The Daily Beast Podcast - Blame Newt Gingrich for Today’s Lying MAGA Republicans

Episode Date: August 14, 2022

The seed of cruelty that the GOP has fully adopted, and nurtured, had been planted long before Trump took office, says Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. Instead, he says on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, someone else is to blame: Newt Gringrich. He explains why to co-host Molly Jong-Fast, along with more reporting on the GOP’s evolution that’s included in his new book, The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party. Plus! Co-hosts Andy Levy and Molly listen to more clips of politicians saying dumb things, this time starring Fox News’ Jesse Watters and sad son Eric Trump. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart, conversations with the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with one of our favorite writers today.

There's, of course, a Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank. He has a new book, The Destructionist, the 25-year crack-up of the Republican Party, and he's going to tell us everything about his new book. But first, let's have some fun. All right, are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Always, yes, clips. Yes, yay. Well, we finally got Molly enthused. It's because she knows what's coming,

which is we have a Jesse Waters take fest. Yes. It's like a death having to listen to that. Yeah, he's not very bright. Let's play our first example. How didn't they just go in and grab what the archivist said was missing? Why'd they take all day? go into every room, grab box after box after box of stuff.

See, now there's no chain of custody on the boxes. And if they plan evidence, Trump can't prove it. They planted evidence last time on the campaign. Remember, the dossier, the moles. They doctored it too, remember? That's how they got the warrant to spy. Literally none of that is true. The chain of evidence, if anything, is better preserved because the FBI has the stuff.

Yeah. Look, he doesn't know what he's saying. So there's no reason I should know what he's saying. That wouldn't make sense. Right, that's true. Just none of that makes even the slightest bit of sense, which is, I assume, why he has a primetime show on Fox. Right, exactly.

I mean, you have been on Fox. Yes. Why is he so stupid? Much like Lady Gaga, I think he was born that way. Yeah. But his mom, remember, I, I know I bring this up every time we talk about him, but like his mom was normal. Well, but you know, you can't always blame the parents, Molly, for you know, every time I'm like,

it's a liberal mom with a conservative kid. How did this happen? Someone makes sure to tell me. No experience with that. Not even a little. No. Okay. Well, unfortunately, morale's not improving at the beatings.

about to continue. He has another really weird theory about this thing. Jesse. They get a sick sexual thrill from trying to block up Republicans. It's a perversion. You know, they like to see them dragged out in their underwear. Me and, sir.

People have been saying for years, and it's completely true that, you know, when Trump says something and in general, when Republicans say something, it's a projection. When they say something about Democrats, it's really about themselves. And I mean, I'm not saying that Jesse Waters

masturbated to video of people saying lock her up. I'm not not saying it, I guess, is what I'm saying. These are literally people who got a thrill out of chanting, screeching, lock her up for years and still do. It's not like they've stopped. So of course he thinks that this is what's true of the left, because it's what's true of himself. Right, right.

No, I mean, also, he's just an idiot. Well, there's also that he's an idiot, yes. Yeah, just like how he gets the sexual, I'm like, I don't get this. And then I'm like, well, you know, we have chronicled his weird dating techniques of popping women's tires. Yeah, he dumb.

We're now going to move on to another person in the pantheon of geniuses we know in this right wing, the simple son, Eric Trump. He has some thoughts on his father. And he walked off the White House premises through the gates across the church. And he stood in front because that's what the nation needed. That's a healing that our country needed. He's, of course, speaking of when Mr. Trump held up the Bible upside down.

You know it was healing because he, yeah. I mean, I don't know. Because of all the protesters he gassed right before that. I have to tell you, the thing that I love about Eric is like he's like, it feels like Junior got high on daddy's supply, but like Eric is really, like Eric is like my father. Like he's got Megan McCain syndrome. He does. Oh, I never thought of that.

Yeah, my father, my father, my father. You know, it's like, you guys, and they're just people. I mean, and they're really, they're not such great people. I'm going to give you a hot take here. First of all, I think junior gets high on a lot of things. But, you know, with Eric, it's, I mean, it really is. Like, it's such a facile thing to say, but he needs the approval so badly that he clearly has not gotten his whole life. And he just thinks one more Fox News hit.

Daddy'll see it. He just tries so hard. And, like, if it were possible to feel bad for any of them, I would feel bad for Eric. It's not possible. I just want to make that clear. It's not possible. But if I were. Yeah.

It would be him. because he clearly is just, I mean, he is Fredo. Like, it really is just, it's sad. I think of the one time I felt bad for him was, remember when everybody was accusing him of stealing the sodad in and out when it was so obvious, he just didn't know better.

That was the ones time I could defend him. That's like literally the story of his life, though, I think. That's on his tombstone. It's just going to say he didn't know better. All three of us could agree that, like, apologizing for meds bad behavior is bad, but in this instance, you're kind of like, oh, poor thing.

Yeah. We have another stop on our tour of dumb. The dumbest member of Fox and Friends, Brian, can we, Andy, would you agree with that assessment as the expert? No. Oh, wow. Really? Damn, I'm two weeks in a row.

I'm fucking failing on Fox Newsidosis. I might actually say he's the smartest. Oh. This is a rough ride today. Jesus. Who's the dubbest? Yeah, I don't even want to know. I don't like talking about things like that

in saying nasty stuff about Ainsley-Earth, so I'm not going to. Well, he was really into the privacy of judges when it was Justice Kegstand, having people protest at his house, but something made him have a change of heart recently, and I can't imagine what it could be. Let's listen.

Facebook. Look at that. He is there drinking whiskey with an entire back of Oreos. Imagine what his A order looks like. The FBI agents who raided Marilago bragged about having, quote, full access to everything in the building, thanks to that guy. So I should clarify what he's saying here is they're looking at Facebook pictures of the judge that sealed the warrant for Mr. Trump's Mar-A-Lago. That approved the warrant. I'm sorry, yes, that approved. Right. He loves junk food as opposed to Trump, who is the picture of House. and Oregon fitness. I mean, okay, I don't fucking care.

I mean, honestly, he loves alcohol. I'm sober, so I can't enjoy that, but I appreciate the fuck out of someone who drinks a lot. And then also he loves junk food. I mean, don't threaten me with a good time. I'm very confused by this. That actually sounds like a normal breakfast, and I'm not really clear what the problem is.

here? This is their job. Like, this is what they do. They get on the air at some ungodly, early hour, and they go through Facebook pictures of a judge. And somehow that's what they get paid enormous sums of money to do. And the people love it. The people love it. We're seeing it more and more.

What I can't believe is like, you know, Fox obviously, contradicts themselves left and right. But I felt like the one thing they were on the side of is like eating bad good. Yeah. I mean, look, when I was there, you know, Michelle Obama was public enemy number one for wanting kids to have healthy lunches. And remember soda gate? Yeah. And you had soda gate.

And you had, I mean, look, as Jesse, as you said earlier, I mean, you know, the big man, Daddy Trump, not exactly known for his low cholesterol. Healthy eating habits. Yeah. So, yeah, it's, but that's our Fox. Well, we do have one more Fox News person to head to a little clip from it. One, Lindsay Halligan, who you of course know as a former Trump lawyer, she has some thoughts on the Trump's raid of his Mar-a-Lago home here. Well, if we're thinking about the future, I'd like to just say that the Biden administration has united Americans against its administration.

and this instant has ironically created bipartisanship on this issue because no American, whether Democrat or Republican, wants an overreaching Department of Justice. We even see Andrew Cuomo and Andrew Yang speaking out about this. The silence of the Biden administration and the FBI is deafening. Americans are listening and watching. Wow, even Andrew Cuomo. I have a theory that Andrew Cuomo is trying to get a Fox contributor. You might not be right. wrong about that. Because he's definitely never going to get a contributor ship on CNN or MS.

No, of course not. No. And like Fox would be all over that. I mean, they would in a heartbeat. I mean, Andrew Cuomo is like the king of overreach. I mean, you know, put judges on the panel that investigated him. The double entendre the overreach with Andrew Cuomo. Yes. But I mean, so like the only, it just doesn't make any sense otherwise. Like, he's clearly got some kind of long game going here. And I just don't think. Right. It's just as Andrew Yang is the stupidest person alive.

He just dumb. Yeah. You can just quote me on that. I mean, he is real fucking dumb. And he's been on this podcast. He's been on twice, yeah. Yeah. But the second time I did say he's the dumbest person.

I think you guys are being, you have to remember, he's the math guy. He's just not the history or paying attention to what's going on in this fucking country guy. Yeah. Well, then he should stick to numbers. Strong agree. Box on the right. I do think it's also important to point out that I believe that Lindsay Halligan is not all that bright either. A Trump lawyer? This doesn't add up, Andy.

Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't make any sense. Dana Milbank is a columnist at the Washington Post and the author of The Destructionists, the 25-year crackup of the Republican Party. Welcome back to the new abnormal Dana Milbank. It is a pleasure to be with... You and the new abnormal and bring you a little of the old abnormal. That's right. So the book is The Destructionist, The 25-year crack-up of the Republican Party.

You got Newt and Carl Rove and Sarah Palin. I mean, like, basically, it's always going to be 1994, right? Yes, Newt created the world that we are living in today. When he came out and said, the Republican Party, party's biggest problem is that it's not nasty enough. And he said, we got to start talking about Democrats as traitors, as abusing their powers, as liars, and cheaters. That was his great innovation in 1994. And now, I mean, that sounds totally normal. That's what we do in any given news cycle. It's hard to overstate the extent to which that was revolutionary then, a transformation from, you know,

the more genteel politics when Bob Michael was running the House Republican Caucus getting Ronald Reagan's agenda through the House. People actually spoke to each other as human beings and made compromises and got things done. And it changed dramatically and inalterably at that moment. Sarah Palin is back. Did she ever really leave? I mean, she's going to win that congressional seat, right? Yeah, I think so. But you'll find that, you know, now Sarah Palin will just have to take a number alongside, you know, Marjorie Taylor Green and Lauren Bobert. Yes, she, it looks like she is on her way to the United States Congress. Really cheapens the whole thing. True or not true, Sarah Palin walked so Marjorie Taylor Green could run. Yeah, I think there's a lot

to that. And, you know, you mentioned that Palin is back or never really left. And Gingrich is another of those characters. You know, he weaves his way through the story. Of course, he had this presidential run in 2012, I think it was. But who is advising Kevin McCarthy in the House Republicans right now? Newt Gingrich. He's right back there and he's on the board of this, you know, pro-Trump America first group. So yes, each one stands on the shoulders of the one before, although it seems to be sort of the opposite. We keep descending further and further into the muck. But yeah, I don't think you have Marjorie Taylor Green or Lauren Bobard or Donald Trump without having Sarah Palin. And I don't think you had Sarah Palin without having Carl Rove and Dick Cheney before that.

And I don't think you have them without having Newt and Tom DeLay. So it's like one of those Russian nesting dolls. I actually wrote something from my newsletter about how Liz Cheney is the product of someone who created this environment. Indeed. I have written similarly on this for the weekend, so you scooped me. But it's painful to watch. I call it a Greek tragedy. We'll call it Cheney, the tragic hero for this moment, a statesman of great promise. The hubris is to think that he can change the rules. He can lie us into war. He can challenge the other side's patriotism and weaponized patriotism. This all metastasizes in all kinds of ugly ways. And it comes back and destroys his daughter. And now he comes back out of retirement to try to save his daughter. But it's too late.

And does he realize that he created this? But of course, you know, his lies about the Iraq war, the weapons of mass destruction and, you know, tying Saddam Hussein to 9-11, and also the politicization of 9-11, the Max Cleland and the Swift voting from back then. There's a straight line between that and exactly what Liz Cheney is decrying right now in Donald Trump, you know, preying upon the patriotism of his followers and saying a free society can't survive without the truth. Absolutely right. and she is now being undone by the very politics that her dad unleashed. You talk about Vince Foster, just in this first chapter,

about some of these scandals that kind of became tropes. Will you explain that a little bit? Yeah, I mean, it seems so quaint now in the era of the big lie to talk about Vince Foster. So just sort of a brief recap of that. Yes, for the people who are not as, yes. Friend of the Clinton's deputy White House counsel gets depressed. He's being attacked all the time by the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He says he's not cut out for this. He reaches out to get names of psychiatrists, gets a prescription for an antidepressant, stops eating, writes a suicide note and then goes off to Fort Marcy in Virginia and kills himself. It's a tragedy. But it did not stay at that. And Republicans decided that this had been a murder. And possibly Hillary, Clinton was in fact the trigger woman, or at least that she had, she was responsible for it in some way, at the beginning of, you know, Hillary Clinton's life as a serial killer, because apparently

she's amassed, you know, a body count of some 50 people. But so look, there have always been those kinds of conspiracy theories. I mean, think of the JFK assassination, but what happened here is you had people in positions of authority giving credence to it. You know, they had four different investigations and still, Newt Gingrich said, I'm just not convinced that he killed himself. And you had the chairman of the committee in charge of oversight in the house shooting a melon in his backyard to prove that Vince Foster was murdered and it couldn't have been suicide. So, you know, I say it's sort of quaint. I mean, it wasn't, it was obviously very painful for his family, but it was sort of a prototype because they managed to convince, I think, only 35% of the country when all of this

was said and done, believed that Vince Foster had in fact killed himself. So the idea is if you keep repeating a lie over and over again, a huge proportion of the public is going to believe it. And I think that became a prototype that was used for the Iraq War. It was used to sell the death panels during the Obamacare debate. And it was used very successfully in 2016 by Donald Trump. And then ultimately leading up to the big lie. And if you've been conditioned, for so long to live in this parallel universe of alternative facts, it's not that big a step. No, it's not. It's exactly what they were working towards. And Newt Gingrich's, I think, I mean, I haven't asked him, but he's obviously quite, he's quite pleased with how this is gone. I would think he is. I mean, you know, we are all living in Newt Gingrich's world. It was the language and the idea that your opponent is the enemy was an important part of that.

but also the more aggressively racist tone. I mean, it has, you know, antecedents in the 1960s and in Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, but it became much more conscious during that period of time and sort of playing footsie with the militia movement, you know, the violent right-wing extremists. Unfortunately, what we're seeing right now is very much a replay of the run-up to the Oklahoma City bombing, when you have people who know better, elected Republicans now saying they're coming, to get you. They're after you. Nobody is safe. They're talking about an attack on you. This is war. And of course, you know, Fox News is doing that and worse. What do they think is going to happen when they rile people up in such a way? Yeah, I think we know what's going to happen.

It's such a weird time in American life because I'm talking to and I'm thinking about the idea that I've often criticized Democrats for their messaging, but this is not messaging. This is like a kind of rot. This is not messaging. messaging, this is like a sort of giving up on all values. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, and I agree with you. We could certainly say the Democrats are awful at messaging. They can never seem to get unified. You know, it's hurting cats. All of that is true. But I think even, you know, a perfectly unified, coherent political party wouldn't be able to deal with this because what you have is one of the two major political parties in our system has stopped good faith participation in the democratic process. Right. We've seen this in the bringing in of the white nationalists, the increasingly violent and authoritarian talk coupled with the actual actions in the state legislatures to sow doubts about elections and actually seize control away from the voters so that the vote can now actually be overturned. We're seeing it also in the dysfunction that, you know, began with the

shutdowns of the Newt Gingrich era, basically, you know, saying, we are going to bring government to a halt. It's gone from limited government, small government to anti-government. That government is the enemy, and we just need to shut it down. That really began in 1995. Even though you're very young, as am I and is Jesse. Very, very, yes. We're almost barely out of our 20s. That's right. Very young here. I just had a birthday 24 again. But you have written for a while, and you've seen a lot of permutations of this Republican Party. I mean, is this the worst it's been? It is the worst it's been. I don't think it's the worst that it will be. You see these iterations over and over again. But, you know, we tend to think that the horrors of the Trump era are unique.

But, you know, like, let's take the, you know, we've been talking about violence. But, you know, Gordon Liddy of Watergate fame, he was on the radio in 1994, talking about the ATF saying, go for a headshot and kill the sons of bitches. You know, you had Palin with her don't retreat, reload, and her, you know, infamous map, Sharon Engel, I think it was talking about Second Amendment remedies to our political problems. You know, the whole Cliven Bundy episode, and then again with his offspring in Oregon. I think each iteration gets worse than the previous, but you can see that, you know, the predicates are there. I mean, there is very little that Donald Trump said, about, you know, dead people voting and, you know, votes being bought and ballot boxes stuffed

that John Ashcroft didn't say in 2001 when they were falsely claiming fraud. We've talked about, you know, the beginning of the conspiracy theories, the dehumanizing rhetoric, the dysfunction. It just seems to happen over and over again in cycles. It's no coincidence that we're looking at this precarious moment with all this violence rhetoric. in the midterms of the first term of a Democratic president. The last time that we had such an episode was the midterms of the first term of the Obama presidency. And before that, it was the midterms of the first term of the Clinton presidency. So everything new is old.

It's just happening in a worse and worse way. Let's talk about something happy. Yes. Tell me something happy at the end of the book. No, okay. Yes, there's not a lot of happiness. I mean, but we can think, just like the Vince Foster, thing sounded quaint. You know, we can think back, yes, there were attempts to intimidate, you know, the counting of votes, you know, before January 6th, but it was known as the Brooks Brothers riot

during the 2000 recount. Well, that was kind of serious. They shut down the counting in Miami-Dade, but of course, it was also a little silly because it was a bunch of young Republicans brought in by Carl Rove in, you know, in blue blazers and ties. To the extent that there's optimism, I would say that we will get through this because, you know, the whole demographic change, the emergence of a multicultural white minority country, that's what set this backlash in motion. Yeah. You know, not in the 94, back in the 1960s. That's going to happen. It's going to be a white minority country. It will be resolved, and this backlash will subside. The problem is what do we have

left by the time we get there. So in the long term, I think there's plenty of reason to be optimistic. And in the short term, we've got to buckle in and keep fighting this to preserve whatever we can. Thank you so much. Thank you, Dana. Well, it's an honor and a pleasure, and I'm sorry for bringing you down. No, it's good. We love to be brought down. And you know, you're just amazing. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science, who will help us understand

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