The Daily Beast Podcast - Donald Trump Actually Did Us All One Big Favor

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

Kurt Andersen has been tooling on Donald Trump for decades—the Spy magazine co-founder once even tricked the Donald into cashing a check for 17 cents. But, Andersen tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson, Trump did us all a favor. He showed America just how rigged our system is in favor of the ultra-rich. “His final ad [of the 2016 campaign] was all ‘Wall Street has taken all of your wealth and ruined the working class. And we must defeat these people of whom my opponent is a puppet,’” Anderson recounts on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Well, yeah, you had a point. But you didn't actually govern at all on that basis. So maybe, maybe he's sort of put that critique of the system on the table”—especially for Republicans who couldn’t take in that kind of message from someone left-of-center. Rick, the GOP consultant, says it’s time for Republicans to realize that “the party of free markets is full of shit because it [isn’t] about free markets. It’s about gaining enough power to use the regulatory state and legislative process to advantage your individual companies or markets. That's not capitalism, that's crony capitalism on a good day and something much worse on a bad one.” Then! Molly and Rick answer listener questions, revealing how they met (not on a chain gang, they swear) and what their surprising super powers are (“I can hit my head on almost anything,” says Molly). Plus! Will our dynamic duo actually open a dogfighting pit, or will they go straight to selling meth? And what does Rick enjoy more than “getting rip shit on cheap gin and watching the Teletubbies?” Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. 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. So, Rick Wilson.

Hello, Molly Junkfast. Hi, Rick Wilson. How are you? How are you doing? I'm prospering, thank you. I'm good. Doing good work amongst the poor and deserving. Okay, good. Is that a Jesus thing? Ish? Not really. Did you hear about the president's raft of executive orders this weekend? You mean the ones he signed at his golf club? Indeed, the ones he signed at his golf club. Tell me more. These executive orders are a fascinating exercise in president. overreach. It's almost as if he decided to take certain parts of the Constitution and take a big fat dump on them with these things because executive orders he did this weekend are because he is such a selfish, shallow, wannabe authoritarian that he realizes that none of them are constitutional,

that they all exceed the ambit of presidential power by a goddamn mile, but he's going to do it anyway because he is so stuck and he's in such a corner because in the Senate right now, he's got a few of these guys who are looking past the Trump era, and all of a sudden they're born again fiscal conservatives. You mean Ben Sass, the ever-vanishing senator? Well, Ben is the, they call him the paragon of moral virtue in the Senate. Actually, they don't, but he and the president aren't a little bit of a contretemn today, but people like Ted Cruz and the rest, and Mike Lee, or all of a sudden, after three and a half years of Trump spending like a drunken sailor, are, oh my God, we can't spend any more on these people wanting $600 a week. My goodness, it might cause the

to lounge about on the chaise and eat bonbons and smoke opium like those lazy bastards that they are. Dear God. And so Trump, feeling the political pressure, knows he's not going to have trouble getting it through the Senate now. He's also worried that he's becoming branded as a heartless fuckwit. It's on a long left, right, to get there? Right, I was going to say, it seems like. But because of all that, he's now saying, oh, I'm going to throw these crumbs into this executive order that unilaterally changes the federal tax code. which is not something the president gets to do on his own recognizance. And it's just a sign of the, like, death twitches of an administration that's out of options and ideas. Of course, my great joy is watching the people that have done all these contortions to defend Trump at every turn.

But he's a strong fiscal concern. Really? He's a constitution? Really? He believes in limited? Really? He's not a status authoritarian? Oh, really?

Well, because he really is. And I pose this to a pro-trial. Trump guy who was emailing me the other night. State legislator, big state. And he said, well, you know, I can't believe that you think that there's a bad thing for him to take a step because Pelosi's blocking him from doing what he wants. I said, when Joe Biden is president, does he have the power as president to unilaterally raise the capital gains tax to 50%. Right. How about 60%? How about 70, 80, 90? How about 99%? Because if you're telling me the president has that power to alter the tax code without legislation, then the

sauce that tastes good on the goose is going to taste just as delicious on the gander. Moral, timely phrases from Rick. What I thought was interesting about that executive order was the reason that he did it was because he couldn't agree with Rand Paul. Well, yeah, it was Rand Paul, and it was Mike Lee and it's Ted Cruz, and these guys are doing their best now to get back into what I call their 2012-2014 era, okay? This is like when the heavy metal band is touring and the wigs aren't as convincing as they should be, but here we go.

Right, but I mean, he did an executive order not to get around the Democrats, but to get around the other Republicans. Well, yeah, exactly. And the difficulty there is that Donald Trump doesn't have actually any idea what to do. He's caught in this political vice. So one of the things he knows is coming is a gigantic, epic, historic, horrifying wave of evictions and foreclosures. And they are the Trump evictions, and they are the Trump foreclosures.

and they're going to hit this country and 20 million people may be homeless or maybe forced out of their apartments or homes. And God knows what happens. And his little sort of wave off one line, oh, we're going to ban evictions. Well, you're not because a lot of that is state law, which the president does not, don't tell him this, but he doesn't magically get to just preempt all state law as well. And so the thing that's so frightening about it for him is that these things, he knows how weak they are. He knows they have a short half-life and an immediately, almost ephemeral nature to them. They're just going to go away and they're just going to disappear really quickly. And so I think there's a hit that's coming on him. This inaction and legislative side is still going to be the downnote of this thing. When do you think this eviction is going to

happen? Well, no, we know it's going to start happening in September and October because a lot of the states that had said they were going to have a moratorium on evictions are starting to lift those. Now, even America's worst governor. Who is Rand DeSantis? Even America's worst governor. Actually, Greg Abbott is really working hard to be the America's worst governor right now in Texas. He's really working at it. It's true. But also, don't forget, don't sleep on Arizona. I never sleep on Arizona.

Doug Deucy, go get them. Yeah. You don't get those death numbers by accident. You got to work for them. Without putting in the work. Yeah. Well, I also think that it's Trump, and it's been this interesting thing where they're putting the impetus on these universities and on the... the schools to control the spread of the virus when fundamentally they have done nothing. So they've

ignored the virus and now they don't understand why schools can't reopen and why... But this problem iterates from kindergarten to college. They want the public impression that it's fine to reopen schools, that there's a plan, there's some sort of logical approach to doing it, and there's not, and they know it. Well, and also their conservatives are saying, well, children don't die of it very often, so send them back to school. And that is not a feasible plan. Children don't die of it very often, so send them back to school. You can't have the government saying that. The geniuses in the great state of Georgia with Governor Brian Kemp, one of America's worst governors, they did the push-it-down-hill thing and said, oh, the school districts have to decide.

So school districts start reopening, and kids start crowding into these schools, and that one child that got expelled or suspended for taking a photograph of this hallway full of kids, elbow to elbow with no, without a mask in sight. Well, lo and behold, I don't know how this happened. Now, this is some science I don't understand because it's just so beyond me. Suddenly there's a COVID outbreak at that school. How did it happen? Nine infections. They've gone online. They must have started testing or something in that school because there's a COVID outbreak. Not supposed to test. But it is interesting. The thinking was, well, we'll just won't address the virus and we'll trick people into thinking. it's okay and they'll just go out and do stuff. And it turns out that you, and we've seen these financial

numbers from the last two months, people don't trust Trump. I mean, his supporters, the people who are willing to die for him do. But normal people don't trust him. The Trump hotties are maybe out there, you know, willing to go and expose themselves, but a lot of normal everyday people, including people who support him without the bomb vest level of intensity, those folks are not interested in dying or having their kids get sick. And it's funny because I, just wrote a piece about this on Friday and that, you know, the fundamental problem for parents is that we just, you don't want to roll the dice. Probably your kid will be fine, but what if your kid dies? I mean, what if your kid gets some kind of, I mean, these people have these brain fogs that go for months, you know, that we don't even know some of them if they'll ever get better. and the lung damage and the, I mean, we just don't know what the long term...

Right. And look, I have been talking to some people last few days about the possibility of COVID exposure in hospitals with heart patients. And they're terrified. And they should be. This is something that is we still don't have a full grip on a plan to deal with it. Trump will never have a plan to deal with it, though. That's the dirty little secret. There will never be a real plan. He ping pongs from one headline to the other, trying to bullshit his way out of every bad. day. And this moment that we're in right now where parents are terrified to send their kids back to school, it's for a reason. They recognize that this is a risk factor that is being pushed upon them for the sake of politics. And the ones who are saying like, my kids going to school for the freedom. Okay. That's great. If that's the choice as a parent, then it's also your choice to

expose yourself willy-nilly. And some people are going to do that. Look, Darwin's waiting room is chock-fucking full right now of Trump supporters. But you know, the other thing that I think is so nuts is that because he's politicized this, people on the right are saying, like, it's worth it. Very few kids die. And the people on the left are saying, like, we need to wait. We have to be thoughtful about this. It's insane. Like, this is insane. Very few kids died on 9-11, so we can just ignore terrorism. I mean, that dumb fuck risk assessment problem that they have iterates it along a lot of different lines. But it is something that there's already a lot of data that children, even if they don't get symptomatic. They spread it like hell. And kids are in closer social contact, even in these

controlled school environments, than any epidemiologists could recommend. But we also just don't know. I mean, the thing is we just don't know a lot about this virus. It's new. We're seeing things from January and February now. The thing that I keep getting struck by is like, we're making all the mistakes they made in 1918. It's become so politicized and Trump still doesn't have a federal response. You keep seeing these articles that are like, we can still stop it. But a lot of the Trump administration doctors even have said, like even Dr. Bricks, who's kind of the Dolores umbrage of the White House. Why is Trump fucking with the mail? Well, because he wants to be reelected. He wants to delay the delivery of absentee and early voting ballots and therefore squeak out a re-election

in a year where people are going to be terrified to come out and vote, except for the people who are Trump hotties who do not fear the virus because they are protected by the miracle of his aura. And also, they're taking hydrochloroquine, right? Right. They're taking hydroxy-chrecoquine. Hydroxy crackaquin, whatever the fuck it is. And they believe that the demon of COVID cannot touch them. But so that's why he's fucking with the Postal Service. I suspect this is one of those things. We're going to drill down like one notch down. It's not really Trump per se. It's Navarro or the Secretary of Failure, Jared. or some other idiot who has got a hard on about the Postal Service,

either from a free market perspective or some political agenda that they've developed here. And it is delaying the delivery of medication to veterans and seniors. It is delaying the delivery of veterans' benefits checks. I mean, look, most of them are electronic. But there are so a lot of people in this country who get their government benefits by a paper check. What about Nikki Haley? She was trying to send her nephew popcorn. Oh, her nephew didn't get his popcorn.

Well, that's just a shame. I'm so sorry. That's almost as bad as a veteran with PTSD, not getting the medication he needs to keep him from fucking committing suicide. By the way, that was one of the most self-indulgent, whiny, out-of-touch things I've ever seen from a person who thinks they're going to be president of the United States. Because I guarantee you someday there will be an ad where a veteran or his family says, I couldn't get my medication because Nikki Haley's ally, Donald Trump, held it back.

They screwed up the postal service for her political gain. It just makes her seem so trifling. Right. I mean... Not getting your nephew's popcorn, man. That is terrible. That is so awful. I mean, I just can't believe the suffering she's experiencing with that.

It is... It does feel out of touch. Well, I think in her case, it was awful form, and it made her look awful. And she's been getting dragged to hell on it the last couple days. Yeah, that is kind of fun. Which is, you know, a side benefit. But look, he is going to play fuck around with the post office. He has utterly politicized it, which I think is...

Can you do anything? Can people do anything to protect the post office? Not really. It is such a gigantic federal bureaucracy, and they're cutting off the operational funding for this. It is a deliberate strategy. It is something that I think people eventually will need to go to jail for, but that's going to be one of the many, many counts of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission coming forward. So what do you do about that, like as a voter and just a concerned citizen like myself? If you're doing an early vote or an absentee ballot, go as early. early as possible. If you really want to make a little extra layer of security, send it with a tracking number. I know that costs a little bit more. But these people are desperate to break

every institution that could possibly cause him to be overturned. And he knows that a lot of people are out there aggressively doing absentee balloting. Do you think that ultimately it will also hurt Republicans? Make me feel better about this. No, it will also hurt Republicans. And it has. And Glenn Bolger, a very prominent Republican pollster, recently said that they were starting to see people they relied on, Republican voters they've been relying on, who were saying, I'm not going to vote absentee. My God, the president says it's fraud. And so Trump has had this like two-week period now trying to say, well, our absentee ballots are the good ones. The rest are the ones that are voter fraud. So you think ultimately it will hurt Republicans too? Don't Republicans do more mail-in-balloting? We were very, very good at Republican turning out mail-in ballots, yes, for a long time, for a very, very long time. And it is a shame that mail-in balloting isn't universal, but because there's very little actual ability to conduct fraud through it. But here we are.

Kurt Anderson is the founder of Spy Magazine, and he is here today to talk to us about his incredible new book, Evil Geniuses. Well, Kurt Anderson, welcome to the new abnormal. We are absolutely delighted to have you here. I have been a fan of yours since the 1980s spy era and beyond. Uh-oh. You will go into eternity being famous for having coined the phrase short-fingered vulgarian in reference to our current president. And I will always love you for it.

Thank you. And, of course, I first became aware of you much later when I saw that you had renamed him, Cheeto Jesus. Whoever came up with that, I want to follow and be friends with that. So there you are. And thus a beautiful friendship was born. Exactly. Tell us a little bit about short-fingered vulgarian, the atmosphere that it came from and how you got there.

Well, the phrase itself, we had spy magazine. It was this magazine of satirical journalism, not humor. I mean, it was, we tried to be funny. Our motto was smart, fun, funny, fearless. It was at the beginning, a very New York-focused magazine, started in 1986. And from the first issue, Donald Trump was one of our subjects. We had a cover story in the first issue. called the 10 most embarrassing New Yorkers,

jokes, and he was one of the 10. So we started looking, paying attention to him. My partner in crime and starting spy, Graydon Carter had recently done a profile of him for GQ Magazine and literally had come back to our little office of spy when we started it and said, man, for a fairly tall guy, this guy's fingers are so fucking short. And so it was just an empirical observation.

You know, it wasn't like, it wasn't as Marco Rubio 30 years later had it correlated with the size of his genitalia. It was just that his fingers were so small, and we thought it was mean and that it might get under his skin. And so we added Bulgarian, and there you had it. We tried other things, other epithets for him, like a Queensborn casino operator and hustler on his best behavior, Donald Trump, and a whole bunch. But then finally, we landed on short-fingered Bulgarian, and it stuck, and the rest is history. That was sort of the Ivana years. It was, oh, it was definitely the Avana years.

And then we went into the, we kept covering him. him in the bankruptcy and dumping Ivana years as well. Yes. That's right. That's right. Spy Magazine did this. I loved Spy Magazine, even though my mother was in it a couple of times, though I'm sure she was like ultimately probably thrilled. But you did this amazing thing where you sent these checks. Can you talk a little bit about that? Yes, great prank. We occasionally did prankish pieces. This was one of them. And in retrospect, what I like about it is that it was this very long con.

We created a thing and set it up officially called the National Refund Clearing House. And this was back when physical checks often existed more often. So we sent to about, I think, 58, around 60 rich, well-known rich people, mostly New Yorkers, a check for $1.13. And said, here's your refund. And we were vague in the letter about what it was for. And we just wanted to see who cash it.

And about half of those cashed it. And then we said, so then after we got those checks back, we sent another check for like 47 cents and said, oh, we're sorry, there was more of a refund. You're also doing this 47 cents. And see who would cash that. And each time, fewer and fewer and fewer of these gazillionaires would cash the checks. Finally, we sent a 13 cent check to the semifinalists. And only two people cash those checks. One was Adnan Khashoggi, the shady Saudi arms dealer.

who was about to go bankrupt. And the other one was Donald Trump, who was also about to go bankrupt. And so they were the joint winners in back to the day. That is the greatest. We also, by the way, speaking of Donald Trump, we, in I think like 80, during the 88 election cycle,

we had, among others, Penn & Shone, who were then big, oh, yeah, pollsters, and Frank Luntz, a young pollster. Do polls for us. Do polls for us. One of the ones we asked was,

Which of these people do wish was running for president? And one of them was Donald Trump in 1988. And 4% of Americans in 1988, according to this poll, wished Donald Trump were running. So we pretended that that was a serious spring of support and that he should do it. Because what a fun joke that would be if Donald Trump ran for president. I promise you, though, knowing Roger Stone, he went into Trump's office and said, this is the building block, sir. You're going to be huge, sir.

This is going to be an amazing thing. I need $25,000 a month, and it's going to be awesome. Speaking of genius, your new book is Evil Geniuses, The Unmaking of America, a recent history, and we'd love to hear more about it. Well, I wrote this other book, published this other book a few years ago called Fantasyland, right as Donald Trump was elected, and its American history, its version of the story, was that we've always had this kind of weakness for exciting and entertaining falsehoods of various kinds as part of our national DNA, and that it had gotten crazy and out of control

starting really in the late 60s and crazier and crazier as it infected your former political party, Rick. And here we are with Donald Trump. I finished the book literally before Donald Trump was nominated, and then he was like a president in the book came out and there you go. This book is sort of my other half of the story. This is, rather than this organic, spontaneous madness of magical thinking that caused that set of problems,

Evil Geniuses is about how, starting in the early 1970s, way before I even knew it was going on, and I was 15 at 16 at the time, that this confederation of CEOs and billionaires, right-wing billionaires, and right-wing ideologs, economic ideologs, really got together and coordinated this extraordinarily brilliant effort to shift the paradigm and end the New Deal idea that, you know, all boats rise. and we should all help each other. And the government's here to make sure that not only that the system is as fair as possible to people and that greed heads don't get out of control and that we can have a sustainable capitalism like FDR tried to do with the New Deal. And here we are living in it. And maybe, maybe we're, you know, just as the New Deal and its aftermath lasted for 40 or 50 years,

maybe this thing now reaching its sell by date is about to end. We can only hope or I can only hope. Well, I will say this. I came into professional politics right out of school in the late 80s for George Herbert Walker Bush. And when I got into the electoral politics side and the consulting side, I've written about this too. There's this growing realization that the party of free markets is full of shit because it wasn't about free markets. It was about gaining enough power to use the regulatory state and legislative process to advantage your individual companies or markets. That's not capitalism.

That's crony capitalism on a good day. and something much worse. Well, and in addition to what the whole political counter-establishment in Washington and elsewhere did, in terms of changing sentiment and what the chattering class and regular people thought simultaneously and not coincidentally, Wall Street kind of aid America and in its variously deregulated ways. And so there are other things that happen simultaneously that I, being somebody, I wrote a whole book about, like, I don't really believe in conspiracy theories.

They're really dangerous and they're mostly preposterous. and they're mostly preposterous, and that doesn't happen. This, as I looked at it, having been a complacent, you know, happy Clintonian Democrat for much of my adult life, most of my adult life, I looked at it and said, wait, this, okay, it's not a crude conspiracy as people think of conspiracies with secrets. It's, A, it's out in the open. There aren't many secrets, but it does kind of quack like that duck and look like that duck and walk like that duck of a, okay, conspiracy, maybe not, but this concerted coordinated effort that was, as I say, just it is, breathtaking in its success and keeping their eye on the prize that what they care about simply

is expanding and maintaining their wealth and power through crony capitalism through any means necessary. And we see it during the COVID, right? And finally selling their soul or what remains of it to support Donald Trump the last four years. All they care about is their wealth, period, end of story. And it supersedes all other values like maintaining a democracy or decency and all the Is there a surprising genius in the book who you were shocked at how influential they were? Well, I mean, I wasn't really shocked by Milton Friedman, the OG evil genius. But having grown up thinking, oh, he's a, you know, look at that guy on TV, he's smart, he's amusing, he's whatever.

I had respect for him. I didn't realize really how evil his soulless notion of how the world works is, that absolutely nothing should matter to anybody in business but profits. everything else is not even secondary, just unimportant. So I didn't realize that. But the one, I guess, who surprised me because I only knew of him as, oh, the Supreme Court Justice who was dinged, who was borked. Oh, yes. Robert Bork.

Robert Bork. See, I didn't know that much about him. I knew, I knew of that. I knew that he was part of the originalist idea of reinterpreting the law that, you know, had the effect, really, of getting the right, everything they wanted under the guise of, oh, no, we're just going back. under this fundamentalist guise of going back to what the Constitution required. But I didn't know. I didn't. Oh, and I knew why he got dinged when he was against the Civil Rights Act in 1964

on the basis of it was violating free market principles that racist restaurant owners could decide who to serve. But what I didn't know is how that he is arguably the most influential person in shifting how we think and how the courts, more importantly, think about antitrust law. And again, conservatives. Milton Friedman was was in favor of antitrust law, you know, that's the way you keep the thing competitive, right? But Robert Borg, in a book he published called The Antitrust Paradox that came out in 1978 at this prime moment for this paradigm shift that I'm talking about in evil geniuses, he was the most influential person in shifting the way we thought about antitrust and being part of this larger effort to simply to cut back, eviscerate, emasculate the federal antitrust enforcement mechanism.

So that's why companies are so big now, and that carries with them their own problems of increasing insecurity and inequality and all the rest. What do you see is the end game to this? When you wrote this book, did you see something, a point where this might break one way or the other? I mean, does it continue to slide down into this sort of corporate control of everything, or does it move? Rick wants to know, should we build a bunker? I'm always about bunkers. Well, although I was told yesterday by one of my daughters that Portugal has the easy. easiest allowance for, you can just buy a house there, not a very expensive house, and you're on the track in five years to citizenship, and that's EU. So the fact that I even took that seriously and was interested in that indicates where my thinking is right now. However, no, I still have talked to me on November 4th about whether or not I'm hopeless. I am an American optimist, 51% optimist, I always say. I love that. And I am. So I think there is a chance that we can fix this. It is fixable. Unlike Fantasyland, unlike that, unlike all the American craziness, which isn't really fixable. It's just there and became an acute illness the last few decades. This was changed in this

bad way from the late 70s through the 90s, and it can be changed back if we have a democracy that is not dominated by oligarchs that doesn't, you know, and we can. So we'll see. I have a weakness myself for cycles, thinking of historical cycles. And I do think that we may be at the end of this 45 year, let's say, cycle where people, especially younger people, are waking up and going, no, no, no, This is not working for 80% of us. We've got to make it work for all of us. Oh, trust me. It was easy to live in that world as a Republican.

Oh. No, it was easy to do that. We've hit the moment in the podcast where Rick must apologize for this. I'm not, no. Oh, Molly, I'm not apologizing about it. But what I am saying, there are plenty of personal and financial incentives to be in that base. Yep.

Trust me. Look, undermining the principles of our democracy is a well-compensated endeavor. Yeah. And if it's Mayacopa Day here on the new abnormal, kind of synthesized excerpt from the book just appeared in the Atlantic Month. It just appeared in the Atlantic. In it, the headline they put on it is something like I was a useful idiot for the capitalists. And I too, again, as not working for Republicans, but being, hey, I'm doing fine. My job is not going to be outsourced or offshoreed or computerized or anything. I'm good. You know, so I think we all, there is blame to go around. Anyway, so is there hope. I have actually a little near the end. I have a little chart to make a deal. easy where there's five options. And it's like if economic growth and technology sort of goes along more or less it has for the last 50 years is one side. And then no, there's super AI. It's amazing. We're making things with computers like kaboom and 3D printing everything and whatever. Those are two possibilities. And then we either keep the system like it is now or make it fair,

at least as fair as it was in 1976 when we had maximum economic equality in America of all time. So those four quadrants, you know, we either become, if we don't really grow like crazy and technology doesn't change everything and we keep the system as it is, I think good chance we become Venezuela. Because the people with pitchforks and all the rest do come up and it is badly in some kind of fascist, left, right, whatever way. But I also think there's hope. I think if we just got back to how our peer countries have operated their successful contentment creating economic systems, and if we had that plus what technology could provide, man, you know, it's closer to utopia than dystopia. So choose where you want to end up in this game. You know, it's a heavy lift to fix it. I'm not saying it's easy to fix, but I am, for all of the annoying aspects of

Bernie Sanders supporters, for instance, I am hopeful about that more and more sane Americans and decent Americans will and are waking up to the fact that a lot of these catchphrases, which I always tell five minutes ago, rejected rigged economy, Wall Street billionaires, all that stuff, which was not part of my vocabulary, is truer than not. And how can we fix that? And Donald Trump and Trumpism are not the means to fix that. Because, look, he campaigned as a guy to the left of any Republican ever and to the left of economically of Hillary Clinton. And what did he do? He gets elected. Boom. What do you guys want? Whatever you want. Sure. to the right-winger and CEOs and rich people. So in a way, I mean, if Donald Trump has helped normalize the idea that it's a rigged system,

and look at his, really, his 2016 campaign, I looked back at it. It's incredible. His final ad, Wall Street has taken all of your wealth and ruined the working class, and we must defeat these people of whom my opponent is a puppet. Well, yeah, you have a point, but you didn't actually govern at all on that basis. So maybe, maybe he's sort of put that. critique of the system on the table and sane and people, even the more the factions in the Republican party, small though they may be, that understand that there's some truth to how market values

have eclipsed all other American values and that's a bad thing, you know? Should we just agree that we will all meet each other in Portugal? Portional? Yes. At the bunker? Yeah. At the bunker in Portugal. Yes.

Yes. Yes. We'll have a tapus in the bunker. I love that. The new Abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these.

So head over to new abnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast and podcasts like The New Abnormal. Thanks. Hey, Jesse, the producer. You said you had something for us. Yeah, ask us some questions. Yes, so your adoring crowd has asked me to pass on some questions to you.

We'll open up a channel very soon where they can do this more in the future. So the first question that everybody's just been dying to know is, how did you guys? I don't work nude. There's a reason we don't use video zoo. How'd you two meet? Prison. Are you wearing pants right now, Rick? Maybe.

How do we meet, Rick, you go. Prison. We were on chain gang. No, we met as all people do these days on the Twitter machine. Yeah, that was how we met. And then I think I came to somebody else's book party at your apartment. Whose book party was it? I don't remember now.

Because we live in dog years now. That's like 35 years ago. I wonder when it was. I still think the idea of telling people it was prison is kind of funny. Chain gang. Working on a chain gang. Work release. Yeah, work release.

Like four years ago. Three and a half years ago? Yeah, like three and a half, four years ago now, yeah. What is a special power each of you have that the audience would be surprised to hear about? No. I can hit my head on almost anything. Yes, you can. I've seen that, actually.

I once hit my head on a plate on a table. Rick was there. I have a couple of what I call dumbass superpowers. One of my superpowers is I always know what direction I'm pointing, almost to the degree which direction I'm pointing. almost to the degree which direction I'm pointing. That's one of my dumbass superpowers. My other dumbass superpower, as my children will now be embarrassed forever, is I can summon sea mammals like fucking Aquaman.

You can't. If I'm around, if I'm around, there will be dolphins or manatees or some kind of fucking sea mammal. No way. It's not. I swear to. No. If I see it, I'll believe.

I call bullshit on that superpower. And I also always know what time is. it is when I wake up. Really? To the minute. Like, always know exactly what minute it is. Oh, it's 408 in the morning. So to feed off of that one, what's the best breed of dog?

German short hair pointer, duh. Chinese crested powder puff, obviously. I will fight you. Yeah, I'll fight you. No, our dogs will fight each other. Our dogs will fight. Yes. Yes.

Oh, my God. The new abnormal dog fighting merge. You need it. I'm sure Noah will love it if we have a dog fighting pit. You know what? If we start with dog fighting, we can expand to bear baiting and then actual cockfighting. We can have a huge underground cockfighting ring. And that leads us into the meth business.

And then you're the queen of the south. Yeah. I'm in. Rick, who is your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is Mr. October surprise. It's Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin. Tell me more. Who is a man of marginal intelligence to begin with?

But he has certainly gotten a staff around him, some of whom, by the way, have been inherited from your best friend Devin Nunes. Oh, the best. Of eager Russia conspiracy guys who are going to produce the most clumsy... You mean broken-brained Devin Nunes? That Devin Nunes? Broken-brain-N-N-Nunias, yep.

And Ron doesn't have much of a brain to start with in terms of communicating. So, Broken Brain, Devin. Anyway, Ron has got a bunch of people around him, and their idea is going to be that they're going to have the Senate committee, the Intelligence Committee, groundbreaking, shocking revelation right at the end of the campaign.

Somehow, they'll meet on October 5th. And they're going to throw out the latest batch of bullshit Ukraine intelligence fakery that Rudy and his little minions are over trying to scrape up from the usual Vauvisicone scales. But this whole thing is the most transparent bullshit you've ever seen. It's Benghazi light. It's dairy farmer Benghazi. It's going to be almost impossible for any human being that has a spinal column and even minimal brain function to believe it, which means the Fox audience will swallow it wholesale.

My fuck that guy is Ainsley Earhart. Ainsley Earhart? America's sweetheart? Yes. Occupant of the curvy couch, girlfriend of client number three, Ainsley Earhart, who today on Fox and Friends, the world's strangest morning program, decided was shocked to learn that children get coronavirus. Shocked, I tell you. Well, shocked I tell you, you know, look, I have to say I very strenuously avoid watching the show involving the curvy couch. What? Because I have come to

the conclusion that I would rather get rip shit on cheap gin and watch the telitubbies. It has about the same level of discourse, and it is a shockingly bad show. It is shockingly terrible. So the fact that Ainsley-Earhart is unable to believe that children get COVID is so on brand. These are not smart people. I think that's fair to say. No, these are dumb guys. So that's my fuck that guy. That's your fuck that girl. And another segment of fuck that guy in the record books. 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 Jongfest 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-studed the Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode,

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