The Daily Beast Podcast - Donald Trump Is America’s Abusive Dad

Episode Date: July 17, 2020

Legendary filmmaker Judd Apatow really liked Donald Trump—when he was on TV. “I watched [the Apprentice] all the time because I found it so hilarious that all of his opinions were so wrong and everyone he would fire was always for the wrong reason. It was so terrible and crazy that it was fun to watch,” Apatow tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. These days, Apatow isn’t laughing. “When you're in show business, you meet people like Trump, you meet people who literally don't exist in the same dimension as you; they're just gone. And that's what he's like. He's like Cosby in a way, these people who are completely deluded and they've been famous and all of their wishes are attended to — they lose complete touch with reality,” Apatow adds, calling Trump the “abusive parent to the country.” Then! Washington Post media editor Margaret Sullivan weighs in on the Bari Weiss controversy. “If Bari was truly bullied at work, then that's very regrettable and I'm sorry to hear that, but she was not forced to resign. I guess you could say cancelled herself,” says Sullivan, author of the new book Ghosting the News. Plus! How many minutes will Trump’s new campaign manager last? WTF is up with the Trumps and Goya beans? And how did Molly possibly survive an entire day without Twitter?!  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, an 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.

Do I sound too far from the mic? No, but you sound so distant on Twitter. Oh, Jesus fucking Christ. It's so, how am I not on Twitter and you're on Twitter? It's magical, isn't it? I mean, everyone, just in case you know that Molly, as of this taping of the new abnormal podcast, is missing a limb. She's unable to move forward.

She exists in a formless vacuum where she may not tweet because of the great Twitter hack of 2020. She's one of the victims of it, and I would just like to pour one out for Molly Jong-Fast, formerly of Twitter. I haven't been able to tweet since like 6 o'clock yesterday, and since then I have, like, it has been a crushing blow to my mental health. I've worked out. I've done like six more counts. You know, you're going to be fit for the twitpocalypse. Exactly. So I'm out because supposedly I was one of the other people, the lesser people, targeted by the hat. I know in your Twitter vacuum you've missed the greatest news.

of the day. I kind of have. First off, I'm not going to just do a victory lap or a dunk on Brad Parscale. No, certainly not. I'm going to do an entire interpretive victory dance about Brad Parscal. As I knew you would. That jumped up fohawk wearing mook. I don't even know what that means, but I don't think it's good. Semioticians will parse it for you later. You'll see what it needs when we're back on Twitter. And the fact that he had turned himself into a star and gotten very rich by conning the con man. Right. And it was always, don't worry, Mr. President. I have my secret black box with magic inside called the Facebook. He pulled a rabbit out of a hat, one. Well, even then. And he got a Porsche or two. Well, he got a Ferrari and a $135,000 land rover. Why do you need a car that

expensive? I wouldn't know. I drive a 2006 Ford F-250 Superduty King Ranch Diesel pickup truck, so. I don't know what that means. Let's put it this way. If wherever, required to go through mud to rescue you during the apocalypse? Yes. It's effective at that sort of tasking. So Parscal was out, and I have to say, there's a quote in today's Wall Street Journal regarding Signor Parzcal, and I will read it to you now because I take great pleasure in it.

Drawing some concern from Mr. Trump was a May advertisement from the Lincoln Project, a bipartisan group working to defeat the president in November. The ad suggested that the campaign manager was getting rich off Mr. Trump. Pascal has denied the accusations. Apparently, that denial didn't work too well. You'll consider yourself to be responsible for the demise of Brad Parskow. I like to think that we had a hand in Brad becoming the Kaffevvy boy for the Trump campaign. By next week sometime, the new campaign manager will be already getting a food taster

and will be wondering whether or not he's going to be eliminated. And I will tell you, we have heard from somebody inside the campaign already that said, it's going to be a day of closed doors and hiding in cubicles and not getting on Zoom calls. So Brad, though, is still doing digital, or is he not really? Is that like a fake? Supposedly, he's still doing digital, but who knows? Right. I mean, and still, what Brad did was funneled to Jared and pay the girlfriends, et cetera. So... Correct.

Trump family is not, this is not ending the Trump family grift. Oh, of course not. I mean, I think the delay primarily came from needing to arrange for the grift to continue. And he knows where all the bodies are buried. And remember, the real campaign manager was never Brad Parscal. And the real campaign manager now is not Bill Steppian. Is it Vladimir Putin? It's close. It's the boy from the movie AI all grown up.

It's Jared Kushner, our first Android American campaign manager. We've seen what Jared's done with Middle East Peace and the coronavirus task force. And the economy and reforming government and methamphetamines. Yeah, he's pretty amazing. I mean, Jared's control of the methamphetamine problem may well have been why the Tulsa rally was a failure. Yeah. I mean, that's beguiling, but I'm going to agree for sure. I mean, why not? I believe it. So Bill Steppian is the campaign manager du jour. And he's actually done campaign managing, though. Not at this level. What did he do? Tell me what he did.

He's a Chris Christie guy. Was he involved in Bridgegate? He was the architect of Bridgegate. Excellent. So what could go wrong? Can you explain what Bridgegate is for everyone who's not completely tuned in on this? A bunch of New Jersey political hacks jerking each other off thinking they were the baddest of the badasses. No, that's not what it was, though.

Explain what it really was. No, I just described what it really was. What it looked like on the surface was then closing down a bridge exit on the George Washington Bridge to fuck with some local towny mayor that they didn't care for. Yeah, and causing hours and hours of trafficked delay on an already very trafficked bridge. Right. But Bill Steppian managed to weasel his way out of legal liability in Bridgegate, but he probably has a shelf life of a bow.

I'm going to my over on it. It's 35 days, let's call it. So he's a Chris Christie guy. He's a Chris Christie guy. And in some ways, he's also there because he's the guy with the most seniority who doesn't have gigantic scandal problems hovering over him. Yeah, Bridgegate is not a gigantic scandal. Bridgegate versus baby daddy Jason Miller. Right.

Or battling Corey Lewandowski. God, I wish he had run for U.S. Senate. I wish he'd run for U.S. Senate. Oh, that would have been fun. Can we just get back to Bill Steppian for a second? Must we? We must. He is a disciple of Chris Christie.

Now, Chris Christie, little known fact, actually big known fact, put Jared's dad in jail. Which is why Chris Christie is not the Attorney General of the United States or the secretary of anything or allowed to come to the White House because, and anyone who knew the enmo of these spiteful little weasels in the Jared Ivanka world would have known Chris Christie would get completely boned by them at the end of the day. No matter how much he humiliated himself in the campaign, it was never going to be enough. So Christie's, he's always orbited the Trump world, but he'll never get back in all the way. And the irony of that is, you know, the Rudy and Christy pairing of those two guys who both wanted to be AG, both didn't get to be AG. Can you imagine Rudy as AG? Sadly, as a former Rudy advisor and employee, I can well imagine it. And it would be interesting to watch it from my home in Uruguay when that was going on.

I got the hookup in Uruguay. That's right. Oh, good. That's terrifying. But the Christie and Rudy arc always amuses me. But both of these guys are somehow back on the radar screen a little bit this week. In part, because just before the president went out and gave that completely nutso bat-ship cuckoo-paloo-paloo-a thing. Rose Garden address where he...

It was Rose Garden rally. It wasn't like a press conference. It was more like a mini-campaign rally. It was a rally, except there were no adoring fans. I kept expecting someone was going to walk out and like gently take him by the elbow and say, okay, it's time for your nap, Mr. President. I mean, this is a person who should not be running the... He was exhausted, by the way.

He was not well. He was grinding along. He was clearly, like, not all there. He was sweating like a whole church, as my grandmother would say. Sweating like a whole church. I could write a whole piece about that. That's a Southernism of the highest order. Yeah, let's cut that out, please.

Continue. Sweating like, right. Roger Stone in a Russian bath. How about sweating like Roger Stone at a grand jury hearing? It's good enough. But so he comes out and does this ridiculous event. Calling it a White House press briefing would be completely off

because he basically spoke for an hour and 40 minutes without interruption and took very few questions. We were briefed, not at all. There was no there there. Right. We learned nothing. We learned absolutely nothing. And the entire thing just left Americans convinced that this guy isn't focused

on COVID. He's not focused on the economy. He's not focused on anything except like this list that came out of the Bannon Miller closet, this search history of their adjut prop white gnats, spank, bank. And it was just an absurd display of desperate white power politics. It's all like that ad, that crazy ad where it's like Joe Biden, radical leftist Joe Biden wants to take apart the police. Please leave a message. I was worried about that, but you said actually it doesn't, Nobody likes that. That ad did not do well for them. But what they're doing with that ad, look, the entire purpose of the Trump administration is trolling.

Right. That's why you have the president of the United States in a moment where 135,000 Americans are dead and 250,000 in total will probably be dead by the end of the year, jerking off in the White House with goya beans on his desk. I mean, Ivanka, right, with the goya beans? Right. And we're going to get hate tweets to troll the libs. I heard one thing from one of my sources in the campaign that there were people. in the campaign who, with my hand to God, legitimately thought they could base advertising to lure Hispanics to Trump on the Goya issue. Really? Yeah. I mean, that's as racist and dumb as the idea that African-Americans

are going to vote for Kanye. And yesterday was the end of Kanye's 11-day campaign, which consisted of him tweeting that he was going to run for president, and he was going to run on his own party, named the birthday party. This set off a news cycle. Can you imagine a news cycle of people seriously considering that a guy who has filed no papers? What did I tell you the minute he filed, that it was bullshit and it would go away? Eleven days. It's just who he is. And he has an album dropping today, I think, or tomorrow.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I have been told the Dr. Sebastian Pumpkinhead, Gorka. The Dragon of Budapest. That's right. The Dragon of Budapest is back in the Trump White House. Well, it's some sort of adjunct part of the Trump administration. I don't think he's actually in the White House per se, and I don't think he is having the president's ear every day. But this is what happens when you're a fish oil salesman. He has a radio show. Trump likes a radio show. He does like a radio show. But you're a fish oil salesman who wears a suede McLevin vest and gets tricked into doing cameos about us. It is a remarkable thing that Trump is sort of trying to get the band back together. He wants people that make him feel comfortable. and make him feel it's kind of like a patient in political hospice.

He wants everyone around him so he can go to the light. He looks like a Bond villain in a Philippines sea movie straight to video knockoff of the born identity. The Gork Identity. He's also really tall. In my younger days, as a Ute, I did play some dungeons and dragons. And Seb Gorka always reminds me of a D&D creature called A Shambling Mound. We're going to get to this segment. I think it should be a regular segment everything Trump touches dies.

Somebody should write a book about that. Yeah, it's a good title. You know anyone? I think I have an agent that can talk to somebody about it. Okay, so Rick, for those of you, for the one person who doesn't know this, Rick wrote a book called Everything Trump Touches, Dies. And it is, I mean, I really do truly hate, hate, hate Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, because he's a racist. But Trump really did kill him. You know, the arc, he is quite literally the thing that started the Senate Cascade for Trump.

Yeah. Jeff Sessions was considered a pure Tea Party constitutional conservative, traditional, old-school Southern Republican. But I have to believe that people in the Republican Party still thought he was a racist because it's so out there. Yeah, sure. Of course. But Jeff was also in the Senate, an institutionalist. He was somebody that was allegedly, aside from the racism, believed in limited government and the Constitution, the rule of law, all that stuff, supposedly. I mean, I fucking hate him, but yes. When he endorsed Trump at that rally in Mobile, you could see a shift inside the GOP because everyone was like, well, Sessions will give him good advice on judges. He'll do this. He'll do that. It's Jeff Sessions, man. You know, he's 500 years old. He's not going to do anything crazy. Right. And sure enough, that started the cascade. And Jeff Sessions soared in power and influence inside Trump world during the campaign of 16. Well, because he was a real guy. Everyone else in that campaign was horrible racist, but he at least had been in the Senate. Whereas everybody else had been.

Jeff Sessions is not a dumb person, okay? He's not a stupid man. But he made the fundamental error of everything, which he allowed Donald Trump to touch him. Yeah. And so from the moment he went into Trump's orbit in 2015, the slow process of everything Trump touches dies, which is the iron law of politics in America. It doesn't matter if you think it's going to miss you. It's like that movie Final Destination.

You think you've dodged death when the truck falls over. in front of you and you just barely get around it. Which final destination? They're like seven. Well, that's why it's never a final destination. Death always comes and ETTD always comes. And so this arc, he became the attorney general. He did the right thing legally to protect Trump.

He did the right thing once. He recused himself once. And then spent the rest of his tenure dodging the knives and bullets of the Trump world. And none of those people believed for a moment that Jeff Sessions should have done anything but recuse himself, but Trump himself looked at it as a betrayal. Jeff is humiliated as AG. He's thrown out unceremoniously,

replaced by hot tub time machine Big Dick toilet salesman Matt Whitaker. That guy was comic gold. I'm sad to see him go. Apparently his book is several pages of great hilarity. Yes, it is. I can attest. Not quite as boring as John Bolton's book,

which is one of the most boring books I've ever read. Continue. Sessions goes back to Alabama, where he had been, for decades, a beloved figure. Yeah. People would set themselves on fire if Jeff Sessions had said, I need you to set yourself on fire for me. But what had happened to Jeff Sessions is he gets in the primary

for the Republican U.S. Senate nomination. And Donald Trump sends down the message from on high to the Magi. Jeff Sessions is an apostate. He is a sinner. He must be punished and destroyed. And, oh, my Lord, did they kill him? He gets beat this week basically three to one by a guy named Tommy Tuberville.

He is a guy with securities fraud problems. He's got all kinds of shitty. He may be the only pathway for Doug Jones to keep that seat in Alabama, okay? A very, very, very Republican state. Do you really think that it's more likely that Doug Jones beats Jefferson Beauregard Sessions versus Tommy Tuberville?

I think it's more like Doug Jones beats Tommy Tuberville. Yeah, me too. Okay, so that's what I think, too. Look, people were conditioned to seeing Jeff Sessions on the ballot throwing the switch. So Tommy Tuberville has a lot of problems, and I'll make a little news here. This was absolutely in our planning in the Lincoln Project world to stay very far away from that and let Trump's nature take its course so they could nominate a much weaker candidate.

And they did. So you think Tommy Tuberville is weaker than Jefferson Beauregard's Seasons? By far. Tommy Tuberville has an opposition research file. Oh, look, it's on my desk. It's about 600 pages long. Why, what's this? Judd Apatow is an American filmmaker, actor and comedian known for classics like The 40-year-old Virgin, knocked up,

and it's recently produced hits like The King of Staten Island and Crashing. Judd, welcome to the show. Can you talk to us what it's like. Different countries have handled COVID in different ways, and you can now see this from the rollout of your new movie. Can you talk about that a little bit? This morning, I was doing interviews with the journalists in France, and it's opening in theaters in France this weekend. So I think there are certain countries that have done much more serious testing and contact tracing, and they're able to have movie theaters open.

I assume, you know, with less people in them, but still they're open. Although I was doing an interview with a guy from Switzerland, and he was like, you know, we're very excited to have your film in the theater. Although, you know, I don't think anyone's going to go. That's just what you want to hear. Thanks. So you're politically active and you have been, where are you? I mean, what are the things that are keeping you up at night right now?

When people ask where I'm at, I say, I'm eight times more angry and unhinged than Rick. So if you think he's worked up, imagine me. I am at the point where I'm just wondering how I feel about the human race. That's where I'm at the point. I always have this thought, which is very sad, which is that Hillary was right when she talked about deplorables. She was 100% correct. Now, we could debate what the percentage is. How many people are truly awful?

And yes, there's people who are ignorance and people who are manipulated, but how many people are truly awful? And in this country, we did have slavery. And there were people who fought against civil rights. There are people fighting against civil rights right now. And there's a percentage of people who are terrible, who will get in a fistfight with you because they don't want to wear a mask. And that's the thing that is really hard just as a person to live with. Just knowing that there's a percentage, maybe it's 3%, maybe it's 22% of people who are just a disaster. And it makes me very sad because I feel like the problems of the world really can only be solved if we're all in it together.

We're not going to solve climate change without massive work and sacrifice. We're not going to be able to deal with this pandemic or the ones that are going to be. coming unless we all work together to help each other. And it's really sad that, you know, Republicans and Trumpers feel like this world is in every person for themselves type of world. And it's America first. It's you first. And that just doesn't work. I mean, that is literally the end of the world, if that's how we look at them. There are days I have the, please let the meteor come today. You look at how degraded some people have but let Trump make them on the right and how little they believe in anything except I'm going to own the libs, I'm going to yell

loudest, I'm going to be the most transgressive, I'm going to be the biggest asshole in the room just because that's Donald Trump's example. Yeah. You know, I've tried to be open in terms of respecting other people's opinions. I believe in a woman's right to choose. But there's a part of me that can understand if you're religious and you believe that, I can see why you would spend your entire life fighting against. I can on some level understand how you get there. and I really disagree. But that makes sense. I also can understand how someone might say,

I think the country works better with the lower taxes, and this is how it works economically, and this is a theory that I believe in, and here's the proof of the I support. I think all that is completely different than do not tell me to wear a mask? Right. I go to Walmart.

And I think that the fact that it's even possible to get that many people to want to go to war over wearing a mask, which is like going to war, over not covering your mouth when you sneeze. I don't understand what that is. I don't understand why people aren't furious when the president says, I'm not going to do anything. I'm just going to the governors figure it out. I don't know how Republicans don't see that for what it is. That's what shocks me. I think it's beyond just the death cult of it. You must notice that he's

not doing his job in any way. I think they've gotten so deep in this cognitive hole that I'm going to Own the Libs has become a substitute for I want to live. They would rather put a middle finger up to experts and doctors and scientists in the media than to do the stupidest, simplest, fucking thing in the world, which is wear a mask. It's a striking change in our culture. It is something that I would never have thought was possible because we are a country that fought in World War II and everybody said, let's make sure that the world is a place for the good people

and we're all willing to sacrifice and the sacrifice of wearing a mask is so tiny that I don't know if people feel like it's a libertarian thing or it's connected to don't take away my gun but what's most tragic about it is what only changes these people's minds

is when their friend dies or their parent dies and then suddenly it all makes sense and that is what's going to happen in the next four or five months is most of those people who wouldn't wear masks they're going to lose somebody And then it's going to be... Right, it's like one degree of separation now.

Everybody knows somebody. And I mean, from living in New York, I've seen my four friends whose fathers have died of this. And I do think when you walk around here, everybody wears masks. It's very dispiriting. But then I try to think, okay, well, how many people are good? And what are they doing? And how can I get in sync? You know, for instance, when I see all of the Lincoln Project video, which are so great.

And they're brutal and hilarious. And then there's these other places that started making similar videos. And that's something that I had been talking to people about. You know, how can we help creatively with getting these messages out there? It literally gives me hope because I just think, oh, you know, people get it. These things are spreading. These ideas are spreading in a way that people can understand. And that there is a force for good that feels like it's getting more and more powerful by the day.

And I am very hopeful for a change if we can fight off the voter suppression. and it's all going to be about voter suppression. My rule that I tell people all the time, Judd, is the way to overcome voter suppression, because you know Trump's going to lie, he's going to cheat, he's going to do all the shady shit you can imagine. The way to do it is you've got to beat him so bad everywhere that it doesn't matter if he cheats. It doesn't matter if they suppress the vote. It's wrong, and we've got to fight it, but we've got to beat him so bad. We've got to knock him so far down that the guy never gets up to walk again.

Yes. Well, I do think, you know, when they think they're suppressing the vote, they're assuming that, you know, older people, for example, don't mind dying of cocaine. It doesn't seem like the best strategy. Hey, Granny, time to go so the Dow Jones can go up. Or people who have children who are being forced to go back to school. I don't know if you've been in a public school recently, but there's plenty of rooms where the windows don't open.

There's plenty of rooms with no windows. There's plenty of rooms where they have like 34 kids in the class, and they don't have an extra class to make the size half as much. So these people, they don't have the physical plant to make it safe. And all those parents, they're in a terrible situation because they do have to go back to work. If you don't help the school do it right, they don't want their kids to get sick. Agreed. What is your next project?

What are you doing next? I'm just going to sit here ranting in my room. Come make ads with us. You can run for the Senate. You should run for the Senate. My creativity is dead. And I'm just going to sit here walking in a circle for the next bunch of that. As long as you don't leave your house, you should be okay.

Well, I'm not doing that much of that. The sad part is that, you know, my family so doesn't want to spend this much time with me. And that's for the first month or two, it's like, oh, my God, we're getting all this, like, special family time. And we never would have had all these dinners together if this didn't happen. And we should at least appreciate that. But now heading into month five, they're like, I got to get it. the fuck out of you. This is entirely what's happening in my house, and I think this may also be happening in

Rick Wilson's house. We resemble those remarks, Jed. Yes. Like, it really is a wild experiment. Even like our animals, like my cats are like, when are you going to get out of here? I have a life without you here. Well, I read this piece in Bloomberg that was like, dogs are becoming overly dependent on humans because they've been home so much.

and they no longer can self-soothe. Cats, oh, I get that. Well, let me say, I can soothe without the cat. I literally forget their soothing. I'm so angry with my cat. I'm running around my house with the camera, taking pictures of them. Every time I read, like, oh, Trump is going to make them hide all the medical information from the CDC.

I'm like, time for a cat photo shoots. It's truly amazing. I mean, I say this from my open floor plan apartment where one of my kids is screaming at me, to be quiet from two rooms away. They're like, please, be quiet. I'm trying to read the Mary Trump book in here. I read it. It's really good.

I heard that she's a very good writer. And what's interesting is everything that she wrote in the book is stuff that we were talking about when he was running for president, which was clearly he's an abused child. I mean, she, I don't know how she describes it, but I would say his dad probably kicked the living shit out of it. I mean, this is someone. Basically what she says. And also what's interesting.

about Trump is he was sent to private school or boarding school, military academy, whatever it was, but no one else in his family was. Never a great sign. Yeah, no. And it's obvious that this whole thing is he can't fill. And the person that he wants to fill it for is dead and he's out of his mind. And I don't know if you've met a lot of people like this, but when you're in show business, you meet people like Trump. You meet people who literally don't exist in the same dimension as you. They're just gone. And that's what he's like. He's like Cosby in a way. These people who are completely diluted and they've been famous and all of their wishes are attended to. And I think they lose complete touch with reality in a psychological way that people don't quite understand. Trump isn't

even there. Right. Right. There is nothing underneath the shell. It's just this roaring cavity of need. Yeah. And I think it's so obvious. I guess the thing that always shocks me is I don't know. why more people aren't put off by it. And people have said that he is the abusive parent to the country. And I guess if your parents were really bad to you on some level, you might be attracted to it in some demented way. But I find it all very off-putting. Like, for instance, when the apprentice was on TV, I watched it all the time. And I watched it because I found it so hilarious that all of his opinions and everyone he would fire was always for the wrong reason. But he was so terrible, so dexist and crazy, that it was fun to watch this erratic person run a game.

It's like a crazy person being the judge of a game. Right. I don't know why people like that in life. But they're not exhausted from him. That's what's so strange. Now, I have a question for you, which is, do you think that Mark Burnett could have stopped all of this? I don't think you ever can underestimate how much people in charge. show business don't want to take any personal risks for other people.

I mean, even now, if you looked at just the online presence of celebrities, how few really say anything of any significance, people really feel like, well, if I make the Republicans bad, I lose half my audience. And that will be enough for them to never mention that there's a million Muslims in concentration camps in China. Which Trump signed off on. Correct. Which he signed off. Even if you look at the end. There's not one person in the NBA, and there's a lot of Muslim athletes. There's not one person that will verbally be enraged that there are concentration camps filled with Muslims in China. And that is sports, entertainment. Everyone is taking care of themselves, and there aren't many people

who say, you know what, I'll take the hit to try to save some of those people. And it's all your favorite stars. It's all your favorite movies. They're not going to take that risk. And it does make you understand why the Holocaust happened. You see it. They're just people. people who are like, I don't want to get in trouble, even for that. That moment of moral courage that it takes to go out when your agent and your other people are saying, hey, man, you know what, let's be safe here and just say something about human rights and don't mention the C word. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And I think what's happening is we thought that China would want our freedom. So let's talk to them. Let's open up to them. And they're going to want to be like us. But that isn't what happened. What happened is we became addicted to their money. And they said to us, you guys all need to shut the. fuck up. We're going to do whatever we want. And we're going to shut off the cash if you don't shut your mouth.

And we were all like, oh, sorry, oh, sorry. So if you tried to pitch a story or something that is critical to China, every company is going to say no. And the same for Saudi Arabia. It's the same thing. Oh, you want to talk about Khashoggi? Shut your mouth. Remember a few years ago when they tried to remake Red Dawn as the Chinese and all of a sudden someone said, oh my God, we can't do that. It's got to be the North Koreans, even though that's vastly implausible, but all the financial overhang. And look, do you ever feel that the country doesn't understand it all how the world work?

All the time. Because that's what I always think, that there's discussions about, here's how we keep oil production going. Here's what's the essential needs of our relationship with China. And that there is never an open discussion of what the true realities of the world are. Oh, no. And the fragility of a lot of these countries in the world that we deal with, that we treat them like they are resilient, and we therefore give them so much more power over our future.

But all these things in this big interdependent world we had hoped for have fallen apart now because we don't do alliances anymore. When you've got a president who shrugs off, when Xi tells Trump, oh, yeah, by the way, we've got these concentration camps. And Trump doesn't just say that is a horror. You must cease immediately. America will take steps if you do not. And city shrugs is like, cool.

Okay. I mean, we lost our moral leadership in the world. I mean, look, it wasn't just Trump, okay? a lot of mistakes going for the way back, but he's assertively abandoning our position in the world. And yes, people do not understand how the world works at all. I have a question, which is, I think everyone's always trying to figure out how much of what Trump does is his own opinion versus just a mushy guy with half a brain with a lot of strong-minded people around him. For instance, I don't think Trump is sitting around going, can we take hold of international students

who are going to be on Zoom and kick them out of the country. Right. Oh, yeah. That's Stephen Miller. Yeah. So how much of any of this is Trump's actual opinion? The more granular of the policy is, the more likely that Santa Monica Goebbels did it, Stephen Miller. The more detailed the thing is about immigration, the more likely it is with Stephen Miller. On trade, it's Peter Navarro. But Trump is, these folks in the White House now, they have, it's ground down to, like, immediate family members and true toadies. Yeah, that's what Jim Acosta said the other day. I will say this about Stephen Miller. He is pure evil.

He's not a stupid person, so he knows how to manipulate Trump enough to keep putting out more kids in cages and things like that. It's terrifying how much he governs by impulse, though. Why do you think that more people don't bail on him? As you see that there's a very good chance he's going to lose, I never understand why there aren't eight Republican senators who don't just call it all out. How is it that it's literally no one but Romney? The answer on that is that Washington is not full of profiles and courage. It's full of profiles and chicken shit. But also money.

Well, that's part of it. But I will tell you this. There's nothing a member of the Senate loves more than being a member of the Senate. Right. And they're terrified that if they go against Trump, he will tweet about them. And Fox News will turn them into monsters. And Mitch McConnell will cut off their money. And those are all true things that would happen.

When he goes down and he's going down spectacularly when this is over, it's going to be historic. The people that were sitting there saying, Oh, I just had to stick with my president because, uh, no. So, as I love to say, you bought the ticket, you get to take the fucking ride. The regrets are going to be enormous. And I think you'll probably start seeing sometime in late October, a few of the guys in very contested seats mildly break away. Who would you say those people are?

Oh, look, Cory Gardner is going to try for a Hail Mary at the end and say, I'm tired of this president. Good luck. I would be there to remind people that he was polishing Trump's shoes. But I think Sue Collins will try that. Martha McSally is too done. Sullivan and Alaska will try that. Danes in Montana actually might

might try that. But what's going to happen November 4th is you'll see Marco Rubio. Your favorite. And Mike Lee, Mike Lee and a bunch of the others. Tom Cotton. No, you won't see Tom Cotton do it because he's an actual cuckoo. But you'll see Marco and Mike Lee and those people, you know,

we've got to be past Trump now. We've got to start over. I had to do it to save the country. You'll be surprised how much I did, how much I stopped behind the scenes. Yeah, that is a giant steaming pyramid of fucking horse shit. Sorry, my language, Judd, I'm notorious. Well, I remember they wrote that paper about it, right?

Like, after Obama won the last election, there was that. The Republicans wrote out, well, here's how we can be more open, and here's what would help us, and then they ignored it all. Yeah, the autopsy, completely ignored it. Now, I'm very anti-gun, and Rick is very pro-guns, and this is our one source of contention. Will you talk to us about your Parkland documentary? Well, first of all, let me say that that issue is something that I care about. deeply because two people were murdered at a screening of train wreck. And here's what's sad about it

is that people are so numb to this cause and to just gun violence in general that there were so many of them that people don't even remember it. And so I, you know, work to raise money and do benefit, you know, for gun control and gun safety. I'm not someone who thinks everyone needs to get rid of their guns. I certainly think that there's very simple specifics that most of the country agrees with that it makes no sense that we don't have pretty airtight background checks or how you care for your guns in your house so your kids can't get to them. And I'm not a fan of people who have committed acts of violence or domestic violence having access to guns. There's all sorts of things that would really change the game in a big way. And it's really tragic that it's

forgotten. And I think what we've learned that it's very similar to the mask issue, which is even when you have the slaughter of enormous amounts of children, our country doesn't really care in the way they ship. And it's a battle that they've made some progress with, but it's very important that the country is really out of control with guns. And I'm really terrified about it. And my kids have to do active shooter drills. You know what that does to their psychology, you know, what happens to their minds. So now they're afraid of COVID. They're afraid of Trump and immigration and kids in cages and they have to do drills for what they'll do when someone comes to shoot them. And, you know, kids are like committing suicide at way higher rates these days. There's so much more anxiety and

depression. And all of this feeds into it. Just the general feeling that the country isn't concerned about them and their safety and their mental health. But Judd, you had a good point there. And this is part of what Neil Stevens wrote a great essay one time about how America stopped being bold. We stop thinking we can do the big, big shit. You know, we stop thinking, oh, we'll just go to the moon. We'll just deal with X. We'll just do with Y. We'll just try to undo Jim Crow. We'll just try to fix voting. We'll just try to build a post-industrial technological country. We stop believing all that stuff because the problems are huge and multivariate and intractable and really shitty. Your point is well taken on that front really is. Support troublemakers like us who speak truth to

power. Believe it or not, your actions speak louder than our words. And our super can get very loud. Visit new abnormal.thedailybeast.com to sign up and become a beast inside member. Margaret Sullivan is the media editor for the Washington Post. She was the public editor for the New York Times. And before that, she was the editor-in-chief of the Buffalo News. She's also a very dear friend of mine. Please help me welcome Margaret.

So your book is about local news, and you have a really fascinating, you are the media critic for the Washington Post, but you have a really fascinating backstory. that makes you the perfect person to write this book. Can you talk a little bit about that? Sure. You know, I'm a native of the Buffalo, New York area, actually a small city, Lackawanna, New York. So when I got out of school, I had internship offers at both of the Buffalo Daily newspapers. There were two at the time. And I asked my dad, what should I do? And he said, well, I think the Buffalo Evening News is the dominant paper. And my dad, who was a lawyer, turns out to have been pretty spot on because I joined the paper as a summer intern. and they hired me. And two years later, the morning paper, the Courier Express was out of business.

Warren Buffett had bought the Buffalo Evening News and he and his appointed publisher went out of their way to realize that there could only be one paper in town and they put the other paper out of business, basically, by being very aggressive. So that was sort of early days of hedge funders putting out of business. I mean, I don't think you could say that Buffett was a hedge funder at all. I think it was more just that a lot of cities were only going to be able to. to support one paper, and so it was a question of market domination. So he was a good owner. Anyway, I stayed at the Buffalo News for a really long time, and when you stay someplace for a really long time, sometimes they eventually make you the boss. So I became the first woman, executive editor,

so top editor of the Buffalo News, and I did that job for 12 years. So, but before that, I'd been a reporter and a columnist and a this and of that, all these different jobs at the paper. And I really saw local journalism from the inside out, and I saw the value of it and what it meant to the community and how it added to civic engagement and all that stuff. And then from there, I became the public editor, the first woman public editor of the New York Times and ultimately the longest serving one, and that's a job of reader representative and sort of internal critic, has since been discontinued, both at the New York Times and at the Washington Post. So that was as recently as 2016. So I started out the very eventful year of 2016 at the New York Times, but was gone by April, you know, before all that stuff

happens that we all remember rather vividly. And it was in 2016 that I went to the Washington Post. So my background has been like largely in local journalism, but then at the two biggest, you know, maybe not the two biggest because maybe the Wall Street Journal, but, you know, these two dominant national and really global newspapers. So that's my background. And that's why I wrote ghosting the news, local journalism and the crisis of American democracy because that local journalism has faded so much, especially in the newspaper realm, but in other ways as well. It really has. You reminded me of when I was growing up. I grew up in Tampa, Florida. We had the Tampa Tribune in the morning and the Tampa Times at night. And my dad got the journal. So I grew up as a kid reading a lot of newspapers every day. I loved it. And now you look at it and that market has one megapaper. What was the St. Pete Times is now the Tampa Bay Times. Yeah. They've all merged together. And of course, as Molly threw out there, hedge fund folks in the mid-2000s discovered all these dying newspaper properties, bottom up, saddled them with debt, made them impossible to continue. And you know, that sort of helps explain the title of my book, ghosting the news, because a lot of these papers, and I actually don't put the Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Bay Times, Tampa Bay Times is still a pretty good paper. But in a lot of places like, for example, the Cleveland Plain dealer and others, you know, they were these big, robust papers. They had three.

300, 350 people in their newsrooms, they're down to like 12 or something. And you cannot cover a metro area. I mean, Cleveland's interesting because it has a big, all-digital Cleveland.com. But the point is, they've become, in some cases, ghost newspapers. They still exist. They circulate. They have a nameplate. They have a building maybe. But they don't have the ability to go out and report the way they used to. And you guys, I feel, this is something I feel a tiny bit defensive about. So I'm going to talk about it for a second. When I talk about local news, I'm not just talking about newspapers. We have to remember there's a lot of other things.

There's public radio. There's TV stations. There's these digital startups. There's nonprofits. There is a whole ecosystem. A lot of it is suffering and newspapers are suffering the worst. I think you're right. There used to be an ecosystem of local news across the country.

And you would have a local talk radio and local sports radio and local news and different capacities. And now, I mean, there used to be in this country local business papers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. In decent metro areas. And now all that has completely gone. You're right. They're like ghost institutions because like the local paper here and where I live in Tallahassee, Florida, it's basically the USA Today, Gannette feed. They've got one or two local stories and it's the rest of its, you know, generic national content. And that's happened all over the country. And it's interesting. You know, you guys are, of course, so oriented toward politics, which is a great thing that you are. Not that politics is a great thing because it really isn't right now, but it's a great thing that you are. And one of the things that happened. when local news diminishes is that people become much more polarized in their voting. So they don't have this kind of common core of facts that they may wish to interpret differently according to their political perspectives. No, they just go into their corners. You know, they're on Facebook. They're listening to either, you know, maybe they're on either Fox News or MSNBC. They're gone off into

their respective corners and they're not going to consider crossing the aisle to vote for somebody who's not, in their tribe. That's a really bad thing. And that is a, you know, I mean, there are studies, not mine, but there are studies I cite in the book that show that civic engagement goes down, that voting goes down, voting across the aisle goes down. And oddly, or interestingly, municipal costs go up because local corruption, right? Exactly right. There's no watchdog there, you know? So it's just the fact that there's no watchdog means that it's going to cost more to your tax dollars, and that's a bad thing, too. That's at the state level, too, because you look at state capitals that used to have

robust press corps. Absolutely. And now in Florida, when I was coming up in Florida politics, there were 60 reporters covering the capital during legislative session. Now there are five. Right, exactly. On a good day. That's a great example, and that's something happening across the country.

I will say, and I try to focus on occasional bright spots here, there is some collaboration going on in statehouse coverage. So in Pennsylvania, there's an outfit. that new, pretty new outfit called Spotlight PA. And it's a bunch of different news organizations, the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, the Philly Inquirer, and some broadcast and radio outfits that have kind of gotten together to cover state politics and state government. So they're no longer as much, I guess, competing for scoops against each other, but rather collaborating to get information out to people. And that is super important and a really good thing. There's definitely this correlation between

if you don't look at local governance, you have corruption, right? I mean, what is the solution for right now? I mean, it's a tough thing. It's not one answer. I think if we're going to fix this, it has to be kind of a patchwork of things that can help. So, I mean, one thing that can help is, even if you don't love your hometown paper, your local paper, try to support it with a subscription and know that they're, okay, maybe it is owned by a hedge fund, but there are still reporters and editors and photographers

and videographers there who are doing the job for you. And if they go away, there's not going to be anything. So I think subscribe. If there's a local investigative digital site or a startup of some kind, consider supporting that with your wallet open. And I also think like to get across in whatever form to your public official, your elected officials, that you care about local news and you want something done about it because there's actually a bunch of stuff that's public policy kinds of initiatives that are on the table right now that need support. I mean, one of them, and not to get into the weeds too much here, but one of them is it would give newspapers a temporary antitrust exemption so that they can negotiate together, a bunch of different publications, negotiate together against

the duopoly of Google and Facebook, which have sucked up so much of the digital advertising. So it would be a little bit of an evening of the field between David and Goliath. So, but in order to make that happen, to be political and governmental support for that. And there are other things like that on the table. And then sort of the one thing that people are talking about now that is very controversial and who knows whether it could ever happen is more direct subsidy from government to news organizations, which is something that we've always resisted because, oh no, it would cut into our independence. But what if it's cutting into the independence of something that no longer exists? It's like it's gotten to be kind of desperate. So that's a thing that's under discussion.

now. Do you think the New York Times needs to have a public editor? So it's interesting. I certainly felt like when I was there that I was able to be of use to the readers of the Times. I also understand why they don't have one. I mean, frankly, it's a tricky thing. When you hire a public editor, you're basically saying, you know, it's completely hands off. You're basically saying to someone who's a veteran journalist, okay, whatever you want to say about us in our pages and on our website and in a very public way, carte blanche, go for it. And so, you know, you have to have someone who is good at it and trustworthy and also, you know, has good judgment. And that's not always all that easy to come by. And it's a real leap of faith, you know, right now. But I mean, on balance, and I said this actually

in an interview that the Times itself printed, so that was pretty good of them, I said that I think that the loss of public editors and Ombudsmen and Ombuds Women is unfortunate, but not a tragedy. There's worse things that are happening in media and in the world than that. We're going to have Jesse now, our producer, who we love, is going to ask this Barry Weiss question. Here he is. I don't want to validate that every reason Barry Weiss said she's resigning was why she's resigning since there seems to be some evidence to the contrary. She did talk about that the New York Times is edited by the Twitter mob. What are your feelings about the positive or negative feedback that Twitter gives to media?

You know, I think that what's really going on in this whole, you know, somewhat boring conversation about the discourse and people writing this letter and a counter letter that says that is that what's happened with Twitter and social media in general and the way media has been democratized is that there's a lot of pushback against people who have some pretty amazing platforms and megaphones. And sometimes it's not very comfortable. You know, I've been there too. It's not very comfortable to have people push back and tell you you're wrong. and tell you, you know, they disagree with you. But I think that on balance, it's a good thing not to have just the gatekeepers, the elite gatekeepers, deciding what we're going to see and hear. That's my answer. No, I agree. If Barry Weiss was truly bullied at work, then that's very regrettable. And I'm sorry to hear that. But she was not forced to resign. She, I guess you could say, canceled herself. Yeah, that's my question, too. Also, she did tweet out a whole thing about what was going on in Slack. And I always am a little. It's little itchy about people tweeting out what's happening in a private company.

You know, look, there's whistleblower situations, but I feel like there's an expectation of privacy. That's true. Here's the thing. And this is kind of foundational for me. If I were at the New York Times right now as the public editor, and by the way, I was not fired. They asked me to stay longer. I would investigate that. I would find out exactly what happened. I would look into these charges of internal bullying. I would talk to the bosses. I would talk to the staff. And then I would try to synthesize it and write some sort of sensible post about it. But I'm really not able to do that from the outside. And that's why I don't like to play public editor in absentia. I mean, it's interesting to me in part because we have this political culture in the country on both sides. I'm not doing a both

sidesism. It's worse on the right that there is this like constant working of the refs. Absolutely. This constant complaint that everything isn't just a fact error or a bias error, but it's part of an insidious conspiracy to destroy the country. And how much do you think that the decline of local news has had to do with that that 40% of the country just said, all I want to do is watch Fox and read my Q&On Facebook group? Yeah, your description of working the refs is so right on. And it's one of the things that has caused what I would call mainstream news organizations. And that's everything from the big networks to the big national papers and others to sort of bend over backwards to be inoffensive at times. And in doing so, is that actually true? fairness or is that defensiveness and being in a defensive crouch all the time. But I think the real reasons for the, the biggest reason for the decline of local news, certainly local newspapers, is just straight up the change in society and the internet, which dealt a death blow to

print advertising, because print advertising was the thing for many, many years, print advertising was maybe two-thirds to three-quarters of the revenue. And then the other part of it came from subscriptions. So now the New York Times, which is doing quite well financially, has flipped that. And so now the biggest portion of revenue is coming from readership. It's coming from subscriptions and events and mostly from digital subscriptions. And the advertising piece of it has gone down some. So I think it's really more a business model problem. And also the fact that newspapers who were which, you know, and I include myself in this, were from a financial perspective, very complacent, used to making 30% profit margins and just like essentially didn't have to do too much to make a lot of money.

When the internet came along and the societal changes came along, we were unprepared and slow. And I would say the opposite of nimble. Not apropos necessarily of news, but I saw that stat yesterday that 65% of the people who said they joined an extremist group did so because Facebook recommended it. Jesus Christ. That's amazing. That's amazing. So Rick was talking about how the USA today, it's not very on the ground in the local news. What do you think media needs to do about being closer to the source? Well, they need to be closer to the source, not to swoop in and say, hey, let's find a diner and talk to people about whether they're still glad they voted for Trump. I call that the endless diner series, but to actually have people on the ground who perhaps actually live there.

And, you know, I think we're finding out now in this particular moment in time that we don't all need to be walking into a building in New York City or Washington. D.C. And maybe this will be one of the small blessings of this terrible time is that we find out we can actually live in different places. Now we come to the only segment of the show, or one segment. The mandatory formation of this show. Right. The only segment, fuck that guy. Today, Rick, tell us who your fuck that guy is. My fuck that guy today is Peter Navarro. Peter Navarro is the head of the White House manufacturing and some other goddamn shit council. But he is one of the president's play things, and he has been the guy inside who has been pushing this jihad against Dr. Fauci. And Anthony Fauci has forgotten more about medicine than Peter Navarro would know if he studied it for

a thousand fucking years. But he wrote an op-ed this week, I believe in USA Today, bashing Anthony Fauci for being wrong on so many things, including Dr. Trump's miracle elixir hydroxy, coxachloric, whatever. And this is basically an attack by a senior friend of the. president on a guy who should be in the center of the COVID response who now has to spend time dealing with these jerkoffs like Peter Navarro, who is also completely fucking wrong on trade, by the way, and has caused untold devastation and economic damage at the middle of the country because of his wrongheaded medieval views on trade. But he also has wrongheaded medieval views on COVID. So I'm sure that soon Peter Navarro will be bringing us more great wisdom

like leeches or perhaps using a wise woman who lives in a swamp to place stones around your body while she sucks out the vicious humors of the deadly COVID. These people are fucking morons. It's part of the Trump administration's war on expertise. And in a normal world, he would have been struck by lightning. Fuck that guy. But what do you really think, correct? I don't know, Molly.

I'm just trying to be more subtle. That's right. So my fuck that guy of this week is Brian Kemp. Brian Kemp, the South's second worst governor? Yeah, wait. Oh, because Ron is number one. He's not as bad as Ronda virus. I don't know.

I think Brian Kemp may actually. be worse than Ronda virus because Brian Kemp last night at midnight, he pushed a mandatory anti-mask wearing. He had an executive order which said that no city can be more aggressive in their COVID mitigation strategies than the state, which is not very aggressive in its COVID mitigation strategies. So I think George is like the fourth largest COVID hotspot in America, I'm pretty sure. and Brian Kemp would like to take it to number one. So he is my fuck that guy. It is a fitting and appropriate fuck that guy because Brian Kemp is another one of these people who,

at the beginning of this crisis back in April, was like, got to go back to work. Open it up. We're good. Ready to go. Let's go. And just like Rondavirus and many others, they are learning a painful lesson on that. Georgia's ICU's and Florida's ICUs are filling up really quickly. And Florida isn't a race to be the third worst place on earth later this week.

Yeah. It's kind of amazing to me that these Republican governors don't see what's coming here, because obviously this is going to end in a lot of tears. Truly. 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-studied The Daily Beast podcast at the dailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.