Real Time with Bill Maher - Ep. #692: Douglas Murray, Sen. Tina Smith, Matt Welch

Episode Date: April 19, 2025

Bill’s guests are Douglas Murray, Sen. Tina Smith, Matt Welch (Originally aired 4/18/25) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO late-night series, Real Time with Bill Maugh. Thank you very much. I know why you're happy. It's good Friday, and this is the day Jesus died for all of our sins, so you know what?

Have fun. It's all paid for. You're playing with the house money. Oh, just the same way it is. It's tax day, or it was on Wednesday, and, you know, one of the things that Doge is done, it's kind of gutted the IRS, so you know, you're not... If you don't have it, don't worry about it.

Yeah. I mean, I'll say this. A lot of the things Trump does are really pantering to the base, but letting tax cheats not have to worry about getting audited, that one came from the heart. It really did. Oh, I don't want to say the economy's going in the shitter, but did you... But you see, people are dying, dying, yeah, they're dying too.

But dying potatoes. For Easter, because eggs are too expensive. This sounds like, sounds like something my Irish relatives did after they shit in a hole and slept in the mud, you know? But, so yes, we're dying potatoes. People are dying overseas because we cut overseas aid. They say the New York Fed says we're going into a recession. We have a constitutional crisis. Today, Melania had a jacket that said,

I'm starting to care. But hey, it's Easter. It's Easter on Sunday. Are you excited about that? Oh, my gosh. My favorite holiday on the Christian Gallaudet. The day when we celebrate Jesus being resurrected from the dead, or is Elon Musk season,

an elaborate scheme to defraud Social Security. And it's a... Oh, it's Easter, very big day at the White House. Trump is honoring the day by locking up guys named Jesus. And he pardoned Punch his pilot. I'm sorry, he pardoned Punch his pilot, is what I meant to get out of my mouth.

Oh, and not just Trump. J.D. Vance, our vice president. He's in Rome. You know, he's a convert, a recent convert to Catholicism. I know he's married to a Hindu, goes right to the Catholics. I don't know what that said. But he, yeah, he converted to Catholicism because he heard priests like little pricks.

So, but, but, no, J.D.'s over there. He wants to get in to see the Pope. It's not sure he's going on to it, He'd like to get in there to convince him that Jesus was dead wrong about being nice to foreigners. Well, Trump has a new foreign friend. He is naive Bukali. He is the dictator. He says, called himself the world's coolest dictator.

Have you seen this guy of El Salvador? It's like if they gave Andrew Tate a country. And he was at the White House this weekend. he and Trump are getting in the gulag business together. Really, we keep sending people down there. Talk about even doing it with American citizens to the El Salvador prisons, and Trump said, you've got to build five more down there.

And some of his supporters were angry. They said, we should be building notorious prisons right here in America. What about good jobs for our sadistic guards? When there is a car battery clamped onto a man's nipples, that should be an American battery. But, hey, say what you will about the barbarism, I'll tell you, the migrants, the encounters of migrants at the southern border way down. I don't have the statistics. I just know the lawns in my neighborhood are a disaster. And, oh, finally, little Haley Joel Osment is in the news.

Remember Haley? Remember the movie The Sixth Sense? He was the kid in that? Well, apparently he's all grown up and has some anger issues. They arrested him, being intoxicated, and he yelled at the arresting officers. You were fucking Nazi

and you were fucking kike. I see dead careers. And over on Fox News, they came down on him like a ton of bricks for this. You do not call people Nazi. All right. We've got a great show. We have Matt Welch and Minnesota Senator, Tina Smith.

Well, first up, he is in New York Times bestselling author, whose newest book is called On Democracies and Duck Cults, Israel and the Future of Civilization. Douglas Murray, isn't it great that we can still laugh in these troubled times? It is. Oh, good. Okay. Let's get... So your book, I want to get right to it because I think it's a very important book,

an important subject, which you've been talking about for a long time, and I want to do that now is kind of connect your book to the wider issue that you have been talking about for a very long time. Israel, the way I see it, and I think you do too, is on the front lines of a much wider war. And when you talk about that war, people on the left call you an Islamophope

because they see multiculturalism. They say we should just, we're all part of the same, and we all part of the same humanity, but cultures are different. And I think that is the theme that you've worked on for a very long time, that Western values are different than other values that other cultures have and in the ways we like to think better. Yeah, I mean, most people in the West, in free countries like America,

seem to think that what we have is the natural order of things. We behave like fish in water. We just don't realize this is what we're swimming in. But it's actually very unusual what we have. One of the lines I try to draw in this book is the democracies, the liberal democracies that we enjoy, some groups, some people, they don't want that. They want something totally different. We have principles in our societies like prioritizing the importance of life. We love life.

The jihadists say, Hassan Nazarallo of Hezbollah, the leaders of Hamas, they say repeatedly, they said repeatedly, the infidel. love life, and that's their weakness. And they say that because they, by contrast, what I call the death cults, they worship death, they glorify death, they're hungry for death, they're hot for death, they glorify in it. And they believe that by terrorizing us, by terrorizing Israel with this boast,

we love death more than you love life, that they will intimidate us, they'll defeat us. And I say we have to take this on, we have to believe them, that when they behave as they did in Israel in October 7th, when they behave as they did at the Bata Claire in Paris or the Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, we should believe that they mean what they say. They really do want death.

And then, of course, there are two things. One, of course, we can do what we can to help them. And the second thing is we can say, you know, we will not apologize for loving life. It's odd that this is controversial in America. Isn't it? But look at the number of people who, for instance, when the Nova Party was attacked on the morning of October 7th,

and hundreds and hundreds of young people were just dancing in the early morning, you would have thought that the sympathies of the world would be with the young people who were attacked, raped, beheaded, kidnapped, shot in the head and much more. And yet, weirdly, instead of all of the fellow students of those people who could have been at a similar dance party if it had been in their country. Instead of having sympathy with the victims,

they actually blame the victims. They double down on it. In New York, there was a memorial, an exhibition to the Nova Party, and hundreds of people in New York came out to attack the survivors of the Nova Party. There was one man who lost both his daughters at the party, and he has to walk through the crowd in New York

celebrating the murder of his daughters. Why, if you agree with the obvious statement that October 7th was the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, some people have had the ability to say that, why have so few people had the ability to say, okay, then who are the Nazis? And why are there so many of their supporters in our midst? Whatever radical movements have existed in the past,

there was a no-go on supporting genocidal, anti-Semitic groups who wanted to wipe out the Jews and then everyone else. We used to have that standard. And also dance parties. Yeah, most... I got to say, you know, like this is what bothers me about the people who call us Islamophobes. You like dance parties, you people. Half of them are at Coachella right now.

Right. You know, I mean, it just doesn't exist in the part of the world that you're cheering for. Right. You couldn't do it. The idiots with the Queers for Palestine T-shirts on. Those people. I saw that, you know, Bernie Sanders and AOC going around the country now and getting huge crowds. and I read that they were in Boise, Idaho, not exactly a blue state.

And the crowd, but their crowd, of course, is a very liberal crowd. And a chant of Free Palestine went up and pretty much stopped the show. So I kind of worry that that's where the Democratic Party is, that this is their next stupid hill to die on. So the chant of Free Palestine, free from who I would like to ask. Do they realize who was really? the people who are enslaving the people of Palestine? If those moronic people had any knowledge,

they would say free Palestine from Hamas. At the very least, they'd do that. Yeah. But as I showed in my book, and I did, as you know, I was on the ground reporting the atrocities of October 7th. I was embedded with the IDF in Gaza as well as Lebanon. But the real question I have comes back to this thing here at home,

which is why are there people, first of all, who openly support the death cult of Hamas, who love it, glorifying it. Then, of course, you've got the ones who, basically like the KKK, they want to cover their heads and their identities whilst calling for genocidal violence. You know the people who wear a kaffir and also a COVID mask because they simultaneously want a lot of intifada

and are fearful of the COVID-19 virus. The Delta variant particularly terrifies them. But these, some of these people are serious about it, and some of them have been just deluded. They couldn't find Israel on a map if you left them alone with a head torch and a map for a week. But there are others who are in the realms of magical thinking.

They genuinely seem to believe that if the Palestinians were given another state, and in my view they were given one in 2005, But if they were given another state, they seemed to believe that everything else in the region would be solved. Yemen's economy would blossom. The mullahs in Iran would give women equal rights

and everyone would be going to gay bars in Riyadh. None of that's true. None of it's true. But the bigger one is, why do they think it would improve anything here at home as well? Why if the Palestinians get another state? Does it not only solve every injustice in the Middle East, of which there are plenty,

but every injustice here in America? This, just as our ancestors, some of them believe that you could turn base metal into gold. These people have been persuaded that if you give yet more governance to Palestinians in the Middle East, I mean, there's a good argument for Palestinian rights, as long as they don't vote in Hamas,

but the idea that you just have another Palestinian state and then all injustice in the world is solved, this is magical thinking. And unfortunately for these people, it has no connection with reality. So what do people like us do who recognize this as a big problem on the left, but also recognize the horrible stuff that's going on on the right? I mean, you were on Joe Rogan a couple of days ago.

We could go something like that. I got a lot of press. And I'm glad you said what you said, which is, I mean, I like Joe, but he has on people who entertain these crazy conspiracy theories and doesn't really push back on them. It's okay to have, I mean, I'm a free speech absolutist pretty much. But there seems to be no pushback on this. And of course, what's going on in this country,

well, we're going to probably be talking about here on the panel in a minute, this kind of encroaching fascism. I mean, I was using the term slow-moving coup before he got elected the first time. Well, the right clearly, I mean, it's always interesting to see what happens at the point of victory. What do you do with your victory? And if those people on the American right,

who are now in the ascendant, if they decide that they want to use their point of victory, to, for instance, lie about, the origins of the Russia-Ukraine war, or lie about the nature of Hamas, or lie about the state of Israel, or lie about history. I mean, the reason I did this pushback

was, I mean, you just have to. I mean, you just have to, in my view. It's basic social hygiene. If you've got somebody who's coming along who pretends to be a historian, who then can always do the thing of saying, oh, I actually don't call myself a historian. It's just other people I allow to call me a historian.

I'm not a car mechanic, but if I kept on being introduced as a car mechanic, I would say, oh, no, no, you got the wrong guy. So they don't mind it. They don't mind it. They have this slip out. These people, though, I was trying to call out on Joe's show, they are doing things like,

Hitler wasn't that much of an anti-Semite. Main problem in the 20th century was Winston Churchill. Winston Churchill was the warmonger. Adolf Hitler wanted peace. And I just, look, it's a matter of social hygiene. Don't feed me this shit. This is... And there's obviously this crossover between the people who are just trolls.

They say this because they think it's really fun to do the Jewish question, to do like a bit of Holocaust denial, a bit of Hitler praise, a bit of Churchill degradation. They think it's kind of funny. What they're watering and what's going to come up underneath them are going to be people who believe this rod. And a lot of people you can clearly see on the right at the moment are very happy if you can denigrate the tradition of Winston Churchill

and pretend that Adolf Hitler wasn't so bad, because then you can do things like Christian nationalism. You can do really, really tough nationalist stuff. They basically... You can buy Kanye apples. That's the last stage. That's like the ultimate. After they've absolved Adolf Hitler,

they want to absolve Kanye, and then they're going to get... get to the point of hand. Well, it's a great book. Everybody should read it. Thank you. It's great to see you. I'm always with you, pal.

You know that. All right. Douglas Murray. All right. Let's meet our panel. Hi, there. Hi, everybody. All right.

He co-hosts the fifth column podcast in his editor-at-large at Reason magazine. Matt Welch is back with us. One of our long-time favorites. Newcomers. She's a Democratic senator. Wow, we got a senator on the show from Minnesota. Tina Smith, welcome aboard.

So again this week, we start talking about this man, Kilmar Abraio Garcia. It seems like every week, but, you know, people are interested in they should be for both humanitarian reasons, and because it is sort of the crux of what our nation is going to become his case. Thank you, one guy. So first, let me give you a bit of an update. He is apparently out of the bad prison, the worst prison in the world. They took him to it. And he met, finally did meet with the congressman.

from Maryland who went down there and talked to him. Oh, there they are. So I want to just skip over to the, not to bury the lead. What I find the most disturbing about this, and we can talk about him in a minute, but, you know, Trump is talking about putting not just people like him who was illegal,

and, you know, I think it's okay to deport people, but not, it's different than disappearing them and putting them in gulags. Trump was asked at a press conference, you mentioned that you're open to deporting individuals that aren't foreign aliens or criminals to El Salvador and he said, love it, why, you think they're a special category of person?

I'd like to say, I do think they're special. They're called Americans. I'm one of them. You got me. I think I'm special. Guilty is charged. Yeah, guilty. I don't think I should be deported just for, because, you know, it has to be a standard beyond very bad people.

the president thinking you're very bad. This is also a problem with the due process aspect of it, which the Trump administration is trying to skate around. Like if we just use the Alien Enemies Act from 1798 and send people away, then we don't have to even bother with a due process and having a full hearing. How do you know that Bill Maher is not an illegal immigrant?

You have to have a hearing, actually. And this is already, I mean, maybe you have to have to. Yeah, they are. But this is already starting to happen. People who are here legally, sometimes U.S. citizens sometimes not, but there's a case of somebody in Florida who was here on a legal refugee status was sent El Salvador because of, like, tattoos. You have to have a hearing to decide whether or not you qualify to begin with. And this guy is from El Salvador, right? But, you know, our Constitution is quite clear that if you are a resident of this country,

you deserve due process. And the other thing... Even if you're here illegally. You deserve to have a hearing. You can't just be shipped off without... And so now there's all this innuendo and all these things about what maybe he did, what he didn't do.

That's why we have courts. That's why we have a legal process in order to get that sorted out. The other thing that Trump said was he talked about homegrown criminals and what he wanted to do with homegrown criminals. To me, that's the clearest of all... I mean, of all the things that go on in the first term,

and now in this one, that are outside the bounds. You know, we heard about norms. Oh, yes, he doesn't guard rails and then just sort of just ignoring summonses and subpoenas. Now we're at the case of the place of just ignoring court orders. I mean, the Supreme Court ruled on this guy. And, again, he's not an angel, apparently. Apparently, there's a little wife beating in the past.

Not cool. It's probably to have courts to figure that out. Right. But it doesn't really figure into this. Even if he did, it doesn't mean you go to the gulag. But the term that the Supreme Court used was facilitate. They told him, nine to nothing, you have to facilitate this man's return. And Trump just said to John Roberts, basically, go get in the go-fuck-yourself line like everybody else.

There was an incredible Fourth Circuit Appeals District Appeals Court ruling yesterday, Jay Harvey Wilkinson. I recommend your entire audience, including your new friends at 1600 Pennsylvania, to read this in its entirety because... That was gratuitous. Well, to read it in its entirety because he says, and this is a regular appointee,

this is a good conservative judge in good standing, he says, rarely is the point so clear. We are right now stashing away our residents in foreign prisons in a deliberate attempt to get away from due process, which is basically our constitutional order. And this should shock the conscience of not just judges, but of everybody who has an intuition of American liberty.

Right. And this bill is where I actually have some optimism. Trump is wrong if he thinks that Americans are going to be in support of this. Americans are in support of deporting criminals. Absolutely. Violent criminals, it's like 97 to 1. Yes, deport the violent criminals. but they're not in favor at all of the President of the United States defying the Supreme Court.

It's like an 80 to 20 issue. He's on the wrong side of that. Okay, but so what? If I may address the little shot you just gave me, so fucking what, okay? I don't understand this. We're at that part of the movie where there's a gun fight and the guy and then click, click. There's no more bullets in the gun.

We have no power. So how do we handle this? And Gretchen Whitmer showed us one way. Can we show that picture? Because she was in the Oval Office, same place I was a few weeks before. And this is what she did. Okay, I think there's a couple of ways to handle the Oval Office.

And this is not the way I chose. You don't want to talk to people? You have no power. I mean, people seemed to gloss over the fact that I went in there. I didn't surrender to him. I said this. Of course, people don't care. They don't watch what I actually did. They just react to clickbait.

But I went in there, and I said to his face, you're scaring people. Why do you want to scare your own citizens? I said to his face, you ran in three elections. You lost the middle one. I said to his face, birtherism was low. Okay. I'm glad that I was able to go and do that. Got a seat at the table.

Because, again, what else do you have? You have no power. So this idea that, I mean, and he's going to be there for another four years. That's a long time to hold your breath. Well, it's a long time to hold the thing up in front of your face. Let me tell you. My governor Whitmer went to the White House. She went there to take care of the business of the people of Michigan.

You have to. And that's what she did. And so then what happens is she gets basically ambushed by the president of the United States who pulls her into a press conference that she's not expecting, where he is signing, he's signing an executive order, directing the Justice Department to investigate people who he thinks are no longer loyal to him. So getting his face right then and there while the cameras are on.

She was like, this is the shit show, and I want nothing to do with this. I think is what she was doing. Well, we need a better Democrat than that. She went there, though. She went there. Yes. She went there. I wish, you know, what was she going to do?

What's she going to do? Not that. I mean, I understand why she did it because she didn't want to be seen with Trump, because that would make her look stupid. She wasn't hiding as she was there. I think it was good of you to go there. I would have gone there. I wouldn't be invited.

But, like, I think Americans should go when the president invites you into the White House and do exactly that. And then report back what you saw, regardless of what, whether that's surprised you not. Yeah, they're also mad at me because I didn't, I mean, all the people who were like, we're losing truth. Okay, I told you the truth. He's different in person. Should I have lied about that?

We want the truth. Yeah, but when you get it and you don't like it, boo. Bad truth, bad truth, Bill. To answer your question. Life's complicated. I'm sorry, I complicated your life for you. To answer your question, though, about the empty guns, which is a very good question,

is that there are times in the past when the Supreme Court ruled against George Wals, for example, said, Brown v. Board of Education, we're going to stop segregation in schools. George Wals says, I've got the guns. You don't. The Supreme Court, the judiciary, does not have the power to enforce laws. They have powers to kind of inform us and tell us about it.

But what happened to George Wallace eventually? The Brown v. Board of Education is rightly hailed as a landmark decision, and he is rightly seen as a retrograde bigot. You cannot go against the American public for too long. There is an intuition of liberty in this country on a whole lot of issues, and Donald Trump likes his popularity, at least a little bit. He's sensitive to his popularity, and if he's on the wrong side of repeated 80 to 20 issues, which he is right now, he's going to feel it, and they're going to get wiped out in the midterms.

That's right. I hope. But in the meantime, you know, I think you've got to talk to the guy. I mean, because the alternative is what? I was reading Tom Friedman's editorial this week, and it's like many other tidurals, and I mention him because I'm a big fan of his. and he wrote,

if Donald Trump doesn't stop his rogue behavior, he's going to destroy all the things that made America strong, respected, and prosperous. Totally agree. And then he finished up, I have never been more afraid for America's future in my life. Totally agree again. You know who's not reading this?

Trump. Or anyone in his cabinet, or anyone on that half of the whole country. So you're just jerking each other off, okay? writing these editorials for the people already agree to read. I don't see what it's doing. I'm just not interested in this beat a dead horse

contest that you're in. I think we have to have something different. And I don't need to be lectured on who Donald Trump is. I was out... I mean, I was the one that was saying he was never going to leave the beginning. This was a Nixon to China thing for me to go there. It's because we were so

vitriolic toward each other. And by the way, if you don't know what Nixon to China means, maybe you shouldn't be involving yourself, I think that one of the problems that we have as a Democratic Party is that we don't talk enough to people that disagree with us. And this is on my mind because I was home in Minnesota this past week, and I was in the reddest, reddest parts of this state. You know, having meetings with people, I'm sure, 70, 80 percent of them voted for Trump. And, like, that's the reason that we lose, I think, is because we don't go and talk to people. who don't like us.

Right. And then when they don't like us, we kind of try to say, well, let me just tell you why I'm really a good person. Yeah. I mean, when it gets to, the whole reason I went to this thing, the whole, when it gets to that point of,

I just hate you, then it doesn't matter what the policy is. It's just, how can I fuck you up? That's how our country is run. How can I fuck you up because I just hate you? So much of Republican politics is trolling. It's just doing shit just because, like, Trump last week,

Bringing back coal? That's really smart. They'll make everyone's utility costs go up, so super good idea if you're trying to lower costs for people. Okay. Also, sort of apropos to this is that someone tried to burn down the governor of Pennsylvania's house last week with him and his family inside.

So again, I would say to the people who don't want to talk, this is sort of the other way that this is going to end up. And we just made a short list of some of the political violence that we've seen in the last few years, the January 6th riot. Some people would say too lenient about how we treated the 2020 riots. Or just the 2020 riots themselves. Themselves, but also a lot of excusing it and saying it's okay. Obviously the Trump assassination attempts. People who think Luigi Manjonian is a hero.

the guy who shot the health executive in the back of the head. Nancy Pelosi attacked at home. Assassination attempt against Brett Kavanaugh. The pipe bombs that were mailed to the Democrats. Remember that in 2019? All the top Democrats by that guy, Caesar Soyak. Steve Kalees. Scalise, Republican Congressman, shot at a softball game.

This is a lot of political violence in this country. And I don't know what the answer to that is, but I don't see it getting better if we're just, just in the, I don't talk to you. I'm at my own lunch table mode. And when we're doing the ends just by the means in our own apologia for it, I would throw into this your category, also Portland, Oregon, for 100 consecutive days or whatever it was in 2020,

when they were just ransacking the federal building there. People apologized for it. They looked the other way and said it was mostly peaceful. We haven't had an adult conversation about political violence in this country at all over the last five years, and it's gotten worse and worse and worse. We don't even really talk about Donald Trump getting shot in the year. That happened all of last year. That's crazy.

I'm really worried about this going forward because there hasn't been irrational the post-October 7th protests on campus. A lot of those turn pretty violent and bad. A lot of like Jews were sort of hiding out in libraries in NYU. Yes. That's bad. And there isn't any proper like excuse and apology for it. So we have to get serious about that because in that polarized moment when we're not being serious, when we're lionizing Luigi Mangione,

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Depos minimum of $10. Veil to be used to fashion responsible. The conditions apply. Okay, well, it is Easter Sunday, this Sunday, and there's something new. Now, I just found out today, they do the Easter egg roll on Monday. I don't know why.

The holiday's over, but I guess that's what they do. And the kids are off from work. Another thing we're bringing back, child labor. If we can only get the lead back into pipes. Okay, so, but this year, something new. Corporate sponsorship for the egg roll. Of course, Trump has to monetize everything.

So, we got a hold of some of the eggs that are sponsored by different corporations. Would you like to see what's going to be on it? Okay. For example, Tesla has one. Please don't throw this at a cyber truck. A Bank of America has

Ask Us for a loan to buy me. Oh, Fialis, he is risen. Oh, McDonald's has unavailable after 11 a.m. Oh, Gwenith Paltrose-Goop sponsored one. Don't ask where this egg has been. Plan Parenthood. When you're done with this egg, we'll get rid of it for you.

Oh, the woods, my pot store in West Hollywood. honestly I'd rather be fried yes and Walmart because isn't an eggshell just more white trash it's a terrible thing so can we talk about the economy

a little bit I did an editorial here about I don't know five years ago during Trump's first term and I was rooting for a recession and boy did that make their heads explode on the right they really fucking hitted me for that I was like really history's greatest months but this man is rooting for a recession and I was saying it's the only

way, Trump's going to be unpopular. And they were like, yeah, and of course, I'm just rooting. I can't make it actually happen. They didn't seem to understand it. I'm not a genius. I can't make it. But I'm rooting for one again. Because the only way this is going to turn around,

and we see it already. I mean, you know, you see conservative papers now, conservative outlets who are not supporting Trump on the tariffs. Partly because they're tanking the economy, yes. and partly because it's kind of a form of corruption.

And when I say kind of in a big way, because you see it already, when you have tariffs, then you can take them off. I mean, he put them on China, but he took them off suddenly at the end, and then he put them back on, of course, because they never last more than a day, on phones and computers.

So in other words, you can reward people. I mean, Trump is great at a couple of things. One, finding ways to reward and punish people. and two, finding a way to get bribed. Those are, like, two of his biggest skills. At crypto, great way to get bribed. And this is also a great way to bribe somebody. And look at the through lines.

So you've got, they give millions of dollars to his inaugural. Then there they are on the diast, the techno bros, the, you know, the, you know, the Amazon's and iPhones. There they are on the dais when he's sworn in. And here they are. and here he is now, just a little bit later, giving them exemptions from these tariffs that he just put on and now he's going to take off for them. And, like, I just talked to a constituent of mine in Minnesota

whose business is in the toilet because of these tariffs. Like, she's not getting an exemption. She doesn't know Donald Trump. She can't walk in there and give him a million dollars. Let me make a call. You know, it's the pay-go. It's if you know somebody, you can get something done, and if you can't, you're out of luck.

Trump has always talked about in his inaugural William McKinley, back when he was the tariff man. He was the president when we had high tariffs and no income tax. And Trump says that's how we got rich and that's how we're going to get rich again. What he leaves out of the story is that one of the main reasons why we got rid of the tariffs and replaced it with an income tax. It was supposed to be that small, so they kind of screwed that up. But they got rid of the tariffs because they were a fountain of corruption. That's what they were.

That's what they did because it wasn't like some really smart guy with the green. nayshade making the precise reciprocal tariffs that are going to carve out this manufacturing sector. No, it'd be like in Trump's first term, there's 200,000 exceptions, right, of the tariffs that he levied against China, 200,000. That's a lot. And so you're just asking one man, the same one person who decided to raise prices on every single American. I don't think we've wrapped our brains around this yet. It's 10% tariffs across the board to the world, let alone China. So that raises the prices on everybody. Something like two-thirds of those imports are used by American manufacturers. Whoops. Their stuff got more expensive. So everyone has less money

because of one man. And this is not what we were supposed to be doing. He was asked, how will you determine tariff exemptions? And he said, instinct. Yeah. Instinct. Yeah. I mean, I can't improve on the comedy. I just, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, yeah. But also, I mean, I just feel like he picked a fight with the wrong bully. He said this week, China needs to make a deal with us. We don't need to make a deal with them. I think that's completely ass backwards. And I'll tell you, I...

I'm always for America. Don't get this visit. I want us to win. But this is just the reality of what China is. They're not going to buy planes from Boeing anymore. I imagine that would ripple through the economy. That's kind of a big sector. Also, have you been reading about rare earth metals?

Yeah. Okay. Let me educate the public because I needed some education on this. First of all, they're not rare. But they're hard to get, and I can't pronounce them. Yes. And China has them all. We're almost completely reliant on them.

They go and they make everything work. Cars, planes, things that we use in the military, robots, drones, turbines, missiles, magnets. Apparently everything needs magnets to work.

China has 90% of that magnets. Like a car can't work without magnets. And there's something to do

with this metal, blah, blah, blah, something, I'm going to the store. Okay. To me,

this is the essence of what is so fucked up about this country and why nobody can be in the center here

where I am where everything makes sense. Listen to this. We make none of this here except we have one place here in California, Mountain Pass.

They have a rare earth mine there. It takes out of the ground in one year what China does in the day. And this article in Times said, could we build more rare earth mines, which apparently we're going to need to do so that since we pissed off China about that, and why should they help us now? You know how long it would take to get the next mine online?

29 years. That's America for you. Doge, cutting everything ridiculously, immediately, and the Democrats, 29 years to build something. I have nothing. I have no question. I'm out. Are you solving the problem, Senator?

Uh-oh. I fucked this up. Go ahead. Keep up. Okay. We have a slight wardrobe malfunction here, but I think it's going to be fine. Yeah, go ahead.

What I was going to say about this, Bill, is that, you know, Trump's, like, completely chaotic and peripatetic and unplanned strategy. And meanwhile, the Chinese, you know, first of all, he pisses off all of our allies. So we have no way of mounting any kind of a global strategy to contain China where we need to, because they're stealing our intellectual property. They're dumping products into our country in ways that are bad for American manufacturing. I mean, they're doing some bad stuff. But what he does is piss everybody off, and then nobody knows what he's going to do. And meanwhile, China has a long-term plan. They have a strategy that they're proceeding with.

And here we are. And they can build a mine in a rare earth mine like in a week. Yes. As opposed to 29 years because of the zoning and the environmental reviews and all this shit. Not that we don't need environmental reviews, but 29 years. But if it takes that long to build stuff, then we're not going to be a country that's building things anymore, and that's our problem. And I say, as a Democratic senator, could you make this an issue? Yes.

This is, I mean, I don't think it's that hard for the Democrats to regain the center. If they would just go at a thing, I talk about this all the time with our governor here. Just the red tape, the ridiculousness of, it's not that we can't do anything anymore. It's not that we're not allowed to. And I feel like this could, this is low-lying fruit for the Democratic Party. You know, this is a perfect example of where if the Democratic Party is only defending the status quo and not figuring out how we can do things differently and better, We're not going to be ever in a place where we can win back the majority in the Senate.

We're not going to be in the place we need to be. And take housing as an example. We know that if we fix zoning laws so that it's easier to build housing, you can fix the housing supply problem, and then housing costs will go down. And that is a strategy that we should be working on. And that is a lot of that's at the local level, but we should be rewarding that at the federal level.

That's just one example. If we want to have a clean energy economy and it takes us forever to put the transmission lines up and the distribution lines to get power where people need it, then we're never going to accomplish our goals. We've got to fix this. So, okay, what do you think of the fact that the people who are getting the big crowds right now are AOC and Bernie Sanders? They're going around the country. Thank you. There's that same guy. I call him the always wrong guy.

No, I'm kidding. Okay, but I feel like, you know, big crowds, again, the shiny object that the Democrats chase all the... It's not about the big crowds that come out to you when you're talking in a festival or wherever they are. I think it's because I think Bernie showed up at Coachella. That must have been fun for the fans. It's who shows up on Election Day, and I just don't see that's the ticket. I mean, Cory Booker, I know you've worked with him. I like Corey a lot from my home state.

New Jersey, made a speech for 25 hours. Again, just whacking each other off. This is just not what's going to get the job done. So, over 400 million people paid attention to what Corey was doing when he stood on the floor

of the United States Senate. I'm not saying... 400 million? 400 million people. Wow, that's amazing if the country only has 350. 400 million viewers. Views, I'm sorry, pardon. 400 million views. My mistake. Oh, okay. 400 million views

and Corey wouldn't say that that's the only thing that we should be doing but it energized a lot of people this is not a what's the one right solution here this is doing a whole bunch

of different things and if there are 20 people in Winona Minnesota that want to stand on the curb every Thursday and wave signs then like that's great you don't really think

AFC should be the candidate do you? No I'm not saying I mean it's not my job to pick who the candidate is going to be oh it's mine

yes and it's And it shouldn't be heard. Maybe you should talk to the president about that. It shouldn't be hurt. I'd like to suggest one thing that Democrats can do besides wearing a diaper on the Senate floor is... Trump did a 90-day pause of a lot of the tariffs. That gives you 90 days.

Pass legislation saying it's no longer an emergency with fentanyl on the border of Canada. But how can you pass? Work with Republicans who are ready to peel right now. Right. He's a grandpa who's already out there sticking his neck out, Mitch McConnell. Other people are doing that past that thing. Well, so we had that bill on the floor. All the Democrats voted for it.

Two, maybe three Republicans voted against it. Didn't go anywhere. And the Speaker of their House said, forget it. We're not doing that. Correct. Keep doing it. These things are not going to get less, more popular. The tariffs are starting to trickle into people's lives.

It's going to get less popular. Let me ask you. One minute to ask you. I see what you're wearing reminds me a lot of what the ladies on the Blue Origin War this week when they win me. What? It does. It's the same.

I can't figure out a way of doing this. I thought about it. It's what? It's a nice color. It's the same color. What did you think about that and what did you think about all the backlash you got? I mean, you've got to be really, really, really rich to spend that amount of money

shooting your wife into space. Shooting your wife. Suddenly you want to get married now, right? Yes. Okay. I mean, all right. I mean, with all the money we waste on space. so many things. It just seemed to me like people

just want a bitch. I mean, so the ladies had a nice day where they could be weightless. You know, was it... Was it... Was it really? That's not even a good of a gunman. All right. Thank you very much. Time for new rules, everybody.

Athletes have to work on maintaining a difference between their let's go face and their... I just got kicked in the nuts face. I can't... I can't tell if you're over joy to you're in agony. It's like watching a Trump supporter looking at their stock

portfolio. Uh, no, someone must tell the woman who claims to have gas lit herself into losing 40 pounds. Uh, that's not what gaslighting means. Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation where someone tries to make another person doubt their own sanity

or reality or memories in order to gain power of them. You just learn to tell yourself, put down the cupcake bitch. Stop encouraging me. New Rule, if ICE wants to kick people out of the country based on their tattoos, it shouldn't be for these ones listed here by Homeland Security. It should be for this guy.

And this guy. And especially this guy. New Rule, now that Lebanon has announced it's banning Snow White because it stars Gal Gadot, who is a sergeant in the Israeli Defense Force, Someone has to tell them, you're working too hard. No one's going to see that movie anyway. And you're not going to settle 4,000 years of acrimony by crossing Galgado. If you want 4,000 years of acrimony, you cross Blake Lively.

New Rule congratulations of the cast of the Breakfast Club, who've reunited for the first time in 40 years, reminding us all what fun those 80s comedy movies were, which is why I say, do Porky's Next. Let's get that gang back together again. Billy, Tim, Peeley, let's see where they are now. Oh, never mind. They're arriving in five minutes. And finally, new rule now that the Trump administration has decided that America will pay any price

and bear any burden to bring back factory jobs, they have to answer one question. Who's going to take them? Who exactly is supposed to do all this monotonous, low-paying labor? Immigrants, they're all deported. It'll probably be robots if we're not using them all for sex slaves. But I'll tell you who's definitely not doing it. Gen Z. The very people who would have to be most invested if this plan is going to work.

Is this who we really think Gen Z is? A generation of manly men who make things with their hands, who get up early and go out to the plant and their heart. hats with their lunch bales and come home dirty, gruff men in newsboy caps working overtime at the steel factory. Seriously, these kids can't handle a gig at the cheesecake factory. They're quiet quitting office jobs. If you walk into a department store and ask them for something,

they act like you barged into their apartment and woke them up. I'm sorry, but Generation Nepo Baby aren't exactly the sinewy, leather-skinned workmen of yesteryear. They're doy gamers who need an emotional support animal to ride in a plane. Can you imagine what they'll need on their lap to operate a crane? I mean, look at the prerequisites. A shift on the factory floor requires, focus, eye contact, social skills.

How would they survive working elbow to elbow with people who don't share their beliefs on everything? If you're on an assembly line, if one person drops the ball, Lucy has to eat all the chocolate. And when someone falls into the liquid plaster vat, he'll die because it'll just be everybody videotaping it. You know, there's a lot of talk these days about the working class and how the Democrats lost the election by abandoning them, which on a policy basis is ridiculous,

but culturally it's working for Republicans who are seen by many as bringing back a time when men were men and worked real jobs and their wives stayed home making tuna casseroles and hot daughters. Trump and his maggot crowd has this testosterone-drenched delusion that America will only return to its glory days when men, real men, burly, brawny, manly men go back to work in red brick factories and have cigarettes for lunch on top of skyscrapers. Okay, but it's 2025, and being masculine is a hate crime now.

And Gen Z? They don't care who's for the working class because a lot of them, let's not paint with a broad brush, not all, but a lot of them don't want to work. They want to know who's for the not working class. Did you know that America has seven million men in the prime of their life who are neither working nor looking for work, which is more than four, what it was back in the day, no cap. Thank you.

There's even a word for it now, nilf. It stands for not in labor force, which people think, people think this is synonymous with unemployed. It isn't. Unemployed people are looking for work. Nilfs are not. They're what we used to call deadbeat.

People whose great skill in life is somehow getting by, Either on disability, wink, wink, or money from their parents, or whatever Scott Dysick does. Listen to this. Half of American parents with adult children provide them regularly with financial assistance, spending almost $1,500 per adult child per month. Wow. Turns out Gen Z was blowing up our 401 case long before Trump got a hold of it. So, I know that Trump clearly.

crowd imagines a gleaming new factory created by high tariffs and thinks, if you build it, they will come. They won't. They're playing Minecraft. They don't... They're not saying can-do. They say can't even.

And if you don't believe me, check out this ridiculous video from an influencer who goes by the name Bacteria Baby that went viral a couple of years ago when the idea of returning to a military draft had been floated. Why is everybody saying Gen Z is going to get drafted?

Like, no, fuck, we're not. And you know why I know that? Because we're just going to say no. Like, how are they going to actually force us to get up and go to war? And we're also, like, really mentally ill. I have, like, six of these. You've heard the adage about how America has two kinds of people, the white-collar types who shower before work, and the working class who shower after work.

Okay, but this guy. kid doesn't shower at all. Because he doesn't work at all. Or want to. Well, that's not quite true. There is one job that 57% of Gen Z say they want to do, but it's not factory work. Fifty-seven percent want to be influencers. Yeah, you know what they say. If you do what you love, you never have to work a day in your life, especially if what you love is videotaping yourself eating food in your car. All right. That's our show. I want to thank Matt Ralph and her.

Tina Smith and Douglas Murray. Now go watch overtime on YouTube. Thank you, best audience in the world. Appreciate it. Thank you very much. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10. Or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand. For more information, log on to HBO.com.