Overtime – Episode #413 (Originally aired 2/3/17)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series, Real Time with Bill C.

Okay, here we are.

Now, you were worried that the question wasn't nice.

It is nice, Tommy.

What do you think of Republicans like McCain and Lindsey Graham who have rebuked President Trump's executive order banning Muslim refugees?

That's a reasonable question.

You know, I'm all for anybody standing in their truth.

I do think that McCain and Graham are both incredibly threatened by Donald Trump, and I think that their relevancy is threatened, so they're lashing out.

But hey, you know what?

We're okay in the Republican Party.

We got a lot of voices.

That's good.

Right.

And where do you think they stand on LGBT rights?

I know where Trump stands.

I think that he's been incredibly pro-LGBT in those issues.

I'm saying that because they're boyfriends.

I'm just saying.

Oh.

Ouch.

What?

They're not?

I don't think that was.

Rick Wilson, do you think it's likely that Trump's base or a majority of the Republican Party will turn against him?

Great question.

Well, look, if he doesn't manage to deliver all these thousands of new coal mining jobs and to turn the economy into some magical 1950s fairyland, well, maybe 1850s for some of his fans,

if he doesn't manage to accomplish a big economic lift for the folks that really were strongly for him, which are lower-middle-class working whites, he's going to have a lot of trouble holding on to those folks if he doesn't show actual results.

You can't just tweet and bullshit your way out of it.

Right.

But, I mean,

he has done a lot of jawboning with corporations.

You know, he would say, I've already saved jobs.

Before I even got to the White House, I saved jobs because, you know, I also read that corporations are scared of him.

Call me crazy.

Call me crazy, but there's a big difference between actual job creation and policies

that make the economy get lit up and a bullshit tornado.

And basically,

that's what all these CEO meetings turn out to be.

The accounts and the stories about them are he goes in and says, I built a great business.

Did you build a great business?

Yes, we're great businessmen together.

It's so nice of you to be here in the Oval Office with me.

And again, it's like Sam's description.

This guy's Chauncey Gardner.

I like television.

And

there's no there there.

Oh, poor you.

You have to listen to all this.

I thought Rick was a Republican.

He is.

Well, there's lots of Republicans going on here.

Yeah, but I'm actually a conservative, too.

That's the difference between me and Trump people.

I love the self-righteous conservatives.

The Trump people, us Trump people

are all awful.

When you see us all going nuts, you love it.

I mean a little bit.

A little bit.

I just, I comfort myself with that beautiful map on November 8th.

You can't use the popular vote.

Yeah, I know I wouldn't want to, because luckily that's not what our elections are based on, Jason.

So it's okay.

Does it bother you how the Republican Party did a 180 on like everything?

Like overnight, like you know, executive orders when Obama did them were the worst thing in the world and now the government is run like

50

does that bother you like that sort of like immediate unabashed hypocrisy I don't know most presidents do that when they first come in there's usually executed a lot of executive orders in reverse not this much and not after saying it's the worst thing in the world right it was the worst thing in the world up until January 20th I think people one of the things that Trump really ran on, one of the things people are really mad about with Washington is this thing where every six months, people in both parties just start saying the opposite of what they said six months ago.

I mean, you look at what's happening with the Supreme Court right now.

So, yeah, I mean, I think that that's a problem for both, but it's especially a problem right now.

I mean, like, he says conflicting stuff in a single day.

I mean, sometimes in a single sentence.

Right, in a sentence.

I've seen him do it in a sentence, which is a talent.

I remember when Republicans were outraged when Barack Obama was picking winners and losers in the economy.

Yes.

And now we've got a president who essentially blackmails companies in the basement saying, I'm going to tweet mean about you if you don't do what I want.

You know,

it's a very different kind of picking winners and losers, but President Game Show host has got a certain shit.

I'm not going to let them talk about him like that, Tommy.

Sam, do you think that radical extremists in other religions or white supremacists pose a threat to national security too?

Sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's pretty darn dry.

And we're done.

We never have said that there weren't other problems or other bad people in the world.

I wrote a whole book on what's wrong with Christianity.

It's just, yeah.

This is a strong.

But see, that's so much.

It's interesting that that's so much more popular among the white languages.

So

yes, we're bad.

It's being, yeah, yeah.

It's like they want to, we should get them that thing that Shiites hit themselves with.

Yes, we're just as bad.

Well, I mean, there is masochism, which is attractive to some people, apparently, but

there's the understandable problem that we see this through the lens of a beleaguered minority.

When you think of, what most people think of Muslims, they think of non-white people who are in our society a tiny minority, and therefore they're deserving, and rightly so, they're deserving of kind of the double protection of the white majority thinking, wait a minute, am I being a bigoted asshole here?

And so that sort of self-scrutiny is appropriate, but it's just you're not following the plot here.

Islam is not a race, right?

Islam is a set of ideas.

Yes.

Right.

Which is

religious.

And

we have to be able to criticize bad ideas.

But you know,

to add, besides that,

you know, I was debating Rudy Giuliani on Meet the Press, and he goes, we're talking about,

this is right before the announcement of whether or not the policeman who shot Michael Brown would be held accountable.

And Giuliani said to me, we shouldn't be talking about that.

That's such a small percentage.

Police people killing black people is such a small percentage, and the greatest percentage is black-on-black crime.

And then I pointed, you know, you point out, well, okay, true.

93% of black people who are killed are killed by black people, but 84% of white people who are killed are killed by white people.

But by that logic, if we would say...

that if we look at the number of people in America killed by terrorist acts in the last 10 years doesn't total 100.

So at that case, it wouldn't be Muhammad, it would be Billy Bob who's a problem to white people in terms of their vulnerability.

That's apart from the argument that you're making.

I'm saying that's part of the logic that drives people to talk about it as well.

But there's some real big differences there, Mike.

Why Billy Bob is not seeking nuclear weapons?

That's why we're not.

You're swats in the Middle East.

There aren't Billy Bob terrorist armies.

I understand that, but I'm saying

the false equivalence.

Well, but the false equivalence was made by a person like a Giuliani who would argue then that we can't have both, and that's my point.

But also

started counting after September 11th.

I'm also funded by Salafists and Wahhabis out of Saudi Arabia to the tune of whatever it takes.

But I'm saying to the masses of people of color who are victimized by white supremacy, I'm just saying that that's an immediate concern for them as well.

I'm not denying

the legitimacy of the broader concern.

I'm saying this is why people are also tuned in on that, and that's often dismissed.

That's all I'm arguing.

But you should double down on that and realize that there are all of these non-white people in Muslim-majority countries who are victimized by theocracy, right?

So So

it's the Muslims who are suffering from terrorism and

literectomies and everything else that they're talking about.

Did we even talk about the people in Quebec?

I mean, a terrorist act against Muslim brothers and sisters.

And they are victims.

And no, no, I'm saying they are most people who are victims

of that terror are Muslims themselves.

We understand that.

Right.

And by the way, until Donald Trump became president, you know, Islamophobia, which is real, we never denied that true.

I mean, there are people who just don't like other people because they're different.

Yeah, although I would argue it's a bad word that we shouldn't use.

It is a propaganda term that prevents this kind of work.

But it's also, there's a component of it that is also real and actual happens.

But, you know, until Donald Trump came along, there was the one in Texas, the mosque that was attacked in Texas, and then in Quebec.

It was mostly non-violent.

You know, it was, yeah, there were probably like...

horrible things people say to people at the supermarket or dirty looks or Facebook.

But now it took him literally a week to turn that violent.

Right.

And it's going to get worse.

I mean, he's just going to make it worse.

I would bet you any amount of money that it's not going to turn out well for us as far as what he's actually trying to do, which is keep us safer.

You would agree with me.

When a president speaks, it's a president speaking.

It doesn't matter that it's a president that, you know, a lot of people, 54% of the country voted for somebody else to be president.

That doesn't change the fact that the president is speaking.

And so when the president does things like call it a Muslim ban and treat people like they're the enemy, right, a whole big swath of people, yeah, it's going to have a horrible effect.

All right, this is for you.

As someone who nearly won an election as a Democrat in a red state, what do you hope Democrats do differently in the next election?

So my experience has always been that politics is not that much different from just like being a good person, like say what you believe and be honest with people.

Really?

I know.

It's hard to believe.

I love how naive you are.

It's not naive.

I mean, it's what works.

And,

I are a Boy Scout.

No, here's what I mean.

People hear the truth so seldom in politics that it's very disarming.

So when you actually.

I mean, Donald Trump, not that he ever tells the truth, but he's got to say this.

He's unfiltered from him.

Unfiltered, and he doesn't look, he doesn't sound like a politician, and he is, in his way, genuine.

I mean, that's not a good thing.

No, it's a weird way, but lies are genuine.

But he is really who he is.

And so Fruitbag from Queens.

For me.

Still my president.

Yours, too.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

We only get one president.

So, anyway, for me, I don't know where to go from there.

Don't let President Bannon hear you say that.

Oh.

No, he likes it that way.

All right.

All right.

We're way late.

Thank you very much, everybody.

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