Overtime – Episode #412 (Originally aired 1/27/17)

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

We are back here.

Eva, having known Donald Trump before he entered politics, do you think there is another side of him we don't see?

What was he like before that?

Wow, I don't know him well, but I will say,

I will say.

Did he ever try to grab your pussy?

No.

No.

A reasonable question.

No.

A reasonable question.

He did not.

He did not.

But I will say, yeah, he was on The Apprentice when I was on Housewives, and I did a charity event for a documentary I did about farm workers in New York.

And so my PR company kind of just invited New Yorkers.

And he couldn't come.

I guess they invited him and he couldn't come.

And he sent me a note and he said, so sorry, I can't be there.

And he sent me a check.

He wrote, he don't, he made a donation to Latinos.

A check.

A check from his personal account?

I can't remember.

I was trying to think that.

It was probably from the foundation.

Yeah, probably.

His con

where he doesn't spend his own money and pretends he does.

Right.

Well, he, yeah, but he did donate, and I was like, oh, that, and I always remembered, oh, that was so nice.

And then I see him when he announced his presidency.

And I was like, oh, oh, who's that?

Tim Ryan, do you see much hope for an improved food system under President Trump?

Well, we didn't get one under President Obama.

That was one of my questions when I interviewed him.

I asked him about the purity of the food system, you know, things he never gets asked.

And I see why, because he didn't really answer the question.

Not to my satisfaction.

I mean, when you look at the appointment for the EPA, you look for the appointment to the Department of Agriculture,

total big ag,

you know, reducing regulations for like healthy food.

But we had a Monsanto guy guarding this door.

I agree.

I agree.

Democrats, I think this is a good issue for Democrats to talk about how we change the food system, how we get

local food into our schools.

We're poisoning our kids right now

with what we feed them.

We have huge rates of diabetes.

It's driving up the Medicare program.

It's driving up the cost of the Medicaid program.

And if we want to get it right, we've got to start getting healthy food into our schools so our kids won't have diabetes.

It'll bring the cost of the health care program down and free up more money for education, free college, debt-free college, clean pipes across the United States, and all these things.

We've got to get the health care costs.

Unreasonable liberal position.

99.

Sorry about that.

That is outrageous.

Got to drive away.

Oh, Jesus Christ.

Richard Haas, do you think it was appropriate for Representative Tulsi Gabbard, she's been on our show, to meet with President Assad on a recent trip to Syria?

Should we meet with dictators or just Putin?

Not funny.

I would not have met with Bashar al-Assad at this time.

He's committed all sorts of war crimes.

More than half of his country is displaced.

500,000 people have died.

Our goal should be ultimately that he gets out of power.

We're stuck with him for the time being.

The real question, I actually think for President Obama, the sad and most critical part of his legacy will be all the stuff he didn't do.

We went from a president who arguably did too much.

in Iraq to a president who did way too little in Syria.

What was he supposed to do there?

Well, among other things, when Syrians used chemical weapons, we could have attacked their air force.

We could have done more to help the opposite.

If we attacked their air force, wouldn't ISIS have taken over the country?

At that point, early on, we actually had lots of options to work with the opposition.

Or if you thought that was the same thing.

The opposition.

Who was the opposition?

There were Sunni groups we could have worked with.

But if you think that?

If you think that?

No.

Then why would you say the Masad?

No, no, no.

There was no moderate.

That's the problem in the Middle East.

Find the moderates.

There are no moderates.

They don't, exactly.

They don't know what the government is.

But you've got to choose your poisons.

You find less radical.

Or if you think that?

But then.

Then you don't say Assad must go.

But they do.

But you land up with like 50 guys.

No, but that was late in the process.

Earlier on, we had bigger options.

And if we had acted decisively, I actually think we could have changed the dynamics.

What it shows is that what you don't do in foreign policy can be every bit as consequential as what you do do.

Okay.

John, do you think it was appropriate for BuzzFeed to publish the dossier on Trump's ties to Russia?

Right, that's a good question.

Would you, as editor-in-chief of the Delhi Beast, have done that?

I wouldn't have.

We had looks at that and made a different decision.

But

it's not, I understand why they did it.

I think it ultimately, though, is used by Trump as a cudgel to criticize all the media, right?

That becomes the thin edge of the wedge for them to say all news is fake news.

And BuzzFeed does a lot of good reporting.

And when all of a sudden they start attacking CNN and BuzzFeed and the Daily Beast, which was one of the first places blacklisted, which we think is a badge of honor, their whole goal is to convince everybody that's fake news and then to elevate propaganda outlets that are doing their bidding.

That muddying of the line between truth and lies with journalism is one of the most dangerous things that's going to be going on the next four years.

Okay, can we expect that protests like the recent Women's March will continue throughout Trump's presidency, and will they make a difference?

I hope so, because if not, it's

not a moment that it's a movement.

And what's...

What I hope is

the way the Tea Party did it, and they were much smaller than the people that came out on Saturday.

I mean, the Tea Party was this big, and they took Congress.

Occupy Wall Street.

Because that was a good question.

That's a good question, because I feel like Occupy Wall Street was short-lived because there was no focus.

What was the agenda?

Who was in charge of it?

And it kind of just fizzled out.

And that's what I think cannot happen with this movement, especially with

the women's march, is what do we want?

Because there was such a cross-section of intersection.

There was an intersection of people that came out to the march.

It was black, white, young, old,

Republican, Democrat.

I mean, people were, it started from this inspiring movement of, I don't want my rights rolled back.

I don't want to limit women's rights.

I want an expansion of women's rights, equal pay.

It started from one Facebook.

One of the people who said, I'm not happy, I'm going to march.

I mean, if you think old media matters anymore, 240 newspapers endorsed Hillary Clinton, and she lost.

And one grandma in Hawaii writes, let's start a march.

And it's the biggest protest in American history.

I mean, that tells you about social media.

How many of the people who marched didn't vote?

How many?

If it's not a vote, we don't know.

We don't know.

But what we do know is that there is an election coming up.

Right.

November of 18th.

That's what I'm saying.

I hope from that Saturday on, let's hope that we can use it in the midterm.

If the message in that 2018 election is

Republicans are still getting elected under the Trump presidency, then we're far.

You've got a problem.

Three-quarters of the Senate seats that are up are Democratic seats.

Right.

Democrats are just disadvantaged, structurally going to be a government.

Yeah, but there's a lot of governor's seats that are up, and if we win governor's races, this is where Democrats kind of forget to vote in off-year elections, be organized in off-year elections.

I think this year is going to be this election.

That's true.

But if you look at the numbers, I mean, in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, how do you think Scott Walker keeps getting elected?

Because people don't, you know, we win the presidential in Wisconsin, usually.

Usually.

But Scott Walker wins.

If you win those governor races, you start adjusting the map for the House of Representatives.

You can pick up two or three seats in Ohio, two or three seats in Michigan, maybe a couple in Wisconsin.

All of a sudden, you start trying to unlock some of this stuff.

You guys have it backwards?

All of this focus on Trump, which you do and others do.

Oh, that's the big change.

I know, but the focus on Trump.

It's actually, it's easy not to if you focus on what's happened.

In the last eight years, the Republicans did the long march through the institutions.

There are 33 Republican governors.

There are 25 states that have a Republican governor in both houses, 25, that have a majority of the country living in them.

These are not the square states out west.

These are big states.

And then we go, gee, how did Trump win in North Carolina and Florida and Ohio and Wisconsin and Michigan?

Well, we've had a Republican governor in both houses of the legislature there for six to to eight years in these states.

These states have become Republican, are strengthening their Republican roots.

And Trump came in and won.

It wasn't Trump.

Trump's not driving the lower Republican roots as so much as fixing and rigging the game so that Democrats can't vote.

That's what they do.

It's not that people want to be more Republican.

Donald Trump proved people don't even like Republicans because he's not a Republican.

And look, look at the episode.

If you explain away why you're losing elections, you're never going to get to win them.

I mean, you really need to figure out why you've been losing

thousands of state legislative races.

We've got to do a better job than those tweets on Halloween.

If you look at the economy in Ohio, you look what Pence did.

Ohio's growing at half of the national average.

We've got a ton of problems.

You look at Indiana, same thing what Pence did to Indiana.

Their economy is not well.

Look at what Brownback did in Kansas.

He's destroyed the entire state.

And got re-elected.

Same in Wisconsin.

I mean, Trump was bashing Scott Walker during the primary because Wisconsin's economy sucks.

So these Republican governors aren't doing a very good job.

That is a hell of an opportunity for us to go in.

All right, week one, we lived through it.

Thank you, everybody.

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