

That's a lot of what it is.

And so the tax thing is just like,

it doesn't take much on Google to follow the money and see how things all suss out.

I mean, billionaires cost Americans money more than anybody else.

We're subsidizing the garbage they they pay their workers.

Amazon, valuated at a trillion dollars in 2017, paid zero dollars in taxes.

That's what the tax, I mean, it's bananas.

Look at the facts I know now.

This is for, I guess the questions are for two people today.

This is for you and me.

Has it become increasingly difficult to make others laugh since Trump took office?

I guess they're saying because, you know, the premises are the punchlines.

I guess that's what the question is.

I mean, for sure.

And also.

I I don't think it's more difficult.

I mean, there's more material than ever, right?

I mean,

it's insane.

I mean,

usually presidents have one thing.

You know, Clinton was horny, and Bush was stupid.

This guy's everything.

He's horny, and he's stupid.

You're right, exactly.

The humor's darker.

I mean, they're like jokes out of the Soviet Union, right?

It was funny

when you weren't in the gulag.

Right, exactly.

All right, thank you, audience.

Thank you, panel.

One more week.

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