Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #411 (Originally aired 1/20/17)

Episode Date: January 21, 2017

Overtime Episode #411 (Originally aired 1/20/17) - Bill and his roundtable guests Jane Fonda, Keith Olbermann, Heather McGhee, Jon Meacham, and Department of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez answer fan questions from the latest show. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. 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 Maher. I'm like a fight with everybody. What am I? Donald Trump? All right, hi.

How should the media respond when Trump attacks a reporter or organization? Good question. You know, that press conference he had, we're entering a new era. Not a press conference, infomercial. Right.

And also, you know, the idea, it's kind of genius, of like, having your clack there to laugh at you, You know, it's like what Howard Stern does. You know, he's got a little kitchen cabinet there where every move you make. There you got, you're a great one, Johnny.

It's good. It's this classic, I mean, he actually, if you look in the textbook of personality disorders, is narcissistic. Oh, yeah. Well, I don't need, we don't need a book. I'm a policy walk. I like to look at the book.

Right. But, you know, I mean, that's one of the things that he does, right? he actually has this shortage of popularity in the real world. And so he is obsessed with the idea that he's popular. And so he creates this sort of sense of a cacophony of support, which is just not true, as today's barely their mall showed. But to answer that question, everybody should have walked out.

It would never happen. It would not have happened if, I can't imagine the circumstances. any of the last five presidents had done it because in those press rooms it is now not about getting an answer from the president but getting yourself recorded and played on your own network asking the question and the guy could just

go uh-huh and they would run that soundbite so there's no uniformity and there's no collectivism but if you now fill if you now quadruple the press room you guys walk out CNN walks out and NBC ABC and CBS somehow go out with him that leaves 47 Jeff Gannons to ask

questions from the Bush administration. Remember him? That's who's going to fill those other seats? Yeah. Well, if anything's good about this, though, it is, I feel like the press has been chastised, and they got the message. I don't know if they're changing. They've changed to a degree already, but they do feel bad. I've never seen them at least feel bad before. They do feel like, oh, yeah, we did fuck up.

We did over-hyped the email bullshit, and we did overcover Donald Trump, and look what we got. But they felt bad after Iraq. and it didn't last long. It's a little like what Tom Sawyer said about Huck Finn when an evangelical preacher came to town. The preacher was so good that Huck was saved until Sunday afternoon.

So, you know, it's just not... It's hard to stay on that wagon. I think that there's going to be a lot of terrific reporting. There has been a lot of terrific reporting. You look at what the Washington Post did on the fact that he's never given anything to charity. The New York Times had the GSA story today. that the President of the United States, as of now,

is in violation of a GSA lease, which explicitly says no federally elected official can own one of these contracts. So the moment he took the oath, he was in violation of federal regulations. Maybe that was one he suspended this evening. But I think that a lot of it is on, and we've been talking about this,

a lot of it's on us to people to act on that information and not let get it lost in the Trump state cacophony. Well, that's why I've been jumping. One Note here, because Tommy one note, I guess. Because we can't normalize fake news. We can't allow the ethics breaches that have occurred. There have been more ethics breaches from the time of the election

to the time of the inauguration than there, I mean, the Obama administration was squeaky clean. This guy is starting square one, and they've already violated every ethics rule in the book. Today. But we cannot score not. And that's why, you know, I got involved. in this race for the DNC because we've got to get out there and organize, organize, organize,

but we also have to be honest with ourselves as Democrats, Bill, because we can talk till we're blue in the face about Donald Trump's lack of character, but we also have to understand that, you know, on election day, we had folks that we didn't touch. You know, we got enamored with data

analytics and we ignored the old persuasion. You know, you can't go to a church every 4th October. and call that an organizing strategy. We've got to get back to basics. And you look at rural America. You look at Wisconsin.

And we also have to shout down our fringe, the politically correct assholes on the far left. But getting more toward the center, too many of them, look, it wasn't even that popular here in this room. No, I understand. I mean, I think we have to get out there and make house calls because there is Howard County, Iowa, in 2012, went for Obama by 21 points. In 2016, went for Trump by 21 points.

That's a 42-point swing. You can't sit here and say all Donald Trump voters are racist. No. There's plenty of Donald, there's plenty of David Dukes out there. But these folks, the challenge was we didn't touch them, we didn't listen to them. When Donald Trump comes in and tells you in Butler County, Ohio, which is cold country. And alienated many. And alienated

many, though, quite frankly. I mean, they have this impression in the heart. Not that we don't care, but that Democrats are just always coddling irresponsible behavior. They just have that impression. The party of giveaways and the party

who just doesn't care about the regular person anymore. And when you talk about jobs, you know, in Ohio for instance, I was there recently, jobs, jobs, jobs was the number one issue. When Donald Trump comes in and says, I'm going to bring your cold jobs back, we know that's a lie.

But what they heard from the Democrats was vote for me because Donald Trump is scary. What they heard from the Democrats is we're going to make you pee next to a guy in a dress. And that's our number one priority. Well, there's that too, but they also heard or are intuited that at this point, the Democratic Party, particularly that embodied

by the Democratic nominee, not her challenger in the primaries, but by the Democratic nominee, that, as George Wallace once said, there's not a dime's worth of difference. They see the elites, and that there's this duopoly that ultimately is a plutocracy.

And so, yes, the cultural stuff matters, but when they looked at Hillary, David Marinus did a great piece about the story of the Clintons is when he went from McDonald's to being a vegan, and that that shift lost a ton. The story of Clinton is not just about

McDonald's and vegans and these cultural signifiers, it's about NAFTA and repealing Glass-Steagall. I mean, there's actual policy that change the face of this economy. And the welfare. And the welfare and the crime bill. And I just, I want to make sure that as we try to do this analysis of what went wrong with the Democrats, we don't end up sort of lionizing the kind of regular American who is, you know, in all of our imaginations, like a middle-aged white guy, like this guy named Gary that called into a C-SPAN show that I was on

and said, I'm a white male and I'm prejudiced. And, you know, you could hear a pen drop on the set. And he then went on to say, you know, it's the gangs and the drugs and, you know, repeating all the Fox News stuff. And then at the end, he said, I actually want to change and be a better American. And I want to know if you're guest,

me, can help me do that. And I had to... It's an interesting way to hit on you. All right. I have a birthday party to get to. Thank you, everybody. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10 or watch them anytime on HBO On Demand.

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