Ep. #449: Adam Schiff, Bari Weiss

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

Start the clock.

Thank you very much.

Okay, all right.

Let me get to the joke.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, thank you.

Okay, all right, I know.

I know why you're excited.

I know.

I love you too.

Thank you.

I know.

How can you not be excited when the Winter Olympics

now it started unless that if you are as excited as me, you you are not very excited.

No, I shouldn't be cynical.

The Winter Olympics is actually a great thing that all nations can come together, even the shithole countries, ladies and gentlemen.

And

we sent Mike Pence to the Olympics.

He's there now, doesn't like it.

Foreigners playing in the snow.

Like I said, he doesn't want to see Mexicans on ice.

He wants to see ice on Mexicans.

And

while you were sleeping last night,

there was a government shutdown.

Do you know this?

Again, this happens.

America is now like one of those mom-and-pop stores where the owner just feels up when he feels like showing up.

Whatever the fuck I was trying to say.

You know what?

There's a joke in there, but we're never going to get it out of it.

But

no, there was no shutdown because we made a budget.

We have a budget.

Okay.

The yearly deficit now, not the debt, that's the accumulation of all the deficits.

That's like 20 trillion.

But just in one year now, $1 trillion.

I don't want to be an I told you so, but you knew this was going to happen when you elected Hillary.

I mean,

Republicans, fuck man.

I mean,

wow.

No shame in their game.

When Obama was president and spending needed to happen, they fought every goddamn penny.

But they opened right up for the white guy.

In D.C., that's called the reverse Kardashian.

And of course, Republicans, you know this about them, they're great for coming up at new rule.

They just pull a rule out of their ass and it's like it's always been there.

The new rule for them, so for the dead, is as long as you claim that you hate this with every fiber of your being, you can go ahead and do it.

They have the same rule for gay sex and collusion.

And of course, most of this money is urgently not needed by the military.

That's where it's going to go.

Trump, I love his quote today.

He said, We love our military.

We gave them everything and more.

Yes, that's why he's known as the master of negotiating.

But the government.

The government is open, and the White House can get back to the important business of hiring wife beaters.

Well, you saw this guy?

You've been following this Rob Porter guy at the White House?

Okay.

Oh, yes.

And Trump now is mad again at General Kelly.

You know, General Kelly, his stone-faced chief of staff.

I call him General Unelectric.

Apparently, he should have vetted this guy, Rob Porter, a lot better.

And everybody at the White House is like, oh, they didn't know.

It was around for a year that these accusations, they didn't know.

His Secret Service code name was Floyd Mayweather.

But you know Trump, always on the right side of an issue.

He sprang right into action.

He told this Rob Porter guy, he said, I want your resignation letter on my makeup table in the morning.

You clean out your crisp brown TGs and your brass knuckles and get out of here.

Oh, yeah.

So.

And

this guy's a Mormon.

A Mormon domestic abuser?

Wow, what's that like?

To the planet Kolob, Alice.

Fans of the honeymooners, you gotta love that in an audience.

But also the interesting thing is Rob Porter, whatever his name is,

was dating Hope Hicks.

You know Hope Hicks, the 29-year-old chief of communications there at the White House?

And Hope Hicks used to date Trump's campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.

And there is rumors that Corey Lewandowski actually dropped the dime on Rob Porter for stealing his woman.

Tune in tomorrow for another episode of All My Douchebags.

You gotta love this White House, don't you?

I mean,

it's every day.

It's like the West Wing meets clueless.

And over on...

Celebrity Big Brother is coming soon.

And in the previews, Amarosa is talking to one of the other housemates.

And she gets into tears when the person says, what's it like over there at the white house and amarosa says it's not going to be okay it's so bad

less than a year over there and they turned her into marlon brando in apocalypse now the horror

the horror

you're an island boy

But of course when Amarosa said that, the White House took the high road and did not comment.

I'm fucking with you, of course.

They had to go tit-for-dat.

I love it with the White House Press spokesman said.

Amarosa was fired three times on the Apprentice.

This was the fourth time we let her go.

Yes, if only there had been some way to predict that she wouldn't be working out.

And then to top off this utterly splendid week, Donald Trump told the Pentagon that he wants a military parade.

Yes, America Ragua

is going to do the tanks in the streets thing.

Oh, it's going to be spectacular.

Tanks and missiles and fighter jets, all presided over by a loose cannon.

And,

you know.

This is scary stuff.

I mean, this has come up before.

They've asked, we don't do this.

No president does this.

Republicans, Democrats.

In the 1950s, in the height of the Cold War, they wanted Eisenhower.

A lot of people wanted Eisenhower to do this.

And Eisenhower said, No, we're strong.

That would actually make us look weak.

But Trump is not Eisenhower.

Eisenhower, for one, went bald naturally.

He didn't comb hairs from his nutsack up over his head.

Did you see Trump's bad hair day today?

This is, look at that.

See?

Yeah.

What?

I always thought the head here came from there.

If it's not there, where is it coming from?

This is why he doesn't come down until 11 a.m.

Do you know this?

The tweet started 6 in the morning.

He doesn't get to the office until 11.

What is he doing that whole time?

His hair.

Seriously, Fox and friends, he watches his stories and does his hair.

That's who your president is, a guy who does his hair all morning and then puts on his face, which he keeps in a jar by the door.

It's just crazy.

All right, we got a great show, April Ryan, Richard Payton, and Jonathan Hurry up here.

Johan Hurry, and a little later, we'll be speaking with Barry Weiss of the New York Times.

First off, he's the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee from California's 28th our own Congressman Adam Schiff.

How are you?

Good to see you.

Oh, we love having you run.

Get a standing ovation.

Thank you.

All right, so.

And not only are you a great guest and the audience loves you,

a liberal icon now, but I know you bear news because this just happened today, probably while you were in the air flying out here from Washington.

Trump is not going to release the other part of the dueling memos, right?

Well, that's right.

You see, last week,

over the objections of the FBI and the Department of Justice, who said, don't release this, it's extraordinarily reckless, it's misleading, it omits material facts, he said, I don't care.

It's going out.

That was the Nunez memo.

That was the Nunes memo.

This week, though, the White House apparently has a newfound admiration for the FBI.

We wouldn't want to release anything that the FBI might be concerned about.

The way they turn on a dime.

Well, so what they're doing is they're sending the memo back to the committee, the same committee whose majority crafted the false memo to begin with, because they know the chairman has the president's back.

That's the White House strategy.

So we're going to sit down with the FBI and the Department of Justice.

We did the responsible thing.

We sent them our memo well before we brought it up for a vote in the committee.

We want to hear any concerns they have about sources and methods.

The problem is this, and this is why we urge the Republicans not to go down this road.

They wrote this deliberately misleading memo that omitted all the important information the reader needed to know.

And when we supplied the material facts, it's like, oh, no, we can't share the facts because that would be disclosing too much information.

Yeah, how do you win on the facts in an era where the facts don't matter to people anymore?

Or where you can, I said this a couple weeks ago, and Republicans got mad at me.

I said, you know, they're sheep and you can drive them from to a different meadow so easily.

And I meant by that, it was only about a year ago, they loved the FBI and the Justice Department.

That was the pillar of being a Republican, law enforcement.

And now, if you look at the polling, they think they're in league with the liberals somehow, and that this is a conspiracy against Trump.

How do you fight that?

Well, it is enormously challenging.

And I think of all of the

difficulties that we face in terms of how we've gotten to where we are politically.

You have, I see, serious issues of campaign finance reform, you've got redistricting, but among the most difficult to deal with is the fact that people now simply get their information from different sources.

Had Fox News existed and been essentially the state-run TV during the Nixon era, there might not have been an impeachment of Richard Nixon.

But there is this whole echo chamber that supports whatever the president says.

What I find so astounding about the last year is how much this deeply flawed president could remake an entire political party in his own image.

But that's what's happening.

That's so quickly.

And probably the most distressing thing about that for me is not what a poor president Trump turned out to be, which we could easily foresee, but rather,

well, okay, we underestimated even that, but still.

The real shock, the real shock is how many people in Congress and in the party would be complicit in that.

There are only a few people who have been willing to speak out, Jeff Flake among them.

I would have thought more of my colleagues.

I would have expected more.

I would have expected people to defend our institutions, to defend the First Amendment.

But no.

And what we are seeing is

the problem when you have someone who lacks character in the Oval Office.

It infects the whole of government.

It's infected our committee.

That's what produced this flawed memo to begin with.

This was put out with a rule we have never before used, and for good reason.

When you selectively declassify intelligence, when you misuse classified intelligence like this, the agencies stop sharing with the oversight committees and sources of information stop sharing with the intelligence community because they can't trust the committee to responsibly handle information.

That makes us less safe.

This damage will be, unfortunately, long-lasting,

but But we need to get back to the mission of our committee, and that is investigating what Russia did, what the Trump campaign did, and what they may have done in combination.

That's what we need to focus on.

But I don't feel a urgency.

I don't feel an urgency out there just talking and walking among people about Russia.

I mean, obviously there are some people who are in the Fox News bubble and they just don't think it's real.

But like DACA, I feel an urgency about.

I think we agree on both those issues.

I think the Dreamers should get their due.

But it looks like that's something that I understand it's more of a human issue or easier to see.

But if you're going to shut down the government, it seems like this is the kind of thing I would shut down the government for.

The fact that Russia is meddling in our election and the commander-in-chief is not fighting a battle that he should be fighting for America.

His number one duty.

The number one thing we're here for.

The number reason we have government is for protection.

Well, look, I think most Americans are just trying to get by in their daily lives.

They're trying to provide for their family.

They're trying to make sure they can get medical care for their kid.

They're trying to make sure if they're a dreamer that they don't get deported to some country they've never really seen before.

But we do need to be mindful of the much bigger challenge facing the country right now.

And that is there is a systematic undermining of our system of checks and balances.

Brick by brick, the walls are being taken down.

The wall between the White House and the Justice Department, the way we are demeaning the press, and as you say, we're suggesting that there is no such thing as objective fact anymore.

The way the administration says that a judge that rules against us is illegitimate.

These are ways in which they're doing enormous damage to our system of government.

And now, tanks in the streets.

You know,

I mean, I laugh too.

I mean, it's a funny premise, comedian, like we like a premise like that, ha ha ha, but I don't, it's not really funny.

The idea, because you should not get used to the look of tanks in the streets.

We don't have that look in America.

And when I've seen that look anywhere else in the world, it's never been good.

And to me, this is like, yeah, let's get them used to that.

Tanks in the streets.

Well, look, I would rather spend our money on making sure that we are taking care of our veterans who are still having a hard time getting medical care they need at the VA, and that our troops are supplied the way they should be,

rather than doing something to gratify the ego of the occupant at 600 Pennsylvania.

Well, I hope that's all it is.

I'm not sure.

But

I know the occupant there,

you should be quite honored.

You have now gotten a nickname from him.

You are Little Schiff.

Yeah.

Well, you're not.

That's what he calls.

I mean, that's been used, but

I'm kind of disappointed because last year I was sleazy Adam Schiff.

Now I'm little Adam Schiff, which is actually, I think, an improvement.

So, does that mean he likes me more now?

It's also confusing.

But I have to tell you, you'll appreciate this, Bill.

One of my colleagues had a suggestion for how I ought to respond on Twitter to the president's attack, which I didn't take because it was much more Bill Moore than Adam Schiff.

But I would share it with you anywhere.

He said, you should write back, dear Mr.

President, when they go low, we go high, Go screw yourself.

But I didn't think I could pull that off.

That was

just not me.

So

when they go low, we get high.

That is a true Bill Maher answer.

Legal here now.

Yeah, bust me on that.

But no, you actually, I like this, that you and a number of other of your colleagues are now sort of like getting in the game, his game.

You mocked him beautifully.

You said something recently recently in one of your tweets about the executive time in the morning that he takes.

This is what I was just talking about.

He's doing his hair for five hours.

You know, this is truly a presidency in which you could say that the country would be much safer in the morning and all day if the president was watching cartoons.

Well, the president is watching cartoons.

That's how bad it is.

But you're doing a young job out there, and I appreciate it.

We all do.

Please keep it up.

All right.

Have a Ship, everybody.

Let's meet our panel.

Hey, how you doing?

Hey, April.

How you doing?

Okay.

Let's meet our panel.

He is a journalist and best-selling author of Lost Connections, Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression and the Unexpected Solutions.

Johan Hari is back with us.

Hey, man.

How you doing?

All right, he was the chief White House ethics lawyer under President George W.

Bush, my old job, who's now a professor of corporate law at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities.

Richard Painter.

How are you, Richard Painter?

And she is the White House correspondent for the American Urban Radio Network and author of The Presidency in Black and White.

April Ryan.

Hey.

Hi.

All right.

So

so much news always happens on a Friday with this White House.

Am I right?

Yeah.

I rings, yeah.

Right.

And now this just came in under the wire.

Another White House resignation because the ex-wife says another beater, David Sorensen, a

speechwriter.

Number three this week, isn't it?

Yes.

Number three.

I know Rob Porter, who's two.

I think there might be a third.

Steve Wynn, the sexual harasser who quit.

Oh, well, I wouldn't say he's exactly in the administration.

Okay, head of the RNC.

But he provides the money in that.

Exactly.

It's the paymaster, Rob.

But again, it's another ex-wife, short marriage, two and a half years.

This does not bode bode well for this administration when you have a president who is already having his issues, dealing with his own issues with sexual innuendos, improprieties, what have you.

But it's so interesting.

You mean a bonker?

What are you talking about?

You're so bad.

No, but no, seriously.

And when we questioned Raj

this week about this, you know, he said that we could have done better.

And the president didn't like that.

And that's why he came in, had the reporters come in, and he wanted to justify.

And he always, the Republicans, they're always, he was like, well, we don't know.

We don't know.

Well, I mean, we don't know, but here's the,

a picture of a black guy.

This is Rob Porter, right?

The wife, the ex-wife.

We saw a picture, okay.

Told others at the time.

The second wife, who also said the same thing happened, they told the same story.

There was a protective order against him.

He was in counseling, and he couldn't get a security clearance from the FBI.

And then Trump, you know...

Who knows?

Yeah.

Isn't it extraordinary that President Obama managed to stock an entire White House for eight years without any violent misogynists?

And Donald Trump struggles to find even a few people who aren't violent misogynists.

Yeah.

What does that mean?

Tell us about him.

It's a very difficult situation, though, for this White House.

I mean, if they were to throw out everyone who is either a wake-beater or a collaborator with the Russians, they might have a pit staff.

You wouldn't have a quorum.

Is that what you say?

You're not enough for a basketball game.

And doesn't this render absurd what General Kelly is now saying?

He's saying, oh, you know, I'm offering to resign because I knew this guy was an abuser.

Why did you go and work for a guy who had 12 accusations of sexual assault against him?

If you're suddenly regarding that as resigning.

Well, let me say this.

Let me say, General Kelly and President Trump are twins from another mother.

They are.

I just, I really don't think.

They are.

But at the same time, it took this for him.

I mean, there's been a pattern with General Kelly.

I mean, from Fortune Wilson, I mean, there's been a big pattern.

And then the conspiracy thing with the Confederacy, it's just been going on and on and on.

And the president has gotten sick.

I mean, bottom line, the president wanted General Kelly there, but once you usurp the president and you stand out before him, more so than he does, and the president can get in his own trouble by himself just by a team.

But when General Kelly throws him under the bus as well, it's a bad thing.

But I'm going to say this.

It's concerning when you have people in that White House who are next to the president, who cannot get a security clearance, be it interim or what have you, and dealing with top-secret and classified information.

This is what I want to ask about.

Something like this, which I don't think would ever happen if we didn't have unified government.

You know, for years people have been saying, you know, if we had a unified government, maybe they'd get things done.

And when it's the Republicans at least, what it turns out is not only are you not getting anything done or anything good, but they do whatever they want.

Security clearance, we don't have to do that anymore.

Mitch McConnell with the Neil Gorsuch thing.

You know, people forget, Neil Gorsuch should be Merrick Garland.

But Mitch McConnell...

But because

they control all three branches of government, they just got, we're not doing that.

There were sanctions

against Russia that they passed.

And Trump just said, not doing that.

But here's the what are you going to do about it?

Here's a thing called checks and balances.

When I was in school, I thought that was the rule of law, and I thought it's still there now.

But here's the problem.

The party that base, they just love this little piece about this president, the fact that he's about anti-abortion guns, he's for guns, and no taxes, and all these other Republican core issues, and all the other stuff doesn't matter.

But what is it?

This is your bailiwick.

What would you say about what I'm asking about here, about the

unified government?

It's not a flaw in the Constitution.

It's a joke.

It's a joke.

Because there is no oversight from the House of Representatives or the Senate.

They don't care.

What's the check on that?

What's the check when we have

democracy bingo and the three lemons?

They may have to get the boot because they haven't been doing anything.

Look at this House Oversight Committee.

They spent two years going through Hillary Clinton's emails and they didn't do anything else.

They weren't even interested in John Kerry because he'd already run for president.

You know, they were focusing on her and then along comes Trump and there's no oversight anymore of anything.

They aren't doing anything.

Bill, you asked what's the check meant to be on that.

It's meant to be the media.

I think one of the most revealing things about Trump is the night of the election one of the first people he phoned to thank was alex jones the deranged conspiracy theorist who claims the sandy hook massacre did not happen and the parents whose children were murdered are liars and their children never even existed when you've got such a broken which by the way alex jones doesn't even believe his own ex-wife says he laughs at his listeners when he's off air it just like trump i'm sure laughs at his voters what you when you

say he's a comedian exactly when you've got such a broken mechanism where that is one of the leading news sources in the united states for ordinary people that's a really, that's a deeper broken mechanism just than one-party government.

Right.

So

you mentioned the media.

We

put together a dictator checklist

last year, no, right around this time.

I think President Trump has a somewhere or less.

It's pretty scary.

And now with the military parades, he had eight out of ten, now he's going to have nine out of ten.

Wow.

You're a narcissist who likes to put your name or face on buildings.

Appoint family members to positions of power.

Rallies.

Who has rallies after the election is over?

He's still campaigning.

He is.

It's not even about campaigning.

It's about he feels blue because someone was mean on TV.

So, ooh, I need 9,000 drooling idiots in an airplane hangar in Tuscaloosa.

Stat!

Make them feel good so we can...

Okay.

Rallies.

You hate the press and use your own propaganda outlet, Fox, state TV, I call it.

And the Twitter.

Missile parades.

You use your office for your own personal financial gain.

Align with other dictators and strongmen.

Claim minorities are the cause of the problems in the country.

And you lie so freely that people don't know what the truth is anymore.

The last one, the one he hasn't done, military costume.

When he comes out with the big,

I am.

That's the day I think I have to resign

Real time from Vancouver

Can't we cut a deal with him about these parades?

Can't we say okay, you're allowed to have this parade provided a few things the Khan family whose son died in Iraq who they Trump mocked because they're Muslim They've got to be at the front.

What about my Aisha Johnson, whose husband died in Niger?

Trump mocked her,

said to her, you should know, he should have known what he was getting into.

If they're at the front, along with all the transgender troops who Trump said should be thrown out of the military, they will let you have your parade, right?

Well, wait,

I do this differently.

I think that Russia, Russia ought to be invited to send a platoon.

They're a major supporter of the campaign.

They supported the campaign.

Campaign contributors expect something in return.

It's only fair, right?

Absolutely only fair.

And another thing I'd add to your list, when you insist that people clap for you

during your speech,

I mean, that's the way they do it in North Korea.

And if we don't clap,

you know, they...

They're un-American.

They're treasonous.

You go off to re-education.

And maybe he wants to send the entire Democratic delegation off to re-education for not clapping during the State of the Union.

If somebody had told me two years ago that we would be doing jokes...

Often, you just did one.

I did one in the monologue where the punchline is that America is really owned by Russia.

I'd always say, you're crazy.

But that's, you do any joke where that's the punchline.

It's not, and from the reporting that I've been doing for the last 21 years at the White House,

it's not about the president.

It's about we, the people.

And the problem is the people who are supporting this who are supposed to say, wait a minute, this isn't right.

And they're not stopping it.

And that's the problem.

And when you go talk about a militarized type of situation, tanks and missiles in the street in the United States, that is rough.

And I know.

That is terrible.

You're right about that, right?

He wants us to get used to the sight of tanks.

At the time when he's talking about whose button is bigger, he wants to show his power.

And the question is, what is going to happen with us in North Korea?

It's not over yet.

He got off on that situation where he was on Twitter and he said the button thing.

And then North Korea and South Korea talked.

But that's one moment.

There's still more because this president likes to throw himself, he makes his own hole and throws himself in it.

And us with him.

And Bill, but it's really important to stress when we're talking, I I think you're totally right, but it's really important to stress when we're talking about.

It's all about his tiny dick, isn't it?

Because you don't know what he has.

There's a lot of compensating.

That's

Peruvia.

This parade is going on on politics.

There's a military parade that's been going on for the last 17 years.

We shouldn't talk about the military without mentioning it.

It's the war in Afghanistan.

He's killed hundreds of thousands of people.

He doesn't have anything to celebrate.

In his first eight months, Donald Trump killed more civilians with drone strikes than Barack Obama in his entire eight years, and Obama killed a lot.

So we've got to talk about the fact that there is an ongoing $1 trillion military parade which is killing people every day.

Okay, Debbie Debber.

Let's have some fun, some comedy.

People have been asking me the last couple of weeks, who is this guy, Devin Nunes?

Because, you know, once in a while, somebody rises to the top.

There he is.

He's from California.

He might be somebody's...

Congressman right here.

And like, who is this guy?

And it's true.

He kind of came out of nowhere.

So I persuaded our friends we've we've done this a number of times before at us weekly to uh every week they have 25 things you didn't know about me next week it's going to be devin nunes would you like to see some of the 25 things you don't know about me i even did it once i was eating the pod i was eating tide pods way before it was a thing

My district produces plum, juicy, delicious oranges, which remind me how I sucked Donald Trump's ass.

I come from a long, proud line of treasonous enablers.

I have to constantly keep moving, or a line forms of people wanting to punch me in the face.

It doesn't bother me I'm called a sycophant because I don't know what that means.

I can lower the IQ in a room faster than a gas leak.

I don't consider my penis small.

I say it's been redacted.

I grew up on a small farm milking cows.

Now I jerk off the president of the United States.

What a country.

All right, she is the staff editor and columnist for the New York Times.

Please welcome Barry Wise.

Barry, how you doing?

Hi.

Great pleasure to meet you.

Okay, I'm so glad you're here.

I've been wanting to have on more people to talk about this issue in a very open-minded way, and you seem very open-minded.

I am very concerned about a widening gap between how all of us speak about the Me Too movement privately, or anything really in America these days, in our own homes, among our friends, and then how we do it in public.

And of course with social media, everybody has a sort of public persona.

Yes.

And we're becoming ourselves and our avatar.

And I like people who keep it real, and I feel like we really have.

So

first of all, address the interesting part of it, which is that the fight is really between factions of women.

It's not between men and women arguing.

Right.

So obviously, the Me Too movement is long overdue, as we've seen today

with Rob Porter and everyone else.

But there's a real debate happening between the hard left and liberals.

The hard left is basically saying

it's okay if a few innocent men go down with the ship if that's what it means, if that's what it takes to bring down the patriarchy.

They hate zero tolerance on the right when it comes to drug policy, but they love zero tolerance when it comes to sexual misconduct.

That's a problem because what it does is collapse all the categories.

It means that Aziz Ansari is on a list next to Harvey Weinstein.

And I don't think anyone with common sense thinks that that's reasonable.

Right, but

meantime,

meantime, the liberals, and I think we, the liberals, and we count, I think you and I count ourselves among them,

we want to see a change in society.

We believe this is overdue.

We share those same goals.

But I think personally that the way to get there and the way to make this a mainstream sustainable movement is to stick to things, I don't know, like due process, like innocent until proven guilty.

Yes, no.

I don't think, I don't

I don't think a politics that basically says this category of person, men, is toxic and tainted, is a good kind of politics.

We see where that ends up.

And what about men just shut up?

Because Matt Damon?

Well, everybody, not just him, but any, any, nobody, no men spoke at the Golden Globe.

Right.

You know,

and when a man does say the wrong thing, and Matt Damon, by the way, did not say the wrong thing.

No, he said the most anodyne thing in the world.

Exactly.

And then he said, after he said what he said, which is rapist.

He said,

apologized and said, I should just shut up.

This is what I'm asking.

This is not going to help.

Because, you know, after he said what he said, he added,

but both those things, he was talking about rape and a pat on the butt.

One is worse than the other.

But he said both should be eradicated, never condoned.

Yes.

And, you know, when you're wrong, even when you say the right thing,

what's a problem?

So this is why.

Then I feel like a husband.

If you want to understand why people are silencing themselves, why are people silencing themselves on this issue?

They see what happens.

When they say the right thing, it's wrong.

Exactly.

And that's a terrifying prospect.

And that is what's happening.

I mean,

there's sort of trial by Twitter, not only for the people that are accused, right?

Not only for the people who, once they're accused, by the way, how do you, what office do you go to to regain your reputation?

But it's also if you step out of line even slightly with the hard left feminist orthodoxy, all of a sudden, like me, you're a traitor to your gender.

You're an anti-feminist.

You're condoning rape culture.

It's also your generation.

There is also a war within the generations and I think within your generation.

And you have to win it.

I'm trying.

You must.

Thank you.

I am telling you because

I ask someone for a drink.

25% of millennial-aged men think that asking someone for a drink constitutes sexual harassment.

Well, if that sexual harassment, doing this is sexual assault, and an unsolicited kiss is rape, we've lost.

It's over.

Right.

That's game over.

Then words don't mean anything.

What's important is that

25%.

And this is what I always try to keep in mind when I'm feuding with the millennials.

I don't think it's the majority of them.

I think it's the upper-middle-class kids who grew up screaming at their parents.

And that was

okay.

And it's.

And they are just so fucking fragile.

Excuse me.

And they're like...

I think of them as emotional hemophiliacs.

And the rest of us

have to be so careful around the business.

I know, I'm sorry.

I'm gone.

Take my penis out.

Cut it off.

Well, this is what's happening.

I had someone touch me on the elbow the other day, and they like,

froze and apologized.

I had someone else email me and say, I'm so sorry.

I said, what are you sorry for?

We were on a podcast together.

He was apologizing because he told me that I sounded like cute.

He used the word cute, was like, You sounded really cute and smart.

And I was like, You're losing your head.

People are losing their minds.

They are losing their minds, and they're going to bleed what is so great out of life.

I mean, we're Valentine, this is the first meeting to Valentine's Day coming up.

You need to get him permission, but not a Valentine.

You know, I mean, who knows what to write in the card?

But,

you know,

you can make anything 100% safe.

A police state, they always say, is the safest place to live.

Right.

But you're in a police state.

Correct.

Okay, we don't want to do that with love.

We've spent our whole history as humans saying it's magical, it's serendipity.

A lot of it happens subconsciously.

We don't know why we're attracted to somebody or why it works or why somebody turns us on.

You can't legislate all this or rule it out of existence.

Right.

I do think, however, that there's an opening in this moment.

One thing I think is true is that I was put through that system that you talked about, the snowflake factory.

You know, I went to a college where I was told that gender is a social construct, nature doesn't matter at all, that there's really no difference between men and women.

I'm sorry, that's just, those are myths, okay?

And that's a lie that the sexual revolution sold to women.

And I think one exciting thing about this moment is that there's an an opening for it to revisit the sexual revolution.

And the fact that all of our sexual conversation, you know, the conversation about our sexual culture is about consent and pain.

Whatever happened to intimacy and love and romance?

Wouldn't it be amazing if that was our conversation?

Courtship.

Courtship.

Courtship.

Courtship.

Courtship.

See, is there any?

That's become a dirty word, but it's courting.

I want to be courted.

Well, but

exactly.

But that doesn't mean sex.

But no, but courted means maybe pursued, which means maybe, ooh, maybe somebody got the wrong idea.

No, pursued.

And you're demuring once and.

You're pursued with boundaries and then you slowly let them in.

But to me, there's a tremendous contradiction between that and then tender.

Like,

well, like, you know, if you ask me for a drink, it is sexual harassment.

And if I do that to you at work, that is sexual harassment.

But I'm going to do this.

But I'm going to do this.

And in 2009,

like animals in 20 minutes.

That seems nuts, right?

I mean,

your generation is a little fucking crazy.

Okay.

So let me ask you.

Let me ask about this to everybody.

Okay.

Hillary Clinton, the Me Too movement came for her a couple of weeks ago.

She had a faith advisor on her campaign.

Don't get me started on why a campaign needs a faith advisor.

You need another pollster, not another.

I need another Xanax when I read something like this.

So this guy, and he was on her campaign in 2008.

He apparently was inappropriate with a young woman who worked under him.

Don't make that joke.

He rubbed her shoulders inappropriately, kissed her on the forehead, sent her a string of suggestive emails.

We don't know what suggestive means.

That's according to the person who says he did it.

So that's okay.

So this is...

Not good.

That's not good.

It's not good.

No, no.

We're not condoning that.

I just want to ask about whether the correct response.

Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post said, How do you write a primal scream?

Because my head is about to explode over the story.

And Hillary's appallingly mild response.

Hillary says she was dismayed, dismayed, like you would be dismayed if this happened to your daughter?

No, you'd want to rip the guy's head off.

You know what?

It's just a little official.

Okay, here's the thing.

Ruth Marcus is not just responding to the semantics of the word dismayed, though.

She's responding to a history of Hillary Clinton coining terms like bimbo eruption.

And yes, you know what Hillary Clinton

called the woman.

Hillary Clinton called the woman, okay?

And then Donald Trump didn't talk about, the president did not talk about the women that Rob Porter or even the speechwriter had dealt with.

So, of course,

we shouldn't stop talking about Trump's standards.

He wanted to be a little bit more.

And it was somewhere on our campaign.

Yes, that is fair.

And the reason that's also relevant is, frankly, if Hillary was president, I do not think we would be having the Me Too movement at all.

Hillary Clinton's a good person.

She was attacked repeatedly in the 1990s by the far-right wing.

She was repeatedly attacked by the Trump campaign, this locker-up chant, and to have people on the far left turning around and dumping on Hillary Clinton.

And I would also have to say I was very disappointed to see one of the senator from New York, Christian Gillibrand, say that Bill Clinton would have to should have had resigned back in 1996.

You know, that's just not right.

After, you know, Putin stole the election from her to just kick her when she's down.

I mean, it's just not right.

She's done a lot for our country.

And we keep talking about.

We keep talking about this Hillary and Bill thing.

It's over.

It's over.

It was tried.

He was impeached.

That's their marriage.

And it's harder to stay than it is to leave.

Okay.

And you have to think about it.

Can I quote one more person on this?

I'm sorry.

I'm interested.

And never say on a talk show, why are we talking about this?

Because I fucking said we're talking about this.

What sort of thing is that to say out of panel?

Why are we talking about this?

This is all anyone wants to talk about, by the way.

And it is relevant to today.

Let me quote you.

Gail Collins writes in your paper, and I love Gail Collins.

Okay, but I didn't understand this.

She's talking, and a great writer, and very funny.

Okay, she's talking about Hillary and Bill, and she's talking about Monica.

And she said,

oh, many women have not gotten over the fact that Hillary did not leave her husband when she discovered he was having an affair in the White House.

Here's the part.

Okay.

With a girl far too young and powerless to be a genuinely willing partner.

Nope.

Monica was 22 to 22.

Way more than that.

And she was not powerless.

You know how that happened, right?

It was during a government shutdown.

She was bringing up.

This is, this is no.

Tell it.

Tell it.

Keep it real, baby.

You keep it real, baby.

Is this considered, you know.

We're off the air today.

So, so, so, no, seriously.

We should all be on stop.

No, no.

It was during the government shutdown, she brought the president a pizza, okay?

And there was no one there, and she brought him a pizza, and she,

a young lady, lifted her skirt to the president of the United States.

And then she proceeds to talk to her mother and Linda Tripp about it.

So whether she was how old she was, and she's getting advice about this and considering him her boyfriend, No, she knew what she was doing.

Okay, but the thing I admire so much about Monica Lewinsky, Monica Lewinsky, could she give consent 100%?

I'm not saying it was right, though.

It was right at all.

But the issue here was an abuse of power.

He went on to lie about the affair, to smear her,

and she was patient zero of internet wiring.

But my question is simply: are women at 22 able to give consent?

Of course.

Monica's worries.

It's incentivizing women.

Monica's always saying it.

You can get mad, you can drink, you give consent.

Monica Lewinsky.

She's always said it's consensual.

And she's always stressed, even when Republicans were really pressuring her to say otherwise, that it was consensual.

And I just want to say about Monica, a lot of people going through what she went through would have gone into a hole and died.

Instead, she's become a heroic advocate for victims of internet shaming.

I urge everyone to watch her TED Talk.

She's become a real American.

Yeah, Monica Lewinsky.

It could have been so easy for her to just give up.

No, seriously.

Watch her TED Talk.

And Hank Reed Bravely.

And for Washington TED Talk.

Look at the work she's done on bullies.

Look at the work she's done.

She's scoring points left and right over the bottom.

The fact that she didn't change her name

is heroic.

Honestly, the kind of work she does now.

This is exactly where Donald Trump wants us to be talking about this.

This is what he did after the Billy Bush.

You guys take that.

Some said here.

Are you fair?

After Billy Bush,

he brings them to

the debate.

And he wants to dig up.

You got stuff from three minutes left.

But no one talks about the question.

You ask the question.

I'll ask the question.

No one talks about the relationship with the president and the first lady.

When she was sitting in that box in the state of the union,

it looked painful.

And

when he went to Davos and she said, I'm not going and I'm going straight to Florida with the stormy weather situation.

I said, wow.

Stormy Daniels.

Stormy weather.

Stormy weather.

Yeah, she got it.

Yeah.

Well, why does she stay?

What's in it for her?

I don't know.

Yeah.

She's got a child.

Yeah.

She's got a child.

But she lived in New York for the first half of this year.

Right, but it could be also, as Amarosa says, service to country.

It's not even her country, is it?

I guess she is.

I know.

We'd like it for its country.

But this is the real issue.

I mean, almost anybody would, and I'm a Republican, but I would trade trade Donald Trump for Bill Clinton any day.

Absolutely.

I would trade Donald Trump for Pennywise the Crown.

Oh, wow.

Okay.

It's always safe to make fun of Donald Trump.

All right.

Last question.

Bernie Sanders says, this is plugging your book on opiates.

Learn lost connections.

Uncovering the real causes of depression.

Oh, fuck.

Sorry.

Bernie Sanders says we should go after the pharmaceutical companies the way in the 90s they went after, the tobacco companies.

He said the American people should know what they knew about when they knew that tobacco was addictive, a major health hazard, and had killed millions of people.

Same should go for the pharmaceutical companies.

What do you think?

If we want to understand why people are taking so many painkillers, we need to understand why they're in such pain.

This is the deeper level to this question.

It's what my book Lost Connections is all about.

We've got a crisis of addiction, depression, and anxiety because we live in a society, everyone knows we have physical needs.

You need food, you need water, you need clean air.

There's equally strong evidence you've got psychological needs.

You need to feel you belong.

You need to feel your life has meaning and purpose.

You need to feel you've got a future.

And we're living in a culture that is not meeting people's psychological needs.

When people are in very deep pain, they will look to anesthetize themselves, right?

And we can fetishise at being angry at the drug dealer.

And there's plenty of bad things the pharmaceutical companies have done, but we've got to understand this deep underlying crisis.

The places that have reduced their addiction crises are the places that have done that.

Switzerland had an opioid crisis as bad as this country has now.

They legalized heroin and they did two things.

They gave people the drug they were addicted to, and they gave them massive amounts of support to deal with the reason they were in such pain in the first place.

Housing, work, therapy.

You know how many people have died of heroin overdoses on legal heroin in Switzerland in 12 years?

Zero.

Not one person.

Everywhere I went in the world, the places...

They're in Switzerland, you know.

But everywhere I went in the world, Bill.

There are loads of people in the United States

who I write about in London.

Okay, all right, you filibuster.

Thank you.

Time for new rules.

Sorry.

Thank you for everybody's opinion on it.

All right.

Neural, if you're going to send a car into space, let's at least be honest with the galaxy.

Send up a 79 Transam so they know we're douchebags.

Neural, stop using the same two pictures in every signs of a troubled relationship article.

I don't even need to read the article.

If my partner is sitting on the edge of the bed while I'm out of focus in the background, it's over.

Also, New Rule, you don't have to read Forbes or watch Fox Business News to know what's going on with the stock market.

If there are guys in blue coats touching their head, bad!

New rule, Megan Markle is allowed to admit that she finds this whole British royalty thing incredibly stupid.

It's okay, Megan.

You can tell us.

It doesn't feel like a fairy tale.

It feels like you've been cast in a really boring season of Downton Abbey.

New Earl, if you send me a text with the typo, you don't have to send another one correcting it.

I went to college.

I can figure out that you're not running latte

because you can't find a place to park your cat.

And finally, new rule, if you can't read, you can't be president.

Now, I know Donald Trump is a stable genius, but he

He handles a teleprompter about as well as the real housewives handle wine.

That's why it took him an hour and a half to sound out the State of the Union address.

The man is an after-school special waiting to happen.

He read

so slowly.

They had to set the teleprompter speed to Shatner.

Now, of course, the president can read a little.

FDR could dance a little.

But

those are the people you have to talk to.

I'm sending you out there.

But according to Michael Wolf for Trump, quote, if it was in print, it might as well not exist.

Some believe that for all practical purposes, he was no more than semi-literate.

Ooh, burn.

And pretty sneaky a wolf, to put it where Trump will never see it in a book.

Today, we learn that Trump does not read the Presidential Daily Briefing as every other president has.

Members of the National Security Council say the only way to get him to read a memo is to stick his name in every paragraph because he keeps reading if he's mentioned.

Like a baby will keep eating his peas if you go, here comes the airplane every time.

You can tell Trump has not taken in new information for decades because he's always saying, most people don't know that.

About things that most people do in fact know.

Nobody knew that healthcare could be so complicated.

Abraham Lincoln.

Most people don't even know he was a Republican.

People don't realize we are an unbelievably divided country.

People don't know this about Iraq, but they have among the largest oil reserves in the world.

He writes it himself, doesn't he?

Here's a picture of Trump hard at work.

Have you ever seen seen an emptier desk?

No need for pen, paper, or any device.

It's all up here, baby.

And that is possibly the worst thing about him.

His certainty that all he knows is all anybody would ever need to know.

Psychologists call this the Dunning-Kruger effect, the tendency of ignorant people to think they're much smarter than they are.

Usually it's harmless and just leads to rock bands making concept albums about robots.

But it gets scary when it leads to a president who thinks global warming isn't real because it still snows.

Trump says, I like reading as little as possible.

I don't need, you know, 200-page reports on something that can be handled on a page.

He's actually proud that he makes decisions without learning anything, which makes him the perfect president for a nation nation perpetually looking at its phone.

They don't.

They don't like you to attack the phone.

Illiteracy isn't Trump's shame, it's his bond with us, a sub-literate president for a sub-literate country.

A country where a majority of adults get their news from Facebook and 24% of teenagers are almost constantly online, mostly with James Franco.

A quarter of Americans say they haven't read a book in the past year, and the other three-quarters are lying.

Lately, the hottest thing in publishing has been adult coloring books, which you can find in the bookstore in the section marked Seriously.

People will always say, I love to read, but don't dig into that too deep.

What they mean is they went to Barnes and Nobles to buy a cat calendar

and on the way out picked up yet another book on cooking in the miracle pot, or a self-help book, or one of the many stories of a boy who dies and meets Jesus in heaven and comes back to life, or some nonsense that's really for juveniles, like Harry Potter or Twilight.

I mean, there's reading and then there's reading.

50 Shades of Gray is to literature what candy corn is to vegetables.

And I hate to tell you, Facebook is not a place to read in the sense of garnering real and valuable information.

Facebook is what replaced reading.

So you'd have more time to take pictures of your dick.

And no, sorry, staring at your phone doesn't make you a reader any more than watching fireworks makes you an astronomer

or getting a tramp stamp makes your ass a museum.

All right, thank you very much.

I'll be at the Mirage in Vegas March 5th.

I want to thank my guests, Johan Harry, Richard Crater, April Ryan, Barry Weiss, and Congressman Adam Schiff.

Join us now for overtime on YouTube.

Thank you, folks.

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

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