Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime - Episode #457: War on Weed, Offensive Speech, Cult of Trump

Episode Date: April 21, 2018

Bill and his guests – Michael Avenatti, Jordan Peterson, Frank Bruni, Gov. Jay Inslee, and Alex Wagner answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 04/20/18) 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 Maugh. Are we here? Are we on? Okay. Okay, so first thing, before we get to the question, do you want to respond to what I just said about marijuana? Well, as we talked about Starbucks, we talked about our great voter rights bill. We talked about our efforts to be climate change. But for you, Bill, I can honestly say, we got the best weed in the United States. It's a growing in this. It's well regulated.

It is well-regular. That's right. By the way, they... Humboldt County would give you a run for your money. They are, but... They're putting a little pressure on us. We've heard from the Attorney General in Seattle, actually, and we need to make sure that they back off.

And wouldn't it be wonderful if the first time Donald Trump said something that was actually true if he said he'd leave us alone on our marijuana decriminalization? Yeah, I hope that that will occur. Well, yes, Jeff Sessions has said, good people don't smoke marijuana. Yeah, good people. Thank you.

A lot of not good people here. Okay, Michael, will you ever release the contents of the warning shot disc of evidence you tweeted about? Oh, yeah. Possibly. It depends on how the case progresses. I mean, you know, we... What's on it? Well...

We... You know, we took that picture, and we tweeted it out, and it was exactly that. It was a warning shot to Michael Cohen, the president, that if they tried to claim... that my client was a liar after 60 minutes. There was going to be consequences and it worked and it worked perfectly

because we heard nothing from them. So we have the DVD and we're going to release it when and if it's necessary and we're going to see what happens with the case. But make no mistake about it, it's locked and loaded. Can I ask Trump is like, why can't I get this?

I mean, I've been listening to all of this about Trump and watching how this conversations go in the U.S., and I have one question about it. I mean, there's all these people in the U.S. who are on the conservative side who are aligned with Trump for all sorts of reasons, and there's all this tension around his presidency and attempts to pull him out of his office for various reasons. And what do you think will happen if that comes to pass? What do you think will happen to these people that have identified with Trump? And, like, how is it that democratic types, for example, are holding out their hand to say, to these

conservative types sort of like welcome back into the fold. Because it looks to me from an outsider's perspective that your country is polarizing in a way that's not good and that, you know, people are going after Trump. And I understand that. It's not like I don't understand that. But there's all these people that elected him and that are identified with him. And they're not taken this well, you know, and so, well, they're not. They're not.

It's not. And, you know, you might not think they're very bright and all of that. And, you know, they're backwards and all of those things. but you know, you need to have respect for the rest of your citizens, and if your country isn't going to pull itself apart, and I really see this happening from an outsider's perspective when I come down here, and I lived in the States for a while,

and it wasn't like this before. If he was just a regular Republican president with Republican policies, I would say you'd have a point. But what is so alarming is the assault on democratic norms, what we were talking about here today, things like threatening to put people in jail, threatening to put journalists in jail, wanting military parades,

praising dictators, wanting to be a dictator. I mean, we are at a moment here. This is, I try to impress on this on the people who are too young to remember a lot of presidents and a lot of elections, how incredibly different this is than anything that ever came before. I never much liked the other Republicans who were in office, but I have a renewed respect for them.

George Bush and Mitt Romney would not have tried to pull this shit. They just wouldn't. What about Nixon? Nixon got caught, and he gave himself up, basically. Well, although this president makes the Watergate burglars look brilliant. Right. It seems to me that it's not a point.

We can be as tough as we're being on the president, and I think we should, for all the reasons you just said, Bill, without telling his supporters that they're stupid, without saying basket of deplorables. If we want to bring them around to what I would say is a more enlightened kind of thinking, and if we want them to see Donald Trump as someone who's turned them, the presidency into one long infomercial for Mar-a-Lago, you know, we can do that without saying to them, you've been duped, your chumps, you're dumb, you're deplorable, and I think we need

to talk to them with more generosity than we do. I'm confused about how this dovetails with your thesis that the left is too preoccupied with being non-confrontational, right? Why, the left is too preoccupied with people? That's interesting. Okay, no, all right. No, that's a good question. The idea that liberals especially, intellectuals, are preoccupied with politically correct speech, that they're not...

Oh, I see. I see. And yet... No, they're too preoccupied with identity politics by a large margin. And they tend to categorize everyone by their ethnicity and their sex and their gender. And I think all that does is turn people into tribal actors and that the end result of that is catastrophe. But weren't you also saying, though, that the left is too worried about offending people? I think that that goes along with... I will.

Yes. Wait. But then on the other hand, when the left, for example, offends people in the political sphere, you're questioning whether that's somehow bad for society writ large. Well, I'm concerned about... I don't...

I think that those two issues are... I think that those two issues are somewhat separate. I'm concerned about the dialogue in the United States around the presidency, pulling people farther and farther apart. It has nothing to do with the behavior of Trump. I think this is an independent issue. You can say positive or negative things about Trump as might.

I know. But that's the issue. That's the issue. They did support him. Without the circus, he's just a lonely clown. But he has these people in Congress who are enablers and this base that it is a cult of personality, not unlike dictatorships we've seen in the past.

I mean, he said once, famously, I could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any fans. Yes, yes. And he has proved that to be almost true. I mean, we cannot imagine what he would do where they were turning them. Because I don't know what that would be. I don't think it's anything.

Because whatever it was, he would just say, well, it's fake news. But, okay, so imagine he's impeached, just for the sake of argument. Impeach or convicted. Okay, either of those. But it seems to me... Well, that mattered. One, he has to leave. Yeah, no, it's not an unimportant... detail, but it still seems to me

that it leaves you with the problem of, what do you do with the disaffected 40% that are going to be very unhappy about this, independent of Trump's behavior. Kind of like the Sunnis after we kicked over Saddam. Well, that's a hell of the president to cite. Yes. Right, right. That's what I worry about.

Let me suggest that this is an argument, looking for an argument rather than a solution. We're not waiting for impeachment. We're making sure that people understand Donald Trump cannot stop us today. Donald Trump could not stop me from the first net neutrality bill to make sure people have access to the internet He could not stop us from doing that He cannot stop us

He cannot stop us from acting on climate change with all this bloviating saying it's just a hoax He can't stop us from fighting climate change He can't stop us from having the best paid family leave and sick leave policy He can't stop us when we demonstrate people progress in our states No Yeah But he No one

He certainly is stopping us from who's the water. He certainly is stopping us from protecting the environment. He has signed executive orders. The first thing he did in office was to sign an order that said, hey, you want to dump your coal sludge in the streams? Go right ahead. The head of the EPA is Scott Pruitt. He's reversed all of this.

No, he just changed it to the environmental pollutants. I know, but to say he can't stop us. And he's changed the tax landscape everywhere. Absolutely. You can't do anything in your state. And he's appointing crazy judges left and right. He's changing things as we speak. We don't cover it because of Stormy Daniels,

but all of this is going on. What can I say? Get used to it. Okay. All right. We didn't get to any questions, but it was a wonderful panel. Thank you, everybody. Happy for us.

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