Episode #410 (Originally aired 11/11/16)

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, no, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's gonna tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

Aka Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

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

Good afternoon.

Afternoon.

Time will be

real time.

Great to see you.

Thank you.

Wow,

that's a very nice reception.

Thank you.

What can I say?

I think I know why you're happy tonight.

Drugs.

What else could it be?

Yeah, let's start with the good news.

California, Nevada, Maine, and Maryland legalize recreational marijuana.

Florida and North Dakota.

North Dakota's on the page now.

With medical, this selection gave us permission to smoke weed and a reason we need to.

Colorado legalized assisted suicide.

I know what you're saying.

Road trip.

I mean.

The closest thing I can compare this to is it's like a night after hard drinking.

You know, where you see who lie next to who you're waking up lying next to and you're like, what have I done?

Maybe if I pretend I'm asleep, they'll get their things and leave.

I mean, can you imagine someone who has been in a coma for the last two years

just waking up?

Hey, man, you know the guy from the Celebrity Apprentice?

Yeah, he's the president now.

And the cake boss is Pope.

And And Bill Cosby's the drug czar.

So.

You know, Republicans, they didn't just win the White House.

They won Congress, the Senate, the House of Representatives, which means they'll get the Supreme Court.

This is a very good time to have fuck you money

and a bad time to be an animal or a plant.

They're going to, well, he wants to get rid of the EPA and replace the environment with something terrific.

They are literally floating the idea of Sarah Palin for

Secretary of the

Interior.

I'm not even sure she sleeps indoors.

I mean,

they're going to get rid of Obamacare, probably get rid of Roe versus Wade.

So, you know what?

Enjoy your victory, Trump voters, because when you're dying because you don't have health insurance to treat the infection you got from a back alley abortion you had to get because of fetal lead poisoning, you can say to yourself, at least I didn't vote for someone with a private email server.

Oh, yeah.

One other little detail about the election.

Hillary won.

She won the popular vote, probably by a million and a half.

It just happened that there were more Trump supporters in the places where it counted, like Moscow.

But also, to be honest, Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania and Ohio, all week long, I've been seeing on TV white men weeping.

like they just won some long, hard-fought civil rights battle.

Move over, women and gays and minorities.

It's our turn now.

White women went for Trump by 10 points.

How does that grab you, ladies?

Hispanics.

He won almost a third of Hispanics.

Turns out the Mexicans are hoping he'll kick out the Colombians.

The Colombians want him to deport the Salvadorians, and the Salvadorians are saying finally he's going to do something about those Guatemalans.

All right, well, chin up.

We got a great show.

David Oxarod, Ana Marie Cox, and Thomas Friedman are here.

A little bit of be speaking with the very funny Trey Crowder.

And a special guest, our good friend John Legend, wanted to come by today.

Say a few words.

But first up, he's a partner at the law firm of Covington and Burling and served as our Attorney General for the first term and a half of President Obama and a hell of a one.

Eric Holder.

Mr.

Nay G.

How you doing?

How you doing?

All right.

Okay.

Well, you look relaxed.

It must be good to be away from Washington.

Yeah, when you're not carrying a bunch of Republicans on your shoulders beating up on you all the time.

It makes you look a little better.

No, you did.

You did a hell of a job and they didn't make it easy for you.

Darrell Issa, did he win?

No.

He got beat?

Oh, no.

Darrell, I don't know.

He's not on our show anymore.

The one thing I didn't like about your show, given all the the crap I had to deal with him, and I had to watch your show and then see him up here, you know.

Well, you know, we...

Ban him.

No, that's...

We can't do it that way.

Come on.

We have to come together.

We have to listen to both sides.

Not in this new world we have.

We push our side.

Well, we do push our side.

But I mean,

I would argue with you that one reason why the Democrats lost is because they didn't listen to the other side.

They didn't hear those voices.

They used to be the party of the working man, and they seem to have forgotten how to do that.

Yeah, so I there are a whole variety of reasons.

I think that's one of them.

I have to think that at least a part of it, though, was decisions made in my Justice Department that had at least some impact.

I can't quantify it, but I think it had some impact.

Absolutely.

But first off, how do we solve this problem of

we win the election, but we don't get to be president?

Because this has happened twice now

since 2000.

Al Gore and now Hillary.

And it seems to be happening to one party.

Only us.

Only Democrats.

Right.

Which is, of course, the way they would would want it.

You kind of can't blame them for that.

But how do we fix that?

Well, I'm in the process now writing an article that says there's a simple solution to it.

We have to just abolish the Electoral College.

It's not.

But they're not going to go along with that.

And

isn't that a constitutional amendment?

It requires a constitutional amendment.

That is some heavy lifting.

But all right, so it involves heavy lifting.

Right.

Let's lift heavy.

Let's lift heavy.

Let's do it.

Now we've got to do it.

I mean, it's funny because, you know, always Donald Trump, opposite land, he kept saying the election is rigged.

It is rigged in his favor.

Not just that, but when you think about the election is on Tuesday instead of a holiday like most countries, poor people can't just say, hey, I'm taking off for the rest of the afternoon in voting.

Long lines in urban places.

Of course, gutting the Voting Rights Act.

Voting rights act, sure.

Where they eliminated polling places.

All of this stuff, it's a completely different.

And then we come up with ideas, the need for photo ID to show that you are who you are.

You know, there's always been an element in our voting system that you had to prove who you were, but they've only come up recently with this notion, these more restrictive and prescriptive things that have a negative impact on those people who are less likely to vote for Republicans.

And they also happen to affect disproportionately people of color.

Okay, so that's, it seems like if one place you can just pop in and vote, and the other place there's lines for six hours, that that would be a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

Against the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution and goes against the fundamental thing that binds us as Americans, the ability of the people to decide who their leaders are, who their leaders are going to be, and what policies those leaders will shape.

Right.

Now, the Republican Party has put itself on the wrong side of history here.

You know, 50 years from now, people are going to look back and say, this is the party that stood for denying people the right to vote.

Democrats want to live.

Yeah, but we live now.

Yeah.

I don't know if they're dead.

And we fight them.

50 years.

I'll be dead.

We fight them now.

We fought them while I was at the Justice Department, and that's going to be a big change.

That's going to be a big change.

I did a whole bunch of stuff to protect the right to vote.

I know you did.

The next Attorney General, I suspect, will not share my values.

Right.

Oh, my God.

Well, if it's Chris Christie, he's a hard ass on pot.

Pot could not be legal.

You may be going back to your skanky dealer.

Yeah.

Chris has got a few problems that I don't think are going to allow him to be attorney general, though.

Really?

You think they care?

Even for them, I think that's a bridge too far.

I don't agree with you.

I don't think they're constrained by anything.

I mean, I'll give this to the...

Well, he's already been demoted.

He's no longer running the transition.

Now he's like the co-chair or something, right?

Well, because they're figuring out another cabinet position.

No, he'll be the assistant next, you know, by tomorrow or something.

Okay.

Well, that's an optimistic view.

I'm looking for, I'm grabbing for whatever I like.

Because I don't see these people constrained by anything.

No, ever.

Certainly not by conscience or by the things that have always defined us as a nation.

No.

So, okay, so speaking of that, it seems like in the election, Russia

and the FBI

were very much for getting Trump elected.

And they seem to kind of work together to make that happen.

I remember when conservatives used to fear Russia and kind of hate Russia.

And now Russia hacks the emails of one side,

which then of course is broadcast all over Fox News, sort of as someone once said, weaponizing the American media.

And then the FBI is sort of in on it too.

It sounds like a vast right-wing conspiracy.

Well, I would separate the FBI from Russia.

I think that what Jim Comey did and what the FBI did,

at least with regard to Jim Comey, I think he made a mistake.

I think he's a good guy.

I've known him for a bunch of years.

I did too.

But his decision in July to hold that press conference and editorialize in the way that he did and then to release that second letter, that had an impact.

Others will quantify it, but I think that had an impact on the election.

With regard to the Russians,

hearing Trump talk about some 400-pound guy in his

underwear and his basement might be doing that.

I mean, all the intelligence agencies said this was Putin and the Russians doing this to our electoral system and his inability to

grasp that and to admit that that's what he doesn't want to to grasp that.

Well, it's always about his BFF Putin.

Yeah, yeah.

And you know, what's interesting about that is that we learn,

I'm not revealing anything I think here, that the Russians are always trying to figure out ways in which they can win over world leaders so that they'll become more pliable.

They were very successful with one of our chief allies, I won't mention who, and I think that Putin is trying to do the same thing with Trump.

Do you think this election really is still about race a lot, that they never really accepted Barack Obama?

Ted Cruz once said he could have been a unifying leader, but he made decisions that inflamed racial tensions, like staying black was a terrible decision.

Terrible decision.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah,

I think there is a racial component to this.

I mean, there's no question.

You know, the notion that somehow or other Barack Obama came here, came to Washington, D.C., and didn't want to work with Republicans is totally inconsistent with these simple things called the facts.

Right.

You know,

They were the ones.

Yeah.

This is a post-fact world we live in now.

Yeah, they're in the bubble.

They're in their little bubble.

And defined.

Liberals have a bubble too.

Yeah.

Not as bad and not as thick, but they do too.

Certain things permeate our bubble though every now and then.

Yes.

Theirs is impenetrable.

That's true.

He talked about suing women.

when he was running.

He said the women who came forward after the election, they'll be sued.

Can a president, a sitting president, sue people?

I suppose.

Can he put Hillary, is he going to go after her like he said he would?

Interestingly, you know, the Jones Jones versus Clinton decisions as a president can be, a sitting president can be sued.

So I assume.

So he's suing.

No, but I'm saying, so I think that would probably say that he would have the ability to mount a suit.

But why would a sitting president of the United States want to involve himself in a law?

I don't know, but this is so uncharted waters.

I mean, I feel.

I feel like we're at that place in the movie Sully where the birds flew into the engine,

but the plane's still flying but soon you know it's going down right

race for impact ladies and gentlemen thank you mr.

Array you did a hell of a job

what a service you did I appreciate that Eric Holder everybody let's meet our panel

okay

All right, here they are.

He is the former Obama White House senior advisor and CNN senior political commentator, David Axelrod, back with us.

She is a senior political correspondent for MTV News and columnist for New York Times magazine, Ana Marie Cox.

And he's the New York Times columnist and author of Thank You for Being Late, an Optimist Guide.

What a good name for that.

Thriving in the age of accelerations.

Thomas Friedman, the great Thomas Friedman.

All right, don't forget to send us your questions for tonight's overtime so we can answer them after the show on YouTube.

This was supposed to be the show we were going to ask: hey, how is the Republican Party going to put itself back together?

But I guess that went away.

So here's a way of thinking about the Trump victory.

It's sort of, I think, a victory for third parties in America.

He really should have been a third party candidate, an oddball billionaire who doesn't really have the ideology of either party.

We've been wanting a third party forever.

This is actually how a third party gets elected, using one of the parties as a host, right?

But not really being one of them.

And this, to look on the bright side, this is an opportunity because he doesn't really have an ideology that's beholden to either party.

He can kind of do anything.

Except he is,

I would say he's a product of the Republican Party.

I think the Republican Party created him.

He wasn't even a Republican Party.

I agree, but they created the groundwork with their shock of voter ID and voter fraud and conspiracy theories and Fox News.

But the thing is, he does have an ideology.

He's not a conservative.

He's what they call it, hmm.

He believes in using government to make big decisions, a sort of sort of socialist-y.

He's also kind of like, he's very pro-America.

He's very pro-America, so he's kind of nationalisty.

So he's kind of a nationalist

socialist.

But you guys, you're ascribing ideas to a guy who I don't think has any ideas.

And

I think what we've seen in the last 48 hours since the election is basically a capture of Donald Trump by the institutional Republicans in Washington.

Today, Mike Pence took over as the transition chief.

He's put corporate lobbyists in charge of all of his transition committees.

And I think, you know, because he doesn't have ideas and he doesn't have philosophical bearings, they see an empty vessel and they're seizing the opportunity.

Well, he got to the point where the fight's going to be interesting, Bill, because I agree.

This is a party that basically rented out its base to whoever could energize it.

Sure.

And it ended up with a fallow garden.

And to me, Trump was an invasive species and just came into this empty garden.

But I do think, to your third party, he does have certain sort of impulses.

I mean, I agree with David.

I don't think he has any huge ideas.

And one is that he said during the campaign, I'm for maintaining entitlement, Social Security.

And the other is, I'm for business, you know, entrepreneurial ideas.

Can he survive, though, this party that voted against, as David can tell you, every infrastructure sort of project that Obama tried to do over the last six years.

Yes, but that's the point.

I have seen this guy change his position from the beginning to the end of a sentence.

I mean, his...

With no punctuation.

Right.

I mean, his con man skills can come in handy here.

And he will take, he could be a success because he can take credit for it.

Oh, God.

He says, I'll get rid of ISIS.

We're getting rid of ISIS.

I'll put America back to work.

We did it.

It's deporting people.

Obama's doing it.

He just has to stand there.

I did it.

He'll say, I didn't really mean a wall wall.

Like a virtual wall.

I was talking about Wall Street in Mexico.

They got him out in the same sentence.

We can keep the ACA, you know, let him make a few cosmetic changes and put his name on it.

That's what he did.

Now he said today, well, we may amend it because what he's discovering is actually people think it's good that if you have a pre-existing condition, you can't be excluded from insurance.

Actually, it's good that 20 million people who didn't have health care have health care.

And maybe it isn't such good politics to take it away from people.

And I think he's discovering that.

But I don't think he's going to have that.

I think that you guys are being optimistic about what the Republican Party will allow.

Mitch McConnell said just yesterday: no, you know what, infrastructure isn't high on our priority list.

And I don't know that Trump has the wherewithal to push an agenda.

I'm not sure that he has one.

I want to take this opportunity right now to invite him on this show.

Really?

Look,

he won.

He ran a vicious, vulgar campaign and I gave it back exactly in measure.

I was also vicious and vulgar.

But he won.

And he did it his way.

Nobody gets to sing that song more than Donald Trump.

Everybody told him he couldn't do this, he couldn't do that, and he won.

He did the hardest thing in the entire world to do, win the election as the leader of the free world.

And it took me eight years to get Obama on.

Maybe he'll come on.

I was watching 60 Minutes and one of his fellow reality show contestants, I mean hosts, Kim Kardashian was on.

And they asked her the typical question, you know, about, well, you don't really have any talent.

And then he said, but, you know, you seem to be worth like $300 million.

And she said, well, I guess that takes some sort of talent.

I would say the same about Donald Trump.

It takes some sort of talent.

Maybe we should recognize that because we lost.

Well, there's the added degree of difficulty of winning while still losing.

You know, I mean, he did lose the popular vote.

And winning while losing the vote.

But he won by the rules.

He did.

There's no doubt about it.

Look, what he pulled off was extraordinary.

But particularly since on election day, two-thirds of the voters said they didn't think he was qualified.

Two-thirds said he didn't have the temperament to be president.

But he is president, which is pretty remarkable when you think of it.

You know, Bill, I've always felt people don't listen through their ears, voters.

They listen through their gut, through their stomach.

And you connect on a gut level with people.

They'll actually give you enormous latitude.

And I think what Trump did tap into, and this is what my book is about, is that we're in an age of acceleration, that in what I call the market mother nature and Moore's Law, globalization is accelerating so fast, okay?

That's the market.

Moore's Law, technology.

Mother Nature, obviously climate.

And this has unmoored a lot of people.

It's got them disoriented.

Yet, I think among his supporters, there are people for whom this was 80% about race, and the other 20% was about race.

But I think there are a lot of other people, Okay.

I think there were a lot of other people who are legitimately unmoored.

But change has come too fast for them.

And you've got to connect to that.

And honestly, the Democratic Party did a very bad job of connecting to that.

You know, you look at the results.

Barack Obama, Macomb, the famous Macomb County, Barack Obama carried it by four points

in 2012.

In Michigan, that was the original Reagan Democrat County.

He carried it in 2012.

Hillary Clinton lost by 12 points this time.

Because essentially, those folks felt like not only was Trump good at exploiting their concerns, but they didn't feel like she was talking to them.

They weren't part of her coalition.

As a general rule, I think it's not good to call people deplorables and say, well, I agree you're halfway.

That didn't help.

It doesn't help.

It doesn't help.

What do you think about the people who are not?

Apparently, disqualifying him wasn't the way to go.

And what do you think about the people now who are out there saying, not my president?

Because I scolded the other side when they did that when Obama took over, and that's not my motto.

You know what?

The time to rectify that was Tuesday.

If you're an American, leave the country, but if you're an American, we only get one president.

Yeah, I agree with that.

On the other hand, Rush Limbaugh, after Obama got elected, I'm rooting for him to fail.

We heard all of this stuff.

Donald Trump, we all excoriated him when he said, I may not accept the results of this election.

So how do we lecture him and then say, but wait a second, now you won and we're not going to accept the results.

But you know, when that rooting to fail thing came up with Mitch McConnell, when Obama took office and every liberal was upset about that, I was not.

I knew what he meant.

He meant, I don't want his policies to succeed.

When you, I heard Obama say, we want Trump to succeed.

Well, if Trump succeeding means his policy succeeding, no, I don't want him to succeed.

No, no, and I don't want him to repeal Obamacare.

I don't want him to get rid of the climate change.

I guarantee you Obama doesn't want him to repeal Obamacare

either.

But it's a tricky thing about it.

Right, but he's just so thin-skinned and needy.

Yes.

Like, we need to keep his ego.

This is the first president we've ever had.

He's also surrounded by the people.

It will, really, really will govern by the polls.

I think he's also surrounded by some legitimately, really bad people.

And

if we, on an issue, Bill, that you and I have talked about and care a lot about, like climate, you know, my attitude is: look, if you do the right thing, and there's a lot of ways to finesse this, Trump.

You need to talk about climate.

Just talk about how solar and wind and all of these things are now truly competitive in the marketplace.

If we just sort of abandon him there, the worst people are going to say, why even talk to these people?

They're not with you.

And

you're going to give them the power to really define what is a critical issue.

But I want to say one other thing about the climate I think that they don't appreciate.

This is an issue that the whole world has moved on for the last eight years.

You mess with this issue.

You abandon Paris.

You will see a backlash, okay, that will make Greenpeace look like a knitting circle.

And I think they will go after his golf courses.

They're just a knitting circle.

But I think they are really playing with

the fact that making him unpopular is the only hope we have.

Seriously.

But Tom, just on your point, you saw who he appointed to head his transition on energy, lobbyists from the oil and gas companies.

He appointed a climate denier to lead his transition on the EPA.

So how does that make you feel about your

expecting good things?

What I'm saying is if they push this, I think they will produce a reaction.

That will be

much bigger than anything they think.

They don't have a mandate.

They're talking about mandate.

And I'm like, slow your roll.

You did not even get

the popular vote.

Mandate?

That's why I have these hats made up.

We're still here.

We're still here, okay?

You don't have a mandate.

This should be our motto.

Can I just say one thing about your point?

Because I think it's really important.

If one good thing comes from this, how many times have we heard people say elections don't matter?

They're all the same.

Elections don't matter.

Elections matter.

And if we take nothing away from this,

other than this, it should be they matter and we're going to lean in and not lean out.

We're not going to walk away.

We're going to lean back and fight and win future elections, including midterm elections, when a lot of progressives walk away.

And to your point, Bill, you know, why do the Republicans have the House?

Because they they very patiently worked at the state level, you know, won these governorships, gerrymandered the districts.

And that's what progressives and liberals have to do.

Rather than these people out there, you know, hashtag not my presenting, I want them all to move to Red States and run for school board.

You know, I mean, like,

that is the most good they could do.

Okay.

And I hope they do it.

Everybody in red states was saying, oh, my God,

what is she talking about?

They'll get tailored.

You're getting nervous.

Sorry.

Now, it is tradition here before we take our break.

We will come back by coincidence right on Inauguration Day, January 20th, my 61st birthday.

What a present.

But when we go away, we always do future headlines because people depend on us for the news, so we have to give you the headlines that you will hear until we come back.

Here are the future headlines you will be hearing.

That's how good we are.

We can predict what's going to happen.

Things like new explosion-proof Samsung phone explodes.

Two injured as driverless cars fight over parking space.

Rachel Maddow Shao now, just 60 minutes of drinking.

After latest failure, Samsung decides to manufacture bombs.

CEO, ah, fuck it.

Christmas Angel visits Tim Kaine, shows him how world would have been different without him, breaks out barely.

That sound has to stop now.

You lost the war, Scarlet.

You're digging for turnips.

I don't want to hear any more groaning.

Billy Bob Thornton, Brad Pitt, chair beers agree, that bitch is crazy.

Zombies delay apocalypse, view Trump victory as proof Americans don't have brains to eat.

Citing Trump, Turkey turns down Obama's Thanksgiving Day pardon.

No way I'm sticking around for that shit.

Obama twists up blunt during cabinet meeting.

No more fucks to give.

Old white woman shoots TV after Sam Jackson asked, what's in her wallet?

All right, he's a comedian and co-author of the Liberal Redneck Manifesto, Dragging Dixie Out of the Dark.

Please welcome the Liberal Redneck Trey Crowder.

Trey?

How are you, sir?

Oh, I love you.

What the hell?

Yes, sir.

Okay.

Got mine already.

All right, well,

we thought you would be the perfect guest here tonight to explain to shocked coastal elite liberals what the hell happened?

What the hell happened?

And by the the way, just the shock on their faces, on their smug, kale-eating faces must be so satisfying to people from your neck of the woods.

Oh my god, man.

That's why I ain't been home since Tuesday, you know, because

I can't deal with seeing the shit.

But no, you know, I.

You're a liberal.

I am a liberal.

I'm a liberal redneck, which people think is an oxymoron, but it's not.

I'm also not a unicorn.

There are more of me.

We do exist.

Right.

I play this out.

I see them every other week.

Right, man.

Yeah,

I'll do shows in like Manhattan, and they'll say, where are you going next?

Texas.

Oh,

don't get shot by a rodeo clown.

You know, like, they just, they just,

it's so clear how they feel about the South or just rural America.

And, you know, it really stands out.

And I think that's a lot of what happened here, frankly.

Like, it's really drove it home for me being on the road this year and talking to people all over the country who have been great, but how much they they fundamentally don't understand and don't care to understand so many of these people and I feel like a lot of this is a backlash from those people against that it is a total backlash I think I feel like what happened was for the last eight or ten years the liberals have been telling white people in America your time has passed and so they made them feel like a minority And then they went out and voted like a minority.

Right.

Yeah.

Isn't that what happened?

Absolutely, yeah.

They turned out, you know, like, but it's so, it's so weird to me because I'll be honest with you.

I didn't, I really didn't expect him to win ultimately because I felt like I knew these people, you know, like I tell people all the time, I'm like the Jane Goodall of rednecks.

You know, like I...

Like I.

The Margaret Mead.

I lived among them for years.

I know their ways.

You know, and

I'm telling you, man, I know, I know, if you would have polled rednecks, not just in the South, but in the Rust Belt too, where, because we're everywhere.

And if you'd have polled rednecks three years ago, what do you think of Donald Trump, right?

I promise you, the consensus would have been he's a smug, full-of-shit Yankee who thinks he's better than everybody else and needs his ass whipped, goddammit.

Or something to that effect.

Really?

Yes, I promise you.

I promise you it would have.

And so it was surprising to me that they bought in, that they took the bait, that they bought into his bullshit.

You know what I mean?

I think one thing we learned from this election is TV, very important.

Celebrities on TV, I mean all us coastal elite types, we thought of Donald Trump as kind of a joke.

The clown is in the New York Post.

And really 60 million Americans saw a guy, an authority figure, who told you you're fired.

And we should have ran Judge Judy.

That's who Democrats should have ran.

See, I'm trying, like,

I totally understand that perspective, but again, having lived there and my whole life, I'm still surprised by it because people that, man, they have a sense of pride, you know, and one thing they hate more, you ain't no better than me, god damn it.

Like that attitude is everywhere, and I'm like, nobody imputes that attitude more than Donald Trump, you know what I mean?

And so I just, I didn't think, I didn't think they'd buy it.

I didn't think they would, but, you know,

the Democratic Party, back me up on this, guys,

sort of lost the white working man.

That's what they used to have.

And they made the white working man feel like your problems aren't real because you're mansplaining.

And

check your privilege.

But you know what?

If your life sucks, your problems are real.

And you know what?

What should I do?

Cut my dick off and check my privilege?

Now, do you really think that's like liberals' fault?

You know, there's that saying like two, two.

Oh, I do.

White person

equality feels like oppression.

I mean, if there's a silver lining this for me personally, it's the two issues I have been on the case of liberals for, and they've been booing me about this for years, and maybe they'll listen.

One is political correctness.

I think I did a show about that for nine years.

You're outrageous with your political correct bullshit, and it does drive people away.

And two, Islam.

You know?

Islam.

They don't, Democrats, there's a terrorist attack, and Democrats' reaction is don't be mean to Muslims instead of how can we solve the problem of shit blowing up in America.

And, you know, that's not a good way to get it.

But the problem with American politics, let's keep this straight, the problem with American politics is we don't cater enough to white men.

No, I didn't say that.

No, you did, actually, you literally did.

You literally did, actually.

No, no, you're right, I think.

Like, you're 100% right about that, but do you want to be right or do you want to fucking win?

You know what?

No, no.

Hey, Democrats, it's not a

win.

You have to stop.

Also, it's like, well, enough.

Democrats have become, to a lot of Americans, a boutique party of fake outrage and social engineering.

And they're not entirely wrong about that.

No,

I don't disagree with you, but I also want to point out that Barack Obama won two elections.

He's the only president since Eisenhower won two elections by 51 percent or more, and he carried a lot of the counties that she lost yesterday.

She lost 90 percent of counties where people have a median income less than $50,000.

So it's not all about culture.

A lot of it has to do with economics.

The fact is,

when Donald Trump said to these folks, the game is rigged against you, I think a lot of folks feel that way because the economy has changed in ways that conspire against a lot of people in this country, and we haven't given them a good answer.

The reason we haven't given them a good answer, though, is that,

you know, I grew up in Minnesota and there's a Minnesota congressman who said, when you were growing up in Minnesota in the 50s, 60s, and 70s, you actually needed a plan to fail.

If you were a white, average sort of white male, average education, because there was so much wind at our back.

And I think the big change now, Bill, you need a plan to succeed and I think what Donald Trump is confronting what the Democrats have confronted is with machines yeah I wrote about this last week I mean IBM Watson you know just co-wrote a song I mean this stuff is escalating it's so quickly machines are eating this stuff and what these people are going to do I'm not sure anybody has the answer I mean because even even Trump's answer to these people that felt so threatened by other people's equality was a lie.

You know, he said, I can bring your jobs back.

I can make America great again.

I mean, he's not telling the story.

They're going to pay for this.

They are going to be pissed at him just as they've been pissed at him.

They won't blame him.

They'll find a way to blame us.

They will find a way.

They will.

They'll find a way.

I've been telling myself that, all right, give him rope to hang himself.

He'll fuck it up, and then we'll be all right.

That won't play, man.

And I think the statement is.

They'll find a way to blame us.

The scariest thing about Trump is that what we've learned during this campaign is when he confronts failure, he looks for scapegoats.

It's one thing when you do that in a campaign, when you do that from the bully propole of the White House, that gets really scary.

He owns it, man.

He owns it now.

He owns it out.

All right.

So a good friend of ours here at the show, I mentioned, called me the other day.

I said, I want to come on.

And I said, John, I would love to have you on.

John Legend, everybody.

How are you, Pal.

Good to see you.

Great to see you.

We have a hat here.

How's everybody?

Now, John, we're still here.

That sounds to me like a John Legend song.

I have a big head.

Would you please write a song?

this won't fit.

Would you please write a song called We're Still Here?

We're Still Here.

I'm Still Here.

Yeah, you're still here.

So you have a little kid.

Yeah.

Too young to understand, I know.

Thank God.

What's going on?

But

if they were old enough, what would you tell them about?

Hopefully by the time she's old enough, this guy won't be in office anymore.

Well,

but.

Wouldn't count on that.

Well, I think...

Everybody's talking about the white working class and how the Democrats need to speak to them, but

I feel like people are forgetting that there's other working class people in America.

They're black working class people, they're Mexican working class people.

And this is not a game for us.

You know we hear him questioning the citizenship of the first black president.

Then we hear him calling Mexicans rapists and murderers that are coming into the country.

Then he's saying he wants to ban Muslims from the country.

We hear all that and we can't get past that.

I guess half of the country could get past that and vote for him because of his Make America Great Again slogan or his promise to bring back jobs that he's not going to bring back.

But we can't get past him saying those things and we'll never get past that.

And the fact that so many Americans voted for that guy who's selling them a load of bullshit and racism, we'll never get past that.

Why didn't Hillary do better with women?

Maybe I should ask you that question.

Well, I mean, I cannot presume to speak for all women, of course.

Oh, come on.

But

I can say I think that gender solidarity turns out to be a little more complicated than ethnic solidarity.

Women, it turns out to be a very good idea.

That's a very genteel way of saying that race is thicker than gender.

She did very well with women who were not white.

Yeah, that too.

It turns out voting with your vagina is a nice party trick, but doesn't really carry you very far in the voting booth.

And I think that it has to do with...

Women don't stick together like some.

I think it has to do with the fact that the way we're socialized in Western cultures is with their scarcity of power, we compete with each other.

And we see other women as competitors.

We're very judgmental.

That's so true.

We're very.

A man walks in the room, another man doesn't even see him.

Right.

A woman walks in the room, they're like, who's she?

What's she wearing?

Why is she making her?

Who does she think she is?

Well, I wouldn't put it quite that way.

We're in a post-politically correct world now.

But I will say that we're not going to be able to do it.

This is not the ante-bellum South that's not.

We have lost the war.

So

it's a very huge.

We have to stop pretending we're not going to get our jobs.

As a woman, I don't do a lot of like, what is she wearing?

But, you know, they know better.

I know.

It's a joke.

This is one of the problems

why we lost this election.

I say transgender instead of transsexual, and it's a fucking hate crime.

And we got to get over this bullshit.

Except, I mean, so what I will say is that

she did win women of color.

And she also, like, let's not be, you know, I want to just re-emphasize what John said, which is that when we talk about working class America, most of working class America are people of color.

Most of them.

And also, she won with people making under $50,000.

Say that again.

Most of working-class America are people of color.

Most people who are working classes are color.

70% of America is white.

They don't work?

No, people who are, just the income gap.

If you look at the income gap, you mean people who are working class tend to be people of color.

And she won people making under $50,000 a year.

So, you know, let's be really careful.

Among non-college-educated white women.

That is true.

Among non-college-educated white women.

That is true.

Can I stress this issue of race, though?

Because everything you say is true.

What Donald Trump said was outrageous, offensive, and the people in the streets right now, you ask about the people in the streets, they're working through something because it was so hurtful and so hard to do.

So it's not just impolite.

No, no, no, I understand.

No, listen, I'm with you.

It's threatening people's lives.

Because if you think Mexicans come into this country to rape and murder your family, that means their life is threatened.

I agree with all that.

I want to make a different point.

The thing that I find offensive is I don't think Donald Trump is a racist.

I don't care if he is.

I don't care if he is.

No, no, no.

Let me figure out what he is.

When he's saying those things,

I think

it's irrelevant.

When he's saying

racial violence, come on.

But let me answer you and then you.

I think he is an opportunist who exploited race and surfed racism and that different

distinction.

No, it isn't.

No, it isn't.

It is not different because he knew better and he knew what he was doing.

I don't care if he knows better.

It doesn't matter.

I care what he's saying and what it's going to cause in the public.

Yeah, no, no, I'm with you.

And it doesn't matter whether he meant it or not to the people being called the N-word in Minnesota.

It doesn't matter or not to the one who gets gigantic.

He knows what he's saying.

He wants to be

It is insidious to manipulate race in the way that he did.

And that's the thing.

So, what makes it dangerous is, I mean, but it doesn't, it really doesn't matter.

It really doesn't matter.

There are people in America who woke up on Wednesday morning who feel that their lives are more in danger than they were on Tuesday.

And these are friends of mine.

Yes.

These are people we deal with every day.

This is not academic.

This is not just a conversation about politeness and political correctness.

This is about people's lives and them being in danger because we have a racist running the country.

You know, Bill, Bill, there's also a lot of people.

These are just people in America.

There's a potential, there's a student out there, there's a postdoc, a person of color, Chinese, Asian, Indian, okay?

And they're saying now, boy, do I want to study in America?

Do I want to work in America?

And you'll see the impact of that in 10 years.

You won't see it now, but you'll see this next Sergey Brin won't come here.

The next great inventor won't come here.

It'll be a brain drain.

Exactly.

I really don't want to take you too far without also saying that we haven't touched on culture issues and that the people he's put in place in his transition team are vehemently anti-gay people too.

And so, like,

numbers, crisis, a hotline for trans people saw an increase of like 400 times, like on Tuesday night.

People are legitimately affected.

People are frightened.

Trans people who have gotten made so much progress under Obama, that stuff is all executive order.

That stuff can get taken away.

The Supreme Court could overturn Orafil.

I mean,

there are people who feel, not just people of color, but any kind of lots of vulnerable communities who are just scared.

Frederiman wrote me a bill.

He said, you know, this is a moral 9-11.

Only 9-11 was done to us from the outside, and we did this to ourselves.

And that's what makes it really.

Can I read you some of my

takeaways?

for what the Democratic Party should do?

Because we were going to talk about how the Republican Party repairs itself.

One, people lie to pollsters.

Don't think that that's not going to happen from now on.

Don't listen to the polls.

They thought they had a blue wall, they had nothing.

Don't nominate someone who can't do a rally, who can only do fundraisers.

Rallies are important.

Find someone who can talk to white people.

Never tell Americans you can't be that stupid, because Americans will say, don't tell me how stupid I am.

Racism is a great product, it sells sells itself.

The Russians are going to fuck with you to have a plan for that.

Ageism.

Joe Biden

couldn't run because he was 73, they thought.

Well, he's only three years older than Trump, who won.

The voters don't care.

They're old, too.

And he's from Pennsylvania.

He probably could have carried that state.

And also, the Democrats have to stop being so nice.

Stop bringing a knife to a gunfight.

You know who the Democrats should nominate next time?

Anthony Weiner.

Anthony Weiner, because he had balls and he was an asshole.

Remember how much we loved Anthony Weiner before the scandal?

Because he stood up to them and said, you're full of shit.

And you know what?

They're okay with the pussy grabber?

I will see you the pussy grabber and raise you a guy who sex teams with a baby by his dick.

You know, Bill, I'm only one half serious about that.

One thing I learned covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that the Doves in Israel always had the same problem, you know, versus the Likud guys.

And what, you know, we always used to say, Leon Wieselter, I think, came up with this line.

What the Doves need is a bastard for peace.

Okay.

And what the liberals need is a bastard for progressivism.

Exactly.

That's what I'm trying.

But we won with Obama.

He was ahead of a bastard.

So we won two elections.

I think he was.

That's not liberal.

But I think he was that.

I think you guys were tough-minded.

But you can't.

He was the opposite of a bastard.

He was genuinely.

Well, I think that's one of the things that Trump is.

He described himself as the anti-Obama, and that rallied his base.

He's as profane and as thoughtless and

divisive as Obama was

the other way, an anti-intellectual.

You do need a star, though.

I think you do need a star.

I think it's important that the person is someone that people can rally around, that people are excited about.

And that's what Obama was.

He wasn't an asshole in any way.

In fact, I think he went out of his way to

be gentle.

He bent over backwards to not scare them with his blackness.

And

it was a pre-existing...

It was still too black.

Pre-pre-existing conditions.

And, you know, 2012, you know, after 2012, I remember my stand-up back was all about how, wow, this is really fucking with their heads.

Because now they're like, once you go black, you never go back.

And I thought, we're safe.

It was not just we elected him, we confirmed it.

We will never go back.

And they went, oh, yeah, we can.

Oh, yeah, we can go back.

It just turns out that, like, the first black president had to be in a truly extraordinary person.

Exactly.

Like, he wasn't.

Jackie Robinson.

He wasn't just a good politician.

He was an extra, he's an extraordinary person.

And it turns out that maybe our first female president is going to have to be.

And I was one, I'm not a huge fan, but she has an incredible career.

I think she would have been a good president.

But she's not, I mean,

Clinton's just fought the last war.

Yeah.

I mean, look at all the things that didn't matter.

Ground game, money, endorsements, surrogates.

All this went out the window.

It was just bullshit.

Did you watch his closing commercial?

Trump's closing commercial.

It like had a message.

People could latch on to it.

Hurrs was great.

It was not.

It was so vague.

It was like, what ran a very good campaign.

She's not a star.

She doesn't have that it factor that Obama had.

She ran an intelligent campaign.

She's turning.

She had great policies.

She's smarter than everybody.

This is a great thing.

I was involved in running the Obama campaigns.

They were very well organized.

We had all the things that people talked about, but we had a product to sell.

We had a great candidate.

And if you don't have the enthusiasm of all the organizations in the world isn't going to help.

I can't let you leave everybody with the impression that the Democratic Party is doomed because of what happened.

No.

This should be a turning point for the Democratic Party.

And everybody should redouble their efforts and come back in two years and come back in four years.

And the Democratic Party can win.

The Democratic Party's on the right side of history.

And he's on the wrong side of history.

So you said,

Bill mentioned earlier, he said one thing, he mentioned in his list, he said we need to find somebody that could talk to white people, right?

And then we just sort of glossed over that.

And like you mentioned earlier, hey, she did great among working class minorities.

And John's talked a lot about how much it's about race and all this.

And I'm not discarding any of that at all.

But to me, and again, lived around these people my whole life, I think that was the racist icing on the fuck you cake that he baked for them

to serve to us.

Like we've talked all around

trying to actually understand these people beyond just their bigotry and their closed-mindedness or whatever.

There's more to it than that is.

I have to say, I've seen more articles about the white working class this year than any other group of people.

So we've been studying them this year.

It's time for new rules.

Everybody, new rule.

All right.

New rule.

Okay.

Now I do.

New rule, someone has to ask Michael Lee, who predicted 23 years ago in his 93 high school yearbook that the Cubs would win the World Series in 2016.

So Mike, there wasn't some bigger event,

something a little more consequential you could have warned us about?

Thanks for the heads up, Nostra dumbass.

New rule, Ruth Bader Ginsburg must live forever.

And in the event she doesn't, the weekend at Bernie's guys must prop her up and walk her around Washington for the next four years.

New rule, it's now liberals' turn to become doomsday prepping gun nuts.

They just need survival products tailored to our lifestyle, like freeze-dried kale and quinoa salad,

pomegranate scented emergency candles, camouflage in panton spring fashion colors of pale dogwood and hazelnut,

and most importantly the Apple Eye Defender.

It's like any other shotgun, just twice as expensive, only accepts Apple's proprietary eye shells

and they remove the barrel sight to make it thinner.

New rule, stop saying it's just a tabloid rumor that Camilla Parker Bowles gas is so bad they nicknamed her the Queen of Farts.

And Charles has banished her from Highgrove House.

One, I want to believe it.

And two, I want England to take us back.

And finally, New Rule, now that President-elect Trump has set a record for getting white votes in America, we all must face up to one fact.

The Anglo-Saxons are not sending us their best people.

But we can't build walls.

That's not the answer.

Like it or not, we're living with Trump now.

Even though that kind of sounds like one of those prescription drug ads you hear on TV.

I'm living with Trump, but I'm not letting Trump control my life.

So one thing the pundits seem to agree on now is that America has never been so divided, although I'm thinking it may have been worse during the Civil War.

But it's definitely the most divided I've experienced in my lifetime, and I lived through the traumatic punk versus disco wars of the 1970s.

We've always had our disagreements here, but now half the country literally wants nothing to do with the other half.

Our motto is no longer e pluribus unum, it's go fuck yourself.

And that is not a sustainable way to live.

What it reminds me of is I think most people in their lifetimes have had the experience at one time or another of having to live with someone you hated.

We've all been there, right?

Some version of roommate hell, where if they were in the living room, you stayed in the kitchen, and if they were in the kitchen, you stayed in the living room, and if they were in the bathroom, you peed in a jar.

You don't give him his phone messages and while you're out, he drags his balls across your pillow.

You could go weeks without acknowledging the other person.

It was like living with a ghost who never washes the dishes.

Eventually, you end up ignoring each other's existence, living in the same place, but not really seeing each other, which is sad, but on the bright side, it does prepare you for marriage.

Well that's where we are as a nation right now.

I'm looking at all these jubilant Trump fans and thinking, what happened?

I don't even know who you are anymore.

And they're looking at us thinking, fag.

But we're here.

We're stuck here.

Oh, sure, people talk about moving somewhere more progressive, like Canada or North Korea, but

most of us Hillary voters still have a soft spot for this crazy mixed-up country of ours.

It's where we first learned to ride a bike and first ran after the ice cream truck.

It's where we served as an altar boy in our church and later sued the church for what happened when we were altar boys.

It's where we developed our first peanut allergies,

got our first regrettable tattoos, huffed our first glue behind our first dumpsters.

It's where we played Monopoly during summer vacations, never imagining that going bankrupt in Atlantic City was a stepping stone to the White House.

Plus, all our stuff is here.

It's tempting to want to divide America down the middle right now.

I've actually been in the bad roommate situation where you literally got white tape and made a line through the middle of the apartment.

It's something they've tried on many, many

sitcoms over the years, starting with I Love Lucy, Lucy on one side, the Spanish-speaking immigrant on the other.

She just wanted to make the living room great again.

Maybe liberals and conservatives need couples therapy, a safe space where liberals can say to conservatives, your obsession with guns makes me uncomfortable.

And conservatives can say to liberals, we feel bullied when you demand that we make gay wedding cakes.

But that's probably not going to happen.

You can unfriend someone whose politics you don't like, but you can't unfriend 47% of America.

Roommates can move out.

Patriots can't.

America needs you more than ever, right here with me and the rest of the resistance.

Until we can figure out how to really make America great again and don't ever let them forget, we're still here.

That's our show.

We'll be back on Inauguration Day.

I'll be at the Buzzdell in Honolulu New Year's Eve and at Maui Art Center New Year's Day.

Thank you, everybody.

All right.

David Axelrod, Honor Marie Cox, Thomas Friedman, Trey Crowder, John Legend.

Thank you, folks.

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

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