The Daily Beast Podcast - Final Debate Just Proves Trump ‘Can Lie in Different Gears’

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

On a special episode of The New Abnormal responding to the final presidential debate Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson are joined by GOP political consultant Mike Madrid, Daily Beast senior editor Tim Teeman and Gary Peters, the Senator from Michigan, who is here to outline the fight against voter intimidation at the polls.   Molly was aghast at Trump’s almost normal debate performance. “It’s almost worse when Trump tries to be normal than when Trump is just insane,” she said. “When he acts like a normal president… then you have constantly fact check him in a way that you don’t when he’s just huffing and puffing and screaming.”   Madrid, a veteran Republican pollster now working with the Lincoln Project, said Trump’s relative calm on stage means he can’t be counted out of the race yet. “If he had just blown his top and set his hair on fire and started stomping on his feet, then we’d be like, OK, it’s done,” he said. “He can lie in different gears.”   But Rick is not convinced that Trump did enough to turn it around. “My theory of the case going in was that Trump needed an absolute knockout, absolutely needed to slaughter Joe Biden on that stage tonight. And I don’t think he got there. I don’t think he even got close to getting there,” he said.   Away from the debate stage, Tim Teeman joined the gang to discuss the Trump campaign’s last gasp “gaslighting” effort to court LGBTQ voters by claiming Trump had been an ally all along. “I don't know about Donald Trump’s personal bigotry, but it doesn’t matter if he’s a bigot personally or not,” he said. “He’s advancing a course of bigotry for his own ends. And that honestly makes him just as dangerous as the bigot with a pair of keys in their fist, ready to punch you in the face on the street.” 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, bestselling 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.

Hey, Molly Junkfast. Hi, Rick Wilson. You know, there was a fundamental question in the universe posed last night about me. Wait, tell me more. I think we should let Frow Ingram tell you herself. And I can't imagine that all Democrats, the ones who really do have principles, I don't believe that they sign on to all of it. Well, tonight, I'm speaking directly to you.

It's time to find a new political home. You want to be with Rick Wilson and that crowd of the Lincoln Project? You know, Molly, Twitter may be a hellscape half the time, most of the time, 90% of the time. But I will say the dragging Laura received for that was truly epic. It was truly delicious. It was rather heartening in the state of constant exhaustion right now to see people like, choice between you and Rick Wilson? Fuck yeah, Rick Wilson.

He's got snacks. Before we get ahead of ourselves, how are you doing, Rick Wilson? I am alive. I am continually in a forward position. I move without rest or Circe. I make the things. They go on the air. The explosions follow. And life is generally good. Your former employer, one, Rudolph Giuliani, life is going a little less well for Rudy. You know, Molly, I was with Rudy for quite a long time, including some of the messy times in Rudy's career. And in the last 36 hours, let's say, I've spoken to many people from Rudy Alumni World. How much more? Many of whom I hadn't spoken with for years, some I've been in contact with,

all of whom have noticed the last, I don't know, three years of the, shall we say, the decline of dignity when it comes to the mayor. That feels very generous. But if you had Rudy touching his d'I during a Borat prank on your 2020 Hellscape Mad Max Mutant Cannibal Waysen Bingo card? Congratulations! If Rudy can get tricked by Borat, how likely is he to have been tricked by Vladimir Putin? One gazillion percent.

It is an ontological certitude. You could define the fundamental rules of the universe by the same level of percentage that Rudy got played by the GRU or the FSB like a dog. This is a guy who, well, let's break down four conceits of Rudy, right? right now. The first conceit of Rudy is that he is this crafty inside player's super lawyer who would never get caught up with a fake Bulgarian actress playing a Russian reporter who, with her whole little haughty act going on, was deeply interested in the 76-year-old mayor of New York. That sort of Rudy being the canny player, that's conceit number one that I think we can dismiss

with this week. Conceit number two is that there's some sort of crafty super lawyer. going on with this Hunter investigation. This is the same shit show that every single Rudy operation since Parnas and Furman. And before that, when these people essentially gambled the Trump presidency on trying to burn down Hunter Biden, they're just trying to throw bad cards into the pile now. They don't have anything left. The American people, their fuck meter on the Hunter Biden story is at zero. You know what I think is interesting? Rudy is shopping a sex scandal while waiting for his own sex scandal to break. That's the other thing I wanted to point out. Rudy says, oh, they did this because of Hunter Biden. This didn't happen yesterday. This happened months ago.

July. Yes. So Rudy knew he had been pranked, that he had been trapped. And that's the fourth conceit, is that Rudy is somehow really close to Trump and that they're communicating on all these things and that Rudy's candid with him. You know, if you get caught and it's something like that or worse, it's probably a good thing if you're the president's free lawyer to let the president know that you may be on tape touching your junk with a girl you thought was in her teens. He didn't think she was in her teens. I think he thought she was a young conservative reporter. But then Borat ran in. I know all about this prank because I wrote a whole piece about it. But then Borat ran in and said she's only 15. But I do think fundamentally, the idea that a really young attractive woman wants to get with Rudy seems kind of nuts.

You know, listen, there are Kissingerian. I have no idea. Yeah, I'm not touching this. That of Kissinger. I'm not sure how I would actually say it. The famous and apocryphal Kissinger's statement about power being the most potent aphrodisiac, it may or may not be true. But I will say this. There clearly is some inverse proportion.

relationship with these people for power or perceived power and judgment. Because, I mean, this is just, also, let's also dismiss with the fact that Rudy was the expert on the cyber. You guys, I wonder if he's not great on cyber. I'm guessing at some point, he called one of his assistants in and said, so deal, there's a deal. We could do it in Nigeria. He's a prince.

Apparently, I'm related to somebody who died there. It would be jerky and idiotic and really stupid, a really dumb way to do business if we didn't go to Nigeria now. I'm giving you guys my terrible Rudy imitation. Because in the 90s and 2000s, Rudy had a phrase that he particularly loved. I was rehashing this phrase with a former extremely senior Giuliani official yesterday. Who said, would you say it's jerky or idiotic to be caught by Borat? on the tragic part of the tragic comedy, there was this recognition that the drinking and the financial situation

and the whole collapse of Rudy as a potential attorney general and as a potential secretary of state, all the things he wanted out of this service to Trump had basically crashed and burnt. Now, this person theorized that he's been being paid through the LLCs or the campaign or something. We don't know that answer, but apparently the rest of his business is completely collapsed.

It's gone. Really? You wouldn't want to be in business with that guy? Call me crazy. By the way, speaking of people... He seems like a good hire. Speaking of people going into business after the campaign, I don't know if you caught the Business Insider Story by Tom Lobionco today.

Now. Everyone's favorite android, Jared Kushner, is shopping, looking for investors on Wall Street and abroad. To help him escape? No, for Trump TV. Jesus. they're already planning Trump TV. Yep, it's the Jared show. Lucky us.

Trump TV. On the Jared show, I'm going to stare into the screen for 30 minutes every day. I'm not going to move my face. It's called Jared in the Uncanny Valley. Do we think that Jared will have a show on Trump TV? Because I'm not, I feel like Jared considers himself to be the brains behind the organization. I mean brains with quotation marks around it. on a relative scale in Trump world.

Right. And with quotation marks around it. Right. No, I'm telling you, the uncanny valley with Jared Kushner every day, he's just going to stare at the screen until people recoil in terror. Yeah, Trump TV, that's going to be something. I mean, I think that seems inevitable, right? Well, you know, Mark Burnett, I heard this from somebody in Hollywood a couple days ago. Mark Burnett is not kidding about doing a post-White House show with Trump, where Trump still plays the president.

What would you do, Mr. President? now that President Biden is doing it. And it's a blurring of reality TV. Oh, and an interdimensional portal into a hell none of us can conceive because it is so completely monstrous. Hey, Molly. Yeah. If you were Donald Trump, where would you have a secret bank account? Switzerland?

Try again. They still have actual banking laws. Ooh, so close. Is it communist China? It is communist China. It is. China. But I thought Trump hated China.

He loves China so much that he pays more taxes in China than he does in America. Yes, that is not hard, though. No, that's not hard. But true. But true. Yeah, he was discovered this week to have had business dealings in communist China with the communist regime of communist China. Tell me more. Who believe in Chinese communism.

Does this make Donald Trump a social? I think it makes Donald Trump a chai-com. I'm sorry, what's the phrase of the term of art in the 50s? A comm simp. Let's just talk about this for a second. We discover Trump has a secret Chinese bank account, a secret Chinese, you know, that he's paid taxes in China, that he continually accuses Joe Biden of being in the tank for China. Right. What else am I missing here?

Well, I mean, one thing that was pointed out to me by a guy in the tent. industry who does a ton of business in China. I talked about this a little bit last night, is that all business in China involves the paying of prodigious bribes to Chinese government officials. This is not an ad for Borat. No, it is not an ad for Borat. The lavish and prodigious bribes that are also large and consequential and yet eye-popping and yet also, and also shockingly huge, those bribes, every American business that's over there ends up doing that. So the Chinese know that Donald Trump's minions, whichever one was assigned to this particular shit show, have paid Chinese officials large sums of the long green, if you will.

All right. So there was a big fundraising numbers yesterday, and we saw that Trump raised $135 million less than Biden in September. Right. Is that bad? Well, look, if you're an incumbent president, you should be able to raise. unlimited money. Okay? There really should not be an upper boundary in what you can do as an incumbent president. You should be financially equipped from the get-go. You should never be behind the

curve. Now, Donald Trump has raised over a billion dollars, and their actual cash on hand is, at this point, dropping through the floor. They're not paying their lawyers. They stopped modeling their data. They're off TV in most all of the swing states now, except for a couple, where they're making their last stand, their alamo. What's astounding is that Biden's campaign, the cost of their money is so much lower. Explain that. Trump's money is costing him from what we can tell somewhere around 70 cents on the dollar, which is fucking crazy level. Well, the company that's doing those is charging them, what we were told, seven to nine cents per email, and their cost is like 0.04 cents per email or per text message.

So these guys are making a killing. Same thing with the email fundraising and the phone and solicitation fundraising. Their cost of the money is enormous because all these, you know, he was going to drain this. He's going to drain the swamp. But what he was, it was the antelope with the broken leg. And all the creatures are coming out of the swamp and dining on the carcass now. Good evening, Molly Chonfast. Hi, Rick Wilson.

And we have Mike Madrid here joining us. So I think we all just came out of what is thankfully the last debate experience of the 2020 presidential season. And what are your feelings on it, Molly? I mean, I thought that was horrendous, but I'm curious to know what you guys thought. It's almost worse when Trump tries to be normal than when Trump is just insane. Well, because everything he says is a lie. So when he acts crazy, it matches the crazy shit he says. But when he acts like a normal president, I mean, not normal, but a little.

little more normal than you have constantly fact-check him in a way that you don't when he's just huffing and huffing and swooping and swooing and swooning. How old would be a lunatic. I think that's right. I mean, Trump was, you know, I always said this. He's not a smart man, but he has a degree of like feral cunning. He's like an animal. He's like smells traps around him once in a while. And tonight he recognized that if he did, you know, the same thing he did in the first debate, It was not just the ball game, but a humiliating end. The campaign, they'd declare it over tomorrow if he'd been, you know, Captain Crazy again. He could lie in different gears.

I think that's kind of cool. I think, yeah, the worst part is it's exhausting because it lives to fight another day, right? If he had just blown his top and lit his hair on fire and started, you know, stomping on his feet, then we'd be like, okay, it's done. I'm not sure that's true because we have had that experience before, and he still has hung on. I mean, his polling isn't great. Yeah, that's part of the fatigue, right?

It's the ghost of 2016, and the guy always does seem to pull the rabbit out of the hat. I think that's right. But I think the fact that he did not go completely berserk, just gives us kind of this, the marathon kind of keeps dragging on. They move the finish line a little bit further down. I mean, I think, look, Trump fatigue syndrome is a real thing. It's set in. I think we're all just exhausted by this shit.

Do I want to know, do you, Trump said he's going to win the house. Mike Madrid, you have a lot of polling. Is Trump going to win him? I don't know what house he's talking about. Maybe the big house. It could be winning a ticket to the big house. Don't Democrats have like 200 and 200 plus seats? Rick and I were just chatting about this.

I mean, I think that the Democrats pick up another between five and nine. I think we were in agreement on that, which ones, of course, you know, and these are not even really marginal seats. Most of the marginal seats have moved already. So these are, you know, you're cutting into the bone here. Trump is an anchor. He's going to pull a lot of people down in a lot of different states. There's a lot of senators completely scrambling.

Kevin McCarthy's got to be trying to spin up some sort of optimistic way of looking at how he's going to lose even more seats, even though every seat out there that Republicans hold are pretty, you know, strong our seats. But it's not going to be pretty. But let's just say this. The 41 seats they lost in the 2018 cycle, they were not going to lose that many again. I mean, they burned through all the easy targets. but the five or nine or ten that are out there now, you know, those are not soft targets,

but they're still going to lose a lot more seats. So the less, the beatings must continue until morale improves. What do you think was the best moment of that debate for Trump? I like it when he gets going on the wind. He sounds so unhinged. The fumes from the windmill? Well, he's so obsessed with the wind. You know, he gets so offended because it has.

It has to connect to the implanted wig, I think, in some way. But his obsession with the wind is just, I almost feel like that was Biden's best setup, was just asking him about the wind. I don't know if, I don't know that Trump had any good moments. I just don't think he had any bad moments, which I guess we now perceive as good. Look, I think he came with a little bit of gusto. And if you believe that, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop has something to do with anything, then I'm guessing you probably thought that he looked good and he looked straight.

But I don't know that anybody beyond a very shrinking hardcore base believes that. I just don't. I think that there's a question that I haven't like scanned around enough yet. But I have to imagine the mongas are a little disappointed tonight because they have been yelling and screaming all day long about whoever this guy that used to know Hunter. You know, he's going to be the killer app. It's going to be the thing that ends the campaign. And Trump's going to go out there and rip it apart. And Trump barely knew what he was talking about. I think I think the boogoo boys are pissed because they didn't get their shit. out after the proud boys got their fault. I don't know. Biden shouted out his people, the poor boys. The poor boys, yes. Yeah, there was no crazy call to action.

I mean, I think that there was probably a lot of, you know, people on the fringe. The land of the Mr. Toys was looking for the call to action and they didn't get it. Right? By God, I'm with the lower Michigan boogaloo militia. He didn't say anything. I'm staying home now. Trump did say a lot of crazy stuff, though. Like New York is a ghost town.

and everyone's moving from there. And, I mean, there was a lot of crazy stuff. We've talked about that before. How do you survive in the radioactive wasteland that is New York? It's funny, actually, because my daughter was in the room and she's like, this is bullshit. But he did say a lot of crazy stuff. Do you think that Biden hurt? I mean, Trump, I think, thought he got a got-a-a-moment when Biden said that we have to get rid of fossil fuel.

Yeah, you know, it's funny because Trump, his campaign, immediately, tweeted out something or they put it out somewhere. Somebody mentioned it to me that there are 400,000 jobs in Pennsylvania regarding fracking and natural gas and oil. And it's like, that number seems a little high. Well, according to the actual figures, it's 23,000 people. And Mike and I were talking to this earlier. If you're a voter who's moved by the subject of fracking, you were already voting for Donald Trump. Yeah. I don't think that it does anything particularly powerful for them. I thought an interesting moment the debate was the character question. Like 1992 was the first time like with Bill Clinton that

there's this contract, contrast between Bill Clinton and George Herbert Walker Bush. But, you know, being the good New England patrician, George Herbert Walker Bush just kind of sidled around it and talked about his biography. This is the first time probably in presidential history where you had somebody just basically say, look at his character. This guy's just a bad dude. Look at my

character. Let's just call it what it is. One of us is a good character. One of us is bad character. And if you can't, see that, then the problem's on you. I kind of like that part. Yeah. I think COVID hovers over everything. And I think those initial moments where Trump was saying, we're going to live with it. And now I'm immune. And there's a vaccine coming tomorrow. You know, all that stuff. It just seemed to me like, you know, he just didn't have an answer. He just didn't have a real answer. I just don't think it worked. I mean, it is this continual thing that he can't make a case for himself for a second term. He can't really make a case for himself for a first term. He sort of tried when he said, you're the reason I got it.

You and Barack Obama are the only reason I got into politics. But of course, that was because he got famous on birtherism. Well, it was also because he has a long time hard on for Barack Obama, because Barack Obama ruthlessly mocked him at the White House correspondence dinner. Right. But he also, I mean, the way he got involved in conservative politics was birtherism. Right. I mean, that's how he got in with.

that crowd, because before that he was a Democrat. That's how Roger Stone got Donald Trump into the conservative timidemond of crazy fucking conspiracy shit like that. On the CNN in instant poll, they're saying 53% of debate watchers are saying Biden won the debate versus 39% of Trumps. And the instant poll was nine, said Biden one and two said it was even. That might be the actual outcome of the race. 5339 is a real possibility.

here. No kidding. Look, I just think tonight was not. My theory of the case going in was that Trump needed an absolute knockout. He absolutely needed to slaughter Joe Biden on that stage tonight. And I don't think he got there. I don't think he even got close to getting there. You know, I think the thing with Trump is that he's lowered expectations so much for Biden. But, you know, for the last six months, he's been saying the guys got dementia, the guys got this, got that. So when he talks and he sounds smart and he makes sense, it just the whole case falls apart. Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, there's very little that they've invested in.

I mean, I'm sure Mike, it's probably millions in digital of them putting out this. What's wrong with Joe Biden? Joe Biden has dementia, you know, all those things on Facebook ads. I suspect that that investment has blown back on them very, very, very badly. I think Trump also dropped it, but his emails comments today, too, didn't he? Like, he literally went that far back in the time machine to 2016, where he dropped. like an emails. The emails, there's an emails problem, right?

There's a laptop problem. It's like, well, the Hunter Biden's laptop from hell has to be a Russian RT talking point, right? Oh, God, yes. Oh, entirely. The sad part of this, guys, is that we will almost certainly never again see Donald Trump on a debate stage. Well, let's not get too excited here. So there's been a lot of nerves around this debate.

A lot of people were scared that Biden might drop the ball. and obviously that did not happen. He did great. I would say even better than when he crushed my boy Bernie, but a lot of people are a little scared that this Hunter Biden laptop thing may boil up.

You know, the Info Wars crowd keeps saying it's about to come out. Do we see anything else changing the game here? I don't think Donald Trump Jr. is in any position to actually reveal anything about Hunter Biden because the whole case fell apart when Borat Prank Rudy.

The case had fallen apart even before that because not a single reporter in this country, except for Hugh Hewitt and a few of these jerkoffs at the Federalists and elsewhere, you know, were looking at this as a major mainstream story. If you look back at Hillary's emails of 2016, it was wall-to-wall, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, everywhere else, okay? Wall Street Journal everywhere. This is now like page A-17 of more crazy shit from Rudy and unverified. But also the Wall Street Journal opinion page ran the story. that Trump was very excited about from Kimberly Strassel.

Remember that he teased during the 60 Minutes interview. And then the Wall Street Journal news page debunked it. Yes, correct. Which is pretty unusual. There's a lot going on with the story. Even in Murdoch-owned newspapers, where you scratch through like the first surface of it and it's, you know, a giant steaming pile of horseshit. So you're just not seeing the same, you know, you're not seeing the same uptake that it got during

you know, Hillary email gate. Yeah, look, this me, this conservative media bubble has gotten so small and so, so extreme and so fringy. I'm not even sure they're convincing themselves anymore with this type of stuff. But there's also a tactical difference. Remember, because of the pandemics, so many Democrats and independents are already voting and have voted early. I think we're sitting at 33, 35 million ballots have already been cast.

The remaining votes are disproportionately Republicans that are already with them anyway. I mean, if this guy's going to drop an October surprise and drop the bill, He better have done it yesterday because there's just not going to be enough votes to move in time to get traction in the media, you know, circus and to bleed out of the bubble to actually move the votes that they're going to need to move. It's totally different than 2016 where Republicans were vote by mail and the independence declined to states and undecided were all the ones that were waiting to the last minute to figure out how they were going to cast their ballot in the Comey bomb drops. This is just Republicans are the late vote. They're already there. They're already with them. They better drop something. quick. And again, like today, tomorrow, if they're going to actually move the needle on this. Can we agree that Comey has done, did worse to Hillary than anyone even in Trump world has even, I mean, Comey really sank Hillary in a way that DNA, DNI Radcliffe.

Yeah. Oh, oh, no, Molly, I think you're exactly on point right there. Radcliffe's, you know, thing yesterday was like a forgotten little love tap. And it's going to be, I think it's still shocking to Trump that at a lot of the Trump-right media complex, it's just not working. It's just not working. It's not penetrating. It's not out there in the country. It's just, you know, preaching to the choir.

And some of that is because the media has gotten better at coverage, that they're less credulous, that they're... Absolutely, Molly. And I will say this, the drop off in accepting that bullshit is in part because the media finally got itself educated to the laundry that was used for so long. It emerges from some Russian fucking propaganda website. It gets on a Twitter account. Some dipshit like Pesobiac or Cernovich or anybody else is an amplifier in that space, you know, tweets about it, Gateway Pundit picks it up, Breitbart takes it from Gateway. Gateway or Brightbar, you know, Fox picks it up from Breitbart and they launder it. So you take the craziest shit in the world. And then everybody else goes, oh, fuck, Fox is

covering it. We have to cover it too. Well, now that's not happening. You know, now the other network's like, okay, that's the crazy town. We're not doing it. Yeah, and it's limited to spread. It's really contained it. It's just kind of like it's now sheltered in place, right? We're killing that virus.

And the reality is it's just sort of tired and played out, too. I really think people are just tired of the drama. They're just tired of the nonsense and it's just not sticking anymore. It's not believable and it's not sticking. And it's so trite. It's literally the same damn playbook. Like, have a little bit of creativity. make up some better lies.

You know, it's the same thing about emails in a freaking laptop. Right. I also think it worked a lot better on Hillary because there was misogyny, whereas here he's like the whitest old white guy you could ever imagine. Well, I think there was misogyny involved, but I also think, and let's be honest about this, Hillary's lifelong habit of extreme secrecy. Right. And her paranoia.

I'm not saying the paranoia wasn't. justified. I'm just saying it was real. So when they started hearing about this, it was like, it opened. Right. How outrageous, you know. Yeah, it opened the door to a lot more of that. But I do, I think that's totally right. But I also think you guys talked about this before. And I mean, I, it's one of the really the things I don't like about him. But he is like the most conservative Democrat. You know, it's hard for them to make all that stuff stick on him, right? That he's like Bernie Sanders. I mean, nobody believes that. just a complete contrast. He's just so different. There's 47 years of experience. Yeah, he's

Joe from Scranton. Yeah, he's the vice president. I mean, there's a lot of vanillaness that, yeah, makes it just hard to stick. He's never been a lightning rod. Hillary Clinton was pushing the envelope on a lot of things. Good for her, to her benefit. I'm doing the right thing, but that became a, she became and leaned into being a cult. Yeah, she leaned into being a cultural lightning rod because she was trying to make change. You got to respect that, but that's going to stick. That was never Joe Biden. There was Scranton. There was Scrant. birth and birtherism tonight? You're not really from Scranton, Joe?

What the fuck was that? Birth certificate. Let's see the birth certificate, Joe. I want the long form, the long-form Biden birth certificate. What wasn't he from Scranton? I didn't understand that. What the hell was... He lived in Scranton as a child, and then he moved to Delaware.

And so Trump was saying, you didn't know Scranton. They love me. You don't know them. They blah, blah. He said something. He did that on the stump the other day, too. Your father's from Delaware. But I mean, your father was born in Delaware.

Before we get into things, we have a fun little treat. There are so many insane things happening in the world right now, and two episodes a week just aren't enough to cover it all. So, the new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks for Beast Inside members only. We'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these.

So, head over to the new. Abnormal.the DailyBeast.com to become a Beast inside member now. That's new abnormal. dot the daily beast.com. Tim Teamon is a senior editor and writer at The Daily Beast, and he's going to talk to us about the ridiculousness surrounding the Trump campaign's last days, as well as what they're doing around LBGTQ issues. Hi, Tim Teaman. Good morning. Hello. So you do a lot of really cool writing for The Beast, and you're an editor there, but you also do a lot of really interesting stuff on LGBTQ. this has been a very interesting time.

So I feel like there's a lot of really interesting stuff going on right now, especially in Trump world. So can you get us up to date on that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, pre-Trump, LGBTQ rights under Obama, obviously we're heading in the right direction. There had been the momentous marriage equality win at the Supreme Court. And, you know, Obama had the ban on trans people serving in the armed quarters and things

like that, they'd figured out a way through that. With Trump, the LGBT-Q animus has been strong, beginning most banner-wise with that ban on trans people serving in the military, which Trump characteristically announced in a series of tweets. But since then, and listeners can go onto the GLAD website, GLA-A-D website, to see the full litany of the anti-L-L-G-T-Q moves for Trump administration has taken. It's just been one thing after another. We're looking at trans people being denied proper access to health care. We're looking at the Trump administration standing squarely against that Supreme Court case that was won recently on Title VII being applicable to LGBT people protecting us from discrimination. The administration stood square against that. And now,

and the reason I guess why we're talking this week, we have yet another appearance by a Trump surrogate at an event, in this case, Tiffany Trump. Yes, please talk to me about. about Tiffany Trump. Well, she headed down to Florida at the weekend to do one of these gaslighting, Earth is square, upside down is up, crazy events, where the Trump administration are claiming they are pro-LGBQ, which is nonsense. I mean, it's from their playbook,

which is that they say the thing that just isn't true. We're going to protect pre-existing conditions. No, you're not. And just say it over and over again in the hope that it will stick. The Trump administration have been involved in a kind of pre-election run-up gaslighting project, that they are in fact pro-LGBQ when they are anything but. And the fascinating thing to me, I will say about it, is that in a survey conducted by Glad, released at the beginning of October, 76% of LGBTQ voters said they were going for Biden. Cool. Okay, that's understandable.

He has a good record and he's standing on a very strong pro-LGBQ equality manifesto. But interestingly, 17%, now that is almost a fifth of LGBTQ voters in America surveyed by Glad. our voting Trump or save our voting Trump. So it reminded me, and as I said in that piece, I mean, the Tiffany Trump thing was a circus and ridiculous in every single way, but it did remind me of the time I grew up in Britain, as you can tell by the accent, in the 70s and 80s. And I grew up, so I was, you know, I'm a Thatcher's child, basically. Margaret Thatcher, again, a homophobic, intensely homophobic period of time anyway, an intensely homophobic administration, which introduced anti-gay laws such as Section 28, which forbid what you call the promotion of homosexuality.

If you think about it now, it's a kind of, yeah, so it's a precursor to the Russian law that Putin has introduced doing exactly the same thing. So that is the time I grew up in. And I will say that even though I grew up in that time, and I am not a conservative voter, my parents certainly either did vote conservative or conservative leaning. And a lot of LGBTQ people like Thatcher for various reasons, powerful, charismatic, Iron Lady, blah, blah. I have met gay Thatcher Acolytes. So the conservatives who support Trump are not an alien species to me. However strange, we may find their affiliation given the intensely anti-LGBQ animus of this administration.

Talk to me about Tiffany Trump. What's she doing? Just go back to Georgetown law study. Get the degree. I would occasionally see her out in about at Fashion Week. Well, she's being dragooned, like all the kids, into the kind of the charabank of this campaign. I'm guessing because she is young and seems, in Trump terms, relatively hip, she's been in the LGBTQ beat to go and say, hey, we like them.

We're okay with the queers. Her speech, listeners should click somewhere and look at it. Was bonkers. It was all over the place. I'm not sure if it was intense nerves, which I have sympathy for, speaking in public, or if she just wasn't in charge of her material, which is understandable. seeing as there is no material there, the Trump administration is not pro-LGBU.

It's a bit like selling a car and saying, hey, look at this really beautiful car, and you're in the audience going, the car has no wheels. There's no steering wheel in the car. So Tiffany Trump in this speech went on about having gay friends. Now, look, the first thing to do, if you're trying to sell yourself as pro-LGBQ,

is not to say some of my best friends again. It's a bit like saying some of my best friends are black. If that's yourself, you have a big blind spot when it comes to racism and or homophobia. So that's the first thing she did. She then sort of said, my mum was on Broadway. She knew somebody who died of AIDS

and my father's going to conquer AIDS. Now, all those sentences, I am actually clarifying that cycle of sentences. On the video, these sentences tumble into, to one another like acrobat in the world's worst circus. So I am not sure where all this was coming from. She clearly wanted to get a message out. It really reminded me of Trump's first gay event where he held the rainbow flag upside down.

Who knew there was a right way to hold that flag? Oh, no. That's the right way to hold a rainbow flag. He held upside down. And for me, when he held upside down, I was like, yeah, that's telegraphing pretty much the fundamental message here, but you do not get this. I think the interesting thing about Trump and LGBTQ stuff is he's dangerous because he doesn't believe in it. He's most dangerous because this is Mike Pence's project.

Mike Pence, his VP, is the signed up far right evangelical here. He is the one that is the driving force behind denying LGBTQ people, their rights and civil liberties, right? Trump is the useful vehicle here. Now, Pence is dangerous, but once you know a bigger, it's a bit like on the street, see a bigot, you know a bigot, you can cross the street or engagement, whatever, you know the bigot is there. When people are not bigots, but advancing a course of bigotry, it makes them really dangerous because they're tabularisers, they can do sort of anything. We are useful to Trump in the sense that we are a useful weapon for his base, we're a useful weapon to get

Amy Coney Bound onto the Supreme Court, were sort of collateral damage, but he doesn't really care about. And the interesting thing for me is, you know, Tiffany Trump in that speech said, my dad has always been pro you. And the interesting thing to me there is, she may really believe that because she may have grown up with a person who didn't really give a hoot one way or another. But as president, of course, he's given more than a hoot. He's just given license to it. So I don't know about Donald Trump's personal bigotry, but it doesn't matter if he's a bigot personally or not. He's advancing a corset bigot for his own ends. And that honestly makes him just as dangerous as the bigot with a pair of keys in their fist ready to punch her in

the face on the street. Yeah, I think that's true. It was sort of baffling to me because I had never understood why we never saw Tiffany on the campaign trail, and that question has really been answered. Well, we didn't see her on the campaign show because she was waiting for a disco track and to enact for Price is Right. And the only event that was going to happen was a gay event. I don't know. Maybe they were waiting for her curling tongs to heat up. I've literally got no idea. But I think the gay thing, gay in a lot of people's minds, means young, it means his. And I think in the campaign terms, it means, oh, who can do this? Well, Ivanka, no, she's not going to go near it because she, her and Jared,

it's kind of too low grade for them. It's perfect for Tiffany. Tiffany also, as I said in that piece, think about the rotten state of relations she's had with her family and her dad over the years. Those kids in this campaign, whatever I think about them personally, they're clearly trying to do something, sort of prove themselves, kind of budget King Lear kind of way. And we can see it.

And the thing that's painful watching that clip, as offensive as I find the gaslighting and the lying about being pro-LGBQ when they're doing everything to take away my civil rights, the thing that's painful is watching her try and match up, try and do her dad's bidding in this very small space and poorly attended space as well. I mean, there's hardly anybody there. Anyone in that audience has blown in on some wind, but kind of beating the street. I think calling Tiffany a budget, King Lear is about right. And I do think it is interesting to see just how little. I mean, the facts that they chose Tiffany as the surrogate chose how little they really care. Yeah, the interesting thing here, right, is they don't care about LGBT rights in a positive way, i.e., they've done everything they can to take them away.

And they don't even care about them that much in an anti-way because they're going to send someone as low-grade as Tiffany to go and sell a bogus message. So what they're doing here is the minimal engagement to try and gaslight as many votes, as they can out of that 17% that I talked about at the beginning. It's not going to be a rich shoal of votes that they're trawling for, but there are some there. And if they're a selfish, money-minded, materialistic, gay people, trans people out there who want to vote for this,

then they can see it here. What I would say to your listeners, in a few months' time, the Supreme Court are going to consider another LGBTQK, this time coming out of Philadelphia, where a Catholic child care agency are seeking, to deny rights applications from same-sex parents. Their case has advanced to the Supreme Court. And so this case will be focused this time

on the issues of religious liberty and religious freedom. These are the two key things that the Trump administration, Mike Pence at the forefront, have been weaponizing against LGBT people in state legislatures, in urban legislatures, and now at the Supreme Court, this weird, amorphous, non-meaning phrase, that people's religious liberty, as they call it,

people's religious freedom, as they call it, are somehow infringed upon by having to treat LGBTQ people equally and with a modicum of respect. This case is now at the Supreme Court in a matter of months. The Trump administration is obviously supporting that case. When people talk about marriage equality being in danger, if Amy Coney Barrett is installed there and those six three, marriage equality itself is a banner thing. We are nervous about that. But what you might see, and the same thing with women's rights on a far right leaning court, is the chipping away of these rights and these liberties to render them meaningless. And so this religious liberty and religious freedom case is really important.

And so when people are casting there, though, or when people are thinking about this thing, and if people are thinking, hey, the Trump administration, okay, they're really not okay, consistently not okay. But they are at the forefront of incremental and determined effort to take away our civil rights. And religious liberty and religious freedom will become a real set of buzzwords, which will be recurring a lot. do not let their gentle-sounding nature fool you about what their real intent is. So good. Thank you so much, Tim.

Gary Peters is a junior senator from Michigan caught in a very tough race. So we're going to talk to him about the state of his race and how important it is to win so the Democrats can have a Senate majority in 2021. This is your, is your first re-election campaign? Yes, right? It is, yeah. First for the Senate. I was elected in 14.

So tell us about your race. Well, you know, Michigan is a true battleground state. And so my race is competitive right to the very end, as we always expected. And Michigan is a battleground for the presidential race. Hillary Clinton lost here and Trump won in 14 in a close race. And it just shows that Michigan is truly a complicated place and is very, very competitive. And you have to run hard right to the very end. In fact, in the presidential race, I think it's impossible to be president of the United States if you don't. in Michigan. It's just the way the electoral college is now. It may not be a sufficient condition, but clearly necessary. So that's why we see Donald Trump campaigning in Michigan, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, have been here. I had the opportunity just recently to campaign with President Biden, and I suspect he'll be back in Michigan soon. But that also makes my Senate race very, very competitive. And the amount of money that's being poured into this race now is extensive. Mitch McConnell knows that we have, Democrats have a,

very real shot to take the majority in the Senate. And in a lot of ways, the Senate is even more important than the presidency when you consider how Mitch McConnell blocked so much of what President Obama tried to do through his administration. So we have to make sure Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have friends in the Senate. And our very real narrow path gets a whole lot more difficult if we lose Michigan. And that's why McConnell, just over the last three weeks, between his super PAC and the Republican Senate Committee have put in $20 million of negative, nasty false ads that all the fact checkers say are false and smears. They don't care about the truth. They're just dumping money. And plus I have Betsy DeVos and her family, the DeVos family, has created a super pack just to go

after me and they're dumping millions of dollars as well. So this is really coming down to crunch time. We have to run very hard and certainly we have to marshal all of our forces to make sure we win this state. One of the things I think is interesting about the candidate you're running against is that he doesn't have that he's a Republican anywhere on his website. No, that's right. No, he doesn't. He has said that he supports Donald Trump 2,000 percent, which is a pretty big percent to support somebody. So a lot of people would say 100 is where it ends, but 2000 is interesting. Yeah, I haven't wrapped my head around the math of that, but that's a lot. And then you look at some of his writings to his supporters.

He says, quote, he's just like Trump, end of quote. But then in public, it's a different view. And in fact, after he lost two years ago, when he decided to run against me, what they did is they erased all of his Facebook posts. They erased everything on social media. They just cleared it completely off. And then he just has gone out raising money, doesn't talk to the press. In fact, the last two years that he's been running against me,

for 500 days, he didn't even do a local interview with any local press because he hasn't said anything. They're just raising money. And he's trying to reinvent himself. But we know exactly who he is and what he's all about. Let's talk about preexisting conditions because that is a big issue. And I saw that incredible video of your opponent saying that he just couldn't answer the question about what Trump care would be because there is no Trump care. and, you know, the emperor has no close. Talk to us about Obamacare, saving it, saving preconditions,

and what you can do as a Democrat. Well, it is absolutely critical to do that. And we know that the Affordable Care Act, ObamaCare, is under significant threat with the Supreme Court nominee that's moving forward. Her writings are clear that she believes that that law is wrong, and she would vote to, likely will vote to overturn it. So it's truly on the ballot here in Michigan. And just statistics. I mean, we have several million people in the state of Michigan who have

resisting conditions. And those protections are gone. They're in serious trouble. We also had the Medicaid expansion as a result of the Affordable Care Act, which provided health care for over 800,000 people in our state. That could go away. The prescription drug prices would go up. The ability to keep young folks on your parents' policy until they get up on their feet and get their feet and get their their life moving. All of those things are at risk. And you're right about my opponent. My opponent basically has shallow talking points, and he's memorized them. If you ask him the question, he'll give you his 15-second memorized answer. And then if you ask him to elaborate, he'll give you the exact same 15-second talking points. Clearly it depends. You're mentioning

a video that circulated quite widely. He was on a local show, and the gentleman who questioned him said, you know, you want to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but you know, the Republicans have not had a plan, as you mentioned. They've had 10 years to come up with a plan. They don't have a plan. So he said, what is your plan? And he met that question with a blank stare, and then he wasn't a politician. Which is, if he's not a politician, why is he running for office? Can you talk to us a little bit about the mail? Because the last time you were on here, we talked about the mail. and I know you've been really involved in trying to save the mail. Can you talk to me about where we are with that?

Well, in fact, we just put out a report from the committee to kind of look at what's been happening with delivery rates. As you know, and as we talked about last time, delivery rates dropped dramatically, starting in July, with the new Postmaster General coming in and instituting a number of policies that had the effect of slowing down the mail. Right, which is what they were there for, which is why he was, right. Right. And if we looked at the numbers, you know, the Postal Service strives to have 95% delivery within their delivery parameters. And then it dropped in Michigan in Detroit region to 60, only 60% on time. So nearly half the mail and for several days.

And I know I talked about some of the stories that I heard from folks when we were on your podcast before. But we just did a report to look at how it's recovered. It's still, even now, delivery times have not recovered to where it was prior to his policies. around the country. But it's been most dramatic in the Detroit region. And it was 60 percent. Now it's roughly 80 percent, but still a long ways from where it was before in the 90s. And it's curious that although other parts of Michigan have recovered to a greater extent, the metro Detroit area still is slow and is one of the slowest areas around the country. Do you think that's intentional? You know, when you see the fact that those numbers have not recovered when they have in other places,

it certainly leads to lots of questions that need to continue to be answered. And I've been pressing the Inspector General to try to get to the bottom of it and find out exactly why. What is the reason for that? But the way from an election standpoint right now, we are certainly encouraging folks, especially now that we're so close to the election, is if you have an absentee ballot in your possession, and around three million people have asked for absentee ballots, that when you fill it out, you should drop it off directly at the clerk's office. Many, many jurists, most all the clerks around the state now have drop boxes outside where you can just drive by and drop it in to make sure that you get it. Because in Michigan, the ballots have to be in by election day.

So you can't risk late delivery if you want to ensure your ballot, drop it in the drop box. And the Secretary of State has set up a website where you can actually confirm that the clerk has received it, which we encourage everyone to do. How bright are you about voter intimidation? Well, it's always a concern as to what we could see at the polling places. We have put together a very robust election protection team. We've got a, have recruited volunteers. A lot of attorneys are coming out so that we have representation at the polling sites. We also had our Secretary of State has been leaning in to let folks know that it's inappropriate to show up at a voting place with a weapon that's visible. I think I'm sure, many, of your listeners recall the images of folks at our state capital with weapons in the capital. And I think also all of you, I'm sure everybody on the podcast knows about the plot to kidnap our governor by a group. Thank you so much, Gary. This was great to have you on.

Good luck. Good luck. Good luck. Well, thank you, Molly. It's great to be with you. And I appreciate you raising these issues. This is a critical time in the history of our country. And as I'm out getting folks engaged and fighting this massive amount of money that's being dumped against me, as I say, they may have more money, but we have more votes. We just have to turn them out. And for me, this election is not just about winning.

We have to win big. We have to send a strong, clear signal that the politics of hate, the politics of division that we have seen these last four years does not represent this country. We have to soundly reject it at the polls. start healing this country. And now we come to our fan favorite, one of our many segments, fuck that guy. Rick Wilson, who is your fuck that guy? Today's Fuck That Guy is a guy that I ordinarily wouldn't these days take the time to wipe the shit off my shoes if I walk through him. But it is a guy named John Cardillo.

John Cardillo is a disgraced ex-New York cop, now a commentator on Newsmax. and he has a web show on Newsmax. And John Cardillo posted a picture, Joe Biden, hugging his son. Do you think that was the most dunked-on tweet of the entire? The dragging and the ratioing was so well-deserved. Because what Cardillo posted was, does this look like an appropriate father-son interaction to you? Now, John, I know you're dumb as a bag of hair. But if you really want to go down the pathway of creepy fucking family behavior, how about Donald Trump?

Because Joe Biden hugging his son in a lovely posed photograph and giving him a kiss on the cheek is nothing compared to Donald Trump sporting a giant fucking... Yeah, I'm cutting his mic like the debate moderator is going to have to do it to Trump tonight. All right. Fine, Jesse, but I will just say this. The reaction to that is a very telling indicator because, look, John Cardell, is a nothing burger in the universe, he means nothing at all. Okay? But what that was was a perfect representation of Trumpian cruelty.

Yeah. Where that's the point where the abuse of a family that had been racked by tragedy and the idea that it was somehow perverse or bizarre and therefore a figure of fun for those people. As I said, it's a distillation of the shittiness of Trumpism and also John Cardillo. I mean, that seems like something you should beep to. I'm sorry, Jesse, but you have to beep all of that. My, fuck that guy. The president's large adult, failed son, Donald Trump Jr.

I'm a sinus problem. Are you okay? Perhaps. Perhaps. The Trump allies, I'm just trying to ignore you so I can get this done. As you should. The Trump allies have been low-key trying to shop this story about They're being, do something on Hunter's laptop.

But they've been careful because they know that this story is bullshit. Today, Junior was like just went full RT, full info wars, and just was like, there's stuff on the laptop, I know it. And so for that, Junior, you are, once again, my fuck that guy. 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-studded 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.