Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher. Thank you very much, space before plenty of room in here, plenty of room, everybody do this through this. Oh, I see you're laughing, you can't. Thank you. I appreciate it. We are so far apart, no spread of the disease in here, right? We are safer than fucking this place. That's our motto here. Anyway, we have one more show after this.

We have this show we have been on. This should could happen now and then one more and then that's the end. What a year, boy. Wow.

Starting with the flu, ending with a coup and spinoff. Oh, my God. I mean, people know this.

You know, there's like five stages of grief after a loss. Everyone knows it's denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. I don't want to name names, but somebody seems stuck on the first two.

Because this this has been the most drawn out transitions into Caitlyn Jenner.

I mean, Trump, we thought he was a Russian plant. Turns out he's an Irish relative. Yeah, this guy reminds me of the remember the movie The Sixth Sense. Remember that movie? The main character doesn't know he's dead.

It's. Thank you know, really, at this press, this presidency was a bar, it is way past closing time. We need that guy who goes, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here.

But, you know, the president is making an interesting case for himself. He's saying he's uncovered a conspiracy, a widespread conspiracy involving tens of millions of Americans voting for his opponent.

Really, that's his case, his case is basically, if you don't count all those votes for Biden, I won by a landslide and that's as much as I can glean.

And also the will of the people. Very unfair.

Very unfair. But don't ever say that these people don't try. I mean, the president has been sending out his Rudy Giuliani went.

That's a life itself, isn't it? Went to contest the vote in Pennsylvania. They said it was going to be at the Four Seasons. Philadelphia, it was it a Four Seasons total landscaping.

I'm not joking about it. I wish I was. This would make a great sketch. It was in a fucking Home Depot where I was going to bring out witnesses to the fraud.

One of the witnesses to the voter fraud that Giuliani brought out didn't even live in Pennsylvania and turned out to be a sex offender.

Yeah, when when they offered him the job of poll watcher, he thought they meant something completely different.

But don't think that just because all this is going on, the president has stopped president thing because Wednesday was Veterans Day and Trump visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and accused him of voting illegally.

All right, great show. We have Caitlin Flanagan and Max Brooks. But first up, she is a senior legal adviser for the Trump 20 20 campaign. Please welcome warmly Jenna Ellis. Jenna.

Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thank you. I thank you for doing this.

Can I call you Jenna? Absolutely, my friends all call me Jenna, so OK, well, I hope her friends, I hope we can have an honest conversation without talking points and stuff. I mean, first of all, I do admire you for coming on. This is a tough argument you have to make. Would you acknowledge that? Well, I think that the argument we're making and I appreciate you having me on, because what all Americans should be concerned about is that every legal vote should count fairly and accurately.

And this is about the future of our presidential elections. And you're agreeing with that.

And I wish that I mean, the way we used a talking point there, the, you know, legal legal vote, no one is contesting the idea that we are not winning legal votes. That's really not OK. Joe Biden at his press conference last week, he said, let's count all votes. What he hasn't acknowledged is that he wants to count all legal votes. What he's wanting is the late ballots. He's wanting all of these ballots from dead people, from nonresidents all over.

He has not come out.

And when I say welcome to the show, please, please give a hand to my guests. I don't have to say, please give me a hand with my guests who are sitting on the panel. We assume the votes are live when someone says votes, we assume it means legal votes. But let me let me ask you today, the president was out talking about the coronavirus and he said.

We're not going talk about that, but in the middle of it, when he was talking about we're not going to be going into a lockdown, he said hopefully the whatever happens in the future.

Who knows which admitted administration it will be, I guess time will tell. OK, you talked to him on a daily basis. You know his mindset. I have not heard this tone since Election Day. What he tweeted a few days before was I won this election by a lot.

This seems to be a different tone, or are you guys admitting that maybe you lost? I don't think it was a different tone at all, and I met with the president actually right before that press conference, I was in the Oval Office. And again, he is wanting to make sure not just for his own election, but for every future election that we know that we have free and fair elections in this country.

And so I think that we do know the only thing we do know that your own. I mean, I don't know that.

But we we don't know that we have evidence and we have lawsuits that are currently going on. We have recounts, some recounts in Georgia with the margin that is so close is actually mandatory.

Your lawsuits are being left out of court. I mean, I'm sorry. I don't want to make this a contentious not all of them. I'm just trying to present what is the truth in what's going on in the courts and also in your own administration. The Department of. Wait a minute. This came out to the Department of Homeland Security. Now, this is going to sound I mean, you work in government, you know, now very few actually don't.

I actually don't. I want to clarify that I don't work for the White House. I work for the campaign and for the president directly. So all the people on Twitter who are saying, hey, you work for me because I'm a taxpayer, maybe they need to read my Twitter profile a little more closely.

Apologies. That's OK, thanks. Department of Homeland Security, that is the government. Yes, OK, they have a branch called the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is what I'm trying to say. It's getting very bureaucratic, but that's what government is. And by the way, that's one reason why we love government.

Why we're not a third world country quite yet is because we have people in place for people of goodwill from both parties who do a tough job as this election was.

And they did it brilliantly in the Department of Homeland Security. Under these Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, there is a group called Elections Infrastructure Government Coordinating Council. They came out today and said. There was no no fraud, no evidence of fraud, the most, the most. This is one of the most secure election in history. And what we learned is a Trump appointee, a Trump super loyalist, he would not fire the head of the security agency when he said this when you lose Chad Wolf.

Isn't it time to say maybe we lost this one? It's not a shame.

Well, you know, if we had said that if we had said that, Bill, when everyone was telling Cydney Powell to stand down on Michael Flynn and the Russia collusion hoax and also impeachment and everything else, Trump's lawyers, myself included, we have prevailed on all of those things. And we have shown through the evidence and through the fight that we are willing to stand up against the deep state where if you prevail, just because wherever you are, where have we prevailed in Pennsylvania?

We have actually know you have as we have so you have in Pennsylvania. We have we have you have a court order. You have not found because you have not prevailed on any.

I'm sorry, but this is your lawyer finish we actually have so.

Well, now you're switching states. If we can go back to Pennsylvania, we have prevailed on two things. One is that we have the meaningful access part of this where we got a court order from a judge that said, because this is a long standing tradition, that both Republicans and Democrats need to be able to observe the ballots being counted. That was not going on in Pennsylvania or Michigan. Of course, Silvania said absolutely no, it was not.

We actually have there are six hundred eighty two thousand ballots that were counted without meaningful access from Republicans or Team Trump.

Not those ballots, what they say in those states, even by Republicans, you just know that's not true.

And we have that's it's six hundred eighty two thousand ballots that were counted without meaningful access. And so that's. So, though, do you know more than this judge in Pennsylvania, have you recently joined the court that I'm not aware of this?

No, I'm reading what the judge let me read you what the judge in the Pennsylvania court said. You were talking about observers, by the way, this whole idea that you need observers. There are always observers in elections. Do you think that either party would go in by law? Do you think the party had any thought of this before the election? Oh, wow. We should maybe on our team in there looking at the ballots. Of course, both parties have their people in the room looking at ballots.

This is there's this idea that observers judged Pennsylvania extra Bill.

No, let's you want the facts. We are not talking about extra observers. We're talking about meaningful access. If you have two people in the room from one hundred feet away and they're not able to actually observe what's going on, and they're actually saying that there are ballots that are being manipulated, that are counted twice, that are being changed, that the signature matching some of the envelopes are being destroyed. These we have over 11000 credible reports that are coming into our election hotline that are simply fraud.

Yes. Again, I would ask you are. Yeah. And so, again, they are credible. And that is what our lawsuits are trying to do, which is, again, I'm just going to read this one more time.

But this is from your own your own Homeland Security Cybersecurity Infrastructure Agency. There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, change votes or was in any way compromised. I will tell you what with the lawyer, with the judge in Philadelphia said he was asking. He said, are you. Are your observers in the counting room, which is what you care about your campaign on your own?

Excuse me. Let me just finish and you can answer. Your campaign guy said there's a non-zero number of people in the room, I'm not making that up a non-zero number. That's got to be a new one for Washington. Meaningly, there are people in the room. And then Diamond said, I am asking you as a member of the bar or people representing the plaintiffs in the room. Trump campaign. Yes. Judge Diamond, I'm sorry. Then what's your problem?

And I know our problem. What's going on, John? So no, Bill, I will tell you again, got a non-zero number means that we could have one or two people in there. But you know what they did in Pennsylvania, they took the court order and they said we will move up the election observers by six feet. And then they moved back the ballot counters by six feet. If you have two people in the room from one hundred feet away, that's why the term meaningful access.

I don't know where you're getting a hundred million.

Why are you doing the ballots OK there? But that's exactly why we are contesting this.

What you up in order? And we won in Pennsylvania. But what you and your boss are are contending is not what your lawyers are even fighting in court. Here is the Trump campaign lawyer in Arizona. Corey Langhoff again said this is not a fraud case. We are not alleging fraud.

We are not saying anyone is trying to steal the election and vote and let and let me let me explain that. So, of course, that's one of your talking points.

And I understand that what's going on in Arizona is that you had this don't touch the green button where if there was a problem with the machine that was being used, the the election officials were telling the voter to touch the green button, which effectively cancelled out their vote. That is not fraud. That is a different problem in Arizona than we're alleging in Pennsylvania or Michigan or Georgia. So when you say we're not alleging fraud and you're using that as a talking point, you're mischaracterizing what the attorney in Arizona said and you're applying it to all of our lawsuits and talking point.

It was a quote from your lawyer. It's a talking point when you look. Let's let's let's not is misleading your audience. Do you want your audience to know the facts and the truth? You invited me on to explain what Team Trump is doing. And I'm telling you, you're mischaracterizing that statement to apply it to other lawsuits outside of Arizona in a way that does not apply in the context of what our lawyer said in here. OK, Rudy, disagree.

We are alleging flawed, but we are alleging fraud in in the other states. Arizona is very specific to the green button. Let's move on.

I say we're not going to come to a meeting of the minds yet. Let's move on to a more philosophical discussion of this, because the president himself has said leading up to the election repeatedly over and over again, the only way I lose is if it's rigged. Is that your view also because it seems like if you have that view in your head, then you could not just accept that you might have lost? Can you accept that you might have lost?

Of course, we can accept that we might have lost. So you think of this and the point of this, though, Bill, let me clarify, is that we want every legal vote to count. There's always a winner and always a loser in every election in the United States of America.

What we want to make this one, the loser always left out. No, that's not true. Actually, that's not true. Hillary Clinton still has not conceded the twenty six to one.

And and let me remind you that Al Gore in 2000 had more time to contest this and have a recount and simply one state that had a one very narrow issue and it took thirty seven days for that to be resolved because it was 500 votes in a giant state.

And and, Bill, that was that was the that Bush's father ran issue here.

The issue here is that we have six hundred eighty two thousand votes in Pennsylvania alone that we have not been able to see how they were counted. We have reports of election fraud and irregularities across multiple states. There are seven states now.

Don't you care about free or do you care that since 2000, voter fraud has been studied by many, many organizations, including conservative ones like the Heritage Foundation? And they found out voter fraud, in-person voter fraud is not a thing.

It's just not a thing. So why it doesn't happen on any kind of level that has ever affected any vote. And it hasn't on this one.

Aren't you don't you are you a little bit ashamed of how you're done? Wait a second.

How you're finding the people who work so hard in the most difficult election in memory, they work so hard to make. You know, that's unfair.

So many things against if they were working really hard for this than they would want to make sure that their states are certifying an accurate count.

They are should all be voting Republican. You can't say that. You can't say that for sure. Bill, don't you want to know that this election and the result is an accurate count? How much fraud is OK with you?

Why do you think so many people on the right, including people like Rupert Murdoch, Karl Rove, Erdogan, the strongman of Turkey, the pope, China now congratulated Biden? Why have so many people come over to this idea that, OK, America had a free and fair election? We're congratulating the new guy. That's the way it works. You win some. You lose some. Why?

Well, China is definitely congratulating Joe Biden because they know they can control him. Beijing Biden is something that actually really needs to be looked at. And I walked right into that one question.

All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So you go China. Congratulating Biden is not a really good thing, but we have always had contested elections through the legal channels, through the recounts. And just because we have the pope or somebody on media who is congratulating Joe Biden, no states have yet certified their results. And that's all that we're asking is to make sure that the results that are certified are the legitimate count. And I think that that is absolutely fair.

And every American should agree to that, just like Al Gore is a Democrat candidate did in 2000.

All right. I was one last question. I let you go again. I commend you for coming here. And you've got a smile on your face like, oh, are you happy warriors?

Do I got to admire that? So I'm happy to try to defend the Constitution. Oh, that's what it's about.

Yeah. So OK, so but let's just for the final question, let's take a little truth serum.

My guess is if I gave you a truth serum, you'd say, yeah, I know Joe Biden loves this one, but. I'm with a group of people who just don't believe the ideas the Democrats have are so dangerous for America. I think this is what you believe, that we just can't let them take over. And so whatever we have to do now, Trump tweeted out, retweeted Jon Jon Voight tweet the other day, which said, This is now our greatest fight since the civil war, the battle of righteousness versus Satan, which I guess makes Biden Satan.

And then he continued, yes, Satan, because these leftists are evil. I know you're evangelical. Do you believe Biden is Satan? Do you believe leftists are evil? Do you believe that it's OK to do anything to prevent them from taking over? Anything, no, I am an evangelical, I'm an outspoken Christian, and I believe that we have a country that has a rule of law rather than rulers, and that's what we're defending. I campaigned very aggressively and very hard for President Trump because I believe that the American people should have re-elected him for four more years.

But that was the campaign on November 3rd. The people cast their ballot. And what I'm fighting for now is to make sure to protect the American system, which requires that every legal vote be counted fairly and accurately. I believe in our system, the separation of powers, and that the judicial branch at the end of the day needs to intervene to make sure that whoever is declared the winner is the legitimate, fair winner. Just like in baseball, umpire has to call balls and strikes fairly.

I am aggressively fighting for election integrity.

Trump got the right girl for the job. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. All right. Let's meet our panel. All right, this will be a somewhat different discussion. He is a fellow, a fellow fellow at both the Atlantic Council and the Modern War Institute and author of the novel Devolution. Max Brooks is here.

And someday I'm going to be a fellow somewhere. Yeah. All right. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic and author of Girl and Caitlin Flanagan is back with us. Her first thoughts on Jenna. Well, first off, what a what a lovely interview with the Black Knight from Monty Python's The Holy Grail.

I mean, that literally was that scene your arms off? No, it isn't. Yes, it is. I have a real though I have to correct her on something, though.

When Jenna said that we have this precedent of taking a very long time because of Gore, Bush, Harry Lippman pointed out this week that the 9/11 Commission, one of the things that it said, that that is just a factor to consider in 9/11 was that there was not a new president being read into security briefings for much longer than usual. And that this period of transition, it's not just about hiring people and it's not just about decorating the Oval Office.

Very important things are being postponed because of this lunatic again.

But this is the supposition that Biden is actually going to stand there on January 20th. I still don't it could happen, but I'm sorry. I've been using the term slow moving coup in the show since, like before the last election was over.

And I finally I heard somebody else say it. Barry McCaffrey this week said, we are watching a slow moving Trump coup to defy the Biden election. Believe your eyes. Now, maybe this won't come to pass, but, you know, we terminated him as president. We didn't support him as a narcissist. You cannot break up with a narcissist. Yes, I've read about this now.

And if it's we know from Michael Cohen's book that that Trump has spent all his life just having these aggressive lawsuits about ridiculous things.

I was one of them. Oh, OK. I just spend like yea hundred grand in court to defend the fucking ape thing. Right.

And he will go on and on and on about these.

And it pisses me off that there is no repercussions for a frivolous lawsuit.

It's like take your shot if you don't get it. No harm, no foul. Same as this. There should be repercussions for trying this shit.

Well, you shouldn't just be able to like, oh, I'll try to steal the election. And if I can't, well, I think there might be. From his philosophical point of view, we have to remember that Trump is a dishonorable man in a system that operated on the honor code. Yes.

And so a lot of things were not done simply because they were not done post Trump.

And that's, by the way, why we have laws, laws take over where personal morality ends. And so, therefore, a lot of things that were just not right will have to be illegal in the post Trump government.

But again, I don't think that we're at the end of this process just because he sounded a little although she denied it. Yeah, a little more conciliatory. I think first he's first tried to stop people from voting altogether. Yes. You know, vote suppression. That didn't work. Then you go to the courts. If that doesn't work, then you go, I've said this. We go to the Electoral College. The state legislatures are in the hands of Republicans.

They actually pick the electors. If that doesn't work, you got the Supreme Court. And then, of course, we have to talk about the purge at the Pentagon.

Well, astep. If you if you can't get it any other way, is the military. It is very. You're going to mean that he is getting rid of the top people who fired the defense secretary and the three guys under him, you this is what coups do. They put people in place when you need them in place? You're a military expert. And I can tell you that when coups happened, this is the difference. For successful coup to happen, you need to have people in place who actually are not just loyal to you, but have the loyalty of the people under them.

So these loyalists he's put in place are great, a consummate fuckups who don't know what they're doing and have no loyalty from the.

But in the military, you just you in the military, you take orders from the fuck up above you, even if he's a fuck up.

But these acts really mean anything in the military as I got to do. What the fuck up above me. Remember that you frag that. And that's a good point because these are all civilians. As far as the uniformed services, Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was very, very clear. And I was actually I was in a conference once where he turned the cameras off because he doesn't screw around when it comes to the press. He said, I do not want a sound bite taken out of context and spun for political agenda.

You brought him up because if he's the next to go, we're in trouble. He's the head of the Joint Chiefs. He said I think his quote was, I didn't belong here when Trump did that thing where he emptied Lafayette Park and you brought out the military. So that couldn't have gone over well with Trump. And he said the military, as we've always known it, should only be a last resort. It should not involve in personal politics.

It shouldn't be used against your own people is another good idea for the military.

But but if we start if I see a purge of generals, even colonels, because that's what happens. I've seen it in other countries. We've read about it. That's when you know you're in trouble because they're getting Stalin did it you getting rid of the officer corps that doesn't agree with you and leave. And we know the military has this super Christian element. And I mean, I'm not saying anything about evangelicals, lovely people. She's one. But there is a big connection more than we thought between Trump and the evangelicals, I would say, because they are gullible people.

They're used to believing a bunch of nonsense. And now Kuhnen comes along and Donald Trump. Yes.

And believe this nonsense. And he I feel like Trump is using this Christian arm now. Well, that's the whole theory of the case for these Republicans is that the Democrats have organized a SWAT team of poll workers and that they're highly organized.

I don't think I've ever met a poll worker. I mean, and it's a hugely important job. My mother would do it every four years. This is not an elite fighting force that can screw up with an entire election because they have a heart of assassins. They're they're disorganized. They're small time. They're doing their job. They believe in their job. And it's really wrong to to bring their work and their service into this kind of question.

They did an incredible job. They did it. It's like the one feather in our cap in the country that can't fucking do anything about the coronaviruses. Fucked up every other thing. This one we got. Right, the bureaucrats.

Yeah, but can I just read it again if you don't think it's possible.

Mike Pompeo. I thought he was a regular Republican, not my type of guy. But we're expecting a smooth transition to the second Trump administration. This is our secretary of state. This is days after the election. Peter Navarro, what is he? He's something big in the White House. He said we're proceeding under the assumption. That there'll be a second Trump administration, Newt Gingrich called what's going on, a left wing power grab. Otherwise known as an election, yes, it's Mitch McConnell.

I mean, we saw Mitch McConnell do this with Merrick Garland, we watch that. And when he really wouldn't, Mitch McConnell couldn't. He wouldn't. But he did. So are we sure he wouldn't? Couldn't?

Well, what you said, I think, is very telling, because the people that I have spoken to in national security and homeland security think that while you never want to say nothing would ever happen, you never want to say that a coup would never happen, especially in the age of Trump. The danger right now, the real danger that we're facing is a homegrown insurgency, because think about this is the first time since the 90s when militia enlistment has gone up during a Republican administration.

It always goes up during Democrats, down during Republicans meaning meaning any sort of armed government, anti-government group, any armed anti-government insurgent. Clearly not a government. No, no, not. These are just guys in the know. These are the Timothy McVeigh. These are guys playing army in the woods.

Well, they're more than they ever were before. They're one they're more powerful. I know, but they're not official. Oh, no, no, no, no. Just not camouflage. And they go in the U.S. these are militias. These are anti-government militia. When you say militia. It sounds very you know, I don't mean, I don't know, militias of 76 with the tricorn or anything. No. I mean, there's just guys who can't get laid who are playing in the woods, OK?

It's only one. And but they're doing a lot more now. Yeah. That they have guns.

Well, that's the threat is when we think to ourselves, oh, God, what if there is a coup? What are we going to do? Do we do peaceful demonstrations, a general strike? Well, they have a plan.

If they feel like this government has been stolen and they're all that's left, they have their AR 15 and they have plans possibly for the next Oklahoma.

They've said it. They and they have said it.

We saw this with the attempted kidnapping of the governor of Michigan. I must go back to Jon Voight and say you do if.

Yes, because he speaks for a lot of people if you think that they are Satan. Yes. And again, this is a big part of Kuhnen. Yes. Which is now a big part of the Republican belief system. If you believe that the other side are. Pedophile ring baby ITRs blood of babies, which I think is I think the blood is good, but the baby, I don't get this straight and just push the baby around. I never read the Protocols of Zion.

I think it's a very anti-Semitic trope that they're also working into that that whole theory.

And it's always in there. It's always going to say never. It's like paprika. Yeah. Never hurts to throw a little. No. Whenever a bell rings, Mel Gibson gets his way. It's just always a little is good.

But there is a mega march this weekend. Yeah. Is it tomorrow that it starts. I know they don't have permits, but they're calling it the million mega march.

Yeah, I'm expecting 50000 people based on his estimates, but.

But say it is a million. I mean, this is in the city of Washington, D.C., a black city. Yeah. There's going to be counter marches and good. Maybe maybe it's good that these people get, as Napoleon called it, a whiff of the grapeshot because I'm putting my money on Black Lives Matter on this.

I mean, seriously. I just think they're harder and harder, harder people. I just do I think that the the proud boys are going to be the pants boys. If if this comes to this, it could be like Black Hawk Down for them there. And they came to Washington and now they're sorry they came. Well, but know what?

Max and I were talking to both the kids of World War Two. You know, that's what I know. My father's long past, too.

OK, so it's like for the first time in our lives, our country needs us and we need to stand together. Even if the election was lost. Stand behind the winner. Yeah, we need to win on our side. We need to start being far more generous about people who have supported Trump and not keep these lists and start saying that we're going to start making a bigger tent. We're going to start working across the aisle because we can't go on like this.

All right. I'm going to get to that at the end of the show. But right now, I just want to say Election Day always brings not just the winners, the big winners, but here in California, of course, we are the king of the proposition. We kind of invented this in America. We're rather proud of it, although I hate it every year because reading the voter guide takes me ten hours. But we like our propositions and it's caught on all around the country.

And the results are now in from a lot of different states. Would you like to hear some of the state?

OK, this is very important. Some of the the propositions that were on ballots around the country, for example, of Florida has passed Proposition seven.

That makes it illegal to keep your shotgun and crystal meth in the same drawer.

That's it. That's going to be big in my home state of New Jersey.

Passed Prop 11. Oh, this is good. Establishes contact tracing for those exposed to the cast of Jersey Shore.

This went on in my state. Oh, California, we passed Prop 18 requires Real Housewives to recycle their old faces.

This is important. North Dakota voted on Prop 12, which officially changes the state's name to the real Dakota.

Portland, Portland, Oregon, they passed Measure 15, which replaces the city's police department with dudes who play ultimate Frisbee in the in the park.

And Texas passed Prop two. Yeah, all decisions now about whether to have a baby are private between the doctor and the slut. OK.

But what were you saying before I had to do my bit? You know what I was thinking? What if Bernie Sanders was the candidate? I mean, if they went this nuts about centrist old sleepy Joe, but they're not afraid of sleepy Joe.

I mean, we all have to accept that for very good reason. And everybody watch that murder.

You know, it's eight minutes on television. The whole country rose up and there. And following that, there were a hundred days of violence. And I think the response, even though that was a tiny proportion of the Democratic Party electorate and even though it was inspired by the most important cause we can imagine, I think they are seeing that. I think when they say evil, I think they're seeing that and they're not really understanding that Joe's their guy.

You know, he's been reaching across the aisle.

Oh, they definitely don't. I mean, he won by slightly. You know, it was a it's a certain victory. But, you know, when you look at the margins, again, we all know the pollsters were wrong. We thought it was going to be a much bigger victory.

He won by I mean, in other words, the country looked to Trump for four years and he won by that much more than Hillary.

First of all, doesn't that say that maybe we're not as sexist as we thought? I mean, it really doesn't seem to be that, oh, Hillary was a woman.

We wouldn't vote for her.

They voted for Biden by this much more after Trump fucked up for that long.

But, you know, that is how you defeat an insurgency. You do not do it with street violence because every insurgent you kill, you make another hundred.

And this is exactly what my dad did in World War Two. He hunted what was called werewolf's, which were Nazis when the rifle went into the hills, vowed to fight the allies for 100 years. And you know how we defeated that insurgency?

We rebuilt Germany. Right. Guys came back out of the headlines.

I agree. And they said, hey, you Brits, I got a job for you.

And if we want to diffuse this homegrown insurgency, I agree we have to govern.

Well, in fact, if you look at the US military's counterinsurgency manual, peel away the tactical layers, it's just a handbook for good government. But here's the problem.

We need a Marshall Plan for West Virginia. Is that. Yes, OK, Marshall, it. Well, no, but because this is what we've been talking about ever since I've been on the show, globalisation has ripped half the heart out of this country and automation is going to rip half the other heart out.

And if we don't get a handle on this, if we don't start to govern by what affects the most Americans, then we will lose again in four years.

Yeah, no, I mean, it's true. I mean, the Democrats lost their base of of especially white working class voters.

Ronald Reagan. Right.

I mean, the Irish were never Republicans in this country until. Right. Reagan came along and they they the white working class, the Democrats have the policies that, you know, support the safety net and that the working class really needs. But socially, we're very, very different. And it's terrible. It's terrible. It's heartbreaking for the Democratic Party to have lost any of the working class.

So but here's the conundrum. I mean, I guess I agree you don't want to further alienate the Republican base, the Republican voter, on the other hand, the Republican leadership. So has the whip hand in how power comes about in this country. And if we get back a little of it with Biden, I think now he'd need the Senate to do this. But you need to when you have a little of this power, especially since things are so stacked against with the Electoral College, the way it is that Senate two senators, four from the fucking Dakotas, they have how many people and 40 million and counting.

With these structural deficit, you have to get back power, which means packing the court, which means adding Puerto Rico as a state.

You have to do those moves.

You have to they've shown with Merrick Garland and now this and everything else Trump has done, they are no conscience about power. We need to get back power. We're like the deer hunter where they have us in that shack playing Russian roulette. We got to get more bullets in the gun.

But the best way to do that is to understand how did Trump get elected? Because every fanatic, no matter Nazis, communist Taliban, they're always starts with the kernel of a legitimate concern. Correct. What are those legitimate concerns? Because people who voted for Obama voted for Trump absolute. My aunt, who I love in Yonkers, New York, voted for Trump. Yep. She's not a fanatic. Right. Why? So we can fix these problems?

Because, look, there are issues we all agree on, right? We none of us want illegal immigration.

We just don't want to treat illegal immigrants like animals in cages. Right?

Well, yes. But I mean, Democrats could say a lot of things during the primaries. I mean, they made it sound like. Come on, come, all right, and you get free health care. Well, and that's they wanted to give there were certain elements of our party that said we want to give prisoners the right to vote in prison.

I know so.

It will be nice, though, if I can just fantasize for a minute if we got back to a place where we didn't have to operate all the time by, this is what Donald Trump thinks and now we have to react to that as opposed to just what's true or not. Right.

Donald Trump thinks he didn't lose the election. And then it's just this bizarre people our age. It's just bizarre that Donald Trump that's a joke. His whole life was a joke and still is that he controls our thinking, everything, everything that we have to pretend all the time. But the best way to to isolate that's the thing that you do in an insurgent. You don't destroy them, you isolate them. Mao Tse tung said that the insurgent is the fish that swims in the sea of peasants, drain the sea and do that by delivering.

Yeah, that's how Franklin Roosevelt brought about this liberal world that we all enjoy. He delivered. So we've got concrete results.

But here again, I hate to agree with all this, but making it happen, I was reading this week about parler, you know, parler.

Oh, yeah. You know what Parla is one guy. Good.

OK on it. He's in the military now. It's I mean, you can be on it. It's it's like the curtain turning into like the right wing Twitter, the right wing Facebook. It shot to number one on and the Apple store and Google. OK, if you think it's bad that we have curated feeds now, which we do, of course we don't all see the same news. We see the opposite news. That's why a vast majority of Republicans still think Trump won the election.

Right? Right. But now we're going to have different platforms.

Apparently, this is because and I was criticizing someone last week for going up for Twitter, threw off this guy who was one of the heads of homeland security, and he was giving his opinion about the wall and Mexicans. And it wasn't my opinion, but it was an opinion. Right. It should not have been shut down. They're not doing it well. So now these people, of course, are saying, well, we'll go start our own.

And they did. And now we're not ever going to hear the same information. I don't know how we achieve these goals that you're talking about. Yeah, worthy though they are.

One of the things we can achieve is let people have a forum, but make sure you know who they are. It's like you're a health guy, right?

In the 1970s, my mother lobbied so hard to get ingredients put on the boxes of the food she was feeding her child. Well, the social media platforms need to do that by putting a check next to every single member. I had to be vetted to go on Twitter and Facebook. I'm sure you did. I'm sure you did. Right. So people know that it's really us. Well, that needs to be every single member. So I know I'm not listening to Sergei and Igor in Kaliningrad.

Right. But if we if we want to bring back people, you know, bring back the right, we have to at least pretend slightly. But every single major news network is not completely leftist. Right. You know? Oh, I was just trying to watch the returns. Everyone was crying. I go to MSNBC. No, they're crying, too.

If we're crying about the returns from Allegheny County and we're just it's explicitly showing that our newscasters are so completely biased.

Of course, the right's going to go somewhere else.

Of course, they're going to leave the traditional news. And, you know, The New York Times, forget it. It has nothing to say to the right. And I think that's where we all that's this issue that our country actually needs us. You know, we all need to grow up in news gathering. Sources need to grow up the people on air, no more crying on the news. They'll tell you about somebody getting beheaded after school, but then you get the Allegheny County returns.

Oh, my God.

It'll have to be taken out on a stretcher.

We you know, we're just going to have to really suck it up and be a little less partisan. I agree.

And by the way, to your point about issues, marijuana, minimum wage, Medicaid.

When when Democrats run on those issues, they win and they even win in red states. This last election, New Jersey, Arizona, Montana, South Dakota made marijuana legal. Even Mississippi made it legal for medicinal. Trump won Florida, but minimum wage race won big in Florida and he was against it during the twenty eighteen midterms, expanding Medicaid benefits. Idaho, Nebraska, Utah. Can you find more conservative trio of states than that? Well, the problem is it's not the secret sauce is not that secret.

Right.

And the propositions are where people don't feel I belong to Republicans or I belong to Democrats. The propositions are where they can just say what they believe. And it's actually they have a lot of common beliefs.

All right. All right. Thank you. This was really enlightening. Thanks for coming.

Time for new rules, everybody. OK, no, since Mike Pence vanished for a week and came back wearing a mask. We have to assume he got his lips done.

And Mike, don't stop there. Get yourself a killer rack because America already has an ass that just won't quit. Nurul, the Trump Winery has to commemorate the election with a special vintage sour grapes.

With notes of bitter orange horseshit and something Eric dropped in the barrel, sour grapes is a full bodied, voluptuous, dare I say, morbidly obese whine that goes with everything from burnt steak to KFC, also available in a sparkling variety if they can get the hookers to pee in it.

New rule, McDonald's must stop trying to come up with healthy options like their new plant sandwich and just lean into being McDonald's, McDonalds, the greasy, high calorie junk food for when you want to eat, fuck your mouth. With absolute garbage, because everything in your life says, fuck it. Besides, McDonald's already has a big plant there called French Fries. Knew also, someone has to tell ifone enough already with the hidden features, the latest is there touch sensitive secret button.

Well, good luck waiting for men to find that.

Because the key guitar hero, someone must tell Rudy Giuliani, who's been out promoting unsubstantiated conspiracy theories about the integrity of our electoral process. You might be taking a little more seriously if the last time we saw you, you weren't lying on a bed fumbling for your dick.

And finally, new rule with two Senate seats in Georgia, still possible seats that will make the difference between gridlock and progress, Democrats must figure out why so many voters still say to them, you're good enough, you're smart enough. But doggone it, we don't like you.

Under the headline, Something Went Wrong, The New York Times described a post-election conference call between Democratic leaders where they wept, coerced and traded blame.

Wait, I thought we won this one, which we did. We did. And yes, ding dong, the whiny little bitch is dead.

Celebration is in order.

We took a big step towards saving democracy and in the process lost two hundred and eighty pounds of ugly fat. All right.

That's my last batch of song for the next five minutes.

But Democrats were supposed to flip the Senate and didn't supposed to flip state legislatures, not a one. And they lost seats in the House in a year. That was so much about making people aware of racism. Their share of minority votes went down. The message to Democrats from so much of the country seems to be we don't like Trump, but we still can't bring ourselves to vote for you. If Cracker Jack was made of popcorn and dog shit and half the people throughout the popcorn popcorn should want to know why.

Liberals can either write off half the country as irredeemable or they can ask, what is it about a D next to a candidate's name that makes it so toxic? Let's ask Ruben Gallego. He's a congressman from Arizona. He was asked how his Democrats could do a better job connecting to Latinos. He said first start by not using the term Latino. Which the vast majority of Latinos have never heard of, and when they do, don't like it. Who likes it, pandering white politicians who mistake Twitter for real people and don't get it, that Latino is like fetch, you can try to make it happen, but it's never going to.

Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spane Burger said after the election, if we are classifying Tuesday as a success, we will get fucking torn apart in twenty, twenty two. That's a congresswoman.

She was urging members not to talk about defunding the police.

James Clyburn agreed. Defund the police is killing our party, he said. Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb says Democratic rhetoric needs to be dialed back, it needs to be rooted in common sense. Thank you. Thank you. There, in my opinion, is the crux of the problem, Democrats too often don't come across as having common sense to a huge swath of Americans. And these are people who believe in Cuidad.

But as I've said before, politics in this country is binary, you have to wear everything anyone on your side does. Republicans are the party of don't wear masks, kids in cages lock her up, and Democrats are the party of every hypersensitive social justice warrior woak bullshit story in the news. They're the party that disappears, people. Or tries to make them apologize for ridiculous things. Anne Hathaway. Apologized last week because in her new movie, she plays a witch.

A fictional character that has three claw like fingers, and that's offensive to people with limb differences. Hey. The week before the NHL, Arizona Coyotes dropped a player after it came out in the press that when he was in eighth grade, he bullied a disabled kid. Yes, that's a bad thing to do. But are we really going after people for what they did in middle school now?

Democrats already lost seats for going after what Brett Kavanaugh did in high school, common sense. Last year, I read about how NBC held an emergency meeting to determine if Mario Lopez should be fired from his job at Access Hollywood. I thought, holy shit, did he sexually assault somebody?

No. He went on a podcast. And when the host brought up the trend of liberal parents letting toddlers pick their gender identity, he said, my God, if you're three years old and you're saying you think you're a boy or a girl, I just think it's a dangerous as a parent to make that determination. Cue the groveling apology. Followed by America saying, yeah, I think Mario's right, maybe kids shouldn't make big life decisions while you still need to make choo choo noises to get the food in their mouth.

I can do this all day, cite stories big and small that are endlessly on people's news feeds that add up to a constant drip, drip, drip of these people are nuts. Everybody heard about that story out of San Francisco, but a guy who got on a crowded elevator with a female professor and when she asked what floor, he said women's lingerie. You know, a little joke for which he earned a formal complaint because it left her shaken, shaken.

Who are these jellyfish? Like the woman who almost derailed Biden's campaign because he kissed the back of her head before she went out to make a speech, she said her brain couldn't process what was happening. Really, your brain couldn't process that like string theory or wormholes.

An old man was trying to show support in his old man way.

She said she was embarrassed, shocked, confused. Well, then, the outside world isn't for you and.

And certainly running the world isn't. I talked to a guy in the Midwest once who told me this story about the day he went out to get his car in the supermarket parking lot, but couldn't back out because the mother and her very young daughter were standing behind his car, which was next to their car, which had a Hillary bumper sticker on it. And the little girl was screaming at her mother, who was profusely apologizing to the child. And he said to me, I just can't let people like that take over this country.

That's what people vote on, not policy. Democrats kept saying in the campaign, you can't possibly think Trump is preferable to what we're selling and many voters keep saying, yes, we can. In fact, our primary reason voting for him is to create a bulwark against you because your side thinks silence is violence and looting is not. Because you're the party of chasing speakers off college campuses and making everyone walk on eggshells and replacing let's not see color with, let's see it always and everywhere, formerly the position of the Ku Klux Klan.

It would be so easy to win elections if we would just drop this shit. Democrats need to listen to our new president elect's old boss, this idea of purity, and you're never compromised and you're always politically broke and all that stuff, you should get over that quickly, quickly, like before they vote in Georgia.

All right. That's our show. I want to thank Max Brooks, Caitlin Flanagan and Jenna will be back next week for our big finale. Thank you very much. Catch all new episodes of Real Time with Bill Maher every Friday night at 10:00 or watch him any time on HBO. On demand for more information, log on to HBO Dotcom.