Episode #409 (Originally aired 11/04/16)

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welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late night series real time with Bill Maurice

good afternoon afternoon

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, folks.

I hope this is the mood we're in a week from tonight.

I'm not fucking kidding about that.

I am so anxious. For the first time in my life, I smoked my medical marijuana for legitimate medical reasons.

I don't know about you, but this election, wow, I feel like I'm waiting for the x-rays to come back.

See if that spot on my lung is really nothing or

and it's not just liberals, you know, who are nervous it's uh independents moderates sane republicans

future generations every other country on earth

all the animals the fish in the sea

there are amoeba under the ice on mars

saying, oh, this could be bad for us.

And, you know, it's all about turnout. I mean, who's going to show up? Will enough black folks turn up? Hispanics, young people, women?

Will the undecided voters figure out before the election which shoe goes on what foot?

You know, and

if, oh, that's not enough, the FBI says Americans should look out for terror attacks on Monday. They said they would do it, but they're so busy with Hillary's emails from 2009.

You know,

a terrorist attack, that would be such a nightmare scenario to watch terrorists ruin our election after all the work Russia has put into doing that.

I mean, this is.

I know this is a comedy show, and I'm going to try to keep it on that level, but it's not fucking funny. There is a slow-moving right-wing coup

going on.

Media, do your fucking job.

Report on it.

The FBI has become politicized.

They're calling it Trump Landia. There's a faction in it that is politicized and trying to sabotage Hillary's campaign because they're convinced that she is the devil.

Now, is it really surprising that guys in a building named after J. Edgar Hoover have issues with women?

Perhaps not.

But we have reached peak insanity here. The Russians are creating fake documents to discredit the Hillary campaign, and the Trump campaign tweets them out as if they are real.

Republicans are trying to elect a sexually assaulting psychopath who is, if not a Russian agent, unwittingly working as one. And people in America are saying, well, it's better than Hillary.

No, No, it's fucking not.

We have to get a grip on reality.

Reality.

Remember, reality?

Trump said yesterday, I'm saying this word for word, he said, I'm honored to have the greatest temperament that anybody has.

And then three fact-checkers died.

He said, Last week, he said, if Hillary wins he's going to let in 650 million immigrants in the first week

A little perspective the country is 320 million people

It took us 240 years to get up to that and she's gonna double it in a week and the pundit said Trump is on message. Yeah, if the message is I'm fucking insane

We are

We are so through the looking glass on this. Melania made a speech

yesterday.

Nothing against Melania. But she made a speech where she said, our culture has gotten too mean.

And she said, her cause when she becomes first lady is a crusade against bullying.

Okay, before you pile on, remember, she comes from a country named Slovenia, which is too poor to afford irony.

And

she, in her speech, specifically emphasized cyberbullying. You want to stop cyberbullying, Melania? Hide your husband's phone.

I mean, she said...

She said, yes, we've gotten too mean. She said we have to treat each other with respect and kindness.

She said, people are too often picked on for their looks and intelligence.

Still not ringing a bell, dear.

Oh, that's how you keep a marriage fresh. Stay blissfully ignorant of every single one of your spouse's personality aspects.

Boy, they make a good couple, don't they? They're a couple that makes sense. She's a supermodel, and he's always saying things that make you want to throw up.

All right, we got a great show.

We got Martin Short, we got Jennifer Grant home, and we got David Frum. And as you know, oh, this is great.
As you know, we, and I do mean we,

I do mean we,

I've been trying to get President Obama on the show for a long time. Now, my dream was to have him here in the studio with you, our studio audience, maybe next time for that.

But for the interview tonight, we were thrilled to be invited this week to the Roosevelt Room in the White House where the president was.

I have to tell you that the president was extraordinarily generous with his time.

I wanted to ask him the kind of questions that we crazy people here at real time might be interested in, the kinds of questions he doesn't often get.

And two of those we saved to tempt you to see more of the interview online at youtube.gum slash real time, where you can see me ask the president about atheism and about why does America need to have an empire.

But right now, here is the President three days ago at the White House.

Okay, we're here with the President. We're very excited to be here.
I'm very excited to be here. Very grateful.
Thank you very much. You must be a little wistful.

You must feel a little like David Ortiz about a month ago, where you know

you're going on to great things in the next chapter of your life. And you're still hitting.
And you're still hitting. But my feet hurt.

But you know you'll never quite have a job as exhilarating.

Well, you know,

it is time.

I tell people

that

this has been a great run.

I have loved this job. I'm not going to pretend that there haven't been moments of great frustration, but it is a singular privilege.

I think I'm

as good a president now as I've ever been because you learned stuff over eight years. You've sort of been around the track a bunch of times.

But I also see now the wisdom of the founders that

at a certain point you have to let go for the democracy to work. So we're a week out from the election and

I you're a history buff. I think when we look back, if Mr.
Trump is defeated, I'm hopeful that we will be the takeaway will be that

socialism was not such a dirty word anymore because of our friend Bernie Sanders.

And I'm just wondering as someone who was accused of being a socialist before, what you think about the idea that in America, yes, we're capitalists, but some things just should not be for the profit motive.

Health care,

prisons, the military, elections, and I would add news gathering. People say get the money out of politics.

I think you've got to get out of the news business first or we're never going to learn anything. Well, a couple things I'd say.

First of all, in some ways the label socialism doesn't make that much sense in a context where there's no economy that doesn't have some socialist elements, meaning that there's some common goods that we all agree everybody should have.

That's what Social Security is. That's what

Medicare is to some extent. That's what public schools are.
We all chip in to make sure that everybody, no matter the circumstances of your birth, have these baseline goods.

And as you know, I felt pretty strongly that healthcare should be

one of those goods. I've also said in the past that if I were designing a system from scratch, I would have probably looked at a single-payer system.
But we do have legacy systems.

And that's the only thing that sometimes when I've had conversations with Bernie,

I've said to him, yeah, we don't start from scratch.

You've got a $1 trillion health care industry, for example, and you've got a lot of people who are working for it and a lot of special interests involved.

And so my goal in the Affordable Care Act was if I can get millions of more people insurance, then that's my first goal. And then the question is, how do we make sure everybody ultimately gets it?

Because there's still gaps in coverage. I think the same is true

when it comes to some other issues. To me, I think there is a pretty bright line around prisons.
I agree with you that the criminal justice system should not be infected by

the profit motive. This is the awesome power of the state saying we can take somebody's freedom away.
We can lock them up because they've breached some part of the social contract.

The notion that

you might incentivize people to lock more people in

or keep them there longer

or not provide the kind of rehabilitation services so that they can get out of there. I think that's a problem.

And so I'm very proud of some of the work that we've been trying to do along these lines. We got more work to do.
When it comes to the media,

that's a tougher call because, look,

state-run media, that's what they got in.

Well, not state-run, but just like it used to be, where it was a lost leader for the networks. They didn't have to make a profit at CPU.

Partly because they had a monopoly, though, to some degree.

So they were fat and happy. In this kind of environment, it's hard to figure out how you would do that.

But

I think the question I'd have when it comes to the media is

how do we create a space where

truth gets eyeballs and is entertaining and

we can build a common conversation.

What is true, when I leave here, one of the things I'm most concerned about is the balkanization of the media where

you've got 800 stations, you've got all these websites. People have difficulty now just sorting out what's true and what's not.

And if you don't have some common baseline of facts,

Yeah, we can have a disagreement about how to deal with climate change, but if we have a big chunk of the country that just discounts what 99% of scientists say completely, it's very hard to figure out how we move the democracy forward.

Okay. Let me ask you about a question that I know people who watch our show are interested in, which is marijuana reform.

Is that something that you care about? It is something I care about.

No, we both made jokes about it, but it's not funny to the people who get arrested, which is over half a million, I think, last year.

You know, you and I both could have had our lives ruined, not really by smoking it, but by being arrested for it.

And, you know, I feel like you had a checklist about let's get rid of a lot of the stupid stuff like opening up Cuba. You know, you came out for gay marriage.

I was hoping ending the drug war would be on that list. It's on the ballot now in nine states in a week, including California for recreational and Arizona and medical in places like North Dakota.

Isn't Isn't it time the federal government caught up to progressive states like Arizona and North Dakota?

Well,

here's what I'm...

I have always believed

that

to the extent that the society legitimately wants to

guard against any kind of substance abuse, that you treat it as a public health problem. Look, I'm an ex-smoker, cigarette smoker.
Ex? Ex.

Really? Yeah.

Did you wink or did you get something in your eye there?

I thought I caught a wink.

I'm chewing the heck out of Nicorette. Really?

But no, when I passed health care reform,

I think

I'd had my last cigarette.

But the reason is because

there was this enormous public health effort to get kids not to pick up smoking

and to

make sure the parents felt guilty if they were passing on that

habit to their kids.

And so that's where I think we need to go with

pot,

alcohol,

and so

I don't think that legalization is a panacea, but I think that we're going to have to have a more serious conversation about

how we are treating marijuana and our drug laws generally. Okay, I want to ask you this question.
Again, it's an issue I think we don't get asked a lot about, but it's important to my audience.

I know people will roll their eyes and say, it's so California to ask this, but food purity,

something that means a lot to me. Somehow it got to be elitist or liberal.

I don't get that to want food that isn't full of pesticides or food that wasn't created by torturing animals in factory farms, isn't full of antibiotics, which is a problem in itself.

I feel like we're upside down on food. We eat too much corn because we grow too much corn because we subsidize too much corn.

And one of the problems with the Affordable Care Act is that people were found sicker

than expected.

And that's partly because of the food, I think.

And obesity and all the work that Michelle's been doing. Yeah.

But shouldn't the food be put more at the top of the agenda when we come to addressing health care?

There's no doubt about it that right now we've got a disease care system. We should have a health care system, and health care system would include nutrition, exercise.

But also pushing back on corporate. Well,

and so

I think what is true is that for a long time, agribusiness has

had a,

obviously, a prominent seat at the table in Congress. It's bipartisan.

Some of the reforms that we've tried to initiate,

for example on the school lunch program, have actually made some progress on this front and Michelle deserves a lot of credit for it, as do a bunch of organizations that have worked on this.

I will tell you, and this may be controversial in some of your audience, it is important to look at the science on this stuff. So when it comes to antibiotics, for example, the science is clear.

We pump our animals full of it and that's not just a problem in terms of what we're ingesting it's also a problem that more and more

you know bacteria is becoming

resistant to antibiotics

but in some cases like for example the GMO debate

it

there are there are areas where there are legitimate concerns there are some areas where

the science seems to indicate well this is okay.

We just got back to the science and it says it doesn't increase the yield. Well exactly.
And they use just as many if not more, pesticides. Well,

so my point is that what we have to make sure we're doing, whether we're on the left or the right, is being driven by the science.

And if it turns out that some of these genetically modified foods aren't

healthier, aren't more productive, and use more pesticides, then

we should follow the science. If in some cases they're not causing any harm, then we should follow the science there as well.
Do you think we ask too little of the public?

Politicians, you know, of course, are always kissing up to the public and saying things like, if we only had a government as good as the people. But the people aren't very well informed.

They don't exercise their right to vote. And when they do, they don't know much about it.

I just feel like we don't ask the people very much. We're afraid to ask the people, eat better.
You know, the phrase was, yes, we can. I feel like they're not pulling pulling their weight on the we.

It's a partnership with them. Eat better, vote more, learn something.
You know,

I'm a glass half-full guy and an optimist about the human spirit.

You are right, though, that people are busy. They're stressed, and they don't have time to follow the intricacies of some debate around Medicaid or what's going on in Syria.
And so, part of the

when I say I want a government as good as

the American people, what I mean by that is that

I think people's instincts, their gut,

what they want out of life and how they want to see people treated is actually pretty good. But

the question then becomes how do we get enough information in front of them to be able to make good decisions. I've always believed that if I could get into,

you know, if I could sit in a living room with every person in America over, you know, that I've got the majority on my side and a healthy majority on my side on every issue that we work on just by having a conversation.

The problem is, we've got all these filters. And look, if I watched Fox News, I wouldn't vote for me either, right?

Because

you've got this screen, this funhouse mirror, through which people are receiving information.

How to break through that is a big challenge. This whole conversation that's been had lately

in the aftermath of the rise of Trump, this notion that

part of what's happened is that both Republican and Democratic elites have neglected the white working class.

The truth of the matter is that every policy I've put forward

would make a huge difference with the white working class.

and the black working class and the Latino working class, whether it's raising the minimum wage or the Affordable Care Act, giving people health care who don't have it and who are working hard and need help, or making sure that unions are strong so that you can have a little more leverage at the workplace, or making sure that

something like the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau

is protecting against some scam mortgage. And what I'd like to figure out, and I think Democrats do have an affirmative obligation to

do this, is to work harder

to figure out in this new age, what's the equivalent of getting into people's living rooms and being able to have a conversation and being able to listen to people.

I know you're off to Ohio, right? You've got an election to rig.

And

I want you to get out there because, boy, it's a very nervous time for a lot of people who are worried about Mr. Trump.

The stakes are high.

I know we've, you know, we were getting the

gong, but

I will say this:

the choice in this election should be really clear.

And anybody who's watching your show and was a supporter of mine, was a supporter of Bernie's,

is

a progressive generally,

This idea that somehow,

well,

both of them have problems and nothing will change either way.

Listen,

all the progress we've made on climate change, Paris Agreement, HFC

Agreement, Aviation Agreement,

The 20 million people who have health insurance that right now that didn't have it before

all the progress that we've made on trying to check

the excesses of Wall Street and

Dodd-Frank and

the

Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, any chance of immigration reform, including the work that we did to make sure that these amazing DREAMer kids all across the country who are now going to college or serving in our military are not suddenly deported or at risk of deportation.

Every single issue that we've made progress on over the last eight years

is

going to be on the ballot in the form of this choice. And I have worked with Hillary Clinton.
I know her, and

she is somebody who cares about these issues. She does her homework.

She cares deeply about ordinary folks. Her policies are

aligned with yours and mine. And yes, she is somebody who believes in compromise and that you don't get 100% of what you want.
But you know what? That's the way this democracy works.

Anybody sitting on the sidelines right now or

deciding to engage in a protest vote, that's a vote for Trump. And

that would be

badly damaging for this country and it would be

damaging for the world. So

no complacency this time. So get out there.
Get out there.

Thank you so much. You did a hell of a job in this office.
I know I speak for myself and my own

means well that you did this. And even though I wasn't on the show that often, I watched it all the time.
Really? Thank you. Well, that's nice to hear.

Thank you, Mr. President.
Appreciate it. All right.
All right. Thank you very much, Mr.
President. Now it's time to meet our panel.

He's the senior editor at the Atlantic and former Bush speechwriter who just announced that he voted already for Hillary Clinton. David Frum is here.

A studly move, David Frum.

She's the former Democratic governor of Michigan, who, if Hillary wins, please, Jesus.

For you to say that

I will fucking join up tomorrow.

We'll head her transition team, Jennifer Graham.

And

he'll soon star in Hairspray Live on NBC on December 7th. And then he'll do a 50-city tour with Steve Martin.
Wow, his career never stops going up and up. You know why?

Because you give the people a quality product. A quality product, Martin.
Oh, for goodness, sadmen.

Don't forget, Mr. Senders, your questions that were tonight's over-times.
You'll be answering them after the show on YouTube. Okay, so...

I'm going to be honest with you. I've had a couple of drinks.

I'm going to be honest honest with you, you've had more than a couple of drinks.

I really have. I mean, I'm shitting in my pants because, you know, let me take you back a couple of years.

First they said, everybody said, except me, by the way, that Donald Trump, when he talks about running for president, he was just saying that.

Just saying that because he wants to, you know, burnish his brand and get people to buy his books or whatever. Okay.
Then he announced he was going to run.

They said, well, sure, he's a reality show star, and people think that's interesting, but he's not going to get any votes. Then he got votes.

And then they said, he's not going to win any primaries.

Then he won primaries. Then they said, but he's not going to win the nomination.

Then he won the nomination. And now these same people are saying

he's not going to win the election.

Yeah, he could win the election. Because, like I said, this is a slow-moving right-wing coup that we are witnessing when the FBI is politicized to this degree, working with Russia, hacking one side,

this is a coup, and this could fucking happen in this country. So I don't want to hear any bullshit about she's got it in the bag.

When I turned on the TV today, the headline was, for the first time, she slipped below 270.

Slip below 270.

Your thoughts.

Well, first of all, it is really clear that if he wins,

it will take us into this authoritarian nightmare.

And there are a lot of people

who appreciate a strong leader. I don't know how...
Yeah, they're called fascists. Well, yes, but disguised, disguised as...

a man of the people in sitting in Louis the XIV's chairs.

But I am curious about if he did win or if he even doesn't win and takes his 50 million people that will vote for him with him,

what happens to the Republican Party that we knew? Because you cannot have

that next week. Okay.

You know what? I'm not worried about the Republican Party as we knew. I'm worried about him winning.
And I'm not worried about his people showing up and taking over a Waffle House. You know,

I'm worried. Well, first of all, I don't don't think he's going to win, and I'll tell you why he's not going to win.

Well, that's dangerous. No, it isn't dangerous.
Get off the panel. No, hold on.

It is not dangerous because.

Yes, I am an American.

Then you should shit your pants, too.

Soon. No.

Very political. No, it's 268, Bill, and it's, remember, we have...
268.

That's where they're saying, CNN. She's at 268.
Big deal. Not enough.
I understand that, but you have to understand that that what the president talked about is the fault lies in the media. The media.

The media, the media. And right now, what do they want? The media wants us to watch an election night.
They don't want something in the bag. It's not good for ratings.

I don't trust anything when it comes to the media.

But,

I mean, one thing is very clear.

We are seeing more people right now register to vote than at any time in U.S. history.

I agree with you that we should be afraid and that we should get people out to vote as a result. But I agree with you that ultimately

people are more sane than

those who would elect that man as president.

Since the Supreme Court shot down the Voting Rights Act, remember that happened? Yes.

868 polling places in the South have been closed since the last election. Those are the people who vote Democratic.

A federal judge scolded North Carolina, which is run by Republicans,

for preventing people from voting. And I don't trust them not to hack the machines.

I mean, if the FBI, what we learned this week about the FBI, that there's this faction, and of course in security, law enforcement agencies, it's usually right-wing folks.

The difference between fascism, and I know that's a strong word, but that's what it is, and what we have enjoyed in this country for 240 years is that those types are under the rule of law.

If Trump gets elected, they're not.

They are the rule of law.

I was one of those pundits who said everything that you made fun of at every stage of the way. So

take what I say with a grain of salt. But when you talk in the way you do, you intensify the problem.
You don't cure it. This is not a right-wing coup.

There are 4,000-plus Republican state legislators in the country. About 5% of them have endorsed Donald Trump.
75% of the Democratic state legislators have endorsed Hillary Clinton.

Of the past Republican presidents, and there are more than a few, past Republican candidates for president, again, they have held back.

Mitt Romney has delivered the most impassioned anti-Trump speech of anybody in the campaign. When you say things like they're going to hack the machines, one of the things that is at issue...

I didn't say they were. I said they're capable of it.
If the FBI is capable of taking leaks from Russia and using it against one side, there have been no leaks on the other side.

Can you imagine what's in the Republican emails? One of the things that we're talking about. Wow, Chris Christie, are you going to finish that pickle?

One of the things.

Come on, Bill, it's a car.

There you go. We got to give him a laughter.
Absolutely. Let's whistle past the graveyard.

I'm on Hess, Brian, December 7th.

Go ahead.

The president has this very eloquent speech about all the things that are on the ballot.

Among the things that are on the ballot are confidence in American institutions and the trust in the institutions. And one of the things that has made Trump possible is the systematic discrediting.

of institutions. And that is not a right-wing phenomenon exclusively, although it happens.
It happens from all kinds of trajectories. It's pretty much.

I remember Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
in 2004 suggesting that American democracy was a conspiracy. It is not a uniquely Republican thing.

And there's a lot of it on the Democratic side, a lot of it on the Bernie side.

One of the things that we, you talked about this with the president, I thought you made a really good point, I mean, about the collapse of media.

There is one small town in Macedonia that hosts 100 pro-Trump sites whose Facebook entries get more likes and more interaction than all of the articles on the campaign from the New York Times.

And they're doing it for clicks and for bucks. There may be Russian intelligence there, too, but there's young people who are doing it to make a living.

And their consumers are people who are so jaundiced, who hear all the time, well, you can't trust the mainstream corporate media. Stop that.

One of the things that this election should remind us of is the importance of expertise and of institutions.

And when we talk about elites in the plural, we don't mean the people who belong to the elites. We mean those institutions of systematic accumulation and testing of knowledge, of true against false.

And unless you reaffirm that, you're going to have more trouble. But he's the one who is undermining all of that.
Yes, absolutely. Yes, he is.
He's benefiting from that. No, no, well, he is.

But he's saying, one, the election is rigged.

Number two, he's encouraging whatever happens post-election, Jason Schaffetz and the others to do these ongoing investigations, which would delegitimize the outcome of the election.

He hasn't said to this day that he will accept the outcome of the election. He is encouraging.

He's encouraging Russia to hack us and the integrity of this.

I'm with you on all of that, but he did not,

the guardrails that collapsed made him possible. I wrote an article for for The Atlantic about the seven guardrails that broke through which he drove.
He didn't knock them down.

He found them down already.

And it's not just conservatives who knocked them down. The attack on the title of the police.
But if every time

it has come from all kinds of places, the attack on institutions

and the attack on the necessary elements of gatekeeping by people you trust, professional politicians.

I was going to say, if every time you saw one of these insane things that he says that makes no sense, the wall on, or his economic policy, that you you had Anderson Cooper not with two surrogates from the right and two surrogates for the left, so everyone would think that CNN was fair and balanced, but actually someone stating the truth.

And actually, a fine being

implemented because you didn't stay the truth.

Let me just say,

if you sell beer or you sell aspirin, you have to say what's really true. But if you say have a commercial for Donald Trump filled with lies, there's no checks and balances.
This is a mistake.

And again, I've said this many times. Politicians can say anything because people don't know anything.

When you say Hillary is going to let 650 million people in in a week, it is so insane that, first of all, the press doesn't right there throw the red flag and go, this guy cannot be president.

But let's go back to the first thing you said, Dave. You were wrong about everything so far.
Yes.

That's so important. Because I think you're old thinking.
You're thinking in the terms of someone who gets elected and is going to abide by the rule of law. That's not what these people will do.

Well, the reason why I use the word fascism is because cult of personality with the dictator, and they don't care about rule of law. Doesn't they?

Well, it's going to be Donald Trump president, Chris Christie, Attorney General of the United States, and he's never been a vengeful guy. We know that.
Right, right, of course.

And Rudy Giuliani, the head of the FBI.

Do you want to live in that country?

I do not, and I've done my part in writing and in voting to prevent it.

But when you denounce the politicians, what happened in this election, and I think Governor Granholm will agree with this, that the way normally people like Donald Trump are kept from power in democracies is there is actually a network of professionals who want to win elections, who want to form coalitions, who have limited goals.

That's what they said in Germany. Do you know that Hitler was elected? Hitler was elected.

I didn't know a bit about this. Okay.
And three months after he was elected, what did he do? He burned the Reichstag to create an emergency where he needed more powers.

Don't you think that they would have that in their mind?

I don't want to be pedantic about the fact that they're the first

of Germany, but he won

barely a third of the vote. In fact, in fact, his vote had dropped from the previous round.
Oh, I felt so much better. But no, the point is, what failed? What failed?

With the institutions of the state and the institution of politics. And

what I'm entreating you,

because places like this, and not you, but your audience, are people who are skeptical about the norms of institutions and of democracy, who do not believe in politics and do not believe in politicians, and think there's something grubby about deal-making and coalition-making.

Back me up. I don't think, David, I think this election.
Those were the people

who were supposed to.

Dave, they don't believe in politics or elections.

They have proved it.

It's all the things I'm saying. The 95% of Republican state legislators who didn't endorse Donald Trump believe in politics.
They're frightened right now.

But they are also disempowered and discredited, and their work is important. It needs to be done.

Why aren't they standing up?

Why are they accomplices?

They believe in the institution.

Do you think that Paul Ryan, at 3 in the morning when he's talking to his wife, actually believes that Donald Trump should be the president of the United States? You know he doesn't.

Oh, at 3 in the afternoon when he looks haunted and hunted, when he talks to the television camera. He looks miserable.
Have you ever seen anyone look more unhappy than Paul Ryan? But

all of them.

So why are they watching this happen? Why are they encouraging this to happen, this takedown of democracy that got them elected because they're working at it? We are unraveling at a very quick pace.

There is a senator, Ron Johnson, you know this guy from Wisconsin,

talks about impeaching Hillary.

I made a joke last week that she's going to testify in a ball gown, you know, at the night of the inauguration.

That's what they really want to do. Talking about impeaching her.
She hadn't been elected yet.

Fascists decide

that you're a criminal. Then they find the crime.
This is what they've done with Hillary Clinton. This is what they've done with Hillary Clinton.
But they do not have crimes here.

The big lie. Trump is out there every day talking about she's under criminal investigation.
No, she's not.

The emails are not a crime, and they have not found anything on Anthony Weiner's Dick Schmorgas board.

That's not really the same thing. No, no, no.
I know what you're going for, but it's the Jack Daniels. You know what it is? It's that whole limited education thing that you struggle with.

But the irony about this is that that FBI chapter, which is out of New York, was using this much derided and debunked book called Clinton Cash to be able to leak out that there was some investigation happening of the Clinton Foundation.

Who wrote that? But a guy who comes from something called the American, or the Government Accountability Institute. What is the Government Accountability Institute?

It is something that Steve Bannon founded. Who is Steve Bannon but the chairman of Donald Trump's campaign? Formerly head of Breitbart.
Formerly head of Breitbart, head of the alt-right.

So not my point is.

And it was independently.

The front page of the New York Times. No, the most important story in the book was ratified by the independent Reporting of the New York Times in April 2015.
The Uranian story.

When you reach a point after we've had for like 20 years where everything is so politicized that they're going to impeach the person before they've gotten her into office, where

put her in jail, what's the chant? Lock her up. Lock her up.
Lock her up. Now they're saying even execute her.
You've gotten to this point where, like Rwanda was in the 90s, where the other

is such vermin, like Hitler called the Jews and the Slavs, that when you take power, you're doing God's work by eliminating your enemies. That's where you're going to be.
I mean, you're yelling.

Let's just say that. You're nominating a Supreme Court justice.
Yes, is the question. Yeah, I was going to say the Supreme Court justice.
The FBI. Here's what I'm interested in.

David, as a Republican, how do you rationalize what John McCain said last week about opposing everyone that Hillary would present?

I don't rationalize it. But

what has happened to a lot of Republicans, because the party system is broken down, because the party is in crisis, that you have people who are normal leaders who are afraid.

They would have what?

Okay, well, my soapbox. What happened to the Republican Party in 2009 veered in an extreme direction.

The leadership misread what the members wanted. The members wanted

more health care, less immigration, fewer wars, no more bushes. What they got was less health care, more immigration, a more aggressive foreign policy, and one more bush.

Out of that disconnect, out of that disconnect between between leaders and led, there created this enormous power vacuum. And into that, Donald Trump stepped and he smashed the party, the power of

the political, of the organized politicians, and they are now frightened because they went too far in the wrong direction at the moment when it counted. And look, that was my soapbox.

I lost a job. I shed blood in this trench.

Once Donald Trump is elected, your sharply worded editorials in The Atlantic are not going to restrain these people.

No, should he be elected, should he be elected, what we need to do is to mobilize the working institutions of American life.

No, that's, no, Bill, we have to, this is what you must defend. And if you are cynical about these things, and if your audience, if these Bernie

standards are saying,

they are burning down the fences that will keep them safe. The courts, the bureaucracy.
Well, there's nothing.

There's nothing that will keep you safe.

I mean every American who rejects institutions, not all of whom are voting for Donald Trump. I mean so-called progressives

who think that politicians are all scoundrels and who think that the work of coalition building that you do is dirty.

That there's something wrong with that. Nothing that will keep you seals.
Mr. From, excuse me, but Donald Trump, cult of personality.
I mean, just since October 1st, we found out he doesn't pay taxes.

Then Pussygate happened.

Amazingly. Front bum gate, we call it Canadians.

Front bum.

Is that what we call it?

I have never fucked a taxpayer.

You and your little bubble.

You think you can come here and tell them anything and they'll believe it?

He doesn't pay taxes, sexual assault, and then he just says he's not going to concede the election.

And doesn't really give to charity either, as New York Times said lastly. All these things didn't knock him down.
And

Russia. Yes.
Russia.

is not our friend. They were the enemy for all these years, and now plainly they're in collusion with the Republican candidate.
Why isn't this the story every night? This is a giant,

giant scandal.

This is insane.

Bill,

on behalf of neocons everywhere, I'll say we told you so. About what? About Russia.
And we've been telling you so about.

So

why aren't the neocons, other than you, standing up and saying this is wrong? This man is exhorting Russia to the system. This act

of our system. Plenty are.
Why aren't they? Plenty are.

Plenty are. No they aren't.

No they aren't.

Here's what Deputy CIA Deputy Director Mike Morrell said about Trump. In the intelligence business, we would say that Mr.
Putin has recruited Mr. Trump as an unwitting agent.

Of the Republican Federation. Right, yes.
This is what Lenin used to call a useful idiot.

And that's what Donald Trump is to the Russians, a useful idiot. And

you sound like my friends at Commentary Magazine.

I don't care who I sound like. That's what the

money is. But then we go back to the media is not reporting it.
Why? Exactly. Why is there no media? Well, okay, there was a story this morning in Newsweek.
It was a big story talking about.

It was a fan. It was the fuck reads.
Okay, I'm just saying.

This reporter was all over it, and he said that not only is this very tight, this Russian, the Russian connection

with Trump, but that the Russians even,

when Donald Trump started to attack the Khan family, that the Russians even had second thoughts because they thought he was too crazy. But could I just know?

And then they came back around because

of course he's their lapdog. Limited time.
To the young people? Yes, please.

Because, you know,

like they say in the action movies, the shit just got real. Yeah.

I know you're young and idealistic, so I've heard these young people on the news and they say things like, well, Donald Trump, I don't like him, but Hillary, I can't vote for a liar.

I mean, first of all, it's just apples and oranges, an orange.

But kids, I've been doing this for 23 years on TV. I've seen a lot.
I know politics. This is different.
I promise you, this will not make your life better.

And also, once fascists get power, they don't give it up. You've got President Trump for life.

I know liberals made a big mistake because we attacked your boy Bush like he was the end of the world, and he wasn't. And Mitt Romney, we attacked that way.

I gave Obama a million dollars to throw afraid of Mitt Romney. Mitt Romney wouldn't have changed my life that much, or yours.
Absolutely crazy. Or John McCain.

They were honorable men who we disagreed with, and we should have kept it that way. So we cried wolf, and that was wrong.
But this is real.

This is going to be way different. And

I don't understand millennials on any level.

That's well said.

It is their Supreme Court that we're talking about. It is their future.
It's their Supreme Court. It's Roe versus Wade, if you believe in that.

I mean, look,

I'm three months away from Sunrise Assisted Living. It doesn't matter to me.

But this is...

So we're sharing a room. In bunk bands, like the Steel Bunker.

But we are their whole future is before them. How can this election not be the most important thing in their lives?

While you're making pleas to a youthful audience that listens to you, on this defense of institutions, when you say all these things about Russia, how do you know these things?

You know it because of the derided corporate mainstream media. It is the New York Times and the Washington Post and institutions like that that broke these stories.

And

he's going to go after you.

He has no respect to

move.

What I'm asking you to do and what I'm asking your viewers to do is

not to join them and not to deride the detested mainstream corporate media, but to buy a subscription to a newspaper and not to rely on Facebook.

And I would say, I know you're going to,

that for those millennials who feel like they can't, they're just not there,

you're not going to have a beer with Hillary Clinton, but you are going to be voting for the child in Flint who needs to have safe lead pipes and the single mom

and you went to health care up to 25%. years.
Single thinking and someone who believes in global warming. Right, I mean, you're voting for

everybody who's affected by this. It's not just about you.

And if you don't,

you are voting for Donald Trump. You might as well just vote for Donald Trump.
You are aiding and abetting. Thank you.

It's time for new rules.

Perhaps our last.

Our final new rules.

New rules, someone has to ask the men who ended the study of an effective male birth control shot because it caused mood swings and altered libido and acne.

What do you think the birth control pill does to women?

It causes mood swings, altered libido, and acne. Hey guys, take the shot, you whiny little bitches.

What better way for us all to not get pregnant than having both of us covered in zits, not in the mood for sex,

and quietly crying because nobody understands me.

Neural, stop asking what happened to hamburger helper's fifth finger.

Where do you think it is? It's in your hamburger.

Neural computer geeks need to explain why my computer always needs to take a moment to think it over. when I ask it to print something.

Save right away.

Check my email. Way ahead of you, boss.
Prints, hold on.

Look, it's just a boarding pass. It's not the beginning of a relationship.
It won't help to

make me wait before you put out.

Neural the Gucci Company should merge with Audi and the Olympics.

and form a doodle of cubic hair.

When you think fine Italian handbags, luxury automobiles, and track and field,

think a doodle of pubic hair.

And if you didn't think that was funny now, trust me, when marijuana is legal next week, you're going to think it's hilarious.

New Real, if you're part of the growing movement known as echosexuals, that's right, echosexuals who have sex with the earth by hiking naked, skinny dipping, masturbating under waterfalls, and yes, fucking trees.

You have to stop doing that.

Or at least hurry it up. My dog is waiting to use that trick.

And finally, new rule, before leaving this election behind, we must all thank Donald Trump for the one good thing he did.

He exposed evangelicals, who are big Trump supporters, as the shameless hypocrites they've always been.

I don't know if you noticed, but Republicans didn't get to play the Jesus card this time around because it's hard to bring up the Ten Commandments when your candidate spent his life breaking all of them.

Trump's commandments are like the regular commandments with LOL at the end.

Adultery? Check.

Cursing. Listen, you motherfuckers.
Check.

Stealing? Check.

Bearing false witness? Wrong. Check.

False idols? Oh, yeah.

He is the world's least godly man. Jesus saw the good in whores and lepers, but if he met Donald Trump, he'd go, sorry man, that's a pre-existing condition.

So with four days left in this longest election ever, I'm going to stop for a minute and appreciate this one silver lining.

that for once religion wasn't dragged into the debate after so many elections where the candidates tried to out-Jesus each other.

This one had no talk from either candidate about how they start their morning with scripture.

The Republican wasn't reaching out to his prayer warriors.

The debate moderators weren't asking, How does faith inform your decisions?

And best of all, we were spared the sight of having to watch Hillary Clinton try and clap on the beat with a black church choir.

But I still think we are owed an explanation from the values voters as to how they could line up behind Trump, a man who loves to say, nobody loves the Bible more than I do, but when asked, couldn't name a single passage.

Even Sarah Palin said, oh, for fuck's sake, it's not a newspaper.

Trump tried to quote scripture once and called 2 Corinthians 2 Corinthians.

As in 2 Corinthians, walk into a bar.

He also once accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Tailor.

Trump has nothing in common with Jesus, who was from the Middle East. Trump wouldn't even let him in the country.

Jesus healed the blind. Trump mocks the handicapped.

Jesus turned the other cheek. Trump grabs your pussy.

Jesus turned water into wine. Trump just whines.

The Bible says, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife. Trump says, fine, what about my daughter?

He did.

He's the devil.

What part of pleased to meet you? Hope you guess my name, don't you understand?

In the primaries, evangelicals had a whole bouquet of religious nuts to choose from. Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, Scott Walker, Ted Cruz, Ben Carson.

Ben Carson, who doesn't just walk with Jesus, they shower together.

But they went for the foul-mouthed thrice-married pussy grabber.

With one exception, and I never thought I would hear myself say this, but let's hear it for the Mormons.

The Mormons

who bailed on Trump Bigley.

White evangelicals go for Trump over Hillary, 75 to 14, but only 19% of Utah Mormons have a favorable view of Orange Hitler.

Because apparently the Mormons believe you shouldn't vote for a lying infantile scumbag just because he's on your team. And they're Mormons.
They'll believe almost anything.

They believe underwear has magic powers. And you get your own planet when you die.
And Adam and Eve were born in Missouri. And Jesus hung with the Indians who were Jewish.

They let Donnie Osmond claim claim he's a little bit rock and roll.

But ask one if Trump would make a good president, and they're like, do I look like I was born yesterday?

Thank you very much.

I hope we're here next week. I'll be at the movie theater in Austin, January 21st, at the Fair Park in Dallas, the 22nd.

I want to thank David Crumb, Jennifer Granholm, Martin Shurt, oh, and President Barack Obama. Join us now for overtime on YouTube.
Thank you, folks.

Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Ma every Friday night at 10, or watch him anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.