Ep. #473: Michael Moore, P.J. O’Rourke

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

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

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

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

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

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

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

Start the clock.

I could listen to it all night, but

it's such a big news week.

I mean, obviously, let's get right to the big story.

The fate of the Supreme Court and maybe the nation hangs in the balance.

I'm kidding, Stormy Daniels wrote a book about Trump's dick.

Screwed, he did.

It's called It Takes a Village to Find It.

No.

No.

It's called Full Disclosure.

And Trump says he isn't commenting.

He hasn't seen it, his dick, not the book.

It's been years.

And it's not all about his dick, but it's a lot about his dick.

And Stormy Daniels, who would know, and she says it is small, but it has a big head like a mushroom.

That's what she said.

A head like a mushroom.

Also, it stands for the national anthem.

Other than that, it's a normal, normal penis.

Okay.

All right.

Let's get to the other dick in the news.

Brett Kavanaugh is the,

this time last week Brett Kavanaugh was heading to

be on the nation's highest court and now he is heading to the world's worst high school reunion

Because

Anonymous is not anonymous anymore We have an extremely credible woman a psychology professor who says back in 1982 when she was 15 and Kavanaugh was 17 Kavanaugh and a friend attacked her at a party and Republican defenders are saying that we shouldn't be revisiting things that happened decades ago, which is what I say about Roe versus Wade.

But

their other big lot is that, you know, if we're judged by what we did in high school, oh my God, none of us would have jobs.

Okay, well, you know what?

It's true.

We all did stupid things.

when we were young.

I sold pot in college,

but I never pinned anyone down and forced the pot in their throat.

You know what I'm saying?

Roy Moore is defending.

Really, the Republicans, boy, they get in like Roy Moore is defending Brett Kavanaugh.

He said, What they're doing to Brett Kavanaugh makes him very mad.

He's also very mad that he wasn't invited to that party with the teenagers.

Party.

Party, it was five people.

I only found this out.

Five people.

This could be investigated so easily by the FBI if the Republicans wanted to go that route, you know, an actual investigation.

It's okay.

I mean, it's a small community.

Britt Cavita went to an all-boys Catholic prep school.

It's the kind of place where the kid goes into confession and says, bless me, Father, for I have sinned.

And the priest says, dude, I was there.

But

I told you, the Republicans, they all get behind the same story.

The one they are all talking about now today, I can't even believe this, is that, listen to this, this is their best defense yet.

Dr.

Ford perhaps was attacked, but not by Brett Kavanaugh, by someone who looked exactly like Brett Kavanaugh.

This is what his doppelgot, that's what they're saying.

Five people were at the party and one brought a robot double.

Yeah, that's right.

Remember 80s parties?

They were kind of like that.

There were a lot of evil twins.

Remember that documentary about Michael Jackson, where he's nice at first, and then he's a werewolf?

Trump, of course, standing by his man.

Trump said yesterday about Kavanaugh.

He said, he's a great gentleman with an impeccable reputation.

And he knows this because Brett Kavanaugh spent nine hours at the White House the first day this broke.

Nine hours for a guy with an innocent story.

That's a lot of time to spend at the White House.

He's been there all week.

But Trump knows this because he said he and Brett Kavanaugh had a long, serious talk, pussy grabber to pussy grabber.

Just to chill in.

And

Mike Pence says this will keep happening as long as America ignores the problem of boy-girl sock hops.

And Betsy DeVos says it means we should get rid of high school.

So, you know, everything.

But finally, I'm going to North Carolina over the weekend.

I can't wait to entertain the people there.

Trump was there.

I know they've had a very rough time.

Trump was touring the storm damage in the Carolinas the other day, and I swear to God, a guy came up to him and he said, I named my dog after you.

Here, boy, here, Mushroom Dick.

All right, we've got a great show.

We've got Steve Hilton, Catherine Rantel, and Tom Hartman.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with my great friend, P.J.

O'Rook.

But first up, you know this guy, the Oscar-winning director of bowling for Columbine, Sicawan Fahrenheit 911.

His latest documentary, Fahrenheit 119, opens today.

The people's comedian Michael Moore.

That's what you are to me.

You are the people's comedian.

Well, not in a North Korean way, I mean.

Tribune of the people, and you have done it again, Maestro.

I don't know how you keep doing it.

You know, you do what journalism should do, which is you make what's important interesting

and compelling and you can't take your eyes off it and this movie first of all the the title fell right in your lap there didn't it yeah he he was appointed president at

229 in the morning on 11 9.

that's spooky 16.

yeah so the movie coming out right before the election obviously you want that

you don't make any bones about you're a polemicist like i am we want people to agree with our point of view yes what would we vote and vote and vote is that the main message you want

What's the main thing you want people to come away knowing from this?

It's not a democracy if you're sitting on the bench.

Everybody has to get off the bench.

Everyone has to participate.

It's not a spectator sport.

Right.

But what the movie shows and tries to explain is to why sometimes people stay on the bench.

And

I get into talking about this, about the Democratic Party,

and

it's a bit of a balancing act in this film because um it's you know it's it's listed as michael morris trump film but nobody wants to go to the theater and look at trump for two hours no

so so i do a favor for the audience i don't think you see him more than 20 minutes in the film but it is about the trumpian time in which we live no i i think and how we got here i think it's great that i mean i do this too you go after the democrats i mean that's what friends do yes they're honest with their friends that is correct Cowards don't.

And you are very brave in this.

I mean, you say very unflattering things about both Clinton and Obama and Hillary.

Yes,

which was hard.

First of all, I love President Obama.

We may not have a better president in my lifetime.

I was for Bernie, but I was out there stumping for Hillary in the general election and trying to get people out there.

But you seem to keep harping on this idea.

I mean, I came away from it with that old Republican talking point notion, oh, crooked Hillary, she stole it from Bernie.

But she didn't steal it from Bernie.

I mean, she got a lot more votes than Bernie.

Correct.

Except we'll never really know because in the 22 states that he won, which is three less than half the country, half the states.

But caucus states.

But, well, yes, many caucus states.

They've got to get rid of that system.

It should just be a primary where everybody votes and there's no superdelegates.

Whoever gets the most votes is the person who at the convention becomes the candidate.

That's the easy way to get the hell out and to figure it out.

And

the DNC a few weeks ago, they had a meeting and they said they got rid of the superdelegates, but they didn't.

People need to understand this.

All they did was say the superdelegates cannot vote on the first ballot at the convention.

After that, they could vote on every ballot and everything else.

So they did not get rid of the superdelegates.

and and to the Republicans credit they actually don't have superdelegates.

Whoever's at that convention is you know whoever is there to represent the white people that voted for them.

The white people deserve a party bill.

They're Americans too.

They are.

That's very true.

That's how Trump won.

He made his people feel like a minority.

Right.

They still think that.

I mean, they think reverse racism is a bigger problem than racism.

I mean right the problem here though is that and I know this personally I feel this personally and that's why it's in this film because I Hillary lost Michigan by about two votes per precinct.

That's it.

All right.

They never should have lost a blue state.

And I interviewed John Podesta in the film and I said, how did this happen?

And

how

first of all, the vote got depressed because the people of Flint, when they were told that she got the questions in advance, and Bernie didn't, that they felt used as props out there in the audience standing up and asking their question, and they already knew, Pillar already knew what the question was.

So people first were upset about that.

In Michigan, this never happens.

There were more people, a record number of people, voting in the April primary between her and Bernie than who showed up in the general election in November.

And in the film, I show something that sadly President Obama did by coming to Flint and

telling people the water was okay, it was still poison, And then he pretended to drink from a glass of water.

And then said it wasn't a stunt.

And it was.

And it just put a knife in the heart of so many people in Flint who were hoping he would come, bring the Army Corps of Engineers, dig up these poison pipes, and replace the pipes in the city.

And in fact, he didn't do that.

And

then people gave up.

And a lot of people stayed home.

They didn't vote for Trump.

But they just they stayed home.

And now you and I wish that that wouldn't happen and you shouldn't stay home and you should see clearly how bad it's going to be.

But you cannot talk to people who have suffered so much, especially in this town where their jobs were eliminated 30 years ago.

Then the economy was ruined.

The pipes are poisoned.

And then as I show in the film, Obama sends the Pentagon in to use Flint as target practice and for 10 days and 10 nights in a row.

fires missiles and bombs into abandoned buildings, troops firing their guns.

Nobody was told in advance that they were coming.

Everybody thought it was a terrorist incident.

And it's like the feeling of we're just

nobody, and America's forgotten us.

We're still drinking out of bottled water.

And

in this small little example, you see how sometimes the Democrats really screw it up.

They're the party of the people.

They should be there for the people.

They should fight for the people.

But the good news about this election in November is that people like myself and others, you've contributed to the DSC.

I'm still feeling it.

Where do you get this money?

Because no divorces, no alimonies.

Really?

People ask me this all the time.

No divorces, no alimonies, no kids.

Right.

No stupid hobbies like celebrities have.

I don't collect fucking cars or motorcycles or paintings.

I don't do Coke or Hooker.

You know, all the crazy shit that people do, I don't do.

So a lot of, I'm the Mets.

So there's a lot of money that, yeah, but that's what I spend it on.

Right, right.

That's what, because...

Thank you for doing that.

And what I and others have done, have gone out and try to encourage

the run for office.

And by the way, that million looked sillier five weeks ago when I did it because the Senate didn't look like it's in play.

It is in play.

It is very much in play.

Yes, it is.

And thank you.

If you remember, when I was on your show in June,

and I said to you, we can win the Senate, and you said to me on the show, even then, oh, wait a minute, where are you going to get this?

And I said, well, you border two states right here with Arizona and Nevada.

Those are winnable states for the Senate.

You always straighten me up.

No, no.

No, it's true.

No, but thank you for not asking me to contribute.

I just said, right?

Well, you got divorced.

You got me.

What?

You did.

You know,

look,

And you've been through a lot.

I was going to ask you, you know.

I've been through a lot, Bill.

Yeah,

but there's never anything worse than divorce.

I know.

Every guy tells me the same thing.

No, no, there was the person who built the fertilizer bomb that was going to blow up my house.

I wanted to ask you.

That guy was worse than the divorce.

I want to ask you that

because, you know, I think getting lost in the story about Professor Ford is that she had to move out of her house.

And she gets death threats.

And there's a smear campaign on the internet and things things go viral.

And, you know, we've become this death threat society.

And, you know, people say to me sometimes, oh, you know, do you think this could get violent?

I think it is violent.

But I also think that's Trump's next card to play.

Yes.

I've already seen him talking about it.

If the Democrats take over, he says, they're very violent people.

We're the violent people.

You're the puppet.

Always turns it around.

But that's what he has when the Mueller report comes out or when some other thing crashes down on him?

He's the violent person.

He's the sexual predator.

Oh, totally.

He is an admitted sexual predator.

And I don't mean just the Billy Bush Bus.

You're the only person on TV who will state exactly what, you know, if you, if anybody is a public high school teacher in here, a public school teacher, if there's a law in the state of California and in most states that if, let's say,

your 13-year-old girl student comes to you and says, My dad keeps saying that

if I weren't his daughter, he'd be dating me.

My dad said the other day that the thing that we have most in common is sex.

Yes, this picture my dad wanted me to take with me sitting on his lap and kissing him.

If you were a teacher and were given that, you were required by the law to turn him in.

That you've shown this on your show.

He has done, he did this when she was a tween, when she was a teen, and he bragged about how voluptuous my daughter is, and she's a teenager.

The thing is that we let him get away with this.

The media let him get away with it.

All his friends in the media, Les Moonvis,

Roger Ailes, all the Bill O'Reillys, the Matt Lowers.

I show this all in the film.

Bill Shine.

The line.

Yes, exactly.

Who was the guy at Fox News when Roger Ailes was there, covering

Bill O'Reilly?

Now he's the advisor to Trump in the White House prepping Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican party.

They're only six degrees from sexual harassment at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

It's a lot closer than just six degrees.

They believe in this.

That's why they don't like this woman who's come forward and they want to go after her now.

And they've given her till tonight or something like that.

That's ridiculous.

Well, right now, I think when we're on the air.

Because women love ultimatums.

That's what.

Yeah.

Especially those who have been victimized by men.

You know, nothing like saying to a potential rape victim

or,

you know, you got till 10 o'clock.

Especially when it's.

So So tell us about the rape.

You know, it's like.

Chuck Bresley, who's 85,000 years old

and looks like he's out of the crucible, you know.

Right.

You have to.

Okay.

Michael, I got to go.

I can talk to you all night.

I'll talk to you after.

All right.

Michael Moore, ladies and gentlemen.

The people staying in.

Go see this movie.

It's entertaining and important.

All right.

Let's beat our funeral.

Thank you.

Okay.

Hey, everybody.

All right, he is the syndicated progressive radio host whose bestseller, Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, is being re-released this week.

Tom Hartman, welcome back, Tom.

She is a Washington Post opinion columnist and a CNN commentator, Catherine Rampel.

Hey, how are you going?

And he hosts Fox News, The

Next Revolution, and his next book is Positive Populism, Revolutionary Ideas to Rebuild Economic Security, Family, and Community in America.

Steve Hilton.

Hey, Steve, good to have you here.

Okay.

Yes, a programming note.

October 19th, we're on until after the election.

There'll be no weeks we're not on, but October 19th is going to be a special one.

I've been on television for 25 years.

I don't know how it comes up.

But politically incorrect went on in 1993, and I looked at the calendar.

It's 2018.

I don't know how it happened.

So we're having a show called The Anniversary Show and 15 years here on my beloved HBO.

So October 19th.

I think you'll enjoy it.

We worked hard on it.

Okay, so let's talk about this latest news.

Senator Grassley writes, it's Friday night, he said, and nothing's been agreed to.

Like Michael said, extending the deadline to 10.

She's not going to take it.

And then he said, we cannot continue to delay.

Why?

Why can't they continue to delay?

It's a completely artificial deadline.

For some reason, Republican.

Obama, they delayed.

I know, exactly.

For some reason, Republicans were content to have a seat open for almost a year so they could steal it from Obama, but they can't wait like three days.

That's how long it took to do the Anita Gill investigation.

And what's particularly insane is they're saying, oh, well, he was 17.

You know, what you do as a teenager shouldn't have lasting consequences.

Just a few months after Brett Kavanaugh ruled in trying to keep this 17-year-old immigrant, Garza, I believe her name was,

a girl who was pregnant,

trying to get an abortion.

He's saying, no, you're going to have to live with that for the rest of your life, that sexual indiscretion.

I think that's right in terms of the big point here, which is that whatever happens with the process, and it's still unclear exactly how it's going to go, the back and forth, there's something really important, which is, you know, when it all started, people, as you touched on, they said, well, you know, it happened such a long time ago, and well, he was drunk, and this is the kind of thing that happens.

And what's really important is I think you've just seen this outpouring of saying, no, that is not okay.

We can't live in a society where that is acceptable.

And I think that's the big thing that will come out, even though we still don't know exactly what the process is going to be.

And Dan Ginsburg pulled out because he smoked pot in high school.

I mean, he stepped down.

He had

a grace.

What year was that?

That was like

under Reagan, right?

Pot smoker.

I smoked pot on this show to your speaker.

No Supreme Court seat for you.

No Supreme Court seat for you.

Yes.

You ought to watch it somehow.

So Elon Musk.

Elon Musk for Le Most.

Yes.

But that's how far we've come.

I think also it's not just about his character,

it's about his credibility.

And he has raised so many questions about his credibility.

If he is willing to lie about this alleged assault, if he's willing to lie about the fact that he received these stolen memos when he was in the Bush White House, if he's willing to lie about the fact that he got these sexually explicit emails from a circuit court judge he worked for who subsequently had to resign because of those emails, how do we know that he's telling the truth about anything else, including on Roevie Wade?

He is a liar under oath.

Yeah.

It's so interesting that

he should be prosecuted for that and he should be impeached from his current position on the DC Circuit.

Let me offer you another perspective on it, which you might expect, which is that as this has been unfolding, I completely agreed with the point a lot of people has been making from a sort of independent, reasonable perspective, which is we've got to let the facts get gathered, give it some time, all of that agree with that.

Until yesterday actually when I saw Kirsten Gillibrand and it seemed to me that suddenly it had tipped over from being reasonable to being something very unreasonable and something we should all be frightened of really, which is she was making an argument that basically he is guilty

until he can prove himself innocent.

And that is not something I think that we should accept.

And furthermore, there's a hypocrisy to it.

I wouldn't mind that so much if the same standard was being applied to others in her party who have had serious allegations made against them, like Keith Ellison.

But that's not how.

What about Eric Schneiderman?

Oh, wait a minute.

I think Keith Ellison is facing the voters.

There will be a decision by the voters.

That's called democracy.

Right.

Kavanaugh is not facing voters.

In fact, if he was, he would be losing by five points right.

Totally agree with you, Tom.

But

that's Apple's.

No, I get it, but it's a completely different thing, number one.

And number two, those allegations are out there.

The voters of Minnesota can decide whether they want Keith Ellison under those circumstances and whether they believe that as their Attorney General.

That has nothing to do with the lifetime of power.

The attitude I'm speaking about, which is the attitude which is that the victim should be believed and should be given the chance to be afraid of the city.

That's not what happened.

I'm going to back up even further and say he shouldn't even be having this hearing because he shouldn't be up for the Supreme Court because it should be Merrick Garland and

if we didn't have the Electoral College, okay, Al Gore would have appointed the two that Bush appointed.

And if we didn't have the Electoral College, Trump Hillary would be president.

The Supreme Court would be a liberal court.

That would reflect the people.

That's not what we have.

And I think as long as we have this situation...

I mean, if we could live in a completely alternate reality, but Bill, I think

the problem with the...

But that's important.

No, no, no.

Before 2000, 2000, the Supreme Court more or less reflected the makeup of the people's politics.

Now, because they steal elections, partly with the help of the Constitution, yes, partly.

Now it doesn't.

Right, and the Electoral College is a vestige of slavery.

It was a sop to the slave states.

Right.

You know, we've got to strip this stuff out of our Constitution.

When you talk about the people's interests.

When you talk about the people's interests not coming first, I completely agree with you about that.

But that's not just because of the court.

That's because of our laws and the fact that Congress makes laws that favor the interests of always the corporate sector, big business, the people at the top.

That's the laws you've got to change, and you can't as long as you've basically got a Congress which is bought by corporate interests.

But whose fault is that?

Yeah.

You're on Fox News.

Everyone.

It's not everyone's.

It is.

Because really, you think the Democrats and both sides think that.

I mean, hang on a second.

Both parties literally collaborate in a system where they buy the outcomes they want.

Big business buys the outcomes it wants from the political party.

Tell me something.

Tell me something.

Who passed a tax cut where 80% of the benefits went to the top 1% of Americans?

Was that a Democratic tax?

For decades.

Or was that a Republican?

If you look at the way that the...

For decades, it would be.

In fact, Obama passed the largest middle-class tax cut in the history of the United States.

Literally for decades, you've seen an agenda push forward that favors the owners of businesses, not workers, that takes power away from from communities, that undermines families.

All of this has happened under administrations of both parties, whoever controls Congress.

And it's been going on for so long.

But that's why you have to since the 1980s.

That's not true.

It's just true.

They've both been there in Congress, but the people who push for the programs that you're talking about are from one party.

Who's trying to cut Medicaid?

Who's trying to cut food stamps?

Who's trying to cut the entire social safety net for poor people from the state?

They always run on, we're going to cut.

They always run, like Trump did, on

we're going to cut your taxes.

And then they cut their taxes.

Let's look at

that.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure the Forgotten Man was not like dying for a bigger tax break for corporate jets.

Right.

Which was in the bill, by the way.

You say that it only happens.

Look at Obamacare, right?

Obamacare.

Look at Obamacare.

It was paid for.

Wait, look at Obamacare.

Look who it favored.

Literally, who wrote that legislation?

The insurance companies wrote the legislation.

Max Wilkins.

Okay, wait a second.

Wait a second.

The insurance companies

was from the insurance companies.

Lobbyists do write Republican legislation word for word.

They did not write Obamacare.

I think that's why the insurance companies did so well out of it.

Billions of dollars of subsidies.

They were in there from the beginning, that's right.

Because he wanted to make it a bill that the Republicans might vote for.

That's why it was basically Mitt Romney's old plan.

You're right.

It doesn't go far enough.

But that wasn't good enough for them because populists in in this country, they're not really populists.

They're people who have a grievance against racial matters and it masquerade as economic matters.

That's what I think of populistism.

Okay.

Well, that's why.

That's exactly why we've...

That's exactly why we've got to make an argument for how we can make...

things work for working people once again.

Like tag team wrestling, I'm going to bring out a ally of yours now.

Okay.

But first we're going to do 25 things you don't know about me.

Now this is something that I have to admit,

it's in Us Weekly every week.

I even did it once at Us Weekly, but we stole it and now I think we own it.

And the guy who really needs it this week is Brett Kavanaugh.

25 Things You Didn't Know About Brett Kavanaugh.

Albinos call me Whitey.

I spent my teenage years completely blacked out, yet I remember never doing anything wrong.

That's so interesting.

If you leave me in a hot car, I melt and become Ted Cruz.

That's, I didn't know that about Brett Kavanaugh.

For my first communion, I drank Christ's blood out of a red solo party cup.

When I was a young man, mother and I ran a motel.

When a waiter asks what I'll be having, I refuse to comment on a hypothetical.

I've never pinned someone to a bed and covered their mouth with my hand.

I use a pillow, like when I killed Scalia.

My spirit animal is the alligator on an izod shirt.

In high school, I was voted most likely to need 65 character witnesses.

The other day, I bumped into President Trump, and he said, pardon me, and we both had a good laugh.

All right, he's the author of the new book, None of My Business, and editor-in-chief of the web magazine, American Consequences.

One of my mentors, PJ Ararke, is over here.

Okay.

Pete.

How are you, pal?

Looking good.

How are you?

I'm good.

All right.

I can't not complain.

Well, I can't complain because the whole economy is about to fall apart.

You know?

No, they're knocking out everything you guys have just been talking about because everybody is going to be like living in the street, you know, and licking water out of the gutter and

eating their pets.

But

it's going to be very bipartisan.

This is sort of a continuation of the discussion we were having, the subtitle of your book, Why I'm Not Rich and Neither Are You.

And I would say that...

you are well you were before you donated all that money to the democrats you know so you've been rich yeah let's let's give that a rest okay because it does

it hurts every time i hear it yeah yeah especially if they lose but um but i i mean i read in your book your father made ten thousand dollars yeah and yet you lived in a house that was a pretty nice house yeah to put on the table only one bread earner you needed two cars yeah so who took all that money who squeezed the middle class See, this is what I'm getting at.

Who did that?

Who?

Was it all immigrants and single moms on food stamps?

Not so much so.

I'll tell you

one group of people that were at fault, the middle class.

Because instead of having that little lifestyle that we had, now everybody has to have two of those lifestyles because they get divorced.

So it doubles the cost, immediately.

You got two families, yes.

These things do seem to go off.

Yeah, you're right.

Well, there are three big things that vastly increased the cost of middle-class life.

One is medical care, and I'm not really going to get into that so much because while we had a great middle-class life, my dad lived to be 49.

Really?

Yeah, really.

So, like, you know,

something blew up in his brain.

I mean, today we would have seen it coming in, like, only half of his brain, so he just would have been crippled instead of dead.

But anyway, because we made a lot of progress medically.

So

my theory is we get a little something out of the increase in medical care.

I'm I'm not sure what.

But housing has obviously gone insane and education has gone insane.

And a lot of that has to do with we lived in a, you know, what was basically an inner-city neighborhood, a close to downtown neighborhood that had good schools and was safe.

That has gone away.

Now you either have to pay a fortune to send your kids to school or you have to move to someplace that costs a fortune in order to have decent schools.

And what is your feelings about the new economy?

I mean I was laughing at the things you wrote in your book, but I would like to.

You don't own any cryptocurrency.

No, I don't.

But I've had the same idea that you have about a Bitcoin.

And

I'm probably missing the boat.

Okay, the whole new economy, the whole digital economy, it's the product of the evil high school math club with weaponized spy rules.

Really?

Yeah, definitely.

You know, I mean, you think back 25, 30 years ago, and you look at the top 10 corporations in America, and you knew them.

You knew what they did.

They made stuff.

They provided services, and you used that stuff.

They made Chevrolets, they made electricity, they made toothpaste and stuff.

Now you look at the top corporations, and they make what?

Money.

Money.

Right.

It's money moving money.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, money and trouble.

And trouble, as far as I'm concerned.

But again, I hate to keep harping at this point, but like it's the 10-year anniversary of the financial collapse.

Man, we're headed right to another one.

Who was more at fault for that?

Who was really fighting for the banks to be able to do whatever they want?

And then after Obama got in, then we passed Dodd-Frank and we reined them in again.

And now Trump gets in and the shackles come off again.

I don't see this as a, they're both equally responsible for the problems we have economically.

Amen.

I'm just,

no?

Amen.

Well, a lot of it, though, has to do with us allowing our money into the hands of people who are a lot smarter smarter than we are.

Now, that's not usually how I describe Republicans.

I mean, I am a Republican, as you well know, and I vote for Republicans because Republicans have fewer ideas.

We got the silly party and the stupid party, and I go with the stupid party, I feel.

But now the Republicans are getting a lot of ideas, and that's a bad thing.

They're just not cut out for ideas.

But to get back to the financial stuff, you will find that it's a bipartisan group of very smart people over there who are tricking us.

In 2008, they came up with this wonderful little package of mortgage things where you couldn't figure out whose house it was or who was living in it or where your money went or where your money was supposed to go.

And they said, trust us, you know, buy these.

Now, it's, to my mind, even worse.

Now we've got these the fang corporations, Facebook, Amazon, so on, that

we just have no idea how they work or what they do.

Yes, we do.

You don't know how Amazon works?

I don't think the next financial crisis is going to come from Facebook.

Amazon's a glorified yard sale.

Yeah.

How do you get to be the richest guy in the entire world by holding a glorified yard sale?

By selling shit so people don't have to go to the store.

People like it.

Yes, they do.

You know, people usually like what gets them in trouble.

I think I think that's also undercutting the people like drugs.

Yeah, people like that.

The real issue isn't whether we will have another recession.

We will.

We will.

That's how business cycles work.

The question is not whether, but when, right?

The thing that I'm worried about is how screwed we are when it comes.

Because right now we have like this.

We have like, think about who's leading our economic policy.

You have the producer of the Lego Batman movie.

You have like people who play economists on TV and people who are picking trade wars for no good reason and making everything we buy, including houses, in fact,

I hear he's going to ruin Christmas.

He is going to ruin Christmas.

That's an issue people can understand.

Trump ruined Christmas.

The Nerf gun

costs as much as a real gun, so you have to get a real gun for your kids.

But

you think that the United States Christmas could be depressed because of this, because of the tariffs?

I think it's very possible.

And Dimsum could cost $1,000 a plate.

Because, you know, they're running out of ways to retaliate.

We don't really, we don't export enough to them.

But the issue is that we have now placed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese goods.

And it's going to hit basically all of your favorite Christmas presents.

Mittens,

computers,

neckties.

Ugly.

Well, I don't know about ugly neckties.

They might be on them.

They might not be.

Socks.

Reptile skin jackets.

Paul Manafort takes a hit.

It's actually going to improve.

So it's going to improve Christmas.

I don't know.

I mean, maybe he's trying to teach us the true meaning of Christmas, that it's about loving one another.

Yeah, we know the Grinch.

At the end of the Grinch, the Grinch has a change of heart, so who knows what will happen.

But the real problem is we've lost the ability to respond to these things.

Interest rates are not high enough to be lowered in response to a crash.

We have pissed away our ability to respond to a serious economic crash.

And there's another one coming because the last one wasn't completely responsible.

Actually, the bigger problem than monetary policy being sort of crippled here is fiscal policy.

Because we just passed this enormous tax cut.

There are no bullets left.

And And the deficit now is going to be a trillion dollars.

That's just what we run up in a year.

Remember?

Remember when he was a lot of money?

Remember when the Tea Party was very upset when Obama was running up deficits that were necessary to get us out of Bush's recession?

When do you think?

You know, again, I have to say, what was it about Obama where it was intolerable?

But it's so important.

Where are they?

Why aren't they in this?

It's not just a business.

What's different about Obama?

I can't think.

I can't put my finger on it.

When you think about the,

look, as you were talking about the way that

the way that,

for so many households, economic security has completely collapsed in the last few decades.

That's not just this financial stuff.

That's also the cost of housing and health care.

And it's getting more expensive because of the tariffs.

We put tariffs on lumber, on steel, on applying

the colours.

Because the house builders and the zoning regulations favour those who already own property.

But I have a a solution.

But the zoning regulations are set at the local level.

Isn't that set by Congress?

No, no, no, no.

That's why you need to change them.

But what does that have to do with anything we're talking about?

Because that makes

it makes

it has a lot to do with your life if you can't afford a house, if you can't get on the housing ladder because it's so expensive.

And that is the reality.

Okay, but your solution, and then I went in.

I was in Mogadishu, okay?

In Somalia.

In Somalia, yeah.

And things have really, really fallen apart.

You have been all over the world.

I have covered some of this stuff.

And so I'm with this reporter who'd been in Somalia for six months and who knew his way around.

So we go down to the market.

We're surrounded by armed Somalis that we've hired to protect us because you can't go anywhere without them.

But even so, he is carrying a Glock 9mm.

And we get down to the market in Mogadishu.

He pulls out this gun.

I've never seen a reporter carry a gun in my life.

And he holds it up in the air and he racks around, big dramatic gesture.

And I'm looking at him like, what?

And he grins like a maniac, and he says, I call it the Visa card of the future.

So I think that's the thing.

That's where we're going to be eating our pets.

Okay.

So

this whole discussion makes me think that, you know, this word elite,

everyone hates elites.

And we all, when you hear that word, have a different idea.

I think when you say elite, you're thinking of something completely different of what I'm...

When I hear elite, I think of Brett Kavanaugh.

That's exactly who I think of.

The guy who went to the

asshole factory prep school, right, which may or may not be why he thinks he can get away with doing anything.

Who, you know, Heritage Foundation, all through this pipeline, you can be mediocre and still advance.

That to me, that's who the elites are.

And I think when the Trump people talk about the elites, not that you're necessarily a Trump person, it's like some liberal arts professor at Oberlin.

When Republicans use the word elite, they're referring to smart people.

When Democrats use the word elite, they're referring to rich people.

I mean, it really just kind of boils down to that.

You're right.

When I say elite, I mean like wise-ass pundits who appear on TV.

Yes, definitely.

I agree with that.

We're all elite, but I think the most important thing is not who's in it,

but the elitism.

Are you an elitist?

Are you in favor of things that help the people at the top, or are you in favor of policies that help working people?

That's elite ideas.

Which party?

Which party fulfills that criteria?

But you've got to get over it.

Both parties, honestly, you've got to understand both parties have totally let people down for decades, and that's why we need something new.

But this is what makes me crazy about the politics.

I saw it this week with Kavanaugh.

It's like everything in the Trump world divides into two realities, obvious truth and a crazy conspiracy theory.

Either,

you know, we don't.

That's right.

We don't know.

I thought about this a lot.

We don't know exactly what happened in that room in 1982.

And I did some research on this.

Trauma.

You traveled back in time

and had a beer.

But trauma doesn't necessarily make you remember everything better.

But also the fact that it was trauma.

I'm pretty sure something happened in there that severely traumatized this woman.

But they want us to believe that she, I don't know, traveled back in time from when she was 15 to fuck up Brett Kavanaugh's life.

And put a witness in the room?

And put a witness in the room.

And the one asking for the FBI investigation.

You know, to believe anything from Trump world, you have to get into this.

It's like the Arab Street.

And it's bizarre.

Lying to the FBI,

you go to jail.

She's saying, I want to talk to the FBI.

He's saying, and his friend is saying, no, I don't want to talk to the FBI.

That should tell you everything you need to know.

Republicans keep their eye on the ball, though.

That's

very often.

Well, no, I think what Republicans are doing is keeping their eye on their constituency.

It started out as, we're all about the rich people, but there aren't enough rich people to get them elected, so we've got to bring in the rubes.

So let's throw out some gun stuff, but mostly let's throw out some God stuff.

And then all the religious people flock around and they want abortion.

That's what I mean, but that's the eye on the ball for them.

Abortion, Brett Kavanaugh, Catholic.

Come on, Catholics teach you, especially his upbringing, it's always wrong.

You know he's going to get rid of Roe versus Wade.

They know that.

And it's everything about getting Brett Kavanaugh.

And for Trump, there's a lot of conservative justices who might do that.

There's only one who's on record saying you can't ever, ever go after a president when he's in office.

For Trump, it really has to be this one guy.

Which may be why they don't want to pull him, right?

I mean, there's a long list of these right-wing justices waiting in the wings.

They could easily swap them out.

There's a reason why they haven't.

It's got to be a lot of people.

Will he make masturbation illegal?

That's what worries me.

Who?

Kavanaugh.

I mean, because we're talking Catholicism here.

It's not just abortion, you know?

Well, he said in the hearings the birth control pills are abortifacience, and they're not.

I mean, you know, he doesn't even understand simple science.

But that's just...

But you know when you, you know, honestly, you know when you

know it's it's it's when you talk like that and you use language like the rubes and all the rest of it.

Honestly, that is exactly the reason that he got elected.

He got elected.

You called.

It's all my fault.

It was all your fault.

But you know that's the basket of deplorables.

Right, like they would have voted for Hillary anyway.

That's the biggest bullshit thing.

I hate this idea that we can't talk about the two things they don't want us to say.

Stupid and racist, even though check and check.

I'm tired of pretending.

I am.

They don't even vote their own economic interests.

All right.

But I want to ask one last question about how, every time we seem to get to one of these things, these scandals or big news stories that the whole country is watching, it just makes us more divided.

You see the people pushing away even further.

And it's like the Republican Party is just becoming, okay, we see, you know, the 11 men, 11 older white men on the Judiciary Committee.

It looks like the town elders who banned dancing on football.

and you know I heard Ted Cruz this week he's attacking Betto Arourke because he was in a rock band a brother oh my god brother what year are you people living in and then I look at the statistics we're becoming divided by party gender-wise

I mean there's going to be no women in the Republican Party married women married women are about equal I'll leave you to what you want to say about marriage based on that but depends on what single women

I mean they didn't even like Hillary that much and she won 63 to 32 unmarried women of all races.

We're dividing now by gender.

We've been divided by gender for a long time.

Not as much as we are now.

But it is the case that like since 1980.

Let's face it, if you think the gender divide is big now, wait a year until Kavanaugh or Clone is on the Supreme Court and Roe is overturned.

And we go back to, I mean, I'm old enough to remember a kid in my high school, a girl in my high school, who just stopped coming to school school one day because she had died from becoming septic from an illegal abortion in 1967 or 66, whatever.

So you think if the Democrats get elected, suddenly Americans will love each other.

I think

if this gets overturned,

you got women who are under 40 who have no idea what it's like to live in a country

where women who get abortions go to jail,

people who perform abortions on the business.

But they could chip away at it.

There are a number of cases that are working themselves through the lower courts at this point.

All of these test cases from various red states that are trying to cut back on your ability to get abortion based on the number of weeks or whether the hospital has

a hallway that's wide enough or whatever.

There are all of these test cases.

I'm not making that up.

That's real.

That's one of the rules.

That's real.

You know, there are all of these test cases working their ways through the courts, and even if you don't end up overturning Roe v.

Wade entirely, you're going to see this steady chipping away at abortion rights.

And that's going to exacerbate that gender divide you're talking about.

Trump was at one of his Daddy Needs Love rallies last night

in Las Vegas.

And

I just want to, you know, again, all this talk about the Democrats are just as bad.

He said if the Democrats win, you're going to have rampant crime, totally unlimited immigration, and the collapse of the economy and the collapse of Medicare.

One party, certainly this one president, just pulls shit out of his ass and says anything.

That alone should tell you there is a difference.

You know, if you've raised toddlers, and I have, you heard there's really no mystery about Donald Trump.

No, there really is no.

I'm going to get to it.

Old toddlers.

All right.

Thank you, panel.

It's time for New Rules.

All right, New Rule, Christie's Auction House, which calls this 1972 David Hockney painting one of the great masterpieces and says it encapsulates the essence of the tremendous complexity that exists within human relationships.

Has to admit it could just be a guy trying to tell his brother dinner's ready.

I think you'd like that one.

New Roll, instead of arguing about Ernie and Bert's sex life, I mean

they're obviously lesbians,

we have to answer the real question: why don't they have jobs?

Bob builds, Dora explores, Thomas pulls a train.

Ernie and Bert are just too idiot who hang out.

Is there money in that?

I'm asking for a friend.

New rule, old married couples have to decide which makes them more happy, treating their erectile dysfunction or getting a reverse mortgage.

Close to the

bone.

That's why I'm doing it.

Because according to the pictures I see in magazines, I can't stop from coming to the house.

The level of satisfaction is exactly the same.

Erectile dysfunction, reverse mortgage.

Erectile dysfunction, reverse mortgage.

Maybe you're one of those couples that enjoys the beach.

Erectile dysfunction drugs make the beach awesome.

You know what else does?

Getting a reverse mortgage.

New rule, if Roger Stone wants to be taken seriously, he must stop dressing like a Batman villain.

This look doesn't say political consultant.

It says my umbrella sprays purple knockout gas.

New rule, the two people at every crowded party who decide the best place to stand and talk is in the doorway

must be followed just to see if they're the same assholes who block the intersection when my light turns green.

And finally, new rule: now that the 25th Amendment, the one about removing a president who's incapacitated, keeps popping up in the news.

Someone has to explain to me: if it was written specifically for this guy, then who is it for?

According to Bob Woodward's book, Trump's lawyers told Robert Mueller that Trump could not testify because he was incapable of telling the truth.

This is what Slingblade's lawyer argues when he's

accused of murder.

My client is incompetent to stand trial.

Now, I know everyone by now knows that Trump is a narcissist, but we have to stop treating that like it's an unfortunate personality tick and start treating it like what it is, a serious and dangerous mental illness.

Trump likes to tag everything with in history.

He did it again this week.

We have the greatest economy ever in the history of our country.

It's always bullshit, but in this one area, he really might be the most extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder in history.

Nixon was bad.

At the end, he was talking to the White House paintings.

But Trump thinks the paintings are talking to him.

When Trump masturbates, he fantasizes about himself masturbating.

This isn't a quirk like having a fear of clowns or calling your wife mommy.

It's in the big book of crazy.

Trump sets off a hundred bombs a week and we chase all of them, but all his flaws are really outgrowths of one thing.

If there was a nutrition label on his his ass,

it would say 35% fat, 65% narcissistic personality disorder.

It all comes from that.

Narcissism is why he has no empathy.

His first thought after the planes hit the towers on 9-11 was, now my building is the tallest.

His whole life is the old joke about the doctor who tells his patient, I've got good news and bad news.

The bad news, you only got a week to live.

The good news, you see my nurse, I'm banging her.

It's an old joke.

You'll get over it.

Narcissism is why Trump can be a traitor and think he's a patriot because it's like what JFK said.

Ask not what your country can do for you.

Ask what you can do for me.

Narcissism is why our government is now so corrupt, because the only quality that matters is being an unbearable suckass to Trump.

No president has ever consulted more widely or talked with more people from more backgrounds to seek input about a Supreme Court nomination.

Oh,

please, you had him at presidents cannot be prosecuted.

Narcissism is why we have a foreign policy based entirely on whether or not when our leader meets your leader, he thinks they like him.

He said about President G,

I like him and I believe he likes me a lot.

Oh, I hope so.

Maybe you guys can watch the notebook together and braid each other's hair.

Same thing with Putin.

He said, I hope I like him.

I hope he likes me.

And then there's his buddy in North Korea.

I just came on stage and I was told that Kim Jong-un

said some terrific things about me.

Great.

Maybe he'll sign your tits.

That's all you got to do is say something nice.

Donald Trump is the world's cheapest date.

He likes me.

I like him.

Who knows what's going to happen?

Like, what?

You're going to fuck?

Who cares whether other heads of state like ours?

These other leaders are laughing at him.

As if Putin is in the Kremlin going, oh, I hope he likes me.

I would poison myself if I thought Donald Trump didn't like me.

Take selfie of me.

I send it to Trump.

And

most chillingly, narcissism is why Trump is so stupid.

The president of the United States, the planet's most powerful human in a data-driven world full of shifting information, can never learn anything.

Narcissism makes you unteachable.

You can't correct him because that would mean he was wrong.

And that's impossible.

He's infallible like the Pope or Oprah.

Trump's brain is like a cell phone with a full mailbox.

You can call, but you can't leave a message.

All right, it's our show.

I'll be at the Mirage again in Vegas, October 26th and 27th at the Castle Theater on Yahalui, Hawaii, December 30th, and at the Blaisdale in Honolulu on New Year's Eve.

I want to to thank Tom Hartman, Catherine Rampell, Steve Hilton, PJLR, and Michael Moore, joining us down for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you.

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

For more information, log on to HBO.com.