Ep. #735: Vice President JD Vance, Sen. Raphael Warnock, Larry Wilmore

Real Time with Bill Maher

Bill Maher discusses Washington's political chaos, Iran negotiations, and rising progressive activism, featuring Vice President JD Vance, Senator Raphael Warnock, and Larry Wilmore. The episode blends satire with serious commentary on democracy, media, and national identity.

Key takeaways

• Iran nuclear talks show cautious progress
• Immigration enforcement sparks debate on tactics
• Social media censorship influenced 2020 election discourse

Transcript preview

Welcome to an HBO podcast from the HBO Late Night Series real time with Bill Ma. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, great to be here. I know. It's a last show for take a summer break for a month. You gotta give me a little time off. It's been nerve-wracking lately. Fourth of July coming up and you know it, today it opened Supergirl. Perfect for the Fourth of July. It was. Yeah, big superhero. Another superhero movie opened this week. But what's going on in Washington, uh, Deadpool. Oh, we kid. We kid the reflecting pool. I'm tired of hearing about the goddamn reflecting pool. I got to say, I don't really give a shit about the reflecting pool. And I love America, but I got to admit, we're the only place you could make a pool improved by pissing in it. With this. that we should spiffy up Washington a little. It needed a little spiffing up, so they tried it with the pool. Whatever happened, you know, what happened next, the algae, and the pool is filled with algae. So then they put a fence around the pool. I like that. I for one, I'm tired of algae coming into this country. I don't know what cost the problems in the pool. Trump says it's lunatic liberals, which is also what he calls me, but you know I was not in Washington who vandalized it. So now he's suing ABC news for reporting falsely on the pool. And ABC says this is baseless, outrageous, and preposterous, and how would you like us to make out the check? But you know, problem is now, there are dead ducks in the pool. Or possibly murdered by Antifa. But you know, the pool is dragging down the president's approval ratings. It's like a little, in the low 30s now in the country and among independence 25% and 0% with ducks. The other big headache of course is the ceasefire with Iran not going perfectly well as ceasefire often don't Iran hit a cargo ship yesterday and you know Trump wants this war over he just you know he just really does know we fired back a little but you know he's basically he's basically he said damage was done you know A month ago he was calling them deranged scumbags. Now it's let me finish. Durendes come back, but very fine fanatics on both sides. I'd say it's got to be tough negotiating this with whoever is doing that. Oh yeah, it's the vice president and he's here tonight. It's got to be the tough job negotiating for this country in this war because last week when he was in Switzerland talking about it with the Iranians at the time President Trump threatened to kill them He said if the Strait isn't open you won't have a country you won't make it back to your country fucking alive. Okay events left, President Trump took him aside and he goes, let me know if there's anything I can do to hinder. But now let's talk about the big earthquake on the left because this is big news in this country. I don't know if you saw what happened in New York, there were three candidates for, these are the primaries. They are going to win the election, so there are three Democrats in Congress. These are meant down these people. Democratic socialists, I think very different than the Democratic Party. What happened is, you know, for years we've been asking young people to vote. Well now young people are voting and they're voting to abolish the police, abolish prisons, unlimited immigration, so no cops, no prisons, no borders, proving for sure that eating tide pods does cause brain damage. There's one candidate. She will be a congressperson from New York's 13th District who the New York Times asked her if someone murders someone randomly should they go to jail couldn't get her to say yes for that She says no more police ever at all ever she says our veterans or war criminals She said fuck Kamala Harris and Joe Biden is a rapist So there is a woke mind virus and I think we found patient zero Her name is D.A. L. L. Avila Chevalier. They call her D-A-C. She makes AOC look like L-O-L-L-T-F. But good news, if you're a Democrat with a Nazi tattoo, you're no longer the weird one. She also says that the United States, the country she's running to be a part of, is occupied native land and says this country America is a fucking disgrace. During the oath of office she's going to take a knee. black men and Arab men fetishize ugly colonizer women to which the Kardashians wrote back fuck you big. All right we got a great show we have Senator Raphael Warnock here and Larry Wobor is here. But first up he is the 50 of vice president of the United States and author of two number one best-selling books. He'll build the elegy and the one that's out now communion finding my way back to faith. All right. How are you going? talk to me that's odd isn't it it is very odd I mean and I'm like this new woman who was elected in New York do you think she'll come on the show oh I know you want no I can't get aOC I can't get me and I'm I'm gonna get kamalharis you know took me eight years to get Obama anyway let's not talk about my problem Or even more, the view. The question is whether it's harder than the view. That's right. Well look, you're negotiating for America. I'm rooting for America. So I want success here. But you know, you came out of these meetings. I heard sort of the same thing. I've heard a lot of talk about progress and that. I've heard it so many times before. Why is this different? Why isn't it bullshit this time? Well, I'd say the most important thing, bill is that the people who judge whether the people who judge whether the oil is actually flowing. They judge this as a success, right? So if you look at oil right now, it's back down to $73 a barrel, got up to $126 a barrel. So there's a signal that there's something real going on here. I think the second bill is whether we make the final deal, because you have to remember this MOU is fundamentally, it says the straits are going to be open, the oil is going to flow, we're seeing that If we don't make the final deal, their nuclear program is still destroyed, they're still much weaker as a country. So my attitude is America wins either way, but I do think that what the president has done is asked us to do something that frankly nobody in 47 years of dealing with the Iranians has done, which is offer them an opportunity to fundamentally transform how they behave with the West. They've been the largest state sponsor of terrorism basically since they began as a nation or at least as an Islamic republic 47 years ago. He's saying, look, if they're we're willing to change too. If they're not willing to change we still fundamentally have all the cards and I think it's a good place for us to be. But their program isn't destroyed. The nuclear program isn't destroyed. The nuclear program is not destroyed. The whole thing is we have to get in there and see. Other rest we wouldn't be doing this. Well let me say first of all so a nuclear program and I'm hardly a nuclear scientist. I'm a lowly politician. The thing that the thing that you have to destroy. their ability to enrich uranium, which has been destroyed. You have to destroy their ability. Well, because you need functioning centrifuges that can actually spend. We know that they're going. We got to get in there and we got to get the dust. And we didn't get in there. So how do we get the dust? So that's actually a separate question. So there's the highly enriched stockpile, which, by the way was allowed to accumulate, that we want to get it. it's buried deep underground and they don't have the ability to turn it into a nuclear weapon so the program is functionally destroyed we're just talking about can we set them back even further through these negotiations okay i'm very excited about you know i only have limited time of this so i want to move on other topics i want to tell you what people have been saying to me you know people get excited why you have the vice president i'm pretty impressed myself i'm very excited about this you know i i had pence on both his vice president a couple of pence Okay. Yeah. Okay. What did you talk about with Mike Pence? Sex, drugs and rock and roll? I don't know. I don't know. I'm... No, I... He was a lot more human than I thought he... But here's what people, when I say you, here's what sticks in their craw. The number one issue, immigration. Not immigration, we like it that you closed the border. That needed to be done. The people who were here, the way you treated, I'm talking about your administration. You weren't out there yourself. But ice, all that shit, too rough, too mean, too unnecessary. I think you go, I'm not telling you what to do. Okay, I'm just giving you some advice as a friend. Okay, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not asking you to apologize, but I don't like what people do that. I'm just saying you go a long way toward getting people who are just completely shut the door to you in your ministry, if you would just own that, that you guys went too far, you went too far, and you should own it like you did childless cat ladies. that bill is you cannot do any deportations without law enforcement and you can't do a law enforcement operation like that without having some situations that don't look good when they're when they're recorded like that I mean let me give you like just one obvious example let's just set aside the the immigration element of this okay if you take a guy who's committed murder and you go in and arrest that guy sometimes that person's gonna resist arrest sometimes if you take a video of it's out of it's out of it's out of and you don't appreciate why that person is being arrested in the first place, it looks pretty icky if you take that out of context video clip. And what I worry about is when people say you can't ever do immigration enforcement if it produces a bad video clip, what they're really saying is you can't ever actually do immigration enforcement. We had 12 million people come into the country, into the interior over the last four years, I should say from 2021 to 2025, and we were elected with a mandate to get some of those people out of the United States to get some of those people out of those people out of those people out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States to get some of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the United States out of the States of America you can't do that easily law enforcement deporting people is never an easy process so I appreciate your argument that we've gone too far but we couldn't do nothing and I don't think there was an easy way to do this of course just there's a middle ground see the other thing that bothers us about stuff like that is that nothing ever lands in the middle which is what I'm always trying to get