The Daily Beast Podcast - Adam Grant Disses Musk and Mar-a-Lago Madness

Episode Date: November 14, 2024

Organizational psychologist and author Adam Grant joins this week’s podcast to help unpack America’s political baggage, sharing leadership advice and coping strategies for the current moment. The Daily Beast’s executive editor Hugh Dougherty offers insight into the “patio power games” playing out at Mar-a-Lago as president-elect Donald Trump assembles his new administration—which may be filled with outlandish, cable TV personalities, but is ruled behind the scenes by a 67-year-old grandmother in aviator shades. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, just pop it in to share an excerpt from the newest episode of the Daily Beast podcast, hosted by our chief creative and content officer Joanna Coles and late night legend Samantha Bee. We're now joined by a true media maverick and journalism powerhouse. I know that because I hired him. Daily Beast executive editor, Hugh Doherty. Hugh took over the reins this past June. He brought his no-holds-barred approach to the Beast from his reporting days at the Daily Telegraph, the New York Post and the Daily Mail.

And I'm so glad we've finally forced you to come on the pod, Hugh. It's a pleasure to be here, Joanna. And Sam, I've been waiting for this day for years. I've been waiting for that. I feel like I've been waiting for this all my life. So thank you. Huey, if I may call you Huey on air, as it were. It's been a pretty busy week at Mar-a-Lago.

I think of you as our Mar-a-Lago patio correspondent. Tell us about what's going on down there. And I'm disappointed that you're not in your Tommy Bahamas. best shirt. I gave you the option of buying a Mara Lago membership for The Daily Beast and you did not want to part with a million dollars. It's a million dollars. Are you kidding? The most recent memberships have been an offer for million dollars. Sam, I know you can probably stretch to that, but so I'm going to do my best to take you onto the patio and into the fake situation room that Donald Trump is using in Marilago.

He has a fake situation room. So Trump and his closest AIDS are working in two places at Maralago. During the day, they're in the fake situation room. They've set up a big room full of monitors and they are watching clips of the people that he is considering for his cabinet and for his top positions.

And the big judgment for Trump, we are told, is how do they perform defending him on air? Of course they do. So who's the best attack dog? Are they telegenic? Are those the two markers? We believe those are the two markers. The best indication we have has been the order in which people have been appointed.

And the first big name to be appointed, of course, was Elise Stefaniac. She's a Republican member of Congress for upstate New York. And she is going to become Trump's ambassadors to the United Nations. She became best known for her all-out attacks. on the presidents of Harvard and Penn during the occupations of their campuses by anti-Israel protesters. And she's endeared herself to Trump by being a ferocious defender of him, not just on Fox News, but on mainstream media as well. And because she's the first that was appointed, I think that gives you some insight into what he's looking for in his cabinet. She definitely has the air of wanting to sit at the table with all the cool girls.

I do have a question, can I ask, okay, so can you set the scene for me a little bit? Like, okay, so what does that patio look like versus the situation room? So they've made like a fake situation. I just want to kind of get a picture of it. Can you just kind of draw a picture of what that looks like? Like who's sitting where? Who's there? So Marilago, of course, it's a huge complex.

And the central stage is the lawn and patio. And at night, it's set with tail. and the central table is set for Trump and whoever he is dining with. It's surrounded by a rope and it's underneath a canopy. And around that are arrayed different tables. Of course, this is a great time of view to eat outside in Florida. It's 84 degrees, 85 degrees, just about every day this week. And at the inner table, Trump is always present in the evening.

And with him is whoever is in favor at that moment. For the last since the election, at least three times Elon Musk has been spotted at the table. Melania, Trump, has been spotted at least once. So she's moved back then? Melania's movements are not entirely clear. She has been seen at Maralago on the night of the election night and on a subsequent night. Whether she stays in Mara Lago or returns to New York, we don't know. And obviously, we don't really know what our plans are for the West Wing,

although she has hired an aid from Goldman Sachs, who is going to help her staff her presence in the White House. I wonder if Elon moves into the East Wing. I loved Anna Navarro's suggestion that he was now the first lady. Elon himself is calling himself the first buddy. And Kai Trump, who is regarded as Trump's favorite grandchild, the 17-year-old daughter of Don Jr., she's calling him Uncle Elon and saying he has reached Uncle's status. Wow.

And Susie Wiles is there the whole time in her aviator. Shades, keeping the whole process going forward. Susie Wiles is incredibly powerful as Trump's chief of staff. She was the co-manager of his campaign, and she has been credited with bringing organization and discipline to the people around Trump, which is a notoriously difficult skill. She's not what you think of as one of the Trump woman, and I'm going to defer on her appearance, but unusually she's a 67-year-old grandmother, and she's from a very conventional Republican background and that's not something that has ever really been seen in the Trump circles before.

He's referred to her as the ice queen or the ice maiden and her tell when she needs to bring some discipline and order and frankly to get Trump to stop as she puts on those mirrored aviators. And that is said reduces him to silence. Wow, Dolores Umbrage. I love it. I love it so much. Oh, that's interesting that she has a tell because Prince Andrew, Apparently, when he was at parties, if he was bored with the people he was talking to, he would look up at the ceiling.

And that was the sign for the aides to move in and move him along. I dare say he wasn't doing that very much to Jeffrey Epstein's because I think he was thoroughly engaged there. Wow. I need a tell. I need a tell for when I want to get out of a comedy. Okay. So all day, so all day we're in the fake situation room. In the evening, we're on the patio.

And then Donald Trump goes off and does like a DJ set. He spends the DJed wheel. DJD. DJT. So far there's been no sign of president-elect DJD-JT, but it is one of his favorite activities at Mar-a-Lago, and he gets control of the decks and gets people up dancing. I need to tell you the story of when I was,

okay, when I was at Full Frontal, I ended up interviewing some of Donald Trump's old, housekeepers. And they told me a story off camera. They actually wouldn't do it on camera, but I think it's okay for me to share it here about how they would prepare his outdoor patio because he does like to eat outside. And they told me that when they worked for him because he's so afraid of insect life and actually nature itself, but he does like to sit outside. Then if they knew or suspected that he was coming, they would just hang hundreds of sticky fly tapes on the patio to just catch every bug that was humanly possible to catch.

And then if they heard that he was like coming into the suite, like he was like on his way, right before he got there, they would run out onto the patio and pull down all the sticky tape and just hope that they had captured everything that was in the vicinity. And I bet they are doing that now as well. I'm sure they are. It's a great story. They are. Okay.

And there are people out in the world, out in the press, they're auditioning for jobs. right now. Mike Davis is called to mind. He's out there saying the most outrageous things, really just pushing, just pushing the boundaries of, he's gone far into indecent speech. He's absolutely horrifying. Can you talk to us about the Overton window? Can you explain that concept for us? Because it feels like a lot of people are transgressing that they're flying right out the window. So the Overton window is the idea of what it's normal and acceptable to talk about. in political dialogue. Things that are outside the Overton window are those things that people really believe that they'd be harmed by saying. And what we're seeing at the moment is what

people who study these things call a shift in the Overton window, that it becomes acceptable to say things which didn't used to be acceptable to say. You highlighted the possible Attorney General, Mike Davies, who has used profane language to refer to democratic officials. And that's something that in the past we'd have expected resignations or firings. But in Trump land, it's become part of the norm. So that's the idea that the Overton window has shifted. And that those things are now acceptable and in some cases, welcomed. When he goes off and he calls legislature James a badass, which is disgusting,

when he's an attack dog of the absolute worst kind, then when they hire someone for the position who isn't quite as extreme or quite as, uses that type of language, their extreme ideas don't feel so scary. Is that the idea? Yeah, very much so. The idea of trying to move the Overton window is that you get to do things that you might not have been able to do before or say things that you weren't able to say before. And particularly when it comes to the criminal justice system, that's been very tightly defined in the past by norms and values. So when it comes to the criminal justice system, Trump world is really keen to use their powers for revenge on Trump's perceived enemies.

And that's something that was way outside the Overton window. So when Davies speaks in such profane terms about Tish James, then that's helping enable the idea that it's okay to take revenge on enemies. Their response can be profane too. I think we've lived the past eight years in this realm, and it causes great agitation in the psyche of the nation, So we can expect four more years of that is what you're suggesting. That's what we can look forward to.

I think if you listen to what Trump has said and to what those people around them have said, they definitely want to shift the Overton window in a much more aggressive direction, which I suppose would mean breaking the Overton window. Yeah, smashing the Overton window. So there's so much crazy in the cabinet to get through. I feel like we should just hit some of the highlights

because there's going to be new ones by the time. They're just dropping all the time. announcements, suspicions, confirmations. So we've got Susie Wild, Tom Holman, Mr. Family Separation, he's back. We've got him in charge of the borders are. And it's not clear if he's going to be in the cabinet. We think probably not. And of course, if he's not in the cabinet, he may not be subject to Senate confirmation. So that would keep some of the confrontations that Democrats would want to have with him much more under wraps. So Hugh, just remind everybody, a cabinet job requires Senate confirmation.

Yes, that's right. The Senate has to advise and consent on the President's most important aides. Everybody in the cabinet is going to have to get an up or down vote from the Senate, but it's a Republican Senate and it's a MAGA Senate. The Republicans are going to have at least 52 seats, possibly 53. And we've got Governor Christine Nell, she's the current governor of South Dakota, right? I actually get her confused with the one who got felt up during Beetlejuice on Broadway that time but that's Lauren that's Lauren that's Lauren yeah who's Congresswoman yeah Christine Nome is the one who shot her dog and then she shot her goat that's right that's right and in her book she said that she met with

Kim Jong-un but later would not clarify if she actually had and nobody has any confirmation of that and it very obviously didn't happen so that's a quality quality pick. Stephen Miller. One of my favorites, former director of speech writing for Trump first term, he's going to be deputy chief of staff for policy. He is generally a ghoul, has been hated since high school when he said, am I the only one who's sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us? He's horrendous. He's horrendous. Marco Rubio, little Marco, best known for drinking water, weirdly, during the State of the Union rebuttal up for Secretary of State.

There's a whole cast of characters. Everybody's jockeying for position. It's Paddyo Power Games. Want to hear more? Subscribe to the Daily Beast podcast wherever you're listening to this to catch a new episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studed The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts.

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