Real Time with Bill Maher - Overtime – Episode #670: H.R. McMaster, John Avlon, Rich Lowry

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Bill Maher and his guests answer viewer questions after the show. (Originally aired 9/6/24) 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 Mark. Okay, here we are. He's the former CNN anchor who is running for Congress in New York's First District, John Abelon. He was the editor-in-chief of National Review and host of the editor's podcast, which Lowry, and the former White House, Massachusetts, security advisor under President Trump, whose new book at war with ourselves, General H.R. McMaster. Okay, this is for everybody. I just mentioned Hitler in the editorial. What's with Tucker Carlson embracing a revisionist historian?

Does anybody remember the guy's name? I read the story today. Tucker Carlson. He does like to push the envelope, doesn't he? He had on a guy who introduced something like one of the most important historians of today. I'd never heard of the guy. He's not a real story. Well, he believes Winston Churchill was the bad guy and Hitler was the good guy.

The real villain. I look people who think revisionism is. just the way to get attention. Like whatever you say, I can undo it and say it's better. You know what? You think men can't get pregnant? Oh. Stop it. Stop it.

This is the... Is he ever the bad guy? Intriguing content. Look, this is junk history that's getting peddled, and, you know, there are people who gravitate to this, but he elevates it. And I think business model for him. You know, it's his business model. He's a

... You're talking about Tucker? Tucker. Tucker calls him, yeah. He's a Gry, he's a charlatan, you know, he's a useful idiot for Vladimir Putin. He saw him sit across from him and suppose he was knowledgeable about history, but he bought in to that whole, I call it, like, do you ever see this show drunk history? No, I love it. Is that great job? But it's like he bought into Putin's drunk history, you know.

And this guy seems to think, like, Churchill's in power and Britain, all in the run up to the war, and he was pushing all the buttons, and he was making Hitler and things. You know, England went to him as a war leader, because the war had started, already because of Hitler. And I actually disagree with you. I think Tucker's sincere in this stuff, and I think it goes to a deep disaffection that parts of the right have, unfortunately,

with America at its foundations. They've come to believe the country is fundamentally corrupt, so every piece of received wisdom. And I think, you know, some narratives are wrong and should be pushed back against, but every piece of received wisdom, including that H.R. McMastert, but that Winston Churchill was one of the greatest figures

in Western history has to be questioned. He was. Churchill? Was not one of the great? He was. He was. They're questioning. But this is this weird, like, when did sort of hating America become hip on the far right?

This is this mirror image sort of like feedback loop between the far right and the far left that's absolutely crazy. They all meet. I mean, sort of the nativist far right meets the self-loathing far left. Yes. And you can't tell who says what. Exactly right. You say the same thing. Yeah.

Well, I'll tell you what I don't like about Hitler. Everybody else had to do that salute. And he just went like that. I thought it was very privileged. It was so superior. It was so superior. I think it's important to make fun of these kind of, you know, authoritarian, horrible people.

And this is why I think Mel Brooks' work is just so brilliant. Charlie Chapman. That's right. Was the judge in Trump's hush money trail right to delay sentencing? Oh, yeah, that happened today until November 26th in order to avoid interfering in the election. election, man, all those trials, and nothing happened. Nothing. It was going to... They indicted him and they wanted to try them on a political schedule. They literally, if they could have,

they would have had them in courtrooms from March to October, a presidential candidate of the United States, and it's just not how the court system works, thank God. This thing shouldn't be sentenced now. It was absurd. They took a misdemeanor that the statute of limitation should have expired on, and they bootstrapped it up to 34 felonies. and wanted to sentence him to jail for it. I'm not a huge Trump guy, but this, I think, is absurd and wrong. The larger issue, obviously, is January 6th, right? And the problem is with the immunity decision.

History is really clear. If you don't hold people accountable when they indulge in political violence, then you get more political violence. And I'm really curious about the... Do you think conservatives end up supporting a constitutional amendment to overturn the immunity? decision of a Democrat as president? I wonder if they will. I think the way these kind of decisions work. We saw it with the independent counsel statute decision that Supreme Court has. In Washington,

eventually this stuff always comes around and bites the other side. So right now, Democrats are so upset. The Supreme Court has done this. Then if Kamala Harris is elected and some Republican prosecutor somewhere in the middle of Red America wants to indict her and prosecute her for some official act, the Supreme Court will say no. And Democrats are suddenly, what a minute. Maybe that decision wasn't so outrageous. What we've seen is this tendency on both ends of the political spectrum to score partisan points

at the expense of confidence in our institutions. Yeah, but Trump really does commit crimes. Let's have to get that little part of it. They're actual crimes. That's what you... We're 60 days out from an election, and I think we've normalized this a little bit, and it's far too freaking dangerous.

He really does commit crimes is one thing, and two, if the positions were reversed, and the Democrat did this, not only were the Republicans to go after him, but they would have done it instead of what the Democrats do. Talk about feckless, General. This is feckless. You had four years to bring four trials, and we get none of them? And it's because they were afraid of politicizing.

Look, that's the thing, is that if Democrat did what Donald Trump did, you would be opposing them totally, and by the way, so would I. And I think that's the issue. I'm so extensively on the record about January 6th. I know you are. I'm completely appalled by it. But you're still endorsed the guys. You're not so appalled that you're going to have.

going to vote for Trump. So you're not a poll. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, I am a poll. But the difference is. But you're still going to vote for it. But January 6 didn't happen. You'd still oppose Trump. Because you don't like him on policy, right?

No, no, no, no. From where I sit in the first... Mostly, no. But you support Trump's policies? I said no, mostly. Right. But you'd consider voting for him absent January 6? No.

Right. Well, consider, yes. If he conceded elections, he would not be He would not be the boogeyman he is. He would just not be the villain he is. That's the main thing. He politicizes the Justice Department, and he does not concede elections.

These are two very new things. Now, you can carp all you want, and you can what about the bullshit about, well, the Democrats say that he wasn't a legitimate president. That's different than actually trying to stay in office. He is completely unprecedented, and it's completely disqualified. It is.

To even consider. voting for I don't know how anyone can. Well, we've got an election lie being used as a litmus test for party loyalty, and everyone's acting like it's normal. It's not. It can't be. All right. What do you think of Trump announcing plans

for Elon Musk to lead a commission on government efficiency to cut regulations and spending? There is a lot in there, isn't there? I mean, government is inefficient. I mean, I remember when Al Gore was going to reinvent government. Remember that? He was given that task. Al Gore, you go reinvent government. How'd that go? Did we reinvent it?

We have a lot of really dedicated civil servants, but in most government agencies, you could randomly kidnap people out of them, and nobody would know so different. The Secretary of Defense disappears for like a week, and no one would. I think this is a good idea, though. I mean, if you look at Elon,

he's revolutionized the U.S. satellite program, right? NASA has been remade by injecting kind of this private sector and entrepreneurial energy into it. So I think we could use that across government. Yeah, I mean, but to your point, I remember, I forget who it was,

maybe it was Bolton, somebody like that said years ago, if you took out 10 stories from the UN, would we know? Or would it might even be better? It's an America-hating work. But it is true. You can all that. By the way, not that this is a pattern we should.

should follow, but yesterday I was driving to work, and as sometimes happens here, the light goes out on a major thoroughfare, and everyone just coped. Mm-hmm. Like, we just, oh, okay, you go, and then I go, and then we just ad-libbed it, and I'm not saying that's how you should run the... There's still an amazing resiliency to American civil society. Yes. But how, you know, we're a dagger drawn over politics.

Most people, it doesn't matter, they treat each other fairly and honorably in his fellow American. That's still a lot of dirtbags, too. Yeah. But we can't wait for the political class to do it. I don't think they're going to do it. So I think we all need to convene discussions. Who fires themselves?

That's the problem. But let's start taking action, stepping up, building guardrails to strengthen American democracy and take it seriously because this is fucking important. We got one country. What are the panel's predictions for the debate next week? I think Trump's going to be an asshole. That's funny. What are you doing?

I'm going out on a limb. Right on the bill. Well, you know, foreign policy doesn't decide elections usually, but foreign policy is really critical at this moment. I believe there is this, as you mentioned earlier, this axis of aggressors that is supporting each other. They're supporting each other in ways that are unprecedented. And I believe these cascading crises from the Middle East

have a very high potential of cascading further into the Indo-Pacific before inauguration. I think we're entering a period of maximum danger. We have a president who sadly has diminished cognitive capacity. We have ourselves at each other's throats. Then we're going to have a period maybe after the election. I think this Russian report is a setup for post-election because the Russians, what they really want

is most of us to doubt the result of the election. Yes. So I think that period between election and inauguration is very dangerous. But the next 60 days, to your point, right? I mean, part of the goal of Russia disinformation and foreign... autocratic disinformation is to divide our democracy, to make it dysfunctional. And that's why that division and dysfunction is something we need to confront. And the stakes of the election do determine the trajectory of the 21st century. It is about autocracy versus democracy at

at home and abroad. Yeah. Okay. I hope you get asked those questions. What will your policy be on a ram? What we were discussing earlier? I think Bill, though, it is key that the whole debate over the mics being open or closed. And it's obvious why Kamala Harris, one of them, open. If the The mics had been open in the first debate. There's no way Joe Biden ever, in this course of rambling answer with lots of pauses, would have finally been able to say, look, we finally beat Medicare. Trump would have interrupted him like five times before he got it and saved them. And by the way, if Trump loses to Kamala Harris, that debate victory for him in June will be the most catastrophic success in American politics.

He won the debate, Biden leaves, and he gets a much tougher opponent. Yeah, they really screwed themselves. He should not have debated Biden that early. That was dumb because Biden revealed himself. They would have said, let's do it in October. And this is the thing, all the people now who acknowledge, you know, Biden's not up to it, all those same people, Democrats, they'd be insisting right now the way they did the entirety of the year. He's great.

He's hailed and Hardy. He didn't wander off. And so would you if it was your guy. What's that? And so would you if it was your guy. Don't make it sound like. Maybe. But this was like, he's not up for the job.

I mean, he literally can't do it. And they told us he told us he was. Speaking as an American historian, you know, I think this is one of the most significant cover-ups in recent American history. Talk about misinformation. To perpetuate. We did it to ourselves. The appearance that the president was, you know, was fit.

I disagree. He didn't believe ball and gone. Go! Sorry. It would be interesting to know. He's not unable to be president. He's unable to run for president. Correct.

He's unable to do a debate. He's not a vegetable who can't think or make decisions. He just can't do the kind of thing. And by way, once all of a sudden, he's not. it wasn't a Biden-Trump rematch. All of a sudden, the whole election changes because it's about new versus old. It's about hope versus fear.

And that's been energizing people. Trump needs to connect her to the current administration, which has disastrous approval ratings and say, you're this unacceptable status quo, not the future. But this thematic debate will have a huge role in play

who wins in November. Have Democrats succeeded in reclaiming the patriotic label? Well, there can, yes? They're convention. You're working on it. Yeah, much better. I mean, it's interesting.

If you had told me before the convention that I would hear Kamala Harris say the word privilege, I would say, oh, I'm sure, and it was going to be about the usual, you know, white privilege. No. She said, it's a privilege to be an American. I mean, she said those kind of things that Obama used to say about, you know, only in this country is my story possible.

And I'm going to say it was music to my ears. Because I like America. It's me too. I don't care who knows it. It is absolutely essential. I've been big on reclaiming the American flag because it belongs to all of us and it can't be a partisan signifier.

But the smartest thing Democrats have done is take back freedom, right? It's about reproductive freedom. It's taking back the word freedom. Taking back the flag, taking back patriotism. And all of a sudden, actually, she's refusing to take debate on identity politics, and Trump is the one who's focused on it.

That flipping the script is very healthy. If you have to be clear, though, that this really is a group of party that has been pushing identity politics extensively. Yes. It was in the government. That's been the biggest. And so what they've tried to do is valorized victimhood.

And I'm afraid of this ideology, this post-modernist, post-colonial neo-Marx's kind of ideology, it robs our young people of agency. I agree with you. I agree with it. The whole system is stacked against you have to tear it down. And so what does that leave young people with? A toxic combination of anger and resignation. So let's like restore agency.

And the ironic thing is this is where the whole shooter comes. The far right is now resembling the far left in this. I would say it's hard to take to. here, Tim Walz, given his record in Minnesota, which had nothing libertarian about it whatsoever, to portray himself as this great champion of freedom. It reminded me, Bill Buckley had this old line that liberals don't care what you do so long as it's mandatory. And that's how Tim Walts says. The guy represented one of the most Republican districts for six terms. But once he was governor with a unified legislature behind him, all bets were off. And it'll be the same thing with Kamala.

sounds like a moderate now. She's flip-flopped on like 10 things without explanation. But if she gets a unified Congress, she'll be the new FDR and the new LBJ. They're all, once they're in there, they convince themselves they have to be transformational presence.

I suppose. The alternative being Donald Trump is a totally different ballgame. That's rewarding someone who tried to overturn an election on a lie that led to an attack on her capital. That's the stark choice. But one of the problems with the patriotism issue,

I think that we were just about to talk about with the Democrats, is, goes back to what we're talking about in the show with education. Yeah. You see interviews with young people, they think, like, America is very often like the worst country in the world. Yeah. And they think it's the worst time to ever be living in. Yeah.

This is just rank ignorance. Yes. They are not, again, common sense. They don't teach the kids basic things in school. They don't know that this is the best time to be alive. The average person alive today lives like kings did, Like just a hot shower a hundred years ago was a giant luxury.

The amount of entertainment we have. The amount of choloric intake we have. The speed of travel, communication, porn on the phone. But no, we do need to think about education, partly as we're educating students to become active citizens in a self-governing society, right? Washington says enlightened opinion

is necessary to a self-governing society. So we need to actually start teaching them history. The good, the bad, and the ugly, but there were a great country. You've got to acknowledge, right? It's the far left that pushed this a historical thesis that our country was founded to preserve slavery rather than founded on principles that made that criminal institution unsustainable. I'm arguing with you, not against you. But I don't think we should replace that with, you know, a contrived happy view of history.

No. You instantly had school districts around the country adopting that as part of the curriculum. It's a lie about we're the first society and history to love. I'm not a partisan guy. What parties were pushing that agenda? But that's, I think, where we get to the revolt of the reasonable, right? Let's start teaching Ken Burns in school. Let's start having a sense that we are imperfect people trying to form more perfect union.

But educating folks about the full capacity of our history is a good thing. What Daniel and Patrick Moynihan used to say? He used to say, he said, do I apologize for defending a less than perfect democracy? I do not. Find me a better one. That's how I feel. But he's right. It is one side that did that.

And that's the weakness. on the far left. I completely agree. And what I worry about, too, we were talking about military radius military service, you know. If you teach your young people that your country is not worth defending, who's going to defend you? Right? Right. It's going to defend you. And I think this is related to

some of the recruiting issues we've had. I mean, just the attacks on the founding fathers, who of course were imperfect. By the way, at this time that they were doing what they did, they were not that different than anybody else in the world, including people of color in other parts of the world, who had slaves. It's not like we invented it in 16. Slavery was endemic to the human condition. It was.

All human history. What was new was when we began to turn against it. The British first against the slave trade and then finally did. We fought the most destructive war in our history to emancipate one million of our fellow Americans. Now, then you teach the failure of reconstruction. You teach the rise of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan. Of course. Separate point on unequal, unequal. But then and actually, by the way, that was all the Democratic Party. Yes. It meant the time. They were conservative populace. But it explains a lot, right? If you understand Reconstruction, we need to study more because the resistance to multiracial

democracy is also a defining factor of our country. We are a great country. I am a very patriotic guy. The fullness of American history is what we need. Because because we're the First Nation found an idea and not a tribal identity, we need unifying stories. So we need to teach those stories. And that's where we've been screwing up.

What are your thoughts on Dick Cheney saying that he'll be voting for Kamala? Yeah. Right. Liz Cheney said she would, and then she... What do you think of that? Come on. When you lose Dick Cheney, Rich, come on, come on, man. Isn't politics funny, though? If someone had told you 20 years ago, Dick Cheney would be endorsing the Democratic candidate for president?

Look, I get their... You know, they can't stand Donald Trump and not being on board with Donald Trump. I do not get conservative Republicans supporting Kamala Harris. That does not... But hold on, but let's work through it. It's not just about, right? It's about one person. The person wants to strengthen NATO and all the multilateral security arrangements that have helped keep the peace for the best part, for the most parts is the Second World War.

The other wants to sell out to a lot of these autocratic countries. That's a personal, not political decision. I think that's actually consistent. Also, I think it's healthy because, you know, I think you get more Republicans endorsing Democrats. It makes the point that this election is about something bigger. It's about building a broad patriotic coalition. The U.S. military was stronger and outweeful when Trump was done with his first term. and he was actually, he said a lot of dumb things about Putin,

but he supported Ukraine more than Obama did, and he was harder on China than any prior president, and now that position has become... We have someone who... Well, I mean, this is a big part of the book. I mean, he actually did. He's the first one who provided defensive capabilities to... I try to tell you guys, but you don't believe it until HR says it.

No, but then he did suspend that assistance to get dirt on the Biden. I mean, so, you know, you said, I would say, I wouldn't say reckless to run. I would say inconsistent erratic versus fecklessness. And I do think that when you talk about, like, you know, coddling authoritarian regimes, look at what this administration has done with the Iranians. I mean, the Supreme Leader has gotten an easy ride from the Biden administration. They didn't even want to acknowledge Iran's role in October 7th at the beginning. They still have not really reimposed or, or actually, you know, enforced the sanctions,

against the Iranians since October 7th, and with them having the whole Middle East on fire. So I think it's a more complicated situation is what I'm saying, John. You know, you can't just make these like... Hold on, H.R. I love you, man. But hold on. Like, we've got one guy saying we should pull out of NATO, right? We should not... Putin could do whoever the hell he wants, basically giving a yellow light to China on Taiwan.

I mean, you know, the autocratic alliance you warn about is in many cases rooting for Donald Trump, because they think it leads to American division and decline. Tell me where I'm wrong. Well, what I'm saying is there were some things, right? There's some things where Donald Trump's right. I mean, there's some things where he's right. There's some things where he's completely erratic and inconsistent.

Where does he write on? I think he's been right on energy security, for example. I think he's been right on reciprocity and trade. He's been right on burden sharing. But then again, with Donald Trump, he's so disruptive, right? He disrupts what needs to be disruptive sometimes. But then he goes on to disrupt himself. And he becomes kind of the antagonist in his own story.

So, I mean, so you've got a choice, right, in this election. People have to make the choice between what I would say are really self-destructive policies at times for the Biden administration on the Middle East, on the war in Israel, but really the war in the region. But kind of the erratic nature of President Trump. But these are the questions, these candidates have to be asked. What are their positions on these issues, on NATO, on Ukraine, on the war in the Middle East? I think you know more than I do. But the hit on Soleimani, I think, was shocking. It wasn't a major war.

One hit, one guy. I think everyone with American blood on their hands around the world slept less easily after that hit. And it just went to the fact that he had deterrent force. People were scared or worried about him in a way they haven't been of Joe Biden. Look, the bipartisan sense is more American foreign policies. We should stand up against tyrants and terrorists, right?

And I do believe that. And I do think that we learned a lot in the wake of the Iraq war. But the fact is, is that right now, for strong on national security, one party's leader seems to be trying to weaken NATO, and the other party has expanded it and strengthened it. A lot of that is working them to try to get them to spend more. But I don't see, the Afghan withdrawal? Does this compute at all?

There's no reason Pompeo should have negotiated with the Taliban alone in Dahan. But it was a conditions-based thing. Biden didn't accept anything else that Trump did, except he supposedly forced by Trump to do a withdrawal. It was done badly. Totally incompetent, dishonorable disgrace. His presidency has not recovered from it since, and our position abroad hasn't recovered from the sense.

And I think you can draw a direct line from that disastrous humiliating withdrawal to the reinvasion of Ukraine in February of 2022. I mean, I think what's weakness is the, what is, you know, provocative is the perception of weakness. So what I would love to hear from both candidates is there. And if I may, 61 Americans were killed when Trump was a. office in Afghanistan. 13 under Biden.

So there's that. Good luck with the campaign. You're running as a Democrat. Thank you. Good luck at home with that. All right. 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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