Ep. #417: Rosa Brooks, Bill McKibben

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

We're still here.

Thank you.

You can sit.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

You humble me.

Thank you very much.

Thank you very much.

You humble me, ladies and gentlemen.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

I think I know why you're happy tonight.

This Russian spy novel we've all been reading turns out to be a real page turner, doesn't it?

I mean, first the national, I mean first

the national, I'm going through puberty.

The

national security advisor has to step down because we found out he was lying about talking to the Russians.

Now our Attorney General this week, a thousand-year-old cracker named

Jeff Sessions,

he had to recuse himself from the investigation.

And you know, Trump said, I don't know anybody.

I don't know anybody who talks.

Does Trump know anyone who doesn't talk to the Russians?

It's like six degrees of Kevin Putin.

But what

is with

what is with this administration?

Always meeting with the right.

They meet with the Russians more than the Olympic Doping Committee.

Yet, Trump said, I don't know anybody.

He was asked that in a press cow.

Did you know anybody?

No, I don't know anybody.

I don't know anybody.

Okay, the national security advisor, his campaign manager, his son-in-law, and now his attorney general have met with the ambassador from Russia, Sergei

Kislayek.

Besides the fact that you shouldn't be meeting with anyone with that name unless they're an Uber driver.

I mean, I'm trying to think of an innocent explanation why all these people are meeting with this motherfucker.

He's their pot dealer.

He went to Trump Tower in December, I guess through the back door because nobody saw him

to meet with the son-in-law and Flynn.

And the White House said today, Well, it was just a brief meeting.

Yeah, well, it probably didn't have to be more than a brief meeting.

You know, they said, Thank you for stealing the election.

And he said, Don't forget, forget, we still have p-tape.

You're welcome, but we still have p-tape.

I mean, Trump is pissed off because

all this Russia talk this week poured cold water on what he thought was his big triumph on Tuesday.

Did you see his speech?

He made a big boy speech to

potty Train Trump went before Congress to give an address and he stuck to the teleprompter

and everybody said that he came across as much more dignified and much more mature.

Actually what happened was that somebody from Price Waterhouse gave him the wrong speech.

You saw that's it?

Everybody saw the Oscars?

Oh my God, that accountant who gave Warren Beatty the wrong envelope, he got fired this week.

Yeah, and he turned in his letter of resignation and they said, this is your water bill.

And you know what?

We know now we found out why this guy screwed up.

He was constantly distracted in his job because he was always on Twitter.

Thank God we don't let that kind of idiot do anything important.

But I must say, for me, the most depressing part of this week was the media.

I did a long thing at the end of our show last week, encouraging the media, thinking they're getting back at it.

Okay, fell on deaf ears.

Trump gets up there Tuesday night for one hour.

He lashes himself to the mast and refrains from yelling at department stores and making fun of the handicapped.

And the media is like, he became president tonight.

He read words off a teleprompter in front of adults, the same thing the Olson twins did at seven.

Really, media, seriously, on a scale of easily fooled, this ranks somewhere between Mormonism and throwing the ball for the dog and pretend

NPR, NPR said Trump pushed the reset button tonight.

Okay, we have a defective president.

We're not going to get better by unplugging him and then plugging him back in.

Reset button.

And if you saw this speech, I mean, it was an hour of mostly bullshit.

They said he lied 51 times.

Low for him.

Of course, he promised to get tough on crime.

That's his big thing.

Especially, he said, after what happened Sunday night in Hollywood when black people robbed those white folks of their gold.

Now, in cabinet news, Rick Perry and Ben Carson,

dopey and sleepy,

have been confirmed for their cabinet appointments.

They were sworn in by Mike Pence.

He said to Dr.

Ben Carson, raise your right eyelid

and repeat after me.

But don't worry about them.

As far as the Russian shit goes, these guys have never had any contact with intelligence.

I can vouch for that.

But

okay.

I mean, they're dummies, but you know, what do you expect in this administration?

People, I think, because of the speech and the Russian stuff, missed the big story of the week, one of the big stories, which is Trump unveiled what he was going to do about health care, and he said, you know what?

Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.

I can't believe Putin paid full price for this guy.

Nobody knew health care could be so complicated.

I love the way this guy is constantly discovering things we've all known forever and then pronouncing no one ever knew it.

It's like your mechanic popping over the hood.

Jesus Christ, there's a lot of fucking shit in there.

All right, we got a great show.

Joy Reed, Rosa Brooks, and Charlie Sykes are here.

And a little later, we'll be speaking with Bill McKiddon.

And first up, he is a CNN contributor, former White House Associate Director under President Ronald Reagan.

Please welcome Jeffrey Laura.

Jeffrey.

How are you, sir?

Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Okay.

Well, Jeffrey, I wanted to have you here because I see you on CNN all the time.

You are nothing if not a steadfast supporter of Donald Trump, and you were on the Trump train early.

2013.

2013, so you get to glow.

But

what I want to know, not polite.

What I want to know is this.

I mean, because I, you know, this is a small circle of the media.

I talk to people, you talk to people, the Washington people, like you come out here.

Everybody says, you're the nicest guy in the world.

Genteel, polite.

What do you see in Donald Trump?

To me, he's not just the most vulgar politician we've ever had.

To me, he's the most vulgar human being.

Vulgar.

Why do you, genteel, nice, polite Jeffrey Lord, have this affection?

You've won mom over.

What is it?

What is the attraction?

Two things.

First of all, I have to say, as somebody who knows him and considers him a friend, he has always been, in my presence, polite, charming, sensitive, truly, truly.

But you would agree he's not that public.

Okay.

So, second.

Would you, but I agree that he appears to people in many ways as you describe.

But let me tell you from a political standpoint, and I mean this seriously.

When you heard the Hillary Clinton thing about the basket of deplorables and people are irredeemable, there are a lot of Americans out there, and I talk to them a lot,

who think that people in the media and the political world look down on them and have basically contempt for them.

And they look at Donald Trump as somebody that can go out there and stand up and dish it right back.

Now, you can say that's right or that's wrong, but there's a genuine, I mean, I've been to some of these Trump rallies and talked to people and asked, you know, what is this?

And this is one of the things that they really appreciate.

They think he is standing up for them and they feel they've just had it.

So that's the thing.

She said one stupid thing and that justifies pussy grabbing.

No, no, no, no.

No, no, no.

Well, I mean, but again, your answer was she did one bad thing.

No, no.

So we forget about it.

Okay, I'm not communicating.

What I'm trying to say is they feel this has been going on for years.

She gave literal chapter and verse to it, but that this has been going on for years and years and years

with people in the media and politics of both parties, I might add.

Okay, but again, your answer is all the bad stuff about Trump, we let go because we needed this

champion,

because the other side is so bad.

I have a feeling that,

let me ask you this about Republicans in general.

I think you think that liberals are so dangerous that almost anything justifies keeping them out of office.

And that would include the massive amount of lying that I hear from your side

and the justification.

Is that true?

Is that the real truth?

You think they're feckless and they're fuzzy-headed and they will sell this country out.

Not to be...

My heroes were JFK, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King.

And then I began to see this in college.

And I went on a protest over Kent State to Vietnam, to Washington, and I began to sense this sort of, you know,

contempt for my parents' generation, the so-called greatest generation.

And I really think that that is morphed.

That Hillary Clinton remark that I just cited to you.

What's interesting is not just that she said it, but the response you hear from the audience that cheered, because they all agree.

That's the kind of thing that I think is really seriously wrong.

And you think that's, it's all because she said blasket are deplorables.

No, I think

today that Mike Pence was using a private server.

Basically doing not with classical

information though,

right?

No.

Absolutely the lead story in USA Today is Mike Pence was using a private server discussing intelligence matters, homeland security matters, private matters.

I mean using a private server to discuss public matters.

Pretty much the same thing they said, lock her up.

Using the under the surveillance of the or the following the rules of the Indiana state government, right?

Okay.

But it just seems to me like the way you guys can turn on a dime about what you hated like three months ago, like using a teleprompter.

Apparently that's okay now that the president is white.

No.

No.

Well, but there was a lot of...

Whoa!

Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

There was an awful lot of talk about how Obama was always using a teleprompter.

Well, sure.

But when this guy sticks to it for an hour, now he's king mature.

They used to go after Ronald Reagan all the time using a teleprompter.

I see, okay.

I mean, you know.

Well, okay, but you used to be the free trade people.

I mean, not always, you know.

Yeah, right, 1890.

William McKinley, Cal Confucian, Sam Lincoln.

You turned on a dime on so many of the used to be the budget responsibility people, and he just proposed a budget where no entitlement cuts, defense buildup,

infrastructure spending of a trillion dollars, and massive tax cuts for both the rich people and the middle-class people.

What happened to the budget responsibility?

Well, I think you do have to, you know, first of all.

I'm just asking generally about principles.

It seems like the only principle is

winning and

the only thing in common that Trump has with the old Republicans seems to be tax cuts for the rich elites that you pretend to hate.

Tax cuts for the American middle class.

And the rich.

But Bill, I mean, this is where we get into the difference here of class warfare.

I don't believe in class warfare.

Well, it is class warfare, and you've already won.

But let me, before we run out of time, let me ask about Russia, because that's the big story on everyone's lips.

I'm sure you would say nothing to see here, because that's the Republican line.

But then why all the lying?

Why did the National Security Advisor lie?

Why did we just catch Jeff Sessions in a lie?

I don't think he did catch Jeff Sessions in a lie.

Well, he said he had no meetings with the Russians, and he turned out he had no.

Why did he recuse himself?

Well, I mean, I read today, again, the questions, the specific questions asked to him by Senator Al Franklin and Senator Patrick Leahy, and it was referenced to a CNN story, as a matter of fact.

That was the reference.

And he was talking about the CNN story.

He was not talking about had he ever met Russians, period.

He wasn't even asked that question.

He just volunteered.

I never met with the Russians, and then he met with the Russians twice.

Why do you think he refused himself?

Because he lied and he got caught.

No, no, Bill, Bill, Bill, look.

He's a senior United States senator.

Senators of both parties and members of Congress meet with Russians and other diplomats all the time.

The Obama State Department sent the Russian ambassador and these other folks to Cleveland, to the Republican National Convention.

So the guy is there in Cleveland at the behest of the Obama State Department.

Okay, that has nothing to do with it.

Well, it does.

He wouldn't have been there otherwise.

But everybody seemed to have met with this guy.

Nancy Pelosi?

I'm just asking, Nancy Pelosi?

Yes, she said she never met with this guy, and now we have a picture of him.

Well, let's have an investigation of her, because I'm sure that...

But the Russians didn't hack Nancy Pelosi's election.

They hacked our election.

All of our intelligence agencies said.

for one side to win, your side.

Are you telling me that if it had worked out the other way and they were only hacking the Republicans to get Hillary elected, you'd let it slide?

Bill, I'm saying

answer that question.

You'd let that slide.

I would be absolutely in favor of an investigation.

I'm probably in favor of one anyway.

Probably.

But I would absolutely be in favor if anybody could show me that the Russians got into any voting machine anywhere in America.

Well, that's how you hack an election, Bill.

No, no, that's one way you can hack an election.

No one is saying that.

Unless you can manipulate the votes in the machine.

Well, you can manipulate the votes other ways.

Let's not play games here, Mr.

Lord.

I like you, and I heard you're a very nice guy, but don't bullshit me.

There are other ways you can affect an election.

And one of them is to hack the emails

of one side, one side, and release those as a slow drip, drip, drip, drip.

And that's exactly what happened.

Investigate it.

I'm for it.

I'm for it.

Absolutely.

But let's get it all out there.

I mean, they've hacked the White House.

Why doesn't he?

They've hacked every agency in government.

You know what could clear so much up?

What?

If Donald Trump would release his tax returns.

Why doesn't he release his tax returns as every other president has done in my lifetime?

It seems like a slap in the face to the American people, and also it seems like he's hiding something.

Right.

I understand that.

But Bill, to be perfectly candid, as I've said many times on CNN, I totally disagree with this.

I don't think he should ever release his tax returns.

We've had presidents presidents of the United States from George Washington all the way through to Lyndon Johnson, who never released a single tax return.

Was Franklin Roosevelt a bad president because he didn't release his tax returns?

I don't think so.

I just think that this is at this stage irrelevant.

It's a political gotcha game.

It's so not irrelevant, and you know it's not irrelevant.

Be honest with me, sir.

Just be honest with me.

I'll be your best friend.

Bill, I cannot really believe it's irrelevant.

I need all the best friends I can get.

However,

respectfully, I have to say to you that this becomes a political gotcha game.

I mean, if he releases there saying, oh, well, you did this, you did this.

We need to get the country moving again, right?

Well,

not if the country is being led by someone that was put there by a foreign power.

Now,

you can't.

I certainly would deny that.

But this is the assessment of the intelligence agencies.

You have no respect for the intelligence.

No, no, no, that's not the assessment.

The intelligence agencies are basically saying that the Russian government hacked the DNC

and Wikipedia and all kinds of purpose of electing one of the two.

We don't know that.

That's what they said.

We don't know that.

That's what they said.

Bill.

That's what the intelligence agency said.

Bill, then they should put out their report, and we should investigate this.

I'm all for that.

Okay.

Let me ask you one last question.

Vladimir Putin, before Trump came along, had a 12%

approval rating among Republicans.

Now it's 32.

Now, Newsweek had a big article this week that said he's poisoned over 30 people.

And, you know, you might say two or three,

but you know, it's kind of like, you know, Bill Cosby accusers.

At certain points,

you go, two or three could be possible, but not over 30.

Not like Stalin and Franklin Roosevelt, though, you know, who murdered Miller.

But we were fighting the Nazis together.

We're not doing that now.

We're fighting.

Are we fighting Hitler now?

No.

So I'm just asking this 32% approval rating that Donald Trump has given to Vladimir Putin.

Good thing, bad thing.

There's a story in Reuters today

that the bromance, as they call it, is souring.

I don't think that there ever was a bromance.

Honestly, I don't.

I think that this is, again, a liberal.

But he said awfully nice things about him for 10 years.

Bill O'Reilly said he's a killer.

And Donald O'Reilly.

I think he is a killer.

But that's on what Donald Trump said.

He said, we've got killers, too.

Phil, Phil.

Did you not read the church report?

You know, the central intelligence agents doing all these things that the U.S.

Senate, run by Democrats in the day, said was bad behavior on the part of the American government, going after Fidel Castro, trying to put poison in his beard and all this sort of stuff.

We have done something.

I agree.

I think there's a moral risk.

He's an ex-liberal, right?

Okay.

All right.

Thank you, Jeffrey.

I wish we had more time.

I hope we come back.

I appreciate it.

You're brave to come here with our crowd yelling at you.

Thank you very much.

All right, let's lead our panel.

All right.

How you doing?

Hard man to get.

That's what he does all day.

Yes, he's good.

He's good.

All right.

Let's lead our panel.

He is the host of YNYC's radio talk show, Indivisible, and editor-in-chief of rightwisconsin.com.

Charlie Sykes with us.

Hey, Charlie, how you doing?

She's a former Pentagon and State Department official whose new book is How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything, very timely.

Rosa Brooks, hey, Rosa.

And she's the host of MSNBC's weekend morning show, AM Joy, and editor of We Are the Change, We Seek, the speeches of Barack Obama.

Joy Reed!

Don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's Robert Time so you can answer them after the show on YouTube.

Okay, we're going to get back into Russia later, later, I hope, but I just want to ask this question first of the panel.

It seems to be that the Russia thing is not going to go away, and for Donald Trump, the way out of this is war.

Because I saw him this week playing military dress-up.

He was out there on the aircraft carrier.

He seemed to love it.

I don't think he'd ever...

I don't think he'd ever been on an aircraft carrier.

He was like, wow, this is big.

You could land a plane on this thing.

He said, we have to win.

This is at his press conference.

We have to win.

We have to start winning wars again.

Well, first of all, I would say, how about not being in wars?

Yeah, right.

But it just seems like he's...

Because once you're at war, you know what?

Yeah.

Then all the questions become the, you know, the traders asking, we're at war.

Our boys are in the field.

Is anyone else worried that he's itching for a war?

I am.

You know, first of all, when I saw him on that aircraft trip, I did wonder if he was rethinking those four or five deferments that maybe he could have helped us win had he decided to accept his country's callback during Vietnam.

He did.

Bones first.

It healed up miraculously the day the helicopter left Vietnam.

Excellent point.

But no, I think to your point, you have a guy who, a lot of his supporters, you know, you were talking to Jeffrey Lord about sort of what attracts people to Trump.

One of the things you'll hear often from Trump supporters is, well, Hillary would have gotten us into World War III.

So we had to vote for him because he's the guy who's going to bring us peace by being friends with Russia.

And now he's doing a massive military buildup.

He's playing cosplaying as a pretend sort of soldier.

And he seems to be spoiling for some kind of a fight.

They put Iran on notice before Mike Flynn got pushed out.

And so you do wonder whether or not...

Two years of we're depleted, I must say, of all the things that bug me in American politics, talking about America and its military as if it's depleted.

I mean, you wrote the book on this, but just the basic facts.

We spend more than the next seven biggest spending countries combined.

Do I have that right?

That's about right.

It depends.

It changes a little from year to year, but that's about right.

Yeah.

I mean, we spend over $600 billion.

That's just the Defense Department.

That's not the nukes, right?

Bush didn't even put the wars on the books.

Yeah.

Right.

Homeland Security, a lot of money, probably a trillion bucks to keep the monsters away, right?

Well, I think it's fair to say that we don't always spend money on the right things.

I mean, the Pentagon simultaneously has plenty of waste, but it also has areas where we've been underinvesting.

Just throwing money at that is not going to solve the problem.

You've got to figure out where to cut and where to invest.

And I do.

Cyber.

Yeah, well, and I do worry that Trump seems fixated just on size.

As we know, he wants things that are huge.

And he, you know, he wants more ships, a bigger army, and that's not necessarily the way to go.

It's not the war we're fighting anymore.

I feel like people in this country confuse defense spending with defense contractors,

which is a welfare program.

Well, and also welfare.

And which is socialism.

Is it not socialism when

we keep making tanks just because it keeps people?

Whoever said socialism was dead.

I'm more willing to take John McCain's word on this than Donald Trump's.

Because remember, Donald Trump's Vietnam was not getting the clap?

Right.

So this is what he knows about winning a war.

Right.

So he said that was my personal view.

But your question about whether you're nervous about Donald Trump, I mean, this really comes to the heart of it.

I mean, I'm a conservative.

I'm the token conservative here.

You know, but during the primary, I thought, look, here's a guy.

He's a serial liar.

He's a con man who makes fun of the disabled and women.

He's a bully.

He's a narcissist, a man with no fixed principles,

who,

quite frankly, has the emotional maturity of a nine-year-old.

And so I don't want to give him, I don't want to give him the nuclear code.

I don't want to put him in charge of the IRS.

I don't want to put him in the FBI.

And the fact that now he's talking about which wars we're going to win, I think ought to alarm people across the political spectrum.

Well, and the other issue is that Donald Trump, because he has no fixed ideology, he is surrounded by people with a very fixed ideology.

People like Steve Bannon, who believe in Sebastian Gorka and this whole crew from Breitbart, believe that we're already in an existential war with all of Islam and that we have to now go and take the fight to them and win this sort of, they call it this North-South global conflict.

They actually want a massive global war against every Muslim on the planet.

You just hope General Mattis is the voice of reason in this administration?

Mad Dog?

Yes.

Well, think about that.

That a guy named Mad Dog is going to be the most rational, calm voice in the administration.

So General Mattis has been the one who has made the point many times in his career that if we don't fund the civilian arms of the U.S.

foreign policy apparatus, the State Department, U.S.AID.

That Trump is cutting.

Then you need to buy more ammunition.

I think Trump thought that was a suggestion, not a warning.

What did you think of putting a war widow in the gallery at the speech on Tuesday night?

I mean, if people missed it,

this was moving to a lot of people in America, and I certainly feel for that poor woman.

If you didn't know who she was, she is the widow of Navy SEAL Ryan Owen.

Now, about a week, was it a week into the Trump administration, they conducted a raid in Yemen, and a Navy SEAL was killed, this woman's husband.

And, you know, I made fun of the media and the monologue, and I'm going to do it more now, because I fucking hate them.

The way they fell hard for this widow in the gallery trick, Van Jones, he became president of the United States in that moment.

Period.

Here's Katie Tur.

I like her, but she said, What the president did with Owen's widow was capital P presidential.

It was the single most extraordinary moment I've seen from Trump.

Actually, it was the worst moment, and that's saying a lot from Donald Trump.

Because first, I mean,

he gets this guy killed ordering a raid over dinner between the entree,

between the appetizer and the entree, right?

It was at dinner that he decided to do this.

And we heard it was because Obama wouldn't do it.

So he was like, Obama's a pussy.

I'm going to do it.

Okay.

The father-in-law,

the soldier's father, he came out and said, why at this time did we have to have this stupid mission when it wasn't even barely a week into this administration?

Why all of a sudden we had to make this grand display?

That sounds right to me.

So

to

fall for this, to...

I got to make a confession because when I was watching that in the moment, I was moved by it because she was real.

Moved by her?

Right.

I was moved because she was real.

And I woke up the next morning thinking, okay, you know, this was a great moment, but then realizing the incredible cynicism of it.

Exactly.

And I do think

that there is almost a battered pundit syndrome going on here.

Where all the pundits are like, okay, so daddy didn't come, you know, our abusive daddy didn't come home drunk and beat us tonight.

He's the best father ever.

And what makes it, absolutely right.

I think there is, I think there's such a desperate sort of thirst for normal that anything he does, when he speaks slowly, they say, oh my God, he's so mad.

And I think there is this sort of desperation.

But the thing that made it for me so cynical, even in the moment, quite frankly, is that less than 24 hours before that, the commander-in-chief of the United States had blamed his generals, said they lost this Navy SEAL.

He didn't take responsibility.

But it didn't stop with him.

Exactly.

Never in the history that I can think of in this country.

had a commander-in-chief blamed the generals.

How cynical was that?

And then to use the applause was for two minutes.

And so the applause makes him

when he was asked about that.

He praised the applause.

I've heard that.

Yeah, I've heard Jeffrey Lord and others say maybe he wasn't referring to they, it's a little murky.

Okay, but this is undeniable.

When he was asked about that, the first thing out of his mouth was, well, this was a mission that was started before I got here.

In other words, right away, I don't take any responsibility.

Blame somebody else.

Right.

Which we shouldn't be surprised at.

No, and it's a real, I think, betrayal of all the men and women out there putting their lives on the line.

You know,

They

really want a commander-in-chief who takes responsibility, and that's what they deserve.

But

I think the American public shares a little bit of the blame with the pundits, right?

There's nothing wrong with the widow of a Navy SEAL killed in action going to that speech and so forth.

But it's on us to tell the difference between what's tragic and what makes somebody an expert.

I think we all know from bitter experience that when something crappy and tragic happens to you, you become an expert on having something crappy and tragic happen to you, but you don't magically become a foreign policy or national security or military policy expert.

And we need to be able to remember that.

And he turns it into a reality TV show by saying, you just set a record for applause.

So

really, how do you think?

I'm pretty sure he didn't do it for that.

Very similar, though.

What do you think the Republicans would have said if Obama had done that after Benghazi?

Right.

And had Chris Stevens' family in the gallery.

And not only that, where are the investigations?

Where is Jason Chaffetz and all of the other Republicans who were saying they were going to continue to attempt to impeach Hillary Clinton had she won over Benghazi?

They treated the Secretary of State as the person who was responsible for a surprise attack on our compound in Libya.

But there is no desire to investigate a mission that the Obama team had said this isn't ready to go.

Trump comes in and over dinner with Jared Kushner decides we think it is ready to go.

Well, what were their expertise to do that?

And when he executes it, I cannot stress enough, he as commander-in-chief threw responsibility onto his generals and said, well, they're very respected.

They wanted to do it.

It's something they wanted to do, and they lost him.

That is the most cynical thing I've ever heard.

Okay, so Trump was asked this week

how he would rate his presidency so far.

It's only been a month and a week.

Finally turned 18 years.

He said, in terms of achievement, I'd give myself an A because I think I've done great things.

In a month.

He's done great things in a month.

He passed two laws, both one to we could, oil companies could take bribes and coal companies can shoot in the river.

Okay, so he's done great things.

But one thing he hasn't done so great, it's kind of undeniable, the tourist industry, maybe just an A- because there's something called the Trump slump.

Visitors are scared away from America.

For good reason.

So, you know, I still love America.

I thought we should try to get tourists to still come here.

So we came up with some tourism posters that I think

you'll appreciate that we'll make our case, but America is still a great country.

America, buy a one-way ticket, we'll deport you home for free.

America, not actually the violent, impoverished shithole our president says it is.

Come to America, we'll make you feel thin.

America, come for the fun.

Stay because you got shot by a red.

America, now under new management.

America, when you just need a break from science.

America, Earth's Florida.

America where pork and beans not only gets its own shelf, it gets its own aisle.

America, duck.

Come to America because let's face it, your country sucks more.

All right, who is an author, founder of 350.org, and scholar in residence at Littlebury College?

Bill McKibben is over here.

Bill, how are you, sir?

Look at that.

Only on our show does an environmentalist get a hand for like a rock star when he gets coming out.

So now that we have a president who thinks that global warming is a Chinese hoax, and the head of the EPA is Scott Pruitt, and today Rick Perry became the Secretary of Energy.

Please, Bill, tell me what the

silver line is.

We missed the worst part.

In the last hour,

they announced that they were gutting the funding for the climate satellites that have been giving us what news we have from.

The NASA satellites, yeah.

If it doesn't, if you can't see it, then it can't hurt you.

That's how it works.

I always want to ask them, I know you don't believe in global warming, what about germs and atoms?

Because you can't see them either.

There's a lot of that going around.

Earlier this afternoon, the EPA under Mr.

Pruitt announced the budget cuts leaked out.

Not only are they going to cut by 97% the amount of money they're spending to try and improve water quality in the Great Lakes, which have finally begun to improve, same thing at San Francisco Bay, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay.

Good thing that no one lives in any of these places.

They also said that the amount of money that they're going to spend, they're going to drastically cut the amount of money they spend on what's called water quality compliance, the kind of things that helped,

you know, that helped alert us to things like Flint, the water crisis there.

Of course, since they're zeroing out the environmental justice program at EPA, probably that won't be a big worry anymore.

They're also cutting by 88% the environmental education funding that they give because why would you at this point?

This talk is about silver lining.

So here's the silver lining.

I mean, this is your fault.

You asked someone on whose most famous book was called The End of Nature.

Okay, so, you know.

That's true.

The silver lining, of course, is that people are fighting back.

Yes.

There was pieces of

So,

you know,

I mean, you could really tell.

The women's march was great in Washington.

The pictures that blew my mind were LA, three quarters,

three quarters, three quarters of a million Angelinos out of their cars and walking.

I mean, that's literally unheard of.

But the same thing's going to be happening.

Not if it rained, but

April 22nd, there's the scientist march and it leads into a huge march.

The next weekend, April 29th, April 29th, this huge climate march on DC.

People are really angry about this.

Yes, and while we're on this subject of what we're doing,

we got to make sure that our politicians on the left do a much better job of making the case.

Because I think when people in America hear EPA, they only get the bad side.

They only think, oh, it's a drag.

It's like that that's kind of not on their radar what it does.

You know, same thing with the Keystone pipeline.

It's going to cost jobs.

You know,

we don't do a great job, the political side, Democratic politicians.

My guess is that they're getting a little bit

of a stealth.

They're getting a little bit feistier as time goes on.

I hope so.

Today, the pipeline news today was that the president said that he was going to make an exception to his rule that you're supposed to use American steel in pipelines for the Keystone pipeline.

I'll let you guess what country is manufacturing 40% of the steel for the Keystone pipeline.

Not Russia.

In fact, the guy, the steel oligarch in Russia whose mills it's being made in, gave a $35 million yacht to Vladimir Putin.

I mean, ridiculous.

Nothing to see here.

But it's...

Look, we're getting to the point where it's so hard to kind of miss what's going on.

Scott Pruitt from Oklahoma, I mean, a perfect case.

They say, oh, well, the state governments will take care of these things if the EPA doesn't.

Look at what happened in Oklahoma.

For as long as this continent's been around, Oklahoma was seismically inert, as stable as it was possible to be.

Tornadoes, yes.

Earthquakes, no.

Not in Oklahoma.

Now, it shakes a lot more than California.

It's the most seismically active place on the continent because we've done nothing but frack it for the last 10 years and force all this water back underground into wells on the faults and whatever.

Well, and Scott Pruitt used to be the

guy there.

What was he in Oklahoma?

Scott Pruitt, he was the Attorney General.

Attorney General.

But he basically was the mouthpiece for the oil industry.

He said scientists continue to disagree about global warming.

Here's

Let me quote the Interior Secretary, Ryan Zinke, on causes of gloma change.

He said, the evidence strongly suggests humans have had an influence.

However, the evidence is equally strong that there are other factors such as rising ocean temperatures.

Why the fuck do you think the temperatures in the ocean are rising?

It's Mr.

Zinki.

It's

the angle.

That's how it works.

Pruitt's the perfect example.

He sued the EPA 14 times, the agency he now runs.

He wrote a letter to the EPA, one of the ones that came out.

He wrote a letter to the EPA

attacking them for measuring methane emissions out of fracking wells.

Well, it turned out he didn't even write the letter.

The local energy company wrote it, sent it to him, he stuck it on his letterhead and sent it off to the EPA.

Today, the

EPA announced that they were no longer going to measure methane emissions out of fracking wells.

Companies didn't have to collect this information, which is particularly ironic because last year at this time, the oil industry was arguing that the EPA shouldn't regulate methane emissions.

Why not?

Because there wasn't enough data yet to figure out whether it was a bad idea or not.

The level

of just complete corruption from the fossil fuel industry that marks this administration is like nothing we've ever seen.

So,

and of course.

You know what, let me ask you this, Charlie.

Trump did not mention the environment, and I don't think anybody was surprised about that in the speech.

But, you know,

any Republican president probably would not have.

And you did kind of a mea culpa in the op-ed pages recently, and you said, you know, right-wing radio, which you've been a part of,

has been somewhat responsible for dumbing down

the Republican bates in this country.

Are you thinking of that on this issue, too?

Well, and not just on this issue, and it's not just dumbing down, it's the creation of an alternative reality silo.

I mean, we've gone beyond echo chambers to actually being two nations that have their own facts, their own arguments, and they don't penetrate with one another.

And that's one of the things that we've created here.

So

the president doesn't need to worry about half of the country because, quite frankly, the conservative media is going to push their narrative, their agenda, and you're not going to be able to penetrate.

And

this is not just right versus left.

This is kind of an attack on the whole concept of truth.

Exactly.

It is an attack on the concept of credibility.

Even the truth is knowable.

The problem with that,

above all the other problems with it, is that in the end,

you know, these are not, some of these are not in the end political questions.

Like in the end, physics doesn't care what your skin is, it just does what it does.

Also, no matter how rich you are, you have to breathe.

That's what I never understand about conservatives.

It's right in the word, conserve.

And that actually is kind of tragic.

You know,

at root, there's a lot to be said for the idea of conservatism, of not changing more quickly than societies can cope with, that kind of thing.

But that's long since abandoned.

I mean, 2014 was the hottest year we've ever measured on this planet.

Until 2015 smashed that, until 2016 smashed that.

We're changing so fast.

I mean, human, not just like America's not ever seen anything like this, we haven't seen change like this since the beginning of primate evolution.

I mean, we're in a complete different thing now.

Well, when you have a president who says things like, nobody knew health care could be so complicated,

what do you think he thinks about this kind of issue?

You know, it's really hard.

I feel like this is the problem that happened with the Republican base, is they hear these snippets and they think, oh, well, repeal and replace.

You know, I think it's not.

Or erase the state lines.

They're done.

You know, and Trump signs something and then holds it up like a price is right girl.

And problem solved.

You know,

this simple solution mentality.

You know, I think it's more than that, though, and I think it goes back to what Charlie was saying about sort of an attack on truth and the whole idea that there can be truth.

We talk about Russian information warfare against the United States during the election, but if you think of this, in some sense, the right-wing media ecosystem is a form of information warfare against the sort of mainstream communications network.

It's a classic, that's what you do.

You go after the enemy's communications, right?

You want to defeat them,

fake news, fake news.

Oh, I know.

There is fake news.

I talked about that.

I know you do.

There are two silos out there.

But there's not the same kind of machine for not just something.

And I actually think it's brilliant.

I think as an insurgency tactic, it's absolutely brilliant, and it's been devastatingly effective.

But you also have, among a lot of people, to give some responsibility to the American people, you have this strange sort of sense that a businessman can do anything.

For many, many decades, we've had people say, we just need to run the government like a business.

Like a business.

Right, well now we've got all businessmen running the government.

And they are also in control of states like Nevada that are, what, 80% federal land.

If they decide to turn that over to their friends in the oil industry, to this Russian oligarch who would like to frack in the Grand Canyon, or they want to turn Yellowstone over because they think that sulfur must be oil,

you never know.

There's nothing to stop them.

And one thing you can do to save yourselves is take back some of these states.

If Democrats controlled Michigan, they wouldn't have let Flint happen, I presume.

The thing that might stop them.

And I said we'd get back to this.

The thing that might stop them is Russia.

Now, we are off next week.

We have a week off.

So we're not back until March 17th.

Tell me where this Russia story is in two weeks, because this Sergey

kissed my ass guy.

He is like the Where's Waldo of Washington.

It seems like the first thing you do when you take a job in the administration is meet the Russian ambassador.

Right, and then forget that he ever existed.

I know

two weeks ago completely forgotten this.

Those Russians are not at all memorable, it turns out.

Where is this in two weeks?

Well, you know what's interesting is the majority of the people now who seem to have been involved pre-campaign, from July through September, in these conversations with Russians, with the exception of Jeff Sessions, are out of government now.

They're out of the loop.

You have Flynn out.

Manafort left the campaign.

They're all out there outside of the scope of presidential privilege, of White House privilege.

And the guy who was supposed to be able to protect them, in theory, is Jeff Sessions, who's now neutralized.

I think you're getting to the point now where Republicans can't avoid...

We don't have a special prosecutor law anymore,

the special counsel law, but I think you're going to have to have Republicans capitulate to the idea of some kind of investigation.

The problem is it's still in the justice system.

And that would be smart for them, because otherwise, I mean, how many bullets are they going to take for this guy?

At a certain point, you create special prosecutors.

You go, okay, this is not our problem.

Let's talk about something else.

I mean,

does Donald Trump, does anyone think he has the moral fiber?

No.

We have to finish the question, please, guys.

But, like, I'm saying, like, obviously he says so many nice things about Putin.

He used to go to Russia all the time.

He had his pageant there.

He had all his money there.

They're the only ones who would lend him money.

There's the P-tape.

I mean, like, there's so many reasons to think that they have something on them.

There's one silver lining which is that you can't blackmail someone who has no shame.

And I've got to believe that Vladimir Putin, if he invested in Trump's election, has got to be experiencing some sense of buyer's remorse.

Oh, yeah.

A little bit of like, uh-oh,

this guy is crazy.

The damage he's done, though, is that he's not going to be able to do that

with poison on his collar.

I mean, number, I mean, but what doesn't make any sense is, first of all, we know, why were all these people talking to the Russians?

Number two, why did they feel the need to lie about talking to the Russians if there's nothing wrong?

And number three, here's the dog that didn't bark.

Has any of the Trump people said, yes, I talked to the Russians and I told them, stop hacking our elections?

No, I don't know.

Right.

All right, thank you, panel.

It's time for new rules, everybody.

New rules.

There are all the self-righteous conservatives who were fake

outraged by President Obama disrespecting the Oval Office, and all the liberals who are currently fake outraged at Kellyanne

doing this

must get together and admit that most nights they look like this.

New rules, stop saying President Trump needs to get a dog.

Yes, he's the first president in 100 years who doesn't have a loyal dog at his side, except that he does.

His name is Sean.

Well,

Sean sloppers quite a bit.

He's always trying to snip your nuts, but come on, he's such a good boy.

New rule, Pricewater House must make up for its Oscar flow by leaking Trump's taxes.

Forget moonlight, what we need is sunlight.

Not funny, but true.

New Rule, if you insist on making your kid go out in public looking like this, you can't be surprised years later when you find him on the internet looking like this.

So.

New Rule, the woman born with no arms who just set the Guinness World Record for lighting candles with her feet, and the man who just set the Guinness World Record for hammering nails with his head have to go on a a date.

Just to hear her say, get it through your thick skull, I can't give you a hand job.

You'll get over it.

It's okay.

And finally, new rule, if the new normal is a president who has bragged about sexual assault and walking in on naked teenage beauty pageant contestants and who has spoken lustfully about his own daughter and once said of a fifth grader, I'm going to date her in ten years.

Tell me again why someone like Elliot Spitzer is so terrible.

Elliot Spitzer, who you may recall, had to go away after a hooker scandal because when a hooker blows a politician, it puts a lobbyist out of work.

But this double standard has got to stop, where all the Democrats' horn dogs have to go live on a farm,

but the Republican hound is allowed up on the furniture in the Oval Office.

So Spitzer wanted a bust a nut.

So what?

He also wanted to bust bankers and insider traders and did.

If he were a Republican today, what he did could totally be spun.

Dating call girls, please.

He was providing struggling millennials with a living wage.

He wasn't cheating.

He was having alternative sex.

Republicans are so much more practical about this stuff.

They think Trump's flaws come with the territory when you hire an alpha male.

Trump does things which appall people, but they also admire the balls of it.

Even after Pussygate, his attitude was still defiant.

Yeah, I say hello to people by grabbing their pussies.

What about it?

Hi, Don Trump.

That's a nice firm snatch you got there.

I mean...

Compared to that, Spitzer is a choir boy, and rehabilitating him would send the message that Democrats are serious about what is important and about winning.

In fact,

actually,

a guy whose big crime is that he got a hooker doesn't even send that message enough, which is why we need this guy.

Yeah, Anthony Wheaton.

Yes?

Another Jew who likes to pork.

Hey, you want to win or you want to go home?

You want the chicken dinner or what?

Balls, I'm telling you.

We need balls.

And I'm sorry that the good ones are usually a little too full of calm.

But they are.

We need our loudmouthed, kick-ass New Yorker who's up all night on social media.

Hey, you know what?

At least when Wiener is playing with his phone at 3 a.m., he's looking for love.

Trump is starting a Twitter war with the land's end catalog.

Let's not forget that Wiener fought like a pit bull for liberal causes and could have been the voice of the party if not for a mistake he made one time.

Okay, two time.

Three.

What does it matter?

How many times?

Oh, shit, he did it again.

Okay, okay, all right, all right.

It's all he can do to keep from humping the mannequins and masons.

You know what?

That same primal force is why he was such a badass congressman.

We don't have the luxury anymore to mess around with milquetoast Democratic politicians who don't move people.

Tim Kaine is a nice guy, but he's the kind of boring beta male that's made the Democrats the designated driver party.

As ridiculous as Trump is, he does come off as an alpha.

That's why he paints his face the color of a baboon's ass.

It shows dominance.

So if Trump, if Trump is indeed the new normal, if it's now perfectly fine for the American president to be Bill Cosby with a super PAC,

then Democrats have to go all out too.

And that means Spitzer, and that means Wiener.

And by the way, next time he runs, no more Anthony Wiener.

He's Carlos Danger.

Fuck yeah, own that shit.

Carlos Danger, a Latino Jew,

tanned, rested, and fully erect at all times.

And restoring wiener, I mean danger.

That would send the message.

Although, wait, although, maybe there's still someone even worse, and by worse, I mean better.

John Edwards.

That's right, John.

Yes, I know.

Left a sick wife to have an affair with Peter Frampton.

And

that was wrong.

That was wrong.

But Edwards also is the one who made health care the issue it became for the Democrats in 2008.

So yes, what he did was horrible.

But the heart wants what it wants, and what the heart wanted apparently was Peter Frampton.

I still don't get that.

And yes, the whole thing was disgusting, but so is openly humiliating your first wife, the mother of your children, while you romance your future second wife in public.

But again, Trump supporters just make a different calculation.

They say, no, I don't like cheating and pussygrabbing, but hey, this ain't a friendly fight.

This is a battle for the soul of the country.

And it is.

And since it is, Democrats should be allowed to put our alpha perbs back on the board.

Especially since the Democratic Party has a proud tradition of excellent horny presidents.

FDR,

JFK,

LBJ,

and of course, how about a BJ?

All right, that's our show.

We're off next week, and we'll be back March 17th.

I'll be at the Civic Center in Des Moines May 7th.

And we've added a second show in Miami.

Trump is good for business.

I'll give him that at the Fillmore August 6th.

I want to thank Charlie Sykes, Rosa Brooks, Joy Reed, Bill McKinnon, Jeffrey Ward.

John and Staff are over time on YouTube.

And 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.