Overtime - Episode #457: War on Weed, Offensive Speech, Cult of Trump

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, real time with Bill Maher.

Are we here?

Are we on?

Okay.

Okay, so

first thing before we get to the question, do you want to respond to what I just said about marijuana?

Well, as we talked about Starbucks, we talked about our great voter rights bill.

We talked about our efforts to beat climate change.

But for you, Bill, I can honestly say we've got the best weed in the United States.

it's a growing industry well regulated it is well regulated well regulated that's right by the way they Humboldt County would give you a run for your money they are but but they're putting a little pressure on us we've heard from the Attorney General in Seattle actually and we need to make sure that they back off

and

Wouldn't it be wonderful if the first time Donald Trump said something that was actually true if he said he'd leave us alone on our marijuana decriminalization?

I hope that that will occasion.

Well, yes, Jeff Sessions has said good people don't smoke marijuana.

Thank you.

I don't know good people here.

Okay, Michael, will you ever release the contents of the warning shot disc of evidence you tweeted about?

Oh, yeah.

Possibly.

It depends on how the case progresses.

I mean, you know, we...

What's on it?

Well,

you know, we took that picture and we tweeted it out, and it was exactly that.

It was a warning shot to Michael Cohen, the president, that if they tried to claim that my client was a liar after 60 minutes, there was going to be consequences, and it worked, and it worked perfectly because we heard nothing from them.

So we have the DVD, and we're going to release it when and if it's necessary, and we're going to see what happens with the case.

But make no mistake about it, it's locked and loaded.

Can I ask a

Trump this

a question about this?

Yes.

I mean, I've been listening to all of this about Trump and watching how this conversations go in the U.S.

And I have one question about it.

I mean, there's all these people in the U.S.

who are on the conservative side, who are aligned with Trump for all sorts of reasons.

And there's all this tension around his presidency and attempts to pull him out of his office for various reasons.

What do you think will happen if that comes to pass?

What do you think will happen to these people that have identified with Trump?

And like, how is it that

Democratic types, for example, are holding out their hand to say to these conservative types sort of like, welcome back into the fold?

Because it looks to me from an outsider's perspective that your country is polarizing in a way that's not good.

And that, you know, people are going after Trump.

And I understand that.

It's not like I don't understand that.

But there's all these people that elected him and that are identified with him.

And they're not taking this well, you know, and so, well, they're not.

They're not.

It's not, and, you know, you might not think they're very bright and all of that, and and you know, they're backwards and all of those things, but but you, but, you know, you need to have respect for the rest of your citizens, and if you're if your country isn't going to pull itself apart, and I really see this happening from an outsider's perspective when I come down here, and I lived in the States for a while, and it wasn't like this before.

If he was just a regular Republican president with Republican policies, I would say you'd have a point.

But what is so alarming is the assault on democratic norms, what we were talking about here today.

Things like threatening to put people in jail, threatening to put journalists in jail, wanting military parades, praising dictators, wanting to be a dictator.

I mean, we are at a moment here, this is, I try to impress on this on the people who are too young to remember a lot of presidents and a lot of elections, how incredibly different this is than anything that ever came before.

I never much liked the other Republicans who were in office, but I have a renewed respect for them.

George Bush and Mitt Romney would not have tried to pull this shit.

They just wouldn't.

What about Nixon?

Nixon got caught and he gave himself up, basically.

Well, although although this president makes the Watergate burglars look brilliant.

Right.

Well, but it seems to me that it's not the point.

We can be as tough as we're being on the president, and I think we should for all the reasons you just said, Bill, without telling his supporters that they're stupid, without saying basket of deplorables.

If we want to bring them around to what I would say is a more enlightened kind of thinking, and if we want them to see Donald Trump as someone who's turned the presidency into one long infomercial for Mar-a-Lago, you know, we can do that without saying to them, you've been duped, you're chumps, you're dumb, you're deplorable.

And I think we need to talk to them with more generosity than we do.

I'm confused about how this dovetails with your

thesis that the left is too preoccupied with being non-confrontational.

Right?

The left is too preoccupational.

Well, just that we are

The idea that liberals, especially, intellectuals, are preoccupied with politically correct speech, that they're.

Oh, I see, I see, where they are.

And yet.

No, they're too preoccupied with identity politics by a large margin.

And they tend to categorize everyone by their ethnicity and their sex and their gender.

And I think all that does is turn people into tribal actors and that the end result of that is catastrophic.

But weren't you also saying, though, that the left is too worried about offending people?

I think that that goes a long way.

I will.

Yes, yes, well, that goes a long way.

But then on the other hand,

when the left, for example, offends people in the political sphere, you're questioning whether that's somehow bad for society writ large.

Well, I'm concerned about, I don't, I think that those two issues are, I think that those two issues are somewhat separate.

I'm concerned about

the dialogue in the United States around the presidency pulling people farther and farther apart.

It has nothing to do with the behavior of Trump.

I think this is an independent issue.

You can say positive or negative.

But he's only

going to support him.

You see, I know.

But that's the issue.

That's the issue, is they did support him.

Without the circus, he's just a lonely clown.

But he has these people in Congress who are enablers and this base that it is a cult of personality not unlike dictatorships we've seen in the past.

I mean, he said once famously, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any fans.

Yes, he is.

And he has proved that to be almost true.

I mean, we cannot imagine what he would do where they were turning him, because I don't know what that would be.

I don't think it's anything.

Because whatever it was, he would just say, well, it's fake news.

But okay.

So imagine he's impeached, just for the sake of argument.

Impeached or convicted.

Okay, either of those.

But it seems to me.

Well, that matters.

One, he has to leave.

Yeah, no,

it's not an unimportant detail, but it still seems to me that it leaves you with the problem of what do you do with the disaffected 40% that are going to be very unhappy about this, independent of Trump's behavior.

Kind of like the Sunnis after we kicked over Saddam.

Well, that's a hell of a

pistocyte.

Yes.

You're right.

That's what I worry about.

Yes, that this is an argument, looking for an argument rather than a solution.

We're not waiting for impeachment.

We're making sure that people understand Donald Trump cannot stop us today.

Donald Trump could not stop me from the first net neutrality bill to make sure people have access to the internet.

He could not stop us from doing that.

He cannot stop us.

He cannot stop us from acting on climate change with all this blovietine saying it's just a hoax.

He can't stop us from fighting climate change.

He can't stop us from having the best paid family leave and sick leave policy.

He can't stop us.

When we demonstrate people progress in our state.

That's Washington State.

No.

But he

no one

can stop us from doing it.

He certainly is stopping us from protecting the environment.

He has signed executive orders.

The first thing he did in office

was to sign an order that said, hey, you want to dump your coal sludge in the streams?

Go right ahead.

The head of the EPA is Scott Pruitt.

He's reversed all of a sudden.

No, he just changed it to the environmental pollutants.

I know, but to say he can't stop us.

And he's changed the tax landscape everywhere.

Absolutely.

You can't do anything in your state.

And

he's appointing crazy judges left and right.

And these are changing things as we speak.

We don't cover it because of Stormy Daniels, but all of this is going on.

What can I say?

He's

just get used to it.

Okay.

All right.

We didn't get to any questions, but it was a wonderful panel.

Thank you, everybody.

Happy Monday.

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.