The Daily Beast Podcast - DC Mayor: We Had to ‘Defend Our Borders’ from Trump’s Troops

Episode Date: June 9, 2020

Trump sent in goons from the Bureau of Prisons, and National Guardsmen from as far away from Utah to take over her town. On the 15th episode of The New Abnormal, Washington D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson what it was like to be under siege from the President of the United States — and how she tried to resist. “We have spent the last week trying to defend our borders, defend our autonomy, and make sure protesters could be in the city peacefully,” Bowser says. Plus! Bowser schools Trump, kindergarten-style; Molly talks about the GOP’s ability to “seize defeat out of the jaws of defeat”; Trump’s “just the tip” excuse; deep state ninjas; and Rick Wilson’s secret past as a NASCAR driver. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit and editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. Really bad week for the Trump White House. I would say if you were having this bad a week, you know what you would do?

What? Well, you would tear gas protesters and priests. Yeah, that's good. People love that. You would build a fence around the White House outside of the existing fence. And you know what you would do after that? What? You'd build another fence outside of those fences? It's important to have lots of fences.

Because as they say, good fences make good neighbors. That must make the gazillion. people who were out marching for the last week, and especially this weekend, it was a terrible, no good, horrible, bad week for Donald Trump. I actually spoke to a source who relayed that the thing that triggered him this weekend was that comparisons of the marches to his inaugural crowd size ain't no Sharpie in the world big enough to cover the fact that there were millions of people in the streets and hundreds of thousands in places like Philadelphia and Los Angeles and Oh, yes, it's a global phenomenon now.

Yeah. And of course, Donald Trump is, as you know, he's a really tough character. He doesn't respond in a disproportionate way to any minor slides or anything ever. I could barely keep a straight face saying that. I was impressed when the people started putting paintings and photos up on the Trump wall. It was a brilliant own of Trump because now it's a reminder of the same issue he's desperately trying to reframe and avoid right in his face. Well, actually, it's not in his face. Let's be honest. He can only see it from the periscope from the bunker. I liked it when he lied about going in the bunker and said that he was just going there to check it out.

And then I did appreciate it when Joe Biden said that in his eight years, they had never actually been to the bunker. This is Donald Trump's what I call a just-the-tip excuse. And it was so pathetic. I don't even think Trump believed it when he was saying it. I don't even think he thought, even my people will be fooled by this. He's clearly taking a terrible. mental beating in the last week, and he deserves every fucking second of it. Let's be honest. I am impressed at what a bad job he has done with this, though. I mean, things have gone really badly, but he's managed to sort of handle it to seize defeat out of the jaws of defeat at every state. You know, the fact that Donald Trump is now trying to grab on to a right-wing, Trump-right meme of defund the police, which he thinks this is going to be the sort of secret sauce,

the magic bullet that's going to undo the fact he has plunged this country into epidemiological, cultural, social, and economic chaos. The fact that he thinks that's going to fix it is interesting to me because already it's fading away. The idea that Trump was going to frame this as Antifa. Right. Just tell our producer, I feel like I need some echo effects when I say Antifa. Antifa. Because they thought it was they were going to turn this into Antifa and they were going to try to make up a wholly the imaginary, quote-unquote, terrorist movement in the country. And they mentioned it and all their little friends on Fox mentioned it. And it collided with reality.

The people that were being arrested for violent protests and for looting. White supremacists. Weirdly enough, they were not a bunch of George Soros-paid deep state illuminati ninjas. They were a bunch of jackasses from the suburbs. A lot of white kids. A lot of white kids. The second iteration of that, of course, when they didn't bring any charges against people with Antifa.

and it turns out that there were things like the Portland guy this weekend, who was some sort of alt-rider who was going to go and shoot up a crowd. Right. And instead got his ass dragged out of his car and beat down, which I'm not advocating dragging people out of their car and beating them down on the regular. Yeah, don't do that. Rick is like, don't do that. Wink, wink, wink. Don't do that. Okay.

Some people richly deserve, while they're sitting in their car about to shoot up people to be dragged out of their vehicle by law enforcement and have a procedure in the courts that takes months or years to adjudge their guilt. or innocence. So we're in a situation where Trump, he sees these protests around the world. He sees him in the country. His one thin read he's clinging on to right now is this idea of defund the police. And again, I go back to this a lot. The DNA of the 1968 campaign from Roger Ailes and Richard Nixon of us versus them, law and order, you know, silent majority. If you don't vote for Nixon, those people will be in your suburbs, burning your house down and setting up a taco truck. God, remember the Taco Truck controversy of 2016? I just mixed my racist Trump campaign tropes from that different eras.

Okay, so let's talk about this poll that shows that 73% of Americans now say that racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem in the United States. Well, I think when it's put in their face by cops kneeling on the necks of African American men and killing them in the street. For nine minutes. For nine minutes. I think that might make it a top of mind thing for. a moment. Look, race is always the unfinished business in this country. It's always the unfinished work in this country. You know, we nudge along and we stumble along and we get a little better here, a little better there, and some things just haven't changed enough. And I think you probably

would have seen those numbers already moving when two Bubba's jumped out of their pickup truck in Beaufort, South Carolina, and shot Ahmed Aubrey to death. I don't know if you've seen any of the testimony since then about them. They are what we refer to as not quality individuals. No, they're Certainly not. My question is now, though, what does Donald Trump do with that number? Because that is not a number that looks like it's re-electing. If you think racial and ethnic discrimination is a big problem, you're probably not going to vote for Donald Trump. I have been assured by Candice Owen and Diamond and Silk that the president is going to get record African-American turnout. And he may well, just not how they think. It's true. I just read something that said he has pollsters for the pollsters now. because he doesn't believe the polls. I tweeted about this a little earlier. This afternoon, there's a Trump tweet.

It's on the letterhead of a company called McLaughlin. Now, McLaughlin is a famous Republican polling firm. And all of us in the Republican world have used McLaughlin at some point. And I've read many, many memos, many polling memos from John McLaughlin. Are they related to the McLaughlin group? No, that is a totally different thing. They're both John McLaughlin, but they're not the same. So they put out a memo today, and instead of a polling member, which is typically pretty

narrative about the numbers and the math and here's the sample size, it leads out with the latest skewed media polls must be intentional. It's clear that NBC, ABC, and CNN who have Democratic operatives like Chuck Todd, George Stephanopoulos, and other Democrats in their news operations are consistently underpolling Republicans, therefore reporting biased polls. And it goes on and it's clear that Donald Trump wrote the first paragraphs of this thing. This isn't a polling memo. This is Trump trying to spank himself off into some fantasy that he's not getting. his ass handed to him all over the country. Now, I will say this. I tell people this all the time. I'm going to tell our listeners this. Whenever you see a national poll that shows Joe Biden up by

seven or eight or ten or 27 points, I want you to go and I want you to as hard as you can. I want you to run into the hammer as hard as you can. Do I have to just keep going behind you and telling you not to, no violence? Don't do any violence. And Rick Wilson is not telling you to commit violence, okay? Now continue, Rick. You're like my human disclaimer. You're like a human terms of service agreement. Anything Rick Wilson says that involves anything that sounds vaguely dangerous, please don't do.

This stunt performed by trained professionals. Exactly. National polls mean nothing. Do not be fooled. Do not think, oh, it's good. We got this in the bag. We can stay home. Or don't think, oh, let's go out with a wish list of every cuckoo pants policy idea we ever had so that we can do that before we get elected.

The state polls for Trump are. bad enough. Okay. He is right now Michigan, a state he picked up in 2016. He is in freefall in Michigan. Weird how a state with a significant African-American population in the largest metropolitan area doesn't look at Donald Trump as the economic liberator that he claims to be. Wait, are we talking about Florida now? No, we're not to Florida yet. Okay, go to Florida. Well, here's the thing about Florida. Trump's numbers here are still pretty good. Okay. He is not trailing back in double digits in Florida. And I'm going to warn Democrats about this. as I have done consistently.

If you're not 10 points ahead in Florida, you're going to lose. If you were not 10 points up on Election Day in Florida, you will lose. The Republican Party here will beg, borrow steel, kick your ass 20 different ways you've never saw coming. And it's not because they're doing voters oppression or any of that shit. It is because they are the best state party in the country. Wait, whose fault is that? It's my fault in part.

Yeah, okay. Just a little listener of Mia Copa. I mean, it's not my fault entirely, but I had a bad. my role in that little world, but they are really, really good. And they know how to do the operational stuff that Democrats are not as good at. I always feel like Democrats are like, we are good so we don't have to try. Yeah, see, no. If I may quote the philosophical text of the movie Get Out. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. No, I think that being on the right side doesn't necessarily mean you win, especially if the other side is willing to. I mean, actually, there was an interesting discussion about this the other day.

I would have never had a career. Well, that why never Trumpers are able to make the ads that Democrats aren't? Oh, hey, that's me. Yeah. No, it is because, look, we understand two things that Democrats tend to underestimate. I will tell you, I was inspired way back after Bill Clinton, one in a lot of. 92 to do my own sort of anthropology of the campaign. And his speechwriter, one of his speech writers, a guy named David Cousnet, wrote a brilliant little book called Speaking American.

He recognized that the power of successful Republican candidates was that we talked in simpler, straighter language. We didn't try to make it into some literary masterpiece every time we did an ad. We wanted to get to the objective, get to the X. We spoke to people the way they were used to being talked to. And so that is a power Trump has had. He speaks to his base the way they want to be talked to, which is, of course, Anglo-racism for the most part, but it works. We make ads that also speak with the sort of the language, the iconography that the people, well, we've got to win this time, understand. The people in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Florida, North Carolina, I have a secret for you, Molly. Do you know what they're not? What? I almost don't want

to know. When you build it up like this, I'm always a little worried. They're not woke. They're not woke. They're not woke. I knew I didn't want to know. at all. They're older, they're whiter, they're rural, they're not woke. They do not give a damn about any kind of gender pronoun stuff at all. They are simple people with simple political needs. The language you speak to them matters and the ads you show them matter. Of course, you know, I am also running a lot of ads from our group. We have a constant creative process in our group that's like, how will Donald react to this? If the answer is badly, off we go to production. You had the Confederate flag this week.

The flag of treason, yep, which has got me some outstanding. Did I tell you the story about the rascal scooter guy last week? Chase me down on your rascal? No, now we have to go to this segment that's called Rick Wilson's best death threat of the week. Where Rick regales us with stories of his most amusing death threat. You know, my greatest death threat this weekend was some guy who sent me a picture of another guy named Rick Wilson. That's amazing. And get this, I can't believe you were a NASCAR driver once because NASCAR drivers love America

because there used to be a NASCAR driver named Rick Wilson. True story. And I just like, oh, you poor bastard. Think the other Rick Wilson is now a county commissioner in Imperial Polk County, Florida. Is he a Republican? I think so. I haven't talked to him for a long time, but I think he might have won that race. See, the idea of having someone with the same name as you is like so foreign to May for obvious reasons except for Kim Jong-un. Right. We're so excited to have Mayor Mariel Bowser join us. She's the D.C. Mayor and the creator of Black Lives Matter Plaza.

Welcome, Mayor. What has it felt like to have active duty military troops in your city? Well, we have spent the last week really trying to defend our borders, defend our autonomy, and make sure protesters could be in the city peacefully. And I think the threat from the White House to bring active duty military in D.C. really put a spotlight on why we need to become a state. I wanted to ask you, how did you come up with the idea for Black Lives Matter Plaza? Well, we were very focused on reclaiming that part of 16th Street that the federal government had moved their police or unnamed or untagged people to block protests.

And when we were able to push them back, we wanted an expression of art. The center, the protest, makes the street a place for healing and strategizing and redress. And the mural, Black Lives Matter, was presented to me from our D.C.'s mural program. It's had an incredible impact we think around the world. I have to say it was very striking to see that from above and very striking to see the long shot up 16th toward the White House with that. there are times public art doesn't quite punch enough. And in this case, it was something that really hit very, very hard. Was this weekend marked by any violence by the police or be looting or rioting or

got out of control or was it a purely peaceful weekend? Let me be real clear because I think Donald Trump has tried to put out an exaggerated view of some of the destruction we saw in D.C. the previous weekend. Donald Trump exaggerating? Yeah. I know. I know.

I'm not happy about any level of violence or destruction. Let me be very clear about that. But we saw two nights really where there were some people among the protesters who were only there to, they were bent on destruction from the beginning. And it was a good number of them. And they did some damage in our downtown. But at no time that we have a level of destruction. And we have very little violence.

We had one police officer that was hurt. But we had some destruction in the downtown. But at no time was that something that our police department, our own police department, Department wouldn't be able to get under control. And then what we saw following the president's attack on American protesters, what we saw after that of the groundswell of people coming out to protest, which completely drowned out any bad actors among them. Since Monday, we have seen peaceful protests in the district. Will you talk about the situation that happened with the Trump administration, clearing the area in front of the church for his photo op? I think the bottom line here is,

This is part of the problem when you have a gray chain of command is nobody is owning the decisions that were made. Like, we don't really know for sure who was in charge, who gave the order, what the chain of command was. That's because of the political involved in what is typically a law enforcement matter that is handled, I mean, dozens, hundreds of times for protests, marches, for inaugurations, for inaugurations. by MPD and the federal police that we work very cooperatively with. So all I'm left to assume is that there was some political influence in what is typically a very cooperative law enforcement response. What is that group of military soldiers occupying D.C. right now? Well, there are a few different types of groups.

So let me talk to you about that. First of all, the D.C. National Guard is unlike the other guards in the state. because those guards are under the command of the governor. In D.C., our D.C. guard is actually a federal guard, which means it is under the command of the federal government. But I have the ability with the president's permission to call them up, which I did for COVID, and a few of them for traffic response during these demonstrations. So we had about 100 of them, and they were working with MPD, my police.

And then we have our normal federal police that we work with all the time. because they have responsibilities here, the Secret Service, the Park Police, and sometimes the Capitol Police, and our FBI and DEA, which we work with on the crime front. So those are folks we work with all the time. And then there was a group that came in,

we're told from prisons, from the Bureau of Prisons, from Border Patrol, and other DOJ assets. We're not sure because they didn't have any identification. Wow. So you don't even know. I've seen lists of the folks that we were told we're coming, but I couldn't look at any of them and tell you where they were from.

Did you hear there were some reports of these unmarked police being violent? Did you have any reports of that? We haven't heard any reports to that. Mayor, I'm curious, what would you like to see happen around Lafayette Park in the White House? I mean, the idea of that area that's sort of the people's space being turned into ring after ring of fences. When I was a kid growing up in D.C., we had so much more access to these federal places. the capital grounds to the depths of the Supreme Court to in front of both sides of the White House. So a lot of that kind of heartening happened after 9-11. We have seen them put up a fence around the whole perimeter of the White House.

It looks like a temporary fence. And so I expect that all to come down. It is not just the D.C. issue. It's an issue for the nation because people come to Washington, D.C. to be able to stand in front of the White House, take pictures, stand in line, take a tour. So the White House being open is a tradition that goes back to the earliest days of our union. So it is a very important thing to get back open. And the symbol to the world that the president of the United States has to be behind a fence is just, it's unfortunate.

It's the old Andrew Jackson's big block of cheese. Yeah. When the White House was essentially much more. much more open. And obviously, look, secure, everyone agrees with us needs to be a secure space. The idea that you ring people further and further away from the center of power strikes me as something that's anti-small D. Democratic. Right. And be clear that the complex is secure.

The Secret Service, it has sharp shooters or the rules. So the White House is secure. You had John Lewis there yesterday? Yes. He had himself there because that's how strong his spirit is. That's amazing. Those pictures were amazing. So what do you think about police reform? Well, I certainly think that we've heard loud and clear and we've seen on our televisions for too long and too frequently people who have been killed by police.

And so we would be blind and certainly not honest about the experience of many Americans, especially African Americans with the police. So I was encouraged by the bill put forward by Democrats today. nationally. Locally, we continue to look at ways to make our own police department and community work together for safe neighborhoods. I don't think all departments are the same, and not all departments have embraced change. I am very proud of the change embraced by the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, for example, who has been on this task force reform for the last 18 years.

We have a lot of listeners who are pretty engaged Democrats. And my question to you is what can they do to help D.C. statehood? They can help us elect a Democratic Senate and a new president. That's what we need. Oh, as easy as that. Easy as that. We need all three houses. And we've had them.

We've had them in the first two years of the Obama administration, and the push wasn't there. I'll give you another thing. Having those three things isn't enough. We need action on D.C. statehood in the first 100 days of the next president's tenure. the first 100 days because we know when issues will arise, budgets will come up, there will be things to be traded between presidents and Congress, so that first 100 days of the new president's agenda is the most critical. How does it feel to be targeted by the president of the United States?

Oh, pick me. You know, this is going to sound strange to you, but it's kind of unfortunate for him. And this is why. Because anytime the president of the United States is in a Twitter, battle with a little old mayor. He's losing. He's losing. He should be in Twitter battles

with heads of state. Not me. For me, taking on the president of the United States who, not to sound like I'm in the kindergarten, but he started it. We just defended ourselves and let me just tell you, it

feels good to be in that battle. And this is why, because we are morally right, we're legally right, and we're politically right. Standing. Senator Mike Lee tried to smear you with a tweet about you kicking the National Guard out of DC hotels. Can you tell us your side of that story? I can. I just think Senator Lee didn't have all the information. And I think he has all of the information now. I think it was incumbent on the Army or the National Guard to make the arrangements necessary, the payment arrangements in particular for the Out-of-State Guard. And by either, a mistake or people being a little fast and loose with our contract. We were paying for the Utah Guard. And that just wasn't something that D.C. residents would have me do.

So we just wanted that payment arrangement to get cleared up. And I think that the Army did that. Hey, folks, if you're a fan of the new abnormal podcast, you're going to love The Last Laugh, hosted by the Daily Beast Matt Wilstein. The Last Laugh is a podcast where comedians get real. Every week, Matt talks to some of the biggest names in comedy, including Sarah Silverman, Sasha Barron Cohen, Samantha B, Larry Wilmore, and Steve Bannon. Oh, wait, not Steve Bannon, about how they're staying funny as the world falls apart around them.

Hey, Molly, I have another one of those days where it's multiple, fuck that guys. Wait, who is it? It's the Buffalo Police Department. When the two officers who pushed down a 75-year-old man onto the street and walked past him as he was bleeding from his head, were a rain that came out of the courthouse today. The entire department was there clapping for them. So I'm going to really question if the whole one or two bad apples thing is still valid when there's a whole fucking barrel of bad apples there praising brutal behavior. You know, it's funny because I read a piece this weekend, which said something to the extent of like the bad apple stuff is systemic.

There are a lot of great and good and mindful cops in this country. But that cultural problem of the blue line and the cop cult, that was a perfect example of it right there. Those guys were not behaving in a way that should. shows that they're servants of the public and seeking to protect people. They were empowered by their armor and by their union and by the fact that they thought that they could get away with it and say, fuck it and knock a 75-year-old man over. And that has iterated out all over the country in the last few days. And the same people on the right right now who lose their shit and say, well, some of these people who are out protesting are violent rioters. That means the whole

movement is discredited. The hypocrisy of that is astounding because they, They say, oh, there are no bad cops. What are you talking about? I can't believe you would even suggest such a thing. It's pretty amazing. We had this thing happen in New York, where I am. Where our terrible mayor, Mayor de Blasio, who is hated by vote the right and the left. I told you you should have voted for Lodagh.

I, like any smart person voted for Bill. He obviously moved you so much you can remember his name 10 years later. Bill Thompson. Bill Thompson. It was a three-way split between Bill Thompson. What's her name? Christine Quinn. And that's why we have ranked choice voting.

So we never have another Bill de Blasio. But he put in a curfew. And then the curfew caused the cops to arrest protesters for staying out too late. I mean, it was like absolutely. So it became this self-perpetuating ring of dysfunction. And the curfew just ended up making a lot more trouble. That was one of my least favorite Johnny Cash songs, Ring of Disfunction. Ring of Disfunction.

Yes. I fell down in a burning ring of dysfunction. semi-disfunction where the society wouldn't function properly. Little known fact that was actually written about New York City government. So my fuck this guy, and I feel like this may happen more than once, is Ben Shapiro. Perhaps you've heard of him. I'm familiar with young Ben. As a Jewish myself, the casual racism of Ben Shapiro really bothers me.

I grew up in a world of like where my parents were working on civil rights and were arm and arm, the South, walking for freedom, and Andrew Goodman was a friend of, if you know, Andrew Goodman, who was murdered in the South by the KKK was a friend of my aunts. Like we come from a world where we, where Jews are committed to civil rights. And so the casual racism of Ben Shapiro really gets at me. He tweeted this thing before I went to bed last night, which just absolutely enraged me because it's this idea that Libs have pushed it too far and now they're going to get theirs. saw this during the Kavanaugh hearings, that conservatives were like, Dr. Ford, you pushed it,

and now you're going to lose the midterms. Anyway, Ben Shapiro said, after this week of, like, these incredible protests and this world of, like, coming together and changing everything, he said, I hope everybody really enjoyed that 1968 to 1980s because we're about to repeat it. History is a cruel mistress, especially if you don't know any of it. That period of time included things like the Watergate blowout, the Republicans being in the wilderness until we had a fluke candidate in 1980 who could pull it off. The idea that the unrest and the economic uncertainty of the 1968 to 80 period, that period of economic uncertainty was like a fucking love tapped what we're going to go through in the next

couple of years. I think you have to understand, Ben, not by the casual racism frame, but primarily by the does it own the libs frame? And he's sort of the gentry version of does it own the lips? He's sort of a little veneer of a slightly more intellectual approach to owning the lives. My lib owning is more curated and artisanal. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media,

culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Jongfast, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at

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