Ep. #476: Omarosa Manigault Newman, Steve Kornacki

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

Start the clock.

Right here with me.

I get to complete it.

Listen, thank you.

That's so sweet of you.

I love you too.

I love you.

There's a lot of love in this room.

A lot of love in this country.

You've heard of a slow news week?

This was a stupid news week.

First of all, look, we feel bad for the people who got hit by the hurricane.

Of course, we wish them the least pain possible.

But anytime there's a hurricane, the news turns into a wet t-shirt contest.

Every FBI is out there with a rain slicker.

I don't know if I'm watching CNN or an ad for Gorton's fish sticks.

And what

pisses me off is that what's souping up the hurricanes gets less coverage.

Hey, media, link those two.

As long as you're out there in the storm.

Link them.

Yeah, I mean a report from the UN,

the UN climate policy.

Do you see this this week says this planet has like 20 good years left?

They say it could become unlivable.

And I don't mean Tarzana unlivable.

I mean unlivable, unlivable, like kid, Tarzana.

It's a great place.

But, I mean, can you imagine that?

A UN report warning about catastrophic damage from climate change drops just as such a hurricane hits.

Only a moron could not see the connection.

Or as Trump said, I don't see the connection.

No, the hurricane is very much on Trump's mind.

He had a whole roll of paper towels stuck to his shoe.

But

yeah, the midterms are less than a month away.

Closing arguments.

Trump is calling the Democrats an angry mob.

We're an angry mob.

And the Party of Crime.

We're the mob?

We're an angry mob.

Because the only liberals I ever see with the pitchfork are composting.

That's...

He says, we're too dangerous to govern.

We're too dangerous.

We're the mob, too dangerous to govern.

And then he mentioned Diane Feinstein, and the crowd started to chant, lock her up.

That's the thing about a lynch mob.

They don't get irony.

Any woman, they don't like Hillary, lock her up.

Diane Feinstein, lock her up.

Taylor Swift.

What the hell, lock her up.

Well, she saw that Taylor Swift came out for the Democrats in Tennessee, and Trump.

Trump does not like that.

I think Taylor Swift reminds him of Hillary, a powerful blonde woman who has been rejected by millions of white men.

No.

There are reports now that Trump has finally agreed to talk to Robert Mueller.

We'll not talk, but answer 15 questions in writing.

First questions,

why did you let Kanye in the White House?

Two, what is boofing?

Three, when you do your hair and your makeup and you go outside, you do realize we can see you.

I don't know if you saw that this week but Donald Trump, our president, held a meeting at the White House to stress the importance of mental health.

He didn't mean to,

but that's.

But come on, well, I mean, really, I mean, Kanye West called for the abolishing the amendment that freed the slaves.

He said it was a trapdoor for black people, whatever that means.

And Trump was like, you had me at bringing back slavery.

But

Tanre, I mean, some of the quotes are pretty amazing.

He said, This is our president.

He has to be the freshest, the flyest, the flyest planes, the best factories, and we have to make our core be empowered.

And Trump said, I have no idea what you're saying.

And I can understand Melania, you know.

I mean,

Trump and Kanye.

One sang gold digger, one married one.

Got a kid, Melania.

All stopping.

No, she's just back from Africa.

She said she's very happy to be home.

She said, there's no shithole like home.

But I mean, that meeting this week with Kanye, it was sad.

He said he was misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder, but it was really a matter of sleep deprivation.

And then Kanye said,

I have problems too.

And

Kanye read it for 25 minutes, and Trump just sat there and listened.

And I thought, finally, at least we found someone who can make Trump shut the fuck up.

All right, we've got a great show.

Rebecca Trister, Rajan Salal is here, and Eddie Gloud Jr.

and here a little later I'll be speaking with political correspondent and author Steve Kornacki is backstage.

First up, she is the reality show star, turned White House aide, whose new book is Unhinged, an Insider's Account of the Trump White House.

I'm Arosa Meingault Newman.

Hello.

Great to meet you again.

How are you doing?

Good to see you.

How are you?

I'm thankful you're here because I don't know whether you're a liberal or conservative.

I mean, you've worked.

A lot of people don't know this before, though.

That is not the first White House you worked in, right?

You worked under Al Gore in the Clinton administration.

So this is not new to you, right?

No, I've been in politics for 20 years this year.

I went into the Clinton administration in 1998.

How would you compare the two?

Similar?

Well, in 1998, we were going through an investigation by a guy named Ken Starr.

We were faced with impeachment.

There was a lot of corruption.

Yeah, but it wasn't the same kind of corruption.

I don't think Clinton was colluding with Russia.

No.

People were sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom, and we freaked out.

No, but you know, as a young political, it was very interesting to watch how the investigation took a turn because it started out investigating one area, ended up another.

So it was very different.

But also, Washington doesn't change very much.

The president changes, but the swamp doesn't change very much.

But, well, I don't know about that either.

I feel like the swamp has moved into the White House.

I mean,

it couldn't get any swampier.

Come on, you know that.

I'm awesome.

So, okay, let's get right to it.

I saw you, I mean, I'm not, I'm sorry, a reality show fan, but I know you did one after you left.

And I remember seeing the...

Okay, and I remember seeing the promo of you like this going, it's so bad.

It was like an ad for a horror movie, you know.

It was get out.

You know, it's so bad.

And

how bad is it?

Because I'm the one who's always arguing with people in this seat who are saying, oh, come on, we've seen worse before.

And I'm like, I don't know about that.

I don't know if we've ever seen this.

I don't know if we ever had a traitor in the White House.

I don't know if a lot of things have ever been seen before.

What do you think?

What did you mean when you said, it's so bad?

Well, we were having conversations about immigration, and this is before we knew that Donald Trump was separating children from their parents at the borders and putting them in cages.

And so I knew that a lot of that was coming down the pike.

And so when I was asked if it was going to get get bad, it got pretty bad.

And those children are still separated from their parents.

Many of them have not been reunited.

And it's just really unacceptable.

And I believe that this president is causing so much damage to the institution.

So why'd you work for him?

I mean, you said, you know, you.

I mean, why'd you go to work for him?

You said because he was your friend.

So if somebody's personal friendship, but you don't believe in their politics, you can overlook that?

Yeah, you know what?

Loyalty has kept me into situations that logic would have gotten me out a lot sooner.

You were loyal to him.

I was very loyal to him.

I met Donald Trump in 2003.

Right.

We did three CEOs.

He made you a star.

And

you're a one-name person.

You just need your one name, like Share.

Thank you, Bill.

I just got compared to Cher.

No, I just said you need one name.

I didn't say you could do a residency at Caesar's.

I don't think that would go well.

But no.

But I mean,

it kind of reminds me, I know people who used to say to me, well, OJ was nice to me.

I was like, yeah, but you know.

Wait a minute.

Thinks just took a left.

No, I don't know.

I want to share to OJ.

Well, I know.

I'm just saying, just because somebody's nice to you, I mean, you certainly must have known he was a giant liar.

I don't think his personality changed.

We know it didn't change when he got to the the White House.

So you must have seen the racism and the hatred

and the lying before.

You know, it's easy to say that hindsight is 20-20.

I mean, 15 years ago, I didn't know that Donald Trump was going to be as insane and unhinged as he is.

I mean, he's.

So it's worse than when you knew him on The Apprentice?

Greatly.

I mean, even just his vocabulary.

He has like six words that he says now.

Huge.

Very soon.

Great.

I mean, back in the boardroom.

Strongly.

Strongly.

Back in the boardroom.

Not a word, but okay.

So, okay.

So back in the day, how many did he know?

He knew a lot more than just.

He's like Coco the gorilla.

He knew 500.

But you know, look, I'm not out to get you.

I never didn't like you.

You're fine.

But

the one thing I didn't like is when after you guys got elected and you said that thing about everyone's now going to have to bow down to Donald Trump.

That's not the way we talk in America.

So you, of all people, know know about saying that like that one dumb thing that everybody just, it was the stupid.

I mean,

you know, you're not the first guest to try that exactly.

I could actually argue the merits of it, but we'll move on.

No, no, no.

But it was stupid.

It was dumb, and it was something that I said in the height of campaign hyperbole.

You know, certainly I don't believe that everybody's going to bow down, but at the time, I had an audience of one.

When you work for Trump, you're not trying trying to entertain the audience, you're trying to entertain him.

Okay, that's the honest answer.

The audience of one is what so much of this country is off track about.

All of Fox News is for an audience of one.

For an audience of one, that's right.

Okay, so

tell me about some of the relationships.

Like, I'm very curious about that, you write a lot about the Trump-Kelly relationship, his chief of staff.

We've heard many times they hate each other.

He called him a moron.

He's a fucking idiot.

But they stay together.

There's something that bonds them.

What?

What is it?

They need each other in a weird way?

They're both very old, cantankerous,

insane guys that are serving, you know, serving the purpose of kind of enabling each other.

Kelly was this war hero, and now he's reduced to getting Donald Trump Diet Cokes and keeping people out of the Oval Office.

I mean, it's sad to see his reputation just reduced to what he's doing right now.

So, okay, all right, what about Ivanka and Jared?

We call them White House Kin and White House Barbie.

Everybody does it.

That's funny.

White House Kin and Barbie.

Are they smart?

I mean, Jared is the one that is the most inscrutable to me.

I can't get, because he doesn't speak.

He's the one I would be most curious to have dinner with because he might be smart.

No?

I mean, his political career started when Donald Trump decided to announce.

Oh, I know that.

Right.

And so

he's that guy in the room that thinks he's the smartest guy in the room and has absolutely no idea.

No, we know he's not knowledgeable about the field.

But you asked, is he smart?

And he didn't even know basic political jargon.

And when you try to correct him, he gives you that kind of posture: like, are you, a woman of color, really trying to tell me something and so the sad thing about it about jared is that he doesn't know how stupid he sounds when he's talking in those things

and

and ivanka is he is trump really hot for her is it is that a thing

you know he said it himself i'm just gonna say he said it himself he wanted to sleep with his daughter it's pretty disgusting

it's pretty disgusting on a daily basis he would tap he would pat her on the behind behind.

He would kiss her on the lips.

He would rub her for very long periods of time.

I mean, it was

awkward.

It's like one of those old 976 numbers, right?

In front of people?

Yeah, absolutely.

And what did she do?

Excuse me, I need a little drink.

What was her reaction to that?

She just loved it.

She loved being daddy's little girl.

She loved being daddy's little girl.

And she would always say, my daddy, and then she would correct herself, my father thinks that.

And I'm like, where'd this accent come from?

I met her when she was 15 years ago.

She wasn't talking that way.

She had a very potty mouth.

Maybe she cleaned it up for the White House.

Okay, well, I thank you for putting up with my questions.

Are you ever going to do another reality show?

I'm doing a reality show right now because

it's thrill as it gets.

Yeah, right.

And live, yeah.

no, I have a lot of projects going on.

I'm so excited.

You know, of course, the book did it well.

Thank you all for supporting it, but it all fit.

Thank you.

Really?

You all bought the book?

No, but you know, that story was just one chapter.

And so I intend to tell the rest of the story

in various formats.

Well, I'm glad you're on the scene.

And thank you for coming by our show.

Thank you.

Amarosa, ladies and gentlemen.

Okay, let's greet our panel.

Thank you.

Okay.

Okay, he is the National Review's executive editor and author of Melting Pot or Civil War.

A son of immigrants makes the case against open borders.

Ryan Salam is back with us.

How you doing?

Good to see you again.

He's a restorative religion and African American studies at Princeton University, whose latest book is Democracy in Black, How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul.

Eddie Gloud Jr., great to see you.

Hope you want TV, Eddie.

It's about time you showed up here.

She's a writer-at-large for New York magazine and author of Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger.

Our returning champion, Rebecca Traister, thank you for coming in.

Don't begin to send us your questions tonight's over time.

It's answered after the show on YouTube.

And also, for one more time, I'm going to mention next week in this time slot is our anniversary show.

I consider it a tribute to the people who have worked on this show.

It's 25 years.

We're going back to the beginning of

politically incorrect in 1993.

And some of the people who have worked on this show have worked on it for 25 years, or 24 or 23.

So us show people have trouble saying, I love you, except on camera, but I love you for all that.

And I want to start with political correctness because

a friend of mine recently said to me, why are we losing?

I guess we're not losing officially yet, but considering how awful Trump is and everything else, it seems like the Democrats should be doing better.

And, you know, 25 years ago, politically incorrect, I said,

like the godfather, political correctness.

I believed it would destroy us then, and I believe that now.

And I think people vote not so much on policy anymore.

I don't think they follow it closely.

I think they vote on who's strong.

They know Trump's an idiot, but he looks strong, and political correctness weak.

80% in this new Atlantic story that published this poll, 80% of Americans see political correctness as a problem.

And I think it's our problem.

And I don't know why more mainstream liberals don't denounce the political correctness that they must know in private conversations is insane.

And I'm going to give you some examples, but I'll ask you to jump in first.

Well, you know, I don't...

Look, I think there is going to be a blue wave.

I think the Kavanaugh bump

has impacted the recent polls.

We probably overstated the possibility of turning the Senate.

But then that's not really a wave.

Oh, no, I think we're going to see a serious shift in the House, I think.

I hope that we do, but I also want to go back to what you said about political correctness making the left look weak and that that's a bad thing.

Yes.

What have we been hearing from the right in its moment of a minority elected party in this country was just able to push through a Supreme Court nominee?

They won.

And what have they been clinging to?

A narrative about how they were attacked.

Poor Brett Kavanaugh's family, I feel so badly for what happened to him, says Donald Trump.

The mob is coming for us.

The angry mob is out there for us.

We've been attacked.

They're playing all those notes that you hear as weak when they come from the left.

The right is trying to get in.

But that's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about, I'm sorry, go ahead.

But Bill, I actually think Rebecca has a really good point.

Everyone in America feels like they're losing right now.

Democrats feel like they're losing.

Republicans feel like they're losing.

Democrats feel like they're locked out of power.

Republicans feel like they've lost the culture.

And it really is true.

Maybe you don't agree with that perception, but there are people who really feel as though their values are being effaced.

They feel like a hounded minority.

And as crazy as that might sound to people who disagree with them, I think that feeling is real.

I think they're performing loss in a moment of victory.

I think it's deeply genuine.

I think that people really do feel a genuine sense of loss and a loss of cultural power.

And you're right to suggest that people think that political power and the exercise of political power is one way to push back against a culture that really does feel lost.

What the hell do we mean when we use the phrase political correctness?

I'll give you an example.

There's like 10 stories a week.

Let me just give you.

Scott Kelly, you're familiar, the astronaut.

Okay.

He tweeted, one of the greatest leaders of modern time, Sir Winston Churchill, said, in victory, magnanimity, I guess those days are over,

had to issue an apology for that, for quoting Churchill, because Churchill, I guess,

lived by the standards of the 19th century.

Let me just finish, because

he said, I did not mean to offend by quoting Churchill.

My apologies.

I will go and educate myself further on his atrocities.

This is the guy who saved us from the Nazis.

And, you know, he was a fighter pilot, married to Gabby Gifford, who was shot and bravely continues on.

And somebody, and people on Twitter, and no one denounces this, and he has to make an apology.

Hold up.

This is when the Trump people go, yes, you people are too fragile to be in control of the government.

No, no, no.

What if it was the case that

he realized that the invocation of Winston Churchill wasn't consistent with what he values?

That he didn't know everything about Churchill.

And then he realized that Churchill, in 1943, sanctioned the starving of Indians in Bengal.

He realized, in fact, that Churchill was, in fact, a vehemently committed racist to the Imperial Project.

He realized that Churchill did not represent his...

So what I mean by this, I want to say this really quickly.

For those who have been caught under the foot of history, you just can't simply invoke the mandate of history as a reason to accept certain figures.

Hold up, hold up.

Of course.

You can't just simply mandate.

So Lincoln comes to me.

I can embrace Abraham Lincoln, right?

I can embrace his view of democracy.

But then I realized that Lincoln held a view that white people mattered more than black people.

Now, once I understand Lincoln fully, I can then embrace him on my own terms.

But I cannot accept Lincoln just because the West declares him as great.

I have to accept him like I'm you know.

But every time I bring up Lincoln, do I have to apologize first?

That's not what he's saying in that moment.

Well, I think that's what I'm saying.

Yeah, and in part, what we write off as

political correctness is correcting a record that has been too simple, that we haven't been taught the complexities, that the power that we so often are taught to celebrate or admire purely is built on inequity and bias that is not often revealed to us.

And it's a matter of correction.

And the other problem is that when we focus on these things, like the Twitter controversy around

hailing Winston Churchill,

we are taking part in representing this as left activism, that this is the left wing when in fact there are strikes going on.

There are strikes for higher wages, strikes against sexual harassment by McDonald's.

But when we focus on the flare-ups on Twitter and not on the record numbers of women and people of color running for office for the first time against Democratic Party,

we miss what liberal legal.

Okay,

I was asking the question, why do we lose?

And no one's answering that.

Respectfully, I mean, I guess my thinking is that I think that both Rebecca and Eddie bring up really important points.

We are in a moment of incredible cultural flux.

And in a moment of cultural flux, people feel really insecure.

My own feeling is that that gentleman should have stuck to his guns, but the thing is that he believes he does not know where things are going to go.

Three months from now, six months from now, he does not know if he's going to be anathematized for this.

It induces this huge sense of panic.

And I do believe that, you know, when you're in this kind of moment of flux, people are trying to figure out how to position themselves.

What is the high status thing?

to do.

And that's why I think that just everyone feels afraid in this kind of a moment.

Okay, but if you don't think these purists are doing us harm, I think you're missing a big point.

I think they wake up and say, how can we make our club smaller?

And then they ask for a lot of people who are not.

I think the purists are doing folks on the right and the left harm.

There's conservative political correctness too, right?

Yes, there was a lot of people.

The idea that you can't actually make a mistake, the idea that you can't revise your view over time, this kind of politics of negation is so incredibly extreme, and I think that everyone feels hounded and wounded by it.

Not everyone, excuse me.

Not necessarily everyone on the panel right now, but I do think there are a lot of people who feel very tentative and insecure.

Can I go back to your question about why we lose?

Yes, because I think that the question about winning and losing often leaves out the fact that there is one party in this country that has enormous power.

And again, I mentioned they're not the popularly elected party, right?

The president is not elected by the majority of American voters.

And they have a stranglehold on the very mechanisms that then they can use to suppress the activism of the left.

Look at the voting headlines from this week, right?

No, but this is really key to why we win and lose.

And

53,000 voters being suppressed by Brian Kemp in Georgia, 70% of them black, 470,000 voters purged in Indiana.

The Supreme Court this week, with its new member, Brett Kavanaugh, upheld a decision that means that effectively disenfranchises Native Americans, right?

These are mechanisms that they can use to make sure they win the Koch brothers' money pouring in as of October 1st.

And part of their other mechanism is to cast their opposition as whiny snowflake purists.

And so they encourage this frame.

We support the powerful's frame of dissent when we focus on that.

But groups have to.

Groups are only successful when they call out their crazies.

The Republican Party doesn't.

You could say that radical Islam has that problem, people calling out the crazies, and I think we have that problem too.

I mean, NPR will not use the term homeless, people affected by homelessness.

I'm just saying, Trump people, independent people, just normal people not here on the coasts, hear stuff like that and they go, you know what, I don't know that much about policy, but you know, this is just too fragile.

I can't let these people in the Oval Office because they're just too weak.

I think that there are, forgive me, Eddie.

I think there are a lot of liberals who feel exactly this way.

And I think that when we're looking at the voices that are most amplified in our politics,

these are voices that find themselves in echo chambers, and these are the places where you look for status and prestige.

And you see this on the right as well as the left, but I think that the left, given its outsized cultural voice in our politics, you see a lot of this.

Yes.

And I think that it really is alienating from a lot of people.

I don't think it's most liberals.

I think just the way Trump is a bully, the PC police are bullies.

And that's

empowering.

It's exciting.

People like it.

It's very fun in a way.

and that's why we see more of it.

Okay.

Go ahead.

I just find this really odd.

And I find it odd for a couple of reasons.

One, I think we take the exaggerated example to dismiss the principle.

So at the heart of political correctness is this reality that this country is no longer a white nation in the vein of old Europe.

And so that means white men, white straight men, can't walk around saying whatever the hell is on their minds.

That's right.

That's right.

Really.

You know?

Really?

So, so and I'm not trying to make this.

I'm not trying.

What do you mean about Scott Kelly?

Can't say

what part of Churchill without a population.

No, I take Scott Kelly.

I take him to say that I didn't know everything about Winston Churchill.

And Winston Churchill probably doesn't represent what I value.

So part of what I'm trying to get at is this, right?

The country is changing.

Dramatic demographic shifts are happening.

See, people are insecure because

the culture is shifting.

And one of the things that's shifting is that certain folk can't go around saying no one's arguing they can argue without being held to account

one thing I think it's really important to emphasize the people who are most vulnerable to this are people of color who hold dissenting opinions in their communities these are people who really feel silenced interest and these are people who do not look that's an interesting move it's look it's actually also deeply true there are lots of folks who feel totally invisible because the college educated upper middle income people who serve as stand-ins for people who belong to category X, Y, or Z are not necessarily representative of 100% of the people who belong to these various categories.

When you look at liberal Muslims, for example, when you look at Muslims who are looking at talking about let's have more freedom, let's have more secularism, these are folks who oftentimes feel silenced and afraid.

You see this in many other groups too.

I'm not saying that the people of these dissenting opinions are right.

Many times they might be totally wrong.

What I'm saying is that they exist and they are invisible in these spaces.

And this drive for status and prestige, I keep saying that

that drive silences a lot of folks.

Pursuant to this conversation, because if you criticize Islam at all, the politically correct police will say you're a bigot.

Including if you're a Muslim and good.

It all depends on how you criticize Islam.

Well, of course.

So part of what I'm trying to do, we have the nuance.

It all depends on how you render your critique.

Great.

That was a nice move in the sense that part of what happens in this context.

It was pretty sincere, actually.

I know it was sincere, but part of what happens is the way in which a certain kind of victim discourse can then be appropriated so that you could play, because I think Republicans have mastered this pincer move.

On the one hand, they revel in the spoils of victory, exercising Machiavellian power, and then when they get called out for doing what they do, they clutch their pearls and then claim to be victims.

Which is what's happening around Kavanaugh.

That is exactly the dynamic.

That is exactly the dynamic that I described around Kavanaugh.

This is we have been attacked and they're using it as leverage to suggest that that they are the victimized.

Okay, Bill, I just want to say there are two kinds of spirals we have right now.

You have rage spirals and you have self-satisfaction spirals.

And the self-satisfaction spirals are really powerful and addictive.

You are in a space where you're affirmed, people cheer for you when you say certain things, and it's amazing and it's addictive.

And it's why Republicans and Democrats both lose.

Because you have Republicans who find themselves solely in their affirming space, and you have lots of liberals who are in the exact same space.

That's what I think of as political correctness, whether of the right or the left.

It's a self-satisfaction spiral.

Okay, let's bring on Steve Cornack

as a palate cleanser.

Steve, he runs the big board as national political correspondent for NBC News and MSNBC.

His book is The Red and the Blue: The 1990s and the Birth of Political Tribalism.

Steve Cornacki is over here.

Steve.

Great pleasure to meet you.

What a pleasure to meet you.

I love watching you because, you know, everyone has an opinion, as you can see.

And you're the guy who doesn't.

I love that.

You're Joe Friday.

Just the facts, ma'am.

Well, thank you.

And I really appreciate that.

And also, your enthusiasm for the subject of politics is so infectious and so real.

And I wonder, where do you get that?

My father was a news guy in radio.

That's where I got it.

Where did you get it?

You know,

election nice.

There's always something.

At a young age, I kind of followed a governor's race when I was a kid in Massachusetts, and the campaign was fascinating.

But the election night, just watching, it was the map of Massachusetts, it was 1990, it was a very close race, and watching the political character of each town and city get revealed almost like pieces in a puzzle.

And at the end of it, I felt like I was in sixth grade, but I felt like I understood a little bit about the state I lived in, and I try to take that to every election I cover.

Wow.

So

this one.

The cycles change so quickly that, you know, between the time the show started and now maybe you have a whole bunch of different information.

But like, I was feeling pretty good about the Senate only like a week ago, and now I feel like

it was a waste of money, wasn't it?

I mean, yeah, look, if the election were held tomorrow, everybody went out and voted tomorrow, I don't think there's a scenario where the Democrats get the Senate.

That's so disappointing.

It's so important, the Senate.

Now, this is the thing, though.

I think there could be two tracks that are developing here.

Because think about it this way.

There are three races.

The Democrats have to win one of them to get a shot at the Senate.

And those three races would be North Dakota, Tennessee, or Texas.

Must win one if you're a Democrat to be in the game.

If you get shot out of all three, you're out.

Now, the reason the Senate seems to be fading from the picture for Democrats is they've gotten bad to devastating news in all of those states this week.

But think about those states and the political character of them.

North Dakota, Trump won it by 36 points, Tennessee by 26, Texas by 9.

Control of the Senate is being decided in Trump country, in deep red pro-Trump states.

Now flip it over to the House.

Democrats need a net gain of 23 seats to pick up the House.

How many districts are there in the House that are Republican-held but that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016?

The answer is 25.

So the math gets different in the House.

When you start talking about where we've seen the Democratic energy, it could work in the House and be useless in the Senate.

Useless in the Senate.

That's my takeaway there.

Maybe not.

We still have time.

And it could be anything.

I mean, we really don't know.

And also, it's so, I mean, this is a lot about what your book is about, where the tribalism started.

I feel like it's so tribal now that in

years past, you could go against someone in your own party if they did something outrageous.

And now everything is just my party, my color.

It's almost like the Crips and the Bloods.

Same colors.

Listen, there was a poll taken taken in 2016.

There was a poll taken in 2016 that essentially asked people, you know, would you be upset if your son or daughter married somebody from the other political party?

Right.

And for Democrats and Republicans,

both answered yes, over 60%.

I mean, those are numbers you used to get for interracial marriage.

And that is how personal the definition of parties become for people.

This idea of red and blue, we think red and blue have been with us forever, or at least all of modern political history.

They really originated on election night 2000.

It It was the first time we looked at an election map in a generation and saw a close race.

And we didn't just see a close race.

We saw deep divisions that were regional, cultural, demographic, and they've been with us since.

You blame Newt Gingrich for a lot of this.

And that made me happy.

I don't know.

And that was right after the Clarence Thomas.

I always thought it was the Clarence Thomas that really kicked Bork and then into Clarence, that really kicked off this new era where the other party, the other people are the other, to where we get to this point now where it's very, very frightening.

I'm frightened because Trump talks every day about us in some way.

The enemy of the people is the press.

Talks about that we're an angry mob.

I mean, when you talk about angry mob, that sounds like he's setting up at some point, you know, we're going to need martial law until we find out what the hell is going on.

You see any way back from that?

Geez, well,

when you mentioned Newt Gingrich, where I think the origin of all of this comes from is the thing that Gingrich got early on in his career, ahead of almost anybody else in politics, was that the future of politics was in nationalizing politics and that media was evolving in a way that was conducive to that.

And Gingrich was living in a world in the 70s and 80s on his way up where Republicans were dominating in presidential elections.

I mean, Reagan got 49 states in 84, Bush senior 40 in 88.

So the Gingrich theory was simple.

You nationalize politics, you make every Democrat in everybody's backyard look just like this national party they've been rejecting, you win everything.

And the media, you know, the proliferation of cable news, all of the other sources of information, Gingrich found a way to nationalize through this expanding media.

But what happened was he gets to his highest moment in 1994, gets the Congress for the first time in 40 years, and politics is nationalized.

Now people start looking at the Republican Party differently.

They start looking at it as the party of Newt Gingrich, a party.

that now has a heavy Christian conservative influence in it and maybe didn't before.

And Gingrich was half right in his vision of politics, basically.

Half the country was roughly going to respond to his version, but the other half was going to respond against it.

And I think that's where we are in politics now.

It's as much about what you and your party are for as who you are against and who is against you.

So who's the key voting bloc this time?

I hear a lot about white women who went for Trump, that maybe that's going to switch.

So that's where the energy is.

I think there's at least the potential energy on the Democratic side.

Think of these suburban areas.

Think of metro areas around the country.

D.C., Chicago, Kansas City, Dallas, Southern California.

You can find those 25 districts.

A lot of them have

the opportunity there, if Democrats can harness it, for female voters, women voters who are upset by Kavanaugh or upset by Trump to swing the balance in those districts, where it gets more complicated.

Will they?

Well, historically,

we thought women would go against Trump because we had a pussy grabber in the last election.

We thought women would go against Trump.

White women.

Because the history of white women in politics in this country is since 1952 when they've been measuring it.

There are only two elections that white women haven't voted for Republicans.

They did a little better in 2016 than they did in 2012.

53% of them in 2016, 56% of them voted for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama.

There have always been incentives on the table for white women who benefit in a white patriarchy via white supremacy and their proximal power via white white men in upholding a fundamentally conservative white patriarchal power structure, white women have historically voted conservatively and on behalf of the white men to whom they are attached.

The question is,

is a small percentage enough to change the game persuadable?

We have seen some evidence.

There was a story in the Times this week about white evangelical women in Texas who are breaking with their husbands in their support for Beto O'Rourke over Ted Cruz.

There's also a question, not just about converting Republican women and Trump voters, but some of the moderate white women who may have been apathetic, perhaps didn't vote, and certainly weren't activists.

There has been

a re-energizing of suburban white women who have previously sat out, not been vocal, even if they pushed levers for Democrats, certainly didn't say anything about it.

And these are a lot of the women who are powering the resistance movements right now, involved in the new activist groups, going out, knocking on doors, fundraising, many of them, and lots of new candidates are running for office.

These are questions, but history doesn't tell us to be hopeful for the white women.

We have to see it first.

Yeah.

63% of white women voted for the women.

Kanye West said that Trump gave him male energy.

That

he lives in a house with a lot of women and he grew up around women and he kind of Trump helped him get his balls back.

Just as a white patriarchy offers white supremacy to white women, it offers patriarchy to men across races and participation in patriarchal power as a way way to get them to support the power structure.

And I think those are some of the dynamics you're seeing around Kanye West.

Yeah, I think it's, we have first, my heart goes out to Kanye West, something is wrong.

And I don't want to, you know what I mean?

Something is wrong there.

And so

I don't want to make fun of

something that I take to be serious in terms of his mental health.

But I also want to make the claim that the way in which he wants to participate in a kind of toxic masculinity, I'm using those leftist phrases now.

I was saying.

A kind of toxic masculinity that Trump affords him, right?

And the fact that Trump, who plays custodial politics so badly, right?

You know, every politician thinks they need to just invite one black person into the room and then that black person can represent all the black people.

Tell me what black people think, right?

Trump just does it so badly.

He doesn't go get Al Sharpton.

He goes and gets Kanye West.

Right?

And all of it to me reflects a kind of disdain for black voters because you think you could hurt us to the polls like cows chew and cut by just simply getting a celebrity out of it.

Just one thing I want to throw out there.

When you're talking about voters of color, the Marist survey recently found that 41% of Hispanic voters are supportive of Donald Trump, 12% of African-American voters, not a majority, a very small minority, but 12% ain't nothing.

And when Steve Cornacki's brilliant book, one of the things he talks about in the early 90s, it's really striking.

You had this group of voters you might call indeed him.

Standing right there.

You might talk about

radical centrists, right here.

Working class folks who are swing voters they were Reagan Democrats before they've never really cemented to the Republican Party some of them did vote for Donald Trump this has been a big conversation about those Hillary Clinton voting Republicans but there are also those folks who voted for Obama and then voted for Donald Trump and they're sort of ambivalent right now and actually cementing that constituency is something folks have been trying to do since the early 90s on the Republican side and I do think some of them are women some of them are men but that is a really important constituency the Republican Party has really failed to fully bring in the tent.

Okay.

Before we run out of time, I did want to bring up something I think that's kind of important, this report I mentioned.

300 government officials, economists, scientists, and industry executives gathered at this Energy Convention symposium, and a leading nuclear weapons physicist said at the event, it has been calculated that temperature rise corresponding to a 10% increase in carbon dioxide will be sufficient to melt the ice caps caps and submerge New York.

All the coastal cities would be covered, and since a considerable percentage of the human race lives in coastal regions, I think that this chemical contamination is more serious than most people tend to believe.

That was Edward Teller in 1959.

Rock-ribbed conservative, by the way.

He was a, yeah, I mean, it's just fascinating that, honestly, it's just a sign of how much the politics of these issues is.

Everybody's got to apologize for something before you go on with it.

But the UN climate report that came out this week says basically 2040 we could see a world that we just can't recognize and I don't know what people have to,

what fire has to be lit under them because we see it happening right now.

And I guess the problem is we walk outside here in Los Angeles and it was a beautiful day.

And when Kanye said, I thought the funniest thing he said was, we can't think about tomorrow.

Yeah, but maybe we should think about tomorrow.

I seem to to remember somebody actually running on the slogan, don't stop thinking about tomorrow.

No comments on that?

Okay, all right.

Let's

go.

So, for example, carbon capture and storage, the tax credit for that has drastically increased.

That's legislation Donald Trump signed.

He signed legislation that's designed to boost advanced nuclear.

He is someone who has said a lot of random things about climate change, but there are things happening behind the scenes in which Democrats and Republicans are working together.

And the problem is that there's so much enmity.

Really?

That must be very, very, very far behind the scenes.

Yeah, it is.

But that's kind of the point, Bill.

There's so much partisan enmity right now, exactly what Steve was talking about, that actually it's only in those spaces where you haven't politicized something yet, when it hasn't become a partisan issue, that's when you actually have to do it.

It's not a partisan issue.

It shouldn't be.

And I agree with you.

But you combine what you just said with the fact that he's rolling back

emissions for cars and light trucks, that he's

trying to roll back Obama-era regulations on methane gas, coal power plants.

He says radiation is good for you.

Deregulation, the policy of deregulation and

what it means for our environment, right?

I mean, almost everyone is a lot of people.

Absolutely.

He's trying and failing.

He is trying and failing because, frankly, he's doing it in such slapdash fashion that these things aren't making it through the courts.

This is just a reality.

Last question, Jamal Khashoggi, if you don't know who he is, he is a Saudi national.

He's been living in this country, Washington Post reporter.

He went into the Turkish, the Saudi Sultan Consulate in Turkey October 1st, I think.

Has not come out since.

They believe a hit squad from Saudi Arabia killed him.

I feel like any other president would have protested.

But I guess that's my question.

Would it have happened anyway, or is it tied to a president who calls the press the enemy of the people?

Sorry, just to weigh in here, I definitely

have to be panelists.

Just, I think that a lot of the information we have on this is coming from Turkey.

And Turkey is a country that arrests and imprisons journalists left and right.

I want us to not rush into anything and really be thoughtful and careful about what's going on.

This guy's dead, and the Saudis did it.

That's that's not, I don't think that's going to change.

The U.S.

intelligence agencies have said that they were intending to capture him and bring him back to Saudi Arabia.

That is really, really bad, but we really do not know what happened here, in my opinion, just yet, before we do something really rapid.

Hypothetically, if the Saudis killed him.

And Trump says, you know, because we have this arms deal where he's selling, you know, that's the way Trump rolls, you rub my orb, I rub yours.

Oh, there it is.

Look at that.

Wow.

That's a good department.

It gets that up quickly.

The expectation that he would react to this with anything different from who we know he is.

He loathes the press.

He makes enemies of the press.

This man is not a citizen.

He doesn't particularly care about citizens if they're not the right kind of citizens, but he certainly doesn't care about anybody who's not a citizen.

The idea that we have seen anything in Donald Trump that suggests that he values human life over imaginary numbers that he spits out about $110 billion in arms sales, I don't see any evidence in anything we've seen that he would react to this any differently for me.

And what he's done, he's just thrown away the illusion that the U.S.

is the defender of democracy and freedom.

Right, we stand for nothing.

We stand for nothing more.

We stand for money.

That's it.

Just pure unadulterated green.

And, you know, I keep rooting for the recession because I think it'll be bad for Donald Trump.

But you know what's different about this one?

And I have the book here about red and blue and tribalism.

And the overlap right now, at least in the initial reaction to this, I am seeing Democrats, but I'm also hearing hearing Republicans who are condemning Saudi Arabia, Republicans who are stepping forward.

So you're actually right now in the early stages of this.

But you always have that.

Jeff Flake makes his sad face.

It doesn't.

They do a big deal.

That's as much as you can get.

And then they support him.

Yeah, exactly.

But it does have the effect, doesn't it?

Sometimes Trump, when he stepped, during the campaign, support, excuse me, I should say, opposition to the wall actually went up.

as Trump campaigned on it.

So sometimes it has this reverse effect on the business.

Politics is like a thermostat.

I think that to build on Steve's point, one thing that is really scary to me about our politics is that almost foreign policy has become partisan.

Republicans don't like China.

Democrats hate Russia.

It's incredible.

Saudi Arabia, Turkey, all of these things, they're partisan issues.

Politics isn't ending at the water's edge now.

Okay, thank you, panel.

Time for New Rule.

New Rule Gravity Industries, the company that makes this flying jetsuit, has to lend me a bunch of them so I can convince Pat Robertson the rapture's here and he's being left behind.

New real people in LA who are always saying, Oh, I missed the seasons back home, have to do the traffic a favor and move back there.

Really, no one in Los Angeles is holding you prisoner.

I mean, unless you're in Scientology,

Plus, we do have four seasons here in LA, and they're all great.

There's fire,

Oscar,

Mudslide, and Sex Tape.

New Rule as a compromise, men who lost their careers to debatable Me Too allegations can make a comeback, but they have to wear a dog cone for a while.

New rule, if you take the time to write a negative comment on YouTube, you're not allowed to act like the video you watched was a waste of your time.

That's two minutes of my life, I'm never going to get back.

What exactly would you have done with those two minutes?

My guess: watch a YouTube video and then write, that's two minutes of my life, I'm never getting back.

New rule, rap rap mogul Suge Knight has to explain how someone can already be in prison and still keep getting sent to prison.

Oh, and if you think surfing time was stressful before, where do you meet the new guy who keeps telling you to pull your pants up?

And finally, New Rule, let's hit pause on this growing consensus among Democrats that we can only beat Trump in 2020 by running a celebrity of our own.

How did we go in two years from wow, it could be a celebrity to it can only be a celebrity?

When I asked my Democratic friends about the plan for 2020, they say two things: What's a plan?

And we need a star.

That's it.

The blueprint for saving us from fascism is rub a lamp and hope Tom Hanks pops out.

Or Oprah, but if...

But

if Oprah is president, who will tell cat ladies what to read?

The Rock says he hasn't ruled out running in 2020, but

if The Rock is president, who's going to star in every movie ever made?

Especially movies with the premise, that movie, except with The Rock.

Like Towering Inferno with The Rock, King Kong with The Rock, Jumanji with The Rock, Faywatch with The Rock, Walking Tall with The Rock,

Earthquake with.

How about The Rock?

If he did run, his hat would say, remake America great again.

Many Democrats feel they found star quality in Michael Lebanetti.

He's like if the hot felon had a law degree.

And it's great the way he makes Trump so mad he can't pronounce his name right.

Another woman just reported by a sleaze-bag lawyer named Aviate.

Aviante?

Are you always thinking about pasta?

Look, I understand the temptation to pick a celebrity.

After all, Trump started with a big advantage because he was a household name like Spam or Preparation Age.

And in today's political atmosphere where substance makes you an elitist and experience means you're part of the swamp, it's like the whole country just went, fuck it, the government can't do anything.

Which candidate will give us the most laughs?

And it wasn't even close.

Donald Trump has no friends.

No one will tell him when he has fucking toilet paper on his shoe.

I mean,

look at him.

He will do anything for a laugh.

I'm very presidential.

But when the prime directive for government goes from keep us safe to keep us entertained, that's bread in circuses, end of the empire stuff.

There are people who are actually excited about Kanye West in politics.

These people are called idiots.

He's eccentric, they say.

No, he's standing in the punch bowl fucking the ice sculpture.

The Democrats' message in 2020 should be, let's get back to normal.

And President Ariana Grande does not send that message.

Of course, celebrities in politics isn't new, but it was always something mostly Republicans did.

Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Sonny Bono, game show host Donald Trump.

The party that endlessly proclaims its disdain for Hollywood will literally run any celebrity who's a conservative.

And it wasn't that long ago they were using the word celebrity as a burn.

He's the biggest celebrity in the world.

But is he ready to lead?

Turns out he was ready to lead.

Because he wasn't black Paris Hilton.

He was a politician.

Government was his skill, his life, his calling.

Like the Kennedys before him and FDR, he was a star, but a star because of what he accomplished in office.

Yes, Obama enjoyed his TV time, but he did it to sell policy, not to do robot voice.

Trump doesn't need to do fallon because he is fallon.

Republicans elect a celebrity who becomes a politician.

Democrats, at their best, elect a politician who's so good at public service, they become a celebrity.

Okay, that's our show.

Next week, right at this time slot is our anniversary show.

We'll be back on October 26th.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas, October 26th and 27th.

I want to thank Rayan Salam, Eddie Glow Jr., Rebecca Traister, Steve Parnacki, I'm Marosa, Magadh Newman.

Stay tuned for the premiere of Pod Save America right after this.

And join us now for

Overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.