Overtime – Episode #382 (Originally aired 03/25/16)

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Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Month series, Real Time with Bill Maher.

We're back.

We were going to get to Cuba and we ran out of time and I know you

want to disagree with me and you don't even know what I'm going to say.

Well, I want to hear what you have to say.

Well, I mean, I think I said it in the monologue.

We have, or somewhere in this show, we have stood with worst dictators.

I think Cuba in the Freedom Watch list is 62nd out of 177 countries, one being the worst.

So it's behind China, I think Iran, Egypt, which is not a great place to be, but it's ahead of a number of our allies like Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

So I guess where I'm coming from is that the United States has all of the leverage in this situation.

And if you're looking at what Roal Castro's plan is, I believe the plan is not to do what China and Vietnam have done, not to have a kind of, you know, basically move away from a socialist economy.

I believe they're looking to Vladimir Putin.

They're looking to Chavez's Venezuela.

They want to have sham elections and he wants to install his son or his son-in-law in power.

And we're allowing that to happen.

Now, we have all the leverage.

I believe we should open up to Cuba and I believe we should normalize relations.

But we can demand a lot more because they're at the most vulnerable point.

It's been going on for 15 years.

No, it hasn't been going on because what I'm saying is that actually we should open up, but we can now demand more from them in terms of how they treat their citizens and also having an open and competitive political.

These things take time.

Of course it takes time.

But we're never going to to have more leverage than we do right now.

They used to look to Russia and Venezuela for cash, for cash.

Now they can't.

They're 90 miles away from the world's largest economy.

And if they open the door a little crack, we're going to overwhelm them.

And they're doing that.

I feel very comfortable that in five years' time, these guys are gone.

50 years of sanctions.

That's what we're going to say.

Look, I mean, he went, the president went, he looked at Raul Castro, he spoke to the Cuban people, he talked about democracy.

I mean, that's the first time.

The Castro family, they're not idiots.

They know what they're doing.

They've given this a lot of thought.

And if they believe that Ian was right,

they have a plan B.

That's my point.

Their plan B is sham elections.

In 2018, it's all ready to be.

But you know, we can't make everybody in the world do everything we want to do.

Of course we can.

Of course we can make everyone do it.

We can't.

Of course we can't.

But the point is that why surrender all of your leverage when they're at their weakest point.

We're not surrendering all of our leverage.

We can never

make a benefit for everybody.

We're trying a different tactic from the one that didn't work for 60 fucking years.

What a crazy idea.

The tactic is let we have one big carrot to offer, that is normalizing relationships and actually offering them the huge economic opportunities that are going to be.

Ending the embargo would be another big carrot.

But yeah, we're not doing that, even though most Americans are for doing that.

Normalizing relationships is a rather big thing, and having starwood and having Airbnb sign deals and getting hard currency into the hands of the repressive apparatus.

They're going to change.

Star Wars's going to be there.

They're going to meet America.

That's worked in Putin's Russia.

That's worked.

That's going to work in Iran.

I mean, that's going to work in all the other authoritarian countries where they figured out they're smart too, Bill.

They're strategic too.

They've given this some thought and they think that they're going to come out ahead.

And I think they're probably right.

All right.

With that said, do any of you have a good cigar connect?

Because I just started.

This is Manitoba.

This is what I care about.

What are the chances of delegates turning on Trump if there is a brokered convention in July?

I think pretty good, right?

I think pretty good too.

Yeah, I mean, it depends on who those delegates are.

They're working them now.

Yeah.

And everybody on the other teams are working those delegates.

I'm not a superdelegate, and I wouldn't be on that side, but I know that they are working those.

No, for the Democrats.

No.

You're not a superdelegate?

I used to be when I was governor, but I'm not anymore.

Oh.

Are you a delegate?

I'm not a delegate, no.

Why not?

Just a regular citizen.

Wow.

I'm very surprised.

Will the new voter ID laws being introduced in key states across the country influence the outcome of the election?

Fuck yes.

Yes.

Of course.

And like it did in Arizona.

Everybody who was watching that five hours.

Fiasco.

Total fiasco.

They went from 200 polling sites to 60 in a heavily Latino county.

People had to wait in line for five hours.

Wouldn't it be great if the Supreme Court

just once went, heck, we got this wrong.

You know, we gutted the Voting Rights Act.

We thought America was better than it was, and it turned out we could not have been more wrong.

Is there any argument on the other side?

The problem is that when we talk about voter ID laws, you've got very different laws in different states.

Some of those laws, Pennsylvania, for example, that's a really bad law.

But then if you're looking at Rhode Island, you're looking at Tennessee, you're looking at other states, they're not all the same.

So the problem is when we talk about voter ID laws, you're talking about a bunch of different provisions that are not available.

They're all for us.

They're all for less.

21 states since 2010 have adopted more restrictive, make it more difficult to vote laws.

21 states have.

This will be the first presidential election for 16 of those states.

They're largely in the South.

They're largely trying to affect minority voters.

Two quick points.

One is this is a solution looking for a problem that doesn't exist.

And anytime you're restricting votes, it's bad.

But the unspoken truth that's happening in America, and the biggest disenfranchisement we've seen since we were fighting on the Edmund Pettis Bridge and others were fighting

for voting rights is the disenfranchisement that's going on of people who've been convicted of nonviolent drug offenses.

We right now have a country where

the drug war, the drug war is not a war on drugs, it's a war on people, particularly poor people, particularly minorities.

And so now you have a nation where you have swing states like Virginia and Florida, where one out of every five African Americans has lost their right to vote.

And so we have this outrageous reality in this country right now where our prison population since 1980 has grown 500%, federal prison population 800%,

more people in jail today for nonviolent drug offenses and all the people in jail for 1975 being locked up for doing things the last two presidents said they're doing, and now they're in a second-class citizenship, a caste system where they can't get jobs, they can't vote, they can't get Pell Grants, they can't get food stamps, they can't get housing, public housing.

They've entered this caste system and it's an affront to our democracy because basically what we're doing is millions of Americans, we're cutting them out, taking away their voice and their participation in our country.

Yeah, what he said.

Well, look, and you also have conservatives and liberals who are agreeing on this and who are seeking to reform this issue.

This is not a partisan issue.

I'm partnering on legislation with everybody from allies from the Koch brothers to others trying to fight something, a system that's completely broken.

Absolutely.

One of the greatest tragedies going on in our country right now is that what we are doing to entire communities like the one that I've lived in for the last 20 years is we're devastating these communities.

A chance for an African American to be arrested.

And by the way, no difference between blacks and whites for using drugs, no difference for dealing drugs, except for some studies show that young white men have a higher rate of of dealing drugs than young blacks.

But an African-American will get arrested for drug crimes about four times more than white.

And this actually might make communities more dangerous.

That's the really scary thing, because if you want to be tough on crime, it turns out that actually using incarceration too much, you actually change the dynamics in these communities in ways that make them more dangerous for the people who live there.

And that is really, really bad.

I used to deal drugs, did you?

I did not deal drugs.

Right there.

Anecdotally.

Did you ever deal drugs, Gerard?

Was that?

Did you ever deal drugs?

No, but back in my day, I was known as an excellent bagger.

You used to deal drugs?

Oh, in college, yes.

Well, yes, yes.

I was going to say just pot, but that would be a lot.

I mean, when I got out of college, it was just pot.

But in college, it was whatever my dealer had.

So you would buy from your dealer?

You were like a middleman.

You'd buy from your dealer and you'd sell the house.

Oh, that's not very nice.

I thought of myself as an entrepreneur.

Middleman.

So is the 70s.

No, but it still goes on today.

Look,

I went to Stanford in the middle of the day.

That's how I got through college.

Well, there's a lot of drug use going on.

Wait, wait, wait.

You paid your way through college stealing drugs?

Yeah.

That's a.

Wow.

Yeah.

Maybe I'm a gangster now.

Wait, wait, wait.

But for the record, for the record, still no.

The answer is still no.

Why?

Because I'm white?

Yeah, kind of, a little bit.

No.

No, no, you're gangster.

Fine, though, you're gangster.

More gangster than you.

Is Donald Trump, Ian Bremer, off base and suggesting that the U.S.

rethink its involvement in NATO?

You know what?

Let's ask a different question that's close to that.

Trump said this week that he was not putting nuclear weapons off the table, dealing with ISIS, because we need to be unpredictable.

You know, you had me at Trump and nuclear weapons.

I mean,

that's a crazy thing to say.

Well, I mean, I would say, number one, Trump's slogan is not make America great again, it's America first.

And it's let's find everyone else to blame.

Mexicans are going to come to rape our women, Japanese and Chinese are robbing us blind, the Europeans are taking advantage of our goodwill on security, Muslims are all going to blow us up.

That's a problem, right?

And we see that with NATO as well.

But I have to say, at least from my perspective,

I think the likelihood that Trump actually could win a general election, given the astonishing negatives he has among young, among women, among just normal Americans,

is really, really low.

And I know we're talking about it because we have to and it's entertaining, but I just don't think it's entertaining.

He could be the Republican nominee and probably will be.

And by the way, in this country, the Republican can always win.

You know, they always said, well, you know, the Republicans are losing minorities and they're losing women.

Yeah, but they never tried a race war election.

They never really roused up those people who, when you lift up the rock, you find out what's living in this country.

And Obama got like 40-something percent of the white vote against Mitt Romney.

Trump's going to get more.

And the behind that is the right thing.

He's 9% points behind Romney among white voters.

But what I will say, I'm...

Trump is?

Yes, in a general election.

Yeah, he's well behind Romney among white.

But again, if he gains some and he loses others,

he's going to move to the middle.

That's the problem.

This is why this is important.

I don't think he will move to the middle.

No, I think that's not.

He doesn't know how to do that.

No, he's going to move to the movies.

He does not know how to adjust.

I think that he's who he is.

So you're talking about Ted.

No, I'm talking about Trump.

He doesn't know how to adjust either.

No, no, Trump will know.

No, Ted will know how to move to the middle.

Not Trump.

I disagree with you.

I think Ted will not.

Trump knows only one speech.

I'm the best.

No, he will say stuff that is appealing.

He's not obligated to be consistent.

No one expects that.

Exactly right.

70% of women, for example, can't bear the thought of voting for Trump in a general election.

All women.

He's going to say, yes.

But

he's going to try to figure that out.

Remember, he's super smart.

He went to Wharton.

So he's going to try to figure out the language that makes him more palatable to groups.

He's going to do that.

And that's

never done that.

What he might do is deliver

a serious blow to the Republican Party for a time.

He's a time where he got more reasonable.

He calculatedly said, you know what, I think I'm going to be able to.

He says that he doesn't want to see poor people out in the street.

He wants to have health care for everyone.

I mean, he said that, right?

He said the thing about trade, which is a Democratic position often, and he thinks that we should be creating jobs in America.

He has said stuff that is appealing to my side of the aisle.

And I think that he will, yeah, I mean,

he will try to moderate that.

He's constitutionally incapable of not doing crazy when he's in front of a camera, right?

That's the point.

Yeah, but we saw him reading from a teleprompter.

We saw him AIPAC reading from a teleprompter.

We saw him being disciplined, right?

You know, it happened once.

We had one little thing.

He fucked it up anyway.

Yeah, one little thing.

He went off to the camera.

Can I tell you what's interesting about Trump?

I've never seen white people scramble before.

Like, I've never seen white America really confused and like, what the fuck are we going to do about this?

It's very interesting.

It's very intriguing.

It's like Donald Trump,

Donald Trump to me is like white Hurricane Katrina.

It's like we didn't realize it was going to be, the levees have broken and everyone is panicking right now and it's very, it's interesting to watch.

He lives here too.

I live here too.

But here's the thing.

Here's the thing.

That's me it's going to be worse for you.

But here's the thing.

I'm from the hood.

I don't trust anybody.

I think everybody's corrupt.

But you don't think it matters if Trump is or anybody?

No, of course it matters.

I mean, it definitely matters.

I'm just saying it's an intriguing thing to watch.

I mean, I think, you know,

I've had a healthy mistrust of literally every candidate that ever existed in my lifetime.

So I'm like, yeah, he's in the pile with the other guys.

With Obama?

With Obama, listen, we were all very excited.

We're all very, we were young, we were excited, we were very happy, you know?

And until Corey runs, you know, we're just going to hang up.

When is that going to be?

I was about to chime in and say that these are the days where I'm going to run, but not necessarily for something, more like from something.

But you're going to give the white people a turn, and they're going to fuck it up, and then you're going to be like,

you're going to be like, come on.

Obama was pretty good.

You miss him.

The first time I was on the show,

you said that, hey, this Obama, if he gets this thing right, you remember this joke, don't you?

They're going to think that these black guys are good at this thing, like basketball.

That was the first, that was my introduction to this show.

And here it is, eight years later, and I'm still suffering through the pain.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

We gotta go.

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