Ep. #418: Sheldon Whitehouse, Jake Tapper

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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, thank you, thank you, and happy St.

Patrick's Day, is it there?

All right.

Thank you very much.

Did you already drink yourself sick?

So unnecessary now that we have a president who makes you want to puke all the time.

Yeah.

Well,

the White House celebrated St.

Patrick's Day by slashing green energy

and everything else that's good in the budget.

Did you see the budget?

Oh, yes, it takes all the money.

They put out their new budget, the Trump budget.

It takes away all the money from scientists, teachers, and human rights workers, and Meals on Wheels and Muppets

and gives it to the people who really need it, the defense contractors.

If only there was a way to get the F-35 to run on coal, it would be a perfect budget.

Yeah, because coal.

Hey,

we're going to put the coal miners back to work.

That's what Trump.

What the fuck is that?

That's what he goes around the country saying every day.

We're going to put the coal by...

That's what passes for good news in this administration.

You're going back down in that toxic hole.

And as they're lowering the mint, and then we're going to take away your health care.

Yeah, this week.

Well,

this week we finally found out what Trump care is.

You know, the whole campaign, he was something terrific.

Remember, I'm going to replace it with something terrific.

There's so many quotes of him saying it's going to, everyone's going to be covered, everybody, it's going to cost you a fraction, a fraction, a fraction of what the old ones, and better coverage.

Wow, that is quite a deal.

Everybody, fraction, better coverage?

People are gonna wanna get sick.

This plan is so good.

You are gonna wish you had a tumor just so you could go to the hospital under my plan.

Now we see what the plan is.

Surprise, 24 million people lose health coverage and the rich get a giant giant tax cut.

This is the new place we're living in in America.

Meals on Wheels, the new budget director said, not showing any results.

You mean other than not killing cripples

and veterans and older people,

old people, you know, 3,200 jobs at the EPA are going to be cut.

under this new budget.

Remember during the campaign, Trump was always saying, what do you have to

This stuff.

Life as we know it.

The budget director also said about the new budget that the after-school meals program gone.

You know, I've always said this: you want Republicans to care about kids, you're going to just have to jam them back in the uterus.

Climate change research.

For years, they said, well, you know, climate change needs more study.

Now, zero.

They made a point, $0,000 in research for climate change, the greatest challenge of our time.

And they're like, nothing.

No, this is like if your car was breaking down and your solution was put black tape over the Czech engine light.

Cutting PBS out.

I mean, most people look at Sesame Street and they see a show that educates children.

Trump sees a show where a landlord is being forced to rent to black people.

And that's

just the policy part.

of our national nightmare that we are living through every week.

You know, there's two parts of this policy and then personality.

Personality, because hours after our last show, a couple of weeks ago, President Crazy Pants

started tweeting about how Obama tapped his phone at Trump Tower based on nothing.

Nothing.

That's the great thing about having tiny hands.

It's easier to pull stuff right out of your ass.

And even though Obama himself has said this is bullshit, the wiretapping, and our former National Intelligence Director said that, the FBI director said that, Speaker of the House said that, the chairman of the House Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate from both sides of the aisle said this.

Trump addressed all these doubters today.

He said, well, I saw someone say it on Fox News.

Really?

That was it?

I saw someone say it on Fox News.

What has to happen

before Republic?

What has to happen, Republican patriots, before you act?

Does the president have to get naked, roll around on the White House lawn, start eating the grass, and going, vroom, vroom, I'm a lawnmower?

I'm going to have a heart attack before this thing.

And Trump said this today in front of Angela Merkel.

Did you see that?

She had a look on her face like how I longed for the days when I got creepy shoulder rubs from George W.

Bush.

And then, oh, that was a great meeting with Angela Merkel.

He obviously hates her.

And of course he's so good at hiding this stuff.

They were sitting there, and the people are shouting, don't you want to shake hands like every president has ever done in every Photoshop?

No.

No, you didn't.

Fuck her.

No, I'm not going to shake your hands.

And then after the meeting, you know, he tweeted, lousy meeting with German Chancellor Barney Rubble.

Low energy, unattractive, didn't even want to make me pop a tic-tac.

Don't start groaning.

I'll go fucking nuts on you today.

You can see I am right on the edge here.

Do not fucking push me.

We're supposed to be on the same team.

Don't be part of the problem.

No, this is driving, it's not just me, it's driving us all crazy, right?

Please tell me it's not just me.

I mean, this is the craziest administration ever.

They think the microwave oven is filming them,

But during press conferences, they don't seem to realize they're being broadcast on TV.

And I saw it on Fox News.

By the president's own admission, all he does all day is watch cable news, which is nothing but commercials for Zoloft, Paxil, Selexa, Abilify.

Don, pick one.

All right, we got a great show.

Barney Frank and Andrew Sullivan are here.

That's going to be fun.

And later we're going to be speaking with CNN's Jake Tapper.

That's going to be great, too.

First up, he is the second-term United States Senator from Rhode Island and the author of Capture the Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse.

Hey, Senator.

Great pleasure to meet you, sir.

Great pleasure to meet you.

Okay, well, I've been following you for a long time, and you are the greatest champion, I think, in the Senate for doing something about climate change.

And when I saw last week that our new EPA director said carbon has nothing to do

with global warming, I mean, this is not a place we were even with George W.

Bush, and they weren't helpful on the subject.

I mean, I wanted to start crying like the old Indian member in the air.

Yeah.

What do we do about people who just won't accept the science?

We've got to get people organized.

You know, once you get out of the control,

once you get out of the machinery that has been built by the fossil fuel industry to propagate this climate denial nonsense, young people, Republicans under 35 think that climate denial is ignorant or crazy by a majority.

You've got all sorts of

people coming out now.

Like James Baker, Baker, Schultz, and Paulson, three Treasury Secretaries, all together saying we've got to do something about it.

The party is going to get left behind if we don't, and we have a solution, which is a carbon tax price.

Okay.

So let me ask you about Obamacare.

That was also big in the news this week, as it's, I guess, in their view, hopefully going away.

Trump always says it's imploding.

He always says it's a disaster, and I don't see a lot of pushback on that.

But it's not really a disaster.

I mean, there's some problems, but give us the democratic version of it because I don't think we hear it enough.

CBO

just said that 10 years out,

if you repeal Obamacare, you will have taken health insurance away from 24 million people.

So it's not much of an implosion if 10 years out it's going to be covering 24 million people.

Less.

Yeah,

if they don't repeal it.

Right, yeah.

So it's not like it's going to be gone away in 10 years.

In 10 years, according to CBO, 24 million Americans will be getting coverage under Obamacare.

That's worth sticking with, and it will improve.

Yeah, I mean, rates are going up for some people, but it is a small percentage.

The way he talks about it.

It just went down in Rhode Island.

Yeah, and it seems to be accepted by so many people in the media that it's a disaster.

I wonder where we would be if the Democrats had defended it better.

I still don't think they're defending it properly.

I certainly, I know they didn't do it then.

I don't disagree.

You don't disagree.

I don't disagree.

Well, who, who?

It's complicated to show how many people it's helping.

To just yell, repeal Obamacare to a crowd that hates Obama already is a much simpler task.

And now it's kind of interesting to watch the Republicans try to switch from the shout repeal Obamacare to a group that already hates Obama and actually get into governing and trying to design something.

And over on the Senate side, you've got a lot of Republican senators looking around and going, what, you want me to set foot in that thing you've designed?

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, they caught the car like a dog.

Yeah.

Now they don't know what quite to do with it.

And it's more popular than ever.

And also, we found out that a lot of people who are typical Trump voters will be losing their coverage.

So

more and more people are finding out that the coverage they have is Obamacare.

Right.

They didn't know that.

They didn't know that.

No.

Yeah.

So, I mean, who is the Democrat who is going to expose this con?

I mean, he is a con man.

I was just quoting there in the monologue some of the things he used to say about what's going to happen with your health care.

It's straight out of a con man's textbook.

You know, way lower prices.

Everyone's going to be covered.

Better.

It's insane.

It is up to the Democratic Party to say, this is a huckster.

This is a used carnival.

This is a fair salesman, a carney barker.

Don't you get it?

I don't see.

Who is that person who is going to step forward and do that?

You?

I think we...

We say every senator looks in a mirror and sees a president.

Nope, not me.

Not you?

I do.

You don't want that job?

No.

I do think we all have to do it.

And I think that there are people out there who are going to be incredibly disappointed.

You know, there's a part a callous Democrat would say, let let them repeal it.

Let the suffering wave go out across the country, and then there'll be a wave back that says, What did you do, you liar?

Right.

People will die.

We actually care that people will die and that there'll be suffering and that it's not good.

It's a great flaw.

We as Democrats.

We care that people will die.

So we have to hold that off.

And we have to, I think, continue to make the case that what this guy says over and over again just isn't true.

And it's important not just because of the individual lie, but there are times in history when the world has to believe the present United States.

Right.

And if this guy has squandered all of his credibility.

That bus has said.

Yeah.

It's

the boy who climbed wolf.

Your book is about

corporate money in

money and power and influence throughout our politics.

Now some people would say, well, look, Donald Trump didn't spend nearly as much as Hillary Clinton, and he won.

He kind of proved that it's it's not that important.

What do you say to that?

Well, unless you count a billion dollars in free publicity that Fox News gave,

if they had to report that, it would look a lot more like.

Okay, but that's not what you're talking about.

But even if.

You're talking about money and Citizens United ruling of the Supreme Court.

Even if he was the exception to the rule,

he still came to a political field where the agenda had been determined by money and politics.

There is a reason that in 2009, Donald Trump said that climate change would be catastrophic and irreversible, and that the science was irrefutable, and that in 2016 he said it's a Chinese hoax.

It's because when he came to the table to look around at what the Republican Party looked like, he realized climate change was totally off the table.

You could not talk about that any longer.

My first three years in the Senate, there were six Republican senators who were working on different climate change bills.

Along come Citizens United in January of 2010, and from 2010 after, there has not been a single significant Republican-sponsored bill on carbon dioxide.

Zero.

The cardio flatlined.

And that's because the fossil fuel industry knew it was coming, asked for it, expected it, went right to work.

And it's not just the spending bill, it's also the threat, right?

If I'm allowed to punch you in the nose with a million dollar spend, I'm allowed to threaten to punch you in the nose.

And the threats are going to be everywhere, even where the money isn't.

And that's part of the effect of Citizens United.

It is so pernicious.

All right.

Well, I hope you keep doing what you're doing.

You're from a state with one million people.

One million people.

California has 40 million.

Someday I hope you will agree that we should get a lot more senators, or you should get a lot less.

Thank you very much, Senator.

You're a good score.

I appreciate that.

Senator Whitehouse, let's meet our panel.

Hey, boys.

Who are you?

Okay.

All right.

Here they are.

He is a writer-at-large for New York magazine.

Our friend Andrew Sullivan's over here.

He was the 16-term U.S.

Congressman from the 4th District of Massachusetts.

My favorite Congressman, Bernie Frank, is over here.

Don't forget to send me some questions for nice overtime so I can answer the show on YouTube.

Okay, first of all, do not adjust your sets.

We have two panelists tonight.

I want to hear about this.

We've done this before, and then all next week, like, Bill, did someone not show up?

No.

No.

This is the way I want it.

Sometimes I'm just going to have two.

I'm getting older, okay?

I'm slowing down.

No, that's not it.

But can you imagine the poor third person trying to get a word in edge-wise with you two?

I pitted a fool.

Anyway, so, all right.

There's two parts of this every week, policy and personality.

I use the word personality loosely.

Let's start with that first, because they're both nightmares.

And I guess my first question is, what is the proper response to insanity?

I never thought I'd have to ask these questions.

But Donald Trump's tweets, like the stuff about Obama wiretapping him, are like, you know, in ancient times, reading the entrails of a chicken.

No,

chickens had entrails.

That's right, there was

some basis for it.

So

I see all day on television people taking this stuff.

They're compelled to take stuff seriously that is just the rantings of a demented man-child.

in full makeup.

So

what is the proper response to insanity?

Well, the usual response is to politely slowly edge out of the room.

If you met someone like this in everyday life, right,

you would think this person is clearly mentally unstable, is saying things that are palpably untrue.

I mean, when he says things that my crowd is bigger than the other crowd, and you know, you could see with your very eyes, this is not true.

And then, of course, his pride and his vanity

requires him never to apologize for anything.

If you accept reality, you're accepting something outside of Donald Trump.

And Donald Trump sees nothing but Donald Trump.

So, how do we react when the president is this crazy person in the park feeding the pigeon?

A couple of ways.

First of all, I will give the media credit.

He has forced them off this automatic, he said, he said.

The media is finally now accepting its responsibility to say that's a lot of crap.

Right.

And then we say,

in fact, I think

Trump's excesses are going to force a lot of people to do jobs they'd rather not do, the media and the Republicans.

But with the media, they are finally saying, no, this isn't true.

He's making this stuff up.

And that's the response, is not to let him change the subject.

And there are people who said, I think mistakenly, oh, when he sends out those tweets, he's trying to divert attention from the real issues.

No, his inability to tell the truth, his lack of contact with reality, is a very fundamental issue.

And I think it's important to keep hammering at that.

But there's also a rather pernicious strategy underneath this: that after a while, you get so used to people in authority telling you things that aren't true that you don't believe anybody in authority is telling the truth.

That's why he's attacking the veracity of the intelligence services, the Justice Department, any aspect of the judiciary, anything that's actually factual.

He's trying to scramble your head.

And when your head is scrambled, just obey the dictatorship.

It's not working.

If he were clever, if that were a strategy, I see, I don't think it's a strategy.

This is a man who is totally out of control.

He's immature.

He says whatever he wants to say for the moment.

If he were doing it strategically, he would focus on a couple of those elements.

But he's attacking everybody.

He's attacking the House Republicans.

There's no strategy.

So

if he were clever, I'd be worried about that.

But

he has 88%

support from Republicans in America.

That's my point.

That's not enough to win.

And I just one thing I don't know.

Well, it was in November.

No, 88% of the Republicans alone wouldn't have won in November, you got a little more than that.

It was other people who is driving away.

And the one example I would give on how it's not working, when a spokesperson for Fox News has to go on the air, as apparently did today, and said, no, the president's wrong, we don't have that.

I think that isn't it.

But look, he is, by every measure, the least least popular president at this stage in his presidency in history.

He doesn't.

I don't know about John Adams.

He doesn't.

But he doesn't know that.

Fine.

This is just.

The polls are rigged, right?

That's what he'll say.

And that is.

Still 40%.

I mean, we've seen this man say things that are crazy, do things that are insane, and steal 40%.

But you know what?

I thought maybe the policy part would be better.

I mean, when he was elected, a lot of us said, well, you know, he's not beholden to the Republican establishment.

He was kind kind of a third-party candidate who hijacked the Republican Party.

He had made a lot of comments about hedge fund managers being shysters and things.

You thought, oh, maybe this.

No, it's the worst of both worlds.

It's straight right-wing.

This health care bill is really just evidence that the Republicans do nothing ever but funnel money to rich people.

Is it not a giant tax cut disguised as a health care policy?

Oh, no question.

It's a tax cut for a lot of people in a lot of areas, and it is a reduction in the ability of people to get health care who most need it.

It's a levy on the people who are in the worst shape, without question.

But bad enough, so, again, he's not able to sell it to the Republican Party.

He is doing us the service.

I don't know yet.

Today they were saying he can.

Through the House, maybe.

Through the Senate, no.

And he's doing us the service of being so

illogical and irrational that I think he's generating a lot of the problems.

I mean, why didn't Democrats ever get honest about what Obamacare was?

Which it was redistribution of wealth.

I mean, it's not that hard to explain it.

The average millionaire paid $37,000 more in taxes a year so poor people could have health insurance.

I don't know what's so hard to explain.

Two things about it, Trump.

Embrace that.

And they don't.

Two things.

First of all, and Trump,

I have, so I'm not being defensive.

Trump is finding out now, and look, part of the responsibility is with the voters.

I can't educate people who are not paying attention, who are busy on Facebook and playing YouTube games.

But beyond that, beyond that,

there is this tendency among people

When they get a benefit, they assume that God wanted them to have it, and that's fine.

And when they lose it, oh, those terrible people.

He's finding this out.

There are a lot of people obviously who were benefited from Obamacare, Medicaid recipients and others, who had no idea who gave it to them.

But what the Republicans realize is they'll know who took it away from them and that's why they're having trouble with doing that.

The other problem was this.

And

if you go back, the health care bill was starting to gain in popularity.

And I have to blame the president for this, of whom I'm generally a great admirer.

People may forget, the rollout of the health care bill was a disaster.

Remember, the Republicans had shut down the Congress.

We were gaining on them from that.

And then I don't know why he was not overseeing that better.

And if you look at the things, it was when the rollout of the marketplaces

and the exchanges, when that got screwed up, we lost a lot of credibility and our efforts to defend just got undercut.

But it still shouldn't be so hard to...

Okay, we own that.

But then Trump comes along, promises those things I mentioned, and then comes in and says, no one knew health care was so difficult.

No one knew.

See, in his mind, he's the smartest person in the world.

So if he didn't know, obviously nobody else could possibly have known.

And it seems to me that they, you know, they kept, you notice they kept the good parts.

They still live in this world, this fantasy world, this I want a pony world, where, okay, they're keeping that you can stay on your plan until you're 26.

They're keeping

it.

No lifetime cap.

They're keeping

preexisting, all the good stuff, and getting rid of the stuff that pays for it.

This is what they keep doing.

They're keeping the good stuff for middle-income people, but always the income people, Medicaid, are the ones who will get pounded because they figure they don't vote and we can get away with it.

But in some ways, Bill,

isn't this a kind of clarifying moment?

Finally, they're going to have to say for the first time, we believe in cutting taxes.

That means you guys have got to do without health care.

They always avoided that from Reagan onwards.

They always kind of elided that fact.

Now they're up against it.

That's why they're having a crisis.

Because half of them have this ideology and they're fighting in their own districts, which are very, very Republican against possible primary challenges.

The others realize that their more moderate voters are going to hate this.

And so there's this impasse.

It may be, Barney, don't you think, that this thing doesn't actually happen at all?

Oh, I think he is doing us.

He is so bad at it and so stupid.

Look,

forget the morality of lying bothers me, but he's a stupid liar.

A good liar doesn't say things that would be a lie.

I mean, small point.

Somebody, oh,

I'll be there in 20 minutes.

I said, you're probably going to be at two hours.

Why would you tell me a lie that I'm going to know is a lie in a half hour?

Do a better lie.

But the question is, though,

does he have such a hold, his charismatic

populist hold on people?

He's just in another rally.

It's the feelings that he evokes that simply flood people's frontal cortexes, and they don't know that.

That's what a common man does.

He tells you the car he knows it's going to break down when you get off the lot.

That's tomorrow's problem

to be solved with tomorrow's lie.

But it's also the technique of a dictator.

It's a technique of a tyrant, which is this.

The truth is whatever I

say it is.

Not only that, but my people to humiliate them have to go out and lie for me.

That's the test of loyalty.

So you see Sean Spicer going out there like an apparatchi in in the soviet union right i mean you do uh microwaves are spying on us i know two things first of all the politician and me i got to defend used car salesman they don't act like he does that

he's a hard-working guy but secondly Secondly, though, I do think it is not working.

He has a smaller percentage of Republicans than those who voted for him, but he's losing other people.

Now, I take this, it is a sign, and you're right, there's a fervor there.

And I hope some of my former colleagues who were pushing the kind of establishment liberal agenda will understand how angry they made people.

They made people almost lose their sense of

his talent.

You've got no one with his ability to rouse these crowds.

But he roused his people.

He was a useless candidate last time and you don't have anybody out there that he's

able to counter him.

Oh, I think Joe Biden could if he were out there.

I think there are others.

But here's the other point.

Joe Biden's Democratic establishment told Joe Biden not to run.

But that's a different point.

You're changing your subject.

I think Joe Joe Biden would be a very effective counter if he got out there now.

I think he could have carried Pennsylvania.

There are others who could have been.

But here's the point.

And Ohio.

It's not working for Trump.

He is doing a better job organizing against him than for him.

And finally, and you talk about the humiliation, and this is what I think you're going to be seeing more of.

He's forced the Republicans to do this.

You now have Republicans earlier than I had hoped would happen.

repudiating him and disagreeing with him.

You have the senior Republicans in Congress now in major leadership positions calling him a liar on the wiretap.

He pushes them beyond where they can go, and I think that's going to be helpful.

All right.

Let me ask about the budget, because

I guess all budgets are somewhat dead on arrival, but they're also a statement of what you think should happen to this country.

We've never seen cuts like this.

And they have an impact.

People overdose dead on the government.

Okay.

So we found out President Bannon believes that

that we should dismantle the administrative state.

Remember that quote, which was rather shocking when we heard dismantle the administrative.

It sounds like he wanted anarchy.

He does, by the way.

I mean, he's a real reaction.

When you want to.

I don't know about anarchy, but yes, he's...

He wants to destroy the government.

And this is not just destroying the New Deal.

What they really are interested in going back to Woodrow Wilson to destroy any notion that the government has a broader statement is that the government

drug administration.

But the budget gives more money to the Pentagon and more money to Homeland Security.

That's the administrative state,

not meals on wheels people.

Yeah,

those are the places of the administrative straight that are out of control.

We don't even know what goes into the budget half the time.

We don't know what they're doing.

We don't know how big they are.

They don't even know how to spend this amount of money in the way they've been giving it.

It's purely symbolism.

It's purely I'm a bigger market

than anybody else.

And we spend more than

the next seven countries combined on defense.

It is insane.

And also, our big problem right now, right, is growing inequality.

Surely every government, every administration comes in, conservative or liberal, and should say, how do we rectify this?

They are making it worse.

They are deliberately doing perverse things in moving resources to the 0.1%.

Let me say, with regard to you, not Joe,

and I think we should take that on.

First of all, and I want to hit him at his own sort of self-claimed competence.

Mr., I'm a great dealmaker.

One of the things he said, a few that I agreed with, was that other countries are doing too little and America is overspending and carrying them and giving them a free ride.

So what does he, he says to them, if you don't start paying more, I'll cut back.

So what does he do?

He announces the huge increase.

So any country, they're all saying, ha ha,

who's he kidding?

He's going to spend 50 billion more.

We don't have to do anything.

I mean, any threat that he's going to be able to do.

Also, his main difference with the Republicans was: I'm not going to be so aggressive in foreign policy.

Exactly.

So,

what does he need this for?

We're supposed to be more America first, right?

Why are we spending all this money on the foreign country?

Let's be careful.

Let's be clear.

If you think about it, there must be some logic behind saying we need more anti-submarine warfare to defeat the Islamic State.

Apparently, there are submarines in the desert that we are not yet aware of.

That's right.

Okay.

So let me ask about something you wrote about this week, Middlebury College, because I am so worried about liberalism.

I mean, it's one thing, it's so easy for us all to be united, because obviously Trump is the ultimate villain.

I mean, it's Rocky III.

He's got Mr.

T to fight.

I worry that liberalism is at a perilous point.

And I know you write about this, and you wrote about Middlebury College.

If you're not aware, what happened was Charles Murray, who's been a guest on this show.

I don't agree with him.

Liberals don't.

I think what he talks about, although he claims to be a social scientist, he does research, is thinly veiled racism.

But there is a way to fight that, and that is to debate him, to bring up points that you can actually look up in books.

That's not what we saw at Middlebury show the tape.

And this could be any college, by the way, when a speaker is invited, and this is what happens.

Yeah,

that's the free speech on the left.

It leads to this big climax of shut it down, shut it down.

And afterwards, a mob actually attacked their car and

a female professor

suffered a concussion.

This is not an argument.

This is a religion, Bill.

This is a kind of secular religion.

You have to believe, if you're on campus, you have to believe certain things, or you are a heretic.

What you saw here was the burning of a heretic.

They don't want to hear other ideas because it will upset them, will hurt their feelings.

The point of a university is to make you uncomfortable.

It's to show you ideas that are going to actually offend and make your life a little more difficult.

And so you can figure out the answer to them.

Yeah, I...

It's

outrageous and indefensible on every level, the university, any college, that people who can be identified who physically prevent someone from speaking should be disciplined, including expulsion, and there ought to be criminal prosecution of those thugs who physically attack them.

The only thing I would differ with is I don't think this represents liberalism.

This is a small group of younger people.

This is campus.

This is campus.

Excuse me, let me finish.

And it's also the millennials in general.

No, but you're not.

Bill didn't say millennials.

He said liberalism.

I reject that as a description of most liberals.

I think most liberals were unhappy with that, opposed to it, it, and critical of it.

Yes, it was outrageous.

Well, it's a fight that liberals are having.

There is a division.

But it's a very small group.

I agree with some younger people.

By the way, I've spent a lot of time on campuses.

I have this new gig where they pay me to go and talk to students.

I like it.

And I have not found the problem is

they get, yeah, but they get intimidated.

But you don't have a problem on campus.

No, but I differ with them on some stuff.

But I find there is an intimidation factor.

I do not think, I'm willing to bet that if you polled the students at Middlebury, a majority would not have agreed with that.

But it's also the faculty, Bill.

It's the best.

It's the faculty that are actually fomenting this stuff.

Yes.

Teaching this stuff, inducting this stuff.

And the parents.

There is something very wrong with the parents and the way they raise their little fucking brats.

That is the problem.

Because

I want to just throw in one thing, by the way.

Clearly, it was outrageous and a violation of civil liberties and it ought to be repudiated.

But I also, I'm not prepared to take the answer, oh, well, but you know, they feel so strongly, don't you understand that?

Yeah, well, if they felt so strongly, they should do something about it in effective ways.

I'm willing to bet you that a lot of those people who were doing that outrageous suppression of free speech sat out the last presidential election.

So I particularly resent it when people who were not there when I was trying to make a hard fight to stop what we're now dealing with now tell me that, oh, well, they got to resort to these kind of measures.

You look at students who are claiming that the Yale leadership is white supremacy when you actually have a white supremacist running for president.

Right.

And they were not even interested in it whatsoever.

Because they much rather attack other liberals than conservatives.

Liberals have to be so careful these days.

I mean, I'm a big fan of Rachel Maddow.

I want her on the air.

But, you know, you can be a fan of somebody and not like everything they do.

And this week she hyped, which is okay.

I wasn't, that's what people objected to-the big hype.

She had a countdown clock.

She's got some of Trump's tax returns, like it was liberal New Year's Eve.

Did you see this?

And then

it turned out to be a big nothing burger, worse than a nothing burger.

It was a help Trump burger because here's what the essence was.

She gets two pages through the transcript from David K.

Johnson of Trump's 2005 tax returns.

He paid 38 million.

on earnings of $150 million, which is about 25%, which is well within respectable.

This is probably the best tax return he's ever filed, which makes me think this came from Donald Trump.

You know,

if

as you said,

he's actually good at this.

If we want to win this, we can't get played.

This is getting played.

I'm sorry.

There's a giant cloud of smug above Rachel Maddow when she was doing that.

Liberals have to be careful not to sound so fucking condescending and smug and as if they know it.

Well, and

start actually engaging the other side and persuading people.

I think you might want to teach by example on that last point a little more than you do.

But

again,

I didn't like what she did.

First of all, I do believe the tax returns ought to be secret.

I will say there's a huge hypocrisy in what she does.

Not for the president, but I don't think they should be leaked that way.

By the way, her journalistic scoop was apparently saying, oh, thank you.

I mean, I don't consider that crusading journalism to accept something.

But of course, the hypocrisy is of him claiming that he's leaks are now a terrible thing, when they were a wonderful thing,

during the campaign.

But this notion that he's this clever manipulator, again, he is in greater trouble.

In the Wall Street Journal, yesterday, Carl Rove and some other right-winger are pleading with other Republicans, you've got to be nicer to him.

We're going to lose this.

It is not working for him.

He is politically weak.

He's having trouble with his agenda.

I think that

the public that's influenciable is overwhelmingly moving against him.

I hope so.

All I'm saying is

let's not weaponize Rachel Manau.

All right.

I will be back with you soon, but right now he hosts CNN's The League with Jake Tapper and State of the Union with Jake Tapper.

Guess who?

Jake Tapper.

Jake Tapper.

Jake Tapper, how are you?

Look, everybody, it's Jake Tapper.

Okay, so

I'm sure people have told you this before, but you know you have the best porn name ever.

Jake Tapper.

Okay.

So I'm glad you're familiar with my earlier work.

So

So you have a lot of new fans, which is great.

You deserve it.

You're doing a great job over there speaking truth to crazy.

It's one thing to talk to power, but then this is a different job.

And tell us a little bit about how you would say your job has changed since Donald Trump becomes president, because you certainly sound different than I ever saw you for the many years I've watched you.

Well, you've been covering politicians for a long time.

Politicians lie.

It wasn't invented on January 20th.

No.

You were just talking about how the Democrats weren't forthright about Obamacare.

We could go back to the Iraq War and on and on.

I've never really seen this level

of falsehood.

It's different.

Just quantitatively?

Completely new.

Because it's not just if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

It's conspiracy theories based on nothing

that have members of his own party distancing themselves from him.

And it's combined with an attempt to discredit the entire Fourth Estate, the entire media.

We're all fake news, all of us, except for Fox and Friends.

You take it personally?

I don't take it personally.

I didn't like it.

The thing that offended me the most personally was when he went after John McCain for not being a war hero.

That bothered me just as somebody's.

And then when Senator McCain started asking questions about the Yemen raid, and the White House suggested that how dare he, anyone, question

this military mission, Senator John McCain is the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Sure.

Actually, literally his job

to question a military operation.

So there's this effort to undercut

the Fourth Estate, legislative oversight, the judicial branch, so-called judges.

So this combination of falsehoods, three to five million illegal votes.

Ted Cruz's dad helped kill Kennedy.

Yeah, it's just

laughing.

This is just the news.

I know, this is just the news.

These are just facts.

And when I watch you and you do, you know, call it out, I'm like, go, Jake, go.

But then I

realize that.

That was you.

Yeah, that was me.

It's a terrible conundrum you're in because

the more you call it out, the more his fans say you're being biased.

Right.

You know, the more they see you do that, they go, oh, well, Trump's right.

He's in in the tank for the other side.

Because everything is so politicized, there is no truth for anybody left.

And so, the more you actually do your job well,

the more you're not given credit by the people who you actually need to convince.

But I refuse to buy into that paradigm.

I refuse to buy into that paradigm because the truth of the matter is that there's no bias when it comes to fact and facts, and there's no bias when it comes to decency.

Well, yeah,

I mean,

it is

empirically indecent to make fun of the disabled.

Yes, you don't have to be a Democrat or a Republican or an Independent or whatever, a socialist, a libertarian.

That's just indecent.

My children know better than that.

Yeah, I know.

No, I always think about that book, Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten.

He violates every rule.

Don't lie.

Don't accuse people of things they're not guilty of.

Don't boast.

Pay your taxes.

Serve your country.

Don't be a racist.

Don't insult, like you say, the handicapped people and other people who are not as lucky to be as great looking as you are, Donald.

I worry that if half the country wants this guy to be president, we do need the UN to step in or the United Federation of Planets or something.

I don't know.

Anyway.

Here's the thing.

I think a lot of people voted for Trump, not because of of that stuff, but despite that stuff.

I think that they voted for

because I don't think they voted for him.

They heard the Access Hollywood tape and they thought, oh yeah, I want that in the White House.

I think that they didn't like Hillary Clinton for a whole bunch of reasons that I'm not going to cite here because Barney Frank will come and hit me.

And they wanted Washington to do something for them.

It's not empirically wrong to say Washington isn't working for the American people and Washington does too many things for powerful special interests And the deal, you know, it's broken.

And some of it is what Andrew was just talking about.

They just like it when liberals are crying.

So anybody who sticks a thumb in liberalism's eye, that's a good person.

There's some of that in some of his supporters.

I think that's true, but he was also sticking his thumb in the eyes of Paul Ryan.

He was also sticking his thumb.

I mean, believe me, you know, Jeb Bush is like Oedipus at this point.

So,

yeah, that's true.

And Mrs.

Bush, that was not a reference to the city.

No, no.

Just a blind part.

So he was sticking his fingers in the eyes of everybody, everybody in the establishment.

So do you think that Cable News and CNN, which you're a part of, is somewhat complicit in putting him in the White House?

I mean, Cable News did cover him like he was already the president before he was the president.

And I would say that they made way too big a thing of Hillary's emails, the Clinton Foundation, all this bullshit.

I agree with Barney that I think that the media has made a good turn, but I do think they have to own that path.

I think that there is certainly, first of all, I'm not the ombudsman for the entire media,

but I think that there are certainly fair critiques of the media when it comes to, especially running a lot of the Trump rallies early on, start to finish, no editorial comments, just like, what is this, what are we doing here?

And CNN did that, Fox did it,

MVC did it.

And my boss, Jeff Zucker, has acknowledged that we did that too much early on.

I think that some of the toughest interviews that were done of President Trump and Hillary Clinton, for that matter, were on CNN.

I mean, I know you saw my interview,

turns out, coincidentally, the last one I ever did with him,

when I pressed him on the Judge Curial map.

Sure.

When I asked him about the Ku Klux Klan.

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

However hard they were on him, they spent too much time on her and her her bullshit.

Those issues were bullshit.

All right.

I want to ask you one last thing, which is about the correspondence dinner.

Trump is not going.

You go.

I go.

It's a company dinner.

Okay.

So here are some things Trump has called reporters.

Dishonest, discredited, disaster, dwindling, dummy, dope.

Crazy, clown, neurotic, mess, boring, biased, no talent, loser.

Sloppy, grubby, third.

Grubby.

Third sad, fake, tanking, fraud, pathetic, phony, terrible, negative, one-sided, troublemakers, crooked, scum,

and of course, sad.

Why aren't you going?

Why aren't you going, Donald Trump?

He does have a way with words.

Is this a scandal that he doesn't go?

No.

Okay, good.

I don't think it doesn't bother me that he's not going.

The truth of the matter is, it's a great dinner for the scholarship that it pays for journalism students.

It's a great dinner to recognize good journalism.

I think that most of us in Washington probably feel a little ambivalent about the whole idea of

people who you're supposed to be,

just as well.

Yeah,

I don't think it's any great effrontery to democracy that he's not coming.

I think it's fine.

I'm sure Vice President Pence will fill the role well.

Keep holding their feet to the fire.

Thank you, sir.

I appreciate it.

I enjoy watching it.

Thank you.

I always have.

Thank you.

Jake Tapper, the porn star.

All right.

New rules, everybody.

New rules.

Okay.

New rules.

New rules.

Stop praising George W.

Bush for his paintings of wounded warriors.

It would be a nice gesture, except he's the one who wounded them.

Would you still love Picasso?

Have you found out his subjects look like this because he fucked them up?

Neurule, Congress must investigate my theory that snowstorm forecasts are just a scheme to sell bread.

Forget Trump and Russia.

I want to know about if Pepperidge Farm ever met with Jim Cantore.

Neural, Roll, now that Russia says kids under 16 can't see the new Beauty and the Beast movie because it's too gay,

they have to tell me, you mean too gay for a musical?

Wow, that's like too stupid for wrestling.

Beauty and the Beast is about a chick who gets hot for a wild animal.

That you're okay with.

Hey, Russia, you're going to take our musicals, all of them, and you're going to like them.

Considerate payback for you giving us springtime for Hitler.

Neurol Eliodoro Estala, the Mexican-American man arrested for having sex with a chain-link fence,

has to find an easier way to say, fuck Trump and his wall.

Neural, these fake tampon flasks,

yes, that's a real thing, designed so you can smuggle booze into places where it's not allowed, must come with a directory to AA meetings because who says to themselves, I don't want to embarrass the kids by openly drinking a cocktail at their school play.

I'll just sip out of this tampon.

And finally, new rule, if you're one of the millions of Americans who wore green to work today and started celebrating St.

Patrick's Day at lunchtime,

stop.

Put down the green beer, take off the shit me, I'm kiss-faced t-shirt.

And hear me out, because as an Irish American, I must say, the association of my tribe with this drunken slob fest is getting a little old.

Been there, puked that.

I mean, imagine if we celebrated other ethnic groups in the same way we do the Irish on St.

Patty's Day, where the worst stereotype is reinforced.

What if for Columbus Day, everyone wore wife beaters and moved back in with their mother?

What if during Black History Month we all bought lobster with with food stamps?

What if for Cinco DeMaya we all went swimming in blue jeans?

Or for Rosh Hashanah we all went out for Chinese and then argued about the bill for an hour?

What if at Chinese New Year we all

We all made soup out of endangered species and then got in our cars and drove like shit.

Folks, when my great-great-parents, great-grandparents arrived in New York from Ireland, they were greeted with signs in shop windows that read, no Irish need apply.

No one would hire the Irish people, which is why they had to form Riverdance.

And all the things said about Muslim immigrants in America today were said about the Irish then.

They have funny accents, they eat weird food, they have an odd religion.

Of course, in their case, it's all true.

And that brings us to some interesting questions.

Like, why do liberals treat some minorities as protected species, but not all?

Why groan at that when a minute ago we were so freely laughing at the Asian driver joke?

And is there there anything wrong, if you are part of a particular culture, to feel an extra, not guilt, but collective responsibility, even if you yourself didn't do something bad?

Liberals certainly feel that way about reparations.

I'm for reparations, and I personally never owned slaves.

Check my taxes.

I mean, it's been a long time since anyone in America held blacks in unpaid servitude, if you don't count college sports.

Now,

if you're under 30, you might not remember, but in the 70s and 80s, terrorism wasn't a Muslim thing, it was an Irish thing.

Back then, the bombs were going off in Belfast, not Baghdad, and the virgins you met in heaven were named Kevin and Sean.

And it's not hard to imagine a scenario where the Irish terrorists of that era tried to get America involved in their war by striking here, where they had a lot of financial support from Irish Americans.

And then Irish Americans like me might have been the ones facing extreme vetting.

What would my reaction have been?

I can't say for sure, but I don't think it would have been, how dare you even suspect me?

Because I know why they were suspecting me.

As long as it wasn't a witch hunt, hunt, my response would have been, ugh, these are my people.

I should own this a little more than the non-Irish guy.

And I think there are a lot of Muslims today who feel exactly that way, but their voices are drowned out by liberals screaming Islamophobe.

You know, there was a draw the prophet contest in Garland, Texas, a few years ago.

Provocative, yes, but you either believe in free speech or you don't.

This is America.

We're supposed to.

Unfortunately, a couple of Muslims didn't and attacked.

And when they got shot, a local Muslim resident named Mohammad Jatpuri said, the extremists got what's coming to them.

You don't just shoot people.

I'm glad they got killed.

See, he may be Muslim, but he's a real Texan.

And any Muslim American I ever talked to basically told me the same thing every immigrant says: that they're glad they left the old country behind and came to a place that's better, freer, less beholden to

traditions.

I saw a meme going around the internet last week when it was International Woman's Day, and it said, A woman should be whatever the fuck she wants.

So,

liberals, you can applaud that, or you can pretend this is just a fashion trend.

You just can't do both.

All right, that's our show.

I'll be at the Civic Center in Oklahoma City, April 9th, and at the Civic Center in Des Moines, May 7th.

I want to thank Edward Sullivan, Marty Frank, Jake Tapper, and Tilden White House.

Join us 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.

For more information, log on to HBO.com.