The Daily Beast Podcast - Gretchen Whitmer’s Chilling Call With the White House

Episode Date: May 8, 2020

On the latest episode of THE NEW ABNORMAL, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast talk with Gov. Gretchen Whitmer about the protesters who stormed the Michigan capitol, the sheriffs who refuse to enforce the lockdown, and a terrifying call she had with the White House. Plus! Rick and Molly chat about the ad that drove the president batty, the Trumpkins who want to wrestle Rick, and the former MAGAites finally departing the S.S. Dumbf*ck.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly John Fass, novelist, an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. The New Abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leadership, and ideas. I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America, and we realize that putting our country over party and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this. We'll be joined by smart guests from media politics, culture, medicine,

and science. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So Rick, yes, I would like to read you a little bit of Trump's Twitter, and you can tell me if... Wait, Donald Trump has a Twitter? No, he doesn't. I'm just kidding. But if he did have a Twitter, it might say the following tweet, because they don't know how to win, and their so-called Lincoln Project is a disgrace to honest Abe, I don't know what Kellyanne did to her deranged loser of a husband, comma, moonface, comma.

But it must have been really bad. John Weaver lost big for Kasich to me. crazed Rick Wilson, dot, dot, dot, lost for Evan McMuffin McMullen to me. Thoughts? Prayers? Deep contemplation. You know, here's the thing. Donald Trump wants to portray me as crazed as I tweeted the morning after that hit. I'm not the one in an Adderall frenzy at 1.45 in the morning rage tweeting about Republican consultants.

It's just, look, Donald Trump gave the Lincoln Project an enormous gift this week. And that gift was his attention. And his attention was riveted on the fact that we did an ad called Morning in America, which we'll link in the show notes. How many people have seen that ad, Rick? 15 million people in round numbers have seen the ad. We spent a whopping $5,000 to put that ad on Tucker Carlson. Wait, what? That's why Trump was triggered.

We put the ad on Tucker Carlson. About midnight, when Trump was finished with whatever activities he was doing for the day, we'd been told he was going to watch Tucker on the TiVo. It was brought to him as a heads up that the ad was going to run. And when it ran, he completely lost his damn mind and was up very late. And then I've spoken to one and I've heard from another through another party. Reporters on Air Force One the next day. And he was apparently raging and screeching like a cut animal in the front of the plane,

absolutely bitch fitting out like nobody's business, which just told us everything. he had to know. We knew his skin was thin. We knew eventually we would get on his radar screen. And now, he's been talking about us and having his minions attack us. Rona McDaniel was still writing press releases about us last night at 9.45 at night. These people, they are so angry about this because we called it out. We captured this moment. You know, we took the old Reagan Morning in America ad, and we flipped it because the original ad in 84, when you were just but a toddler. I was five. I know. No, six, six. When the original morning in America, ad ran, it was this thing that captured the optimistic feeling in the country. It was a reflection,

not an insistence. When Trump is trying to tell people everything's great, everything in the country is awesome, he is running up against the reality wall of the fact that we've got record unemployment, great depression level collapse in the economy right now because of his actions. But when we did this, we said 70,000 people are dead and 30-some million Americans are unemployed. It's mourning with a U in America. And it just rattled him like nothing I've ever seen. And I've done a lot of controversial and big political ads in my past. And so of the other members of our team.

Jim Acosta asked him about it. And what did he say? He said they should be called the Loser Project. They're losers. They lost to me. And then he proceeded to stand on a runway and rant about us for two minutes and 45 seconds of just unhinged bat shittery. And strategically speaking, the smart play, the crafty play would have been for him to go,

what ad. But he can't help himself. He cannot help himself. And now that we're on his radar screen, now that they've been pursuing us now for days, bitching and whining and complaining about everything, we're happy to keep this running battle going for as long as they like. I mean, Donald Trump is an amazingly weak man, and we proved it. What do your direct messages on Twitter look like after Donald Trump tweets about you?

Oh, plenty of Gitmo, plenty of tribunals, plenty of traitor. You're a traitor to the country. You've betrayed America. You deserve to die. I get a lot of pictures of like my throat cut in Photoshop or bullets in my head in Photoshop. I get some very graphic descriptions of how I'm going to be tortured to death. They're really charming people, honestly. There's one that I find completely baffling and yet hilarious.

I swear to God, I think it must be Jacob Wall. It's always the same kind of phrase, but it's a different account. I will have an WWE or MMF wrestling or fight with you for charity to prove you were a libtard cuck. And I'm almost like, what is wrong with you, people? I'm 57 years old. I'm not going to wrestle you. You come at me. I'm going to fucking shoot you.

I mean, for God's sake, who do you think I am, people? I'm not getting sweaty with Jacob Wohl? Good God. You've heard it here first. Rick Wilson refuses to get sweaty with Jacob Wall. I guess it's good. I guess that's good. Are you relieved in some sense?

I'm very relieved. I'm extremely relieved. And might I add, I mean, I follow Jacob Wall on Instagram, so I sometimes watch his lives. The fact that that guy is not in jail is just amazing. Did you hear the thing about the Fauci story today? I mean, so Jacob Bull and Jack Berkman. Two worst criminals. They're the most inept criminals. They're the gang that can't tweet straight. They tried to hire a woman to falsely claim that she had been sexually assaulted by Anthony Fauci. And Anthony Fauci is 79 years old. Yeah, look, I mean, the guy's in good shape. He could still go. He enjoys power walking with his wife

around the Capitol. But it just doesn't strike me as the character of Anthony Fauci. to sexually assault a 20-year-old girl, especially one that turns out to have never met him or known him, and she confessed it. She came out and told reporters this weekend, look, I lied, they paid me to do it. Here's the story. Boom, but-a-boom. I recorded them. How are these dipshit criminals not in jail? The other question, of course, is how is Mike Flynn not in jail?

It is because Bill Barr is the most corrupt government official in the history of this country in our lifetimes. So a minute before we sat down to tape at 3 o'clock, we were. We got word that the case against Mike Flynn has been dropped. And the only way that that happened is that Bill Barr put his greasy fat thumb on the scale of justice and told his people, don't prosecute the guy. The kind of techniques that the FBI used, when Mike Flynn, who confessed to the crime, by the way, he confessed to the crime. He admitted his guilt. The investigatory technique of using information to tell him that bad things would happen if he didn't play. ball and fess up. I want to see that applied in the FBI to every other criminal now, okay? When they get a

drug dealer, I don't want them to have any sort of high pressure tactics. No, we've learned that is totally unfair. When they get some guy who's committed a federal crime of some kind, the next Enron, let's say, they should not question these guys because, you know, it could be unfair. Oh my God, the use of tactics that might have gotten them to admit they're wrongdoing, good God. Susan Hennessy from Lawfare, who's a really smart. Yeah, oh, yeah, she is. Pointed out. an important point, because we are literally just digesting this information like a minute after it's come out. So there's no think pieces on it yet. There's no even reporting. There's not even any tweet pieces on it yet. Right, exactly. Well, Susan Hennessy tweeted, an important point to remember is why Flynn is being rewarded.

He never gave up the missing piece of the puzzle, which is whether Trump knew about or directed the call to Kisley Act. Mueller said he couldn't get to the bottom of it because Flynn and McFarlane claimed to not remember. Right. There's an old PGR work phrase that Americans parse a denial as a full confession of guilt from a politician. I've got to say, I think this action on Barr's part, Barr is very smart. People should not underestimate Bill Barr's intelligence. He is very, very smart. He understood this. He understands this is the weak spot, the inflection point, the danger zone. But I hope Mike Flynn understands one thing. He will be subpoenaed to appear before Congress. He will be back in the hot seat. He will have plenty of chances to perjure himself again. He will have plenty of chances to fuck up again. And he will because he's a hothead. And now he feels like he's been liberated because the president is his bestie. But this is like living in a third world kleptocracy. I've ranted about Bill Barr from the very start, the time he took that seat, that the pattern of behavior he displayed was that the law means nothing, justice means nothing, Donald Trump means everything. This is Saddam Hussein territory with this guy. I don't think we've seen

the worst of it yet. But imagine how nuts so, the Q's Kewanon people are going now. They're now waiting for the arrest to begin. Right. They're convinced we're going to be swept off to Gitmo anytime now. Yeah. I mean, that is kind of the thing I'm the most impressed with. Here's Q&N, this insane conspiracy that has gone on forever without any, always wrong, right?

Continuously, always wrong. Always. Always. And now, finally, something they had fantasized about has come true. But remember, they went through several iterations of what Mike Flynn was. For a while, they thought Mike Flynn was this hero. Then they got a little nervous, and they started saying that Flynn wasn't really in the center of it. But now they're going to try to portray this as this was Trump's plan all along to drive out the deep state agitators.

And Mike Flynn is blah, blah, blah. I will predict that Trump is going to troll the American media in the next few hours by talking about bringing Mike Flynn back into the White House. Jesus. Really? That's my prediction. I'm going to make the call. Making the call here. Can you imagine? If I'm wrong, I owe you a dollar.

Okay, good. I think Flynn, his reputation before he got into Trump's orbit was absolutely terrible inside the intelligence community. He had been a superstar back in the early 2000s and went off the rails, as we talked about in a prior episode. And now I think there are going to be three inevitabilities. Trump is going to tease that he's coming back into the White House. He will be a contributor on Fox News before the sun is down, I'm pretty sure. Oh, no question. And he is about to become.

a constant fixture on the Trump campaign circuit. Oh, yeah. He's going to be an element. Remember, Trump's campaign is now reduced to its base only, a slurry of non-college educated white dudes over 50. Who haven't died of COVID. Conspiracy wackadoodles, alt-right dipshits, and a sort of collection of people who live and breathe the oppositional defiant disorder politics of his idea of the Republican Party. And so he's going to talk to those people and Flynn's going to be a great token for him. I don't know how Trump is going to survive without the rallies, though. I mean, like, what we see when he went to Arizona on Tuesday is that this man is not okay without having something to express himself. You know, I think they're going to have to trick him into wearing one of those virtual reality headsets.

And you could see him like staring, waving at the crowd with the big clunky 3D goggles on. I kind of love that image. He needs it. It's part of his addictive ego-stroking activity. He feels like committed to killing his base, though. I mean, like he won't wear the mask because he doesn't think it's a good look for him. You know, I don't have to agree with Donald Trump on everything, and I rarely do. But if he wants to kill his base, the Dow Jones could use a bump.

Pete Hickseth on Fox today told us that Americans need to be brave and go out and get infected. Right. He said that from his home office. You first. You first. Go into a nursing home full of COVID patients. You first. All these Fox contributors are very brave from their basements.

and home offices in blue states. You know that Donny germaphobe today is bathing in bleach and lysol and hand sanitizer because UVA tanning. Right. A member of his immediate staff, one of his valets, turns out to have tested positive for the vid. You know he's losing his mind. Remember the Bolsonaro guy who was one of Bolsonaro's press secretary. Also, Donald Trump Jr.'s girlfriend, Kimberly Guilfoyle's birthday party was like a super

I'm not going to set you up for the joke. Do not make the joke, right? Super spreader party, no. Can I make the joke? Are you sure I can't make the joke? You can't. So I can't make a joke with Kimberly Goldfell and the phrase super spreader anywhere in the joke? No.

I definitely can't make that joke. You cannot make that joke. Damn it. Anyway, the point is Kimberly Guilfoyle may have spreaded. Her birthday party spreaded a lot of COVID. And Trump somehow did not catch COVID there. I had a former friend of Trump. somebody who knew him pretty well. We were texting about this earlier today. He said, I suspect Trump has so many viral loads in his system already. It probably scared off the COVID. Good times. The idea that the national propaganda system is being motivated to do the go back to work, get back to school, go back in public. It's all over. It's done. So what if we lose a couple hundred thousand people? That is the frame of the debate now. And that is the way in which they look at this.

immediate future is Trump, he wants to put the paddles on the economy, try to jolt it back to life. And if we're stacking bodies like cordwood and that the biggest growth sectors of the economy are funeral homes, body bag manufacturers and mortuary fluid manufacturers, well, so be it. Whenever we talk about this, I think it's important to point out that you can't juice an economy where people won't do anything. You can say open the country, let's go, let's go. But the reality is, and we saw this in Georgia this weekend, even if you do it, if the public consumer confidence isn't there,

it doesn't matter. Exactly. And it's in Georgia this weekend and it's in Florida right now. I spoke to somebody today in Miami who told me there were some stores and restaurants that were starting to reopen and that the foot traffic in these stores is zero.

And the restaurants, while there are more people probably than there should be in some of them under this 25% rule, they're still not going to be sustainable. And markets are magic, as I always say. And people in those marketplaces

are going to make decisions based on self-interest and based decision on their risks, and they still view this as a risk. And you can't cheerlead people away from the fact that we're now at one degree of separation in this country. Everybody knows someone who has died of COVID or has been sickened by it, but they're going to try. They're going to try. They're going to try.

And, you know, the campaign of the president is going to work very, very hard. And as Brad Parskow. Oh, now we have to talk about Brad Parskow. The most important man in America. The center of Donald Trump's campaign, Brad Parskow. Brad Parskow. Taller, better looking and thinner than Donald Trump. He's Brad Parskow.

Brad Parskow today tweeted, and you, I think, had one of the greatest comebacks on it. Brad Parskow tweets a picture of the Death Star saying, for three years, we built up a campaign death star. I don't have the exact quote in front of me, but... The Death Star. We built up a campaign death star, and now it's fully operational, and here we go. I have rarely seen anyone get dragged faster and further. As you tweeted, Hamel himself may save the campaign.

Does he not know how that ended? It's like amazing to me. They constantly do things like that. The thing that will save us ultimately and save American democracy if there's such a thing is the fact that these people are so stupid. You know, Molly, I used to believe that stupid people would be easily overcome by inanimate objects and fall into shallow pits and lay face down in puddles and dispose of themselves. But there's something about Trumpism that's like a magnet for stupid. And I know that they're going to say, oh, those elitists are talking bad about us again. Can't believe it, Martha.

You got in big trouble for your Ukraine joke. For my Ukraine joke, yes. But these people around Donald Trump, and you actually see this in the polling even more starkly now, the split in 16 of college versus non-college voters was about five to seven points, depending on the state. Now it's about 20 points in a lot of swing states. College educated voters have made a clear, sharp decision. They're like, I do not wish to be on the SS dumb fuck any further.

I am getting off at the next port. I am not going to play this game. Look, a lot of these people that are going to drive any economic growth right now are working from home, and they can't. And a lot of people that are going to have to go back to work at the lower end of the economic spectrum are going to be the ones who get exposed. And they're going to pay a terrible price for the rush to reopen. And I think the Trump voters are so mentally broken by him that they don't process the risk as risk. They process it as a challenge to the liberal elite. And unfortunately, a lot of them are going to pay a terrible price for this.

That's why the government abandoning the CDC directions today. They basically just decided that it was too hard to follow the CDC guidance and that these scientists, eh, we'll just take our chances. Let's go. Fuck it. It's a crap shoot. Well, you know, bliver die, whatever. Right. I'm sorry, but call me crazy, but viral Russian roulette doesn't strike me as much of a national policy.

It also betrays something that I talk about about Trumpism a lot. And that is that Trumpism is inherently a negative philosophy. It is inherently reductive and it is inherently pessimistic. There's always some evil force out there to blame. There's always some bad guy to blame. There's always some evil conspiracy from the deep state or wherever. Making America Great is this sort of optional formation only because these bad people are stopping it. This isn't a conspiracy against them.

But yeah, the idea of throwing out the science because it's too complicated and we'll just take it, take our chances. Why do the hard stuff? Right. And we've seen more and more Australia, New Zealand, South Korea have all crushed the curve, stop the disease. They have numbers of deaths in the hundreds. We have numbers of deaths in the 10,000s. We're going to cross 100,000 in this month.

And as much as the good news coming out of New York that the curve is diminishing, the rest of the country is not. Yeah. And we are still on the upward spike. And this push is going to buy us three bounces of this ball. And do not taunt happy fun ball, as Saturday Night Live used to say. but do not taunt the COVID. The virus isn't sentient, but viruses will exploit weaknesses.

And one of our weaknesses will be to rush back out and reinfect people. Because, you know, that jackass who loves Donald Trump shows up at the Applebee's and the one cook in the kitchen who has COVID. And it gets on that guy's food and it gets on his friend's food and his neighbors and da-da-da-da-da-da-da. All that is going to ramify out. And I know I'm old enough to remember when the disease was going to disappear in April, but it's not. and it's going to be worse. And the scientific consensus is basically unanimous on this. And the political consensus on the Trump side is, eh, fuck it. Hey, so, Molly, I don't know about your theory of this. What do you think about the theory that they're basically trying to force these reopenings and

everything else because they know the states are about to collapse? What do you think of that? I don't think Trump really gives a shit about the states, but I do think Trump has decided from whatever polling they're actually showing him that the economy, needs to come back in order for him to get reelected. I think that's it. And unfortunately for Trump, 3.1 million additional claims this week, the trend line is going down on the claims, but it's not going down quickly. And I think that the knockout for this, you know, we're going to have great depression

level unemployment. Goldman and all the other investment houses are predicting that the worst is going to start hitting us in September and October. Right before the election. Right before the election. Yeah, long bomb. I just don't understand people keep saying there's going to be a second wave. But the first wave has not yet ended.

Exactly. And the first wave is still with us, in part, because for two months, he deceived the country. He lied. He knew it was here. He knew it was kind of bad. He was told repeatedly. And by new, I'm going to say, they told him, Don, this is bad. And he kept putting the stock market in his head, the stock market and the economy,

were more important than the country. The second wave is probably still coming, according to all the epidemiologists and biologists and infectious disease exports out in the world, you know, just like 1918 and just like all seasonal flus, there's usually a bump again in the fall. Maybe we will have flattened things enough. Maybe we will have managed our alterations to our lifestyles enough that the balance is not a bad one. But if it is terrible, we will have surrendered this. One epidemiologist I spoke to off the record the other day, and we talked about this a little bit with our friend from Yale a couple weeks ago. When you do social distancing and you do all the

isolation things to try to stop the spread and flatten the curve, if you give up on that, you don't start from where you left off. You start from zero again. Because it only takes one guy going into a grocery store or a Costco or a restaurant or a bar and 20 people get infected and they are not being over one. Boom, here we go. And we're off to the races a second time. At least Jared has stockpiled a lot of PPE. That's right. But that's his PPE. The government, that's for him. That's not for you. Listen, I don't want to know about the details of his romantic life with Ivanka. I just said, Governor Gretchen Whitmer is with us today. and Governor, I want to thank you so much for coming on the new abnormal.

I wanted to ask you a little bit about what it's like being in the center of both the political storm of Donald Trump's attention and about the steps that Michigan is taking right now and trying to figure out a pathway as your numbers continue to sort of bubble along on both trying to restart your economy and trying to do all the correct steps to preserve public health. There's no handbook for this moment. And I think the unique thing about a global pandemic is that across the country, we are all. trying to build the plane as we fly it. And so we can't ship in and help one another the way that we would if it was a geographic type of disaster. This is one that we're all confronting simultaneously. And I think one of the most sobering moments for me was in a call with my fellow governors in the White House early on where it became very clear that these masks that we were already running out of in Michigan, that there was no place to get up. That we have a national

stockpile, but it was never going to meet the need. I think that was the moment where I realized we've got to set up a global procurement office in our state emergency operations center. And that was very early on. Michigan's numbers were climbing so rapidly. We were one of the first hot spot in the country outside of Seattle. And of course, New York was climbing rapidly at the same time. And that was a sobering moment. And when I voiced my concern on one interview, I think that's when I got on the radar of the White House because I had said, you know, I am worried about getting the masks that we need. We're trying to buy masks from around the world. And as we have contracts that are coming, we're supposed to get a shipment in days. We get notified. They're either delayed or canceled and that our masks were going to the federal

government. I was very concerned and I voiced it. And I think that's, well, and the rest is, you know the story. Where do you get your PPE now? I don't think she wants to tell. Right. Don't tell us if you think it's... Don't tell us where you get your PPE. I'll just say this. In the beginning days, it was so scarce.

And we had nurses and doctors and respiratory therapists who had wear one mask for a whole 12-hour shift. These are masks that, you know, on a day, an individual doctor could go through tens of them because you change them out for each patient. But they were wearing them for a whole shift or even days on end. That's why we had to really pull out all the stops. And so we were contracting with companies from any lead we got we followed up on. In the meantime, we've now got more stable source of PPE. We're producing some of it here in this country, and some of it's being produced right here in Michigan. We've really been able to ramp up.

But on those early days, we literally would have like a shift's worth of PPE. Now we've got weeks' worth. That's still not a lot, but it's a lot more than we have. So, Governor, I think one of the biggest images out of the last couple weeks from Michigan is the rent-a-crowd, proud boys who decided they were going to come and storm the Capitol, tooled up and dressed up in their cosplay military outfits and bringing long guns. How did that work out? And what are the steps you guys are taking now?

And I guess the biggest question is, we all know that was sort of political theater on their part. But did it change the minds of anybody in the Michigan legislature? Did it alter your ways of approaching any of this? The answer I'm trying to get to, to be perfectly honest, is that these guys are what I call a dangerous joke. It was political theater. I know that not everyone in my state agrees with all of the actions

I've felt necessary to take. I know that there are a lot of people who are grieving, whether it's the loss of a loved one or the loss of a job or maybe the loss of a business that doesn't make it. And that is, there's a lot of stress involved with that. And a lot of people who are isolated and struggling with their mental health, I think that is a reality. And that's not unique to Michigan. It's all across this country. That being said, what happened at our capital was not the people that disagree. It was a political rally. And it was very evident in the fact that there were Confederate flags, which is not something. you see very often in Michigan. They were swastikas. You know, Governor, I'm from the deep south and we don't see many Confederate flags anymore. No, Michigan was a proud union. Anyway, there was a huge Trump float. There were anti-choice demonstrations.

You know, it was a political rally. And I think that it was not representative of who we are in Michigan. It was the vast majority of people are doing the right thing, and that's why our numbers have flattened. But one of the interesting things that I saw reported, and it'll be, you know, I haven't betted it. So I'm hesitant to put too much credibility into it. But there was a company that put a geo fence around the Capitol that day and then followed cell phone usage. And it corresponds with where we still see hotspots in rural parts of Michigan.

And that was my fundamental concern was that people were demonstrating, I respect people's right to disagree with me. And if it makes them feel better to criticize me, then fine, go for it. But all I asked was that people observe these best practices, wear a mask, stay six feet away from others. And they didn't do that. And my fear was that they would congregate and then go back to different parts of our state and maybe take COVID-19 with them. And it appears that that might have been part of what happened that day. And it's really unfortunate. But like I said, it's not representative of this state. It's not even representative of people who don't agree with me on all the actions I've taken. Do you have rogue sheriffs who are refusing to enforce social distance in your state? So I do have a few sheriffs who have spoken out and said that they're not going to enforce the orders.

The unfortunate political side of what's happening here in this country right now. We are in the midst of a global pandemic, a virus that does not observe state line or party line, that we should all be unified to fight that right now more than ever we should recognize we're not one another's enemy. It is a virus and we should all be using every tool we have to combat the spread of it. The fact that it's become a partisan issue is really unfortunate, and I think we'll contribute to the longer period of time that we're combating COVID-19 and greater loss of life and more economic pain. And that's a really awful commentary on kind of the partisanship that we're seeing play out in this moment. What do you do pragmatically with the rogue sheriff?

Molly, that's a good question. I mean, what are my choices, you know, and my choices to continue to call on Michiganders by and large to do the right thing. They are. They really are. And as you talk to people in the state, they are taking this very seriously. That's why our numbers have so dramatically dropped in terms of where we were predicting our curve to be headed and we're seeing some flattening. The vast majority of people are doing the right thing. And so we just have to stay absolutely tethered to epidemiology and the data and really be smart about continuing to build up our infrastructure on the public health side. It seemed to me that when you put in a lot of the early,

guidelines that a lot of that seemed to be following basically the sort of CDC track of what they were recommending or what they were being allowed to recommend. It felt like there was a moment where on the political side, a lot of your opponents kind of seized on things like, oh, I can't buy seeds at the store. And that overreaction, have you had to gauge and sort of calibrate some of the things that you wanted to recommend based on the fact that there's kind of a bad faith argument in their heads already that anything you recommend is somehow political in their minds? that last part of what you just said is so true that no matter what I do, it's not going to be enough for some people. They're going to pervert it to make a political point. And if I calculated

every move I made based on what I think they may or may not do, I would probably not make very good decisions. And so I'm not paying attention to that stuff. I am really listening to our U of M School of Public Health and the epidemiologists. I'm listening to the heads of our hospital systems and our frontline workers. I am working with our business sector leaders to make sure that we promulgate best practices for when parts of our economy start to re-engage so that we're prepared. And I'm going to continue to do that because when people post pictures that they can't buy a baby car seat and Megan McCain weighs in and Rand Paul weighs in and Ted Cruz weighs in, you know, it's just not accurate. And I can't bat down every inaccuracy.

I'm going to continue to forge ahead and do what I know to be the right thing to do. And I know that we're saving lives in the process. And you know what? That's what matters the most right now. You have a very diverse state. You have Grand Rapids, for example, which is sort of very different than other parts of Michigan. Can you talk a little bit about the conservatives? Are they behaving?

Are they doing it? Michigan is a diverse state. And I think it's one of the great things about, you know, the auto industry that built the middle class. People came from around the world for jobs in Michigan. And because of that, it's a great strength. It's also a challenge, of course. The west side of the state, Grand Rapids, you know, I grew up there, and it is different than Southeast Michigan, the metropolitan Detroit area.

And frankly, the Upper Peninsula is like a whole other world, too. All in good ways. But I would just observe that when you look at the actions that people are taking, they're taking this very seriously. There have been different cell phone, I think, usage maps that have pointed out. We're traveling very little. When we governors in the Midwest were really pleased to see how well our states have done. I was chatting with the governor of Indiana, Governor Herbert, and he was pointed out that same map that we were all kind of looking at and boasting about because Midwesterners were taking it very seriously by and large.

And we've seen that to be true all across the state of Michigan. I'm interested in that sort of question that a lot of governors have been asked the last few weeks is you've ended up as governors in these states by and large, Republicans and Democrats, especially in the Midwest, have seen their approval numbers spike. It's a doctrine I've been calling sort of for shorthand radical competence. You feel like the governors are getting to the point where they're having to rely on their state and their personal resources and their individual ability to lead and to manage these things. In a national epidemic or pandemic, it would seem like the federal government would play the role that, you know, we expected it to play under, you know, George Bush and Barack Obama

both did pandemic preparation. And it seems like it all went out the window. Do you guys feel like you're a little bit on your own in some ways? Well, yes. I think that one of the things that I've really come to appreciate in this moment is my fellow governors. It would be preferable if there was a national strategy and consistent, accurate information coming out of the federal government and the procurement on behalf of all 50 states.

But in this moment, that's not what it should be, in my opinion. And so we've had to step up in and do things that none of us ever contemplated using powers. that have rarely ever been used, trying to solve problems that are exacerbated because of that lack of national strategy. And in this moment, I have really been grateful that, while I've only been governor for 16 months now, that in that time I've developed some really good relationships with governors on both sides of the aisle. When I pulled our kids out of school here in Michigan, J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, called me right away and said, tell me your thought process. What do you know? What are you thinking? Who are you listening to? What are your concerns? About a

week and a half later when he and Governor DeWine of Ohio, Republican, closed bars and restaurants, I got on the horn with both of them individually and asked those same kind of questions. You know, I've been regularly chatting with Tony Evers in Wisconsin and Tim Wals and Minnesota, Larry Hogan and Maryland. These are the people that I'm talking to regularly because there's really very few people that can appreciate all of the different. decisions that we have been confronted with, that we have to navigate. And when we talk to one another, we have the benefit of each other's resources as well. So when I'm talking to Mike DeWine, I know that Cleveland Clinic is informing a lot of the information that he's basing his

decisions on. And he knows the University of Michigan, even though he's from Ohio, he respects the U of M when it comes to epidemiology and health expertise. And then Tim Walls, you know, has Mayo in his backyard. So we're all I think been able to help one another in a way that's been really, I think, important. You have an unemployment explosion, which we're going to have in a lot of states, but you've been doing some interesting stuff with that. Can you talk about that a little bit? Sure. So in the unemployment system, I think Michigan, like a lot of states, has suffered because we've had people making policy decisions that made it harder to collect unemployment. In the last administration,

they took unemployment from 26 weeks to 20. Erected a number of other barriers. And so once this pandemic threw us into a state of emergency, Michigan has the 10th highest number of people in our country. And yet we have the third highest number of deaths. We've been uniquely hit hard here in Michigan by COVID-19. And so during the state of emergency, it became very clear that there were going to be a lot of people who were going to be unemployed.

And so I executed a few executive orders to make it easier for people to claim unemployment and to qualify for a longer period of time. And so I took it from 20 weeks back to 26 so we could draw down the federal maximum for our people. I eliminated a lot of the red tape with regard to documentation that applicants used to be required to produce. Now they don't have to. It's just too difficult for people to do that. And so we've tried to make it easier and we've tried to ensure that people have greater support in this scary moment. Wow, you should call my governor DeSantis down here in Florida. He is having a less than salutary experience doing the unemployment system down here. And it sounds like you guys have it wired.

We've helped 1.2 million people with unemployment. And we still have tens of thousands who haven't gotten through. And they're frustrated and they are loud and understandably so. As we were describing what we have done in unemployment, though, it's Herculean. And it's by far and large. I think we're doing it as well, if not better than any other state in the nation. And you look at Florida. we helped three times as many people in Florida than Florida has been able to. And that was what the director pointed out. I'm not trying to be critical of the governor down there. It was a good point for me to appreciate how much we have done, even though there's still more to do. That's a remarkable statistic, Governor. And today's numbers with 3.2 million additional, at the least, we'll see what the corrections are tomorrow. New filings this week.

I don't think that that element is going to go away as something the states have to face in the coming years, frankly, at this point. Yeah, I think it's going to be a hard road back as I keep reminding people. Tough times don't last, but tough people do. And we're going to get through the. So, Governor, it's a grim time in this country. Tell me something that you've discovered or seen in Michigan among your people or in yourself that's been like an upnote. It's been like something you want to hold on to when all this is over. Well, I think there are sources of inspiration every single day.

Even on the hardest days, there are people that are doing remarkable things who would never get acknowledged for their commitment to others. And you see it, you see them shine right here and now. Done so many Zoom calls, whether it's with our grocery clerks who are kind of unsung heroes in this moment, or our nurses on the front line or teachers who are bending over backwards to continue to help their kids, their students learn. I talked to a 10-year-old the other day and her name was Lauren. And Lauren sent me a bunch of masks that she's making. She has a scrunchy business and she's quite the same. She retooled her scrunchy business to produce masks.

She's donated hundreds of masks to grocery store workers and people in her community and sent me a few of them. And every single day, there's a story like that that is just really pretty awesome and keeps me going. Keep up the hard work up there. It's not over yet. But I appreciate you making the time to sit down with us on the new abnormal today. Yeah. Thank you so much. We'll talk to you again soon.

Look forward to it. Support troublemakers like us who speak truth to power. Believe it or not, your actions speak louder than our words. and our super-egoes can get very loud. Visit new abnormal. dot the daily beast.com to sign up and become a beast inside member. So now we are onto the segment called Fuck That Guy, where we complain about people who are particularly appalling and egregious.

My fuck this guy is actually a woman, and her name is former Alaska governor. She can see notoriety from here, Sarah Palin. And you'll remember that. Sarah Palin is most famous for running for vice president, saying lots of stupid stuff, being on the mask singer. And most recently, she visited Salon A La Mode, that's French in case you're wondering, in Texas. While its owner, Shelly Luther was in jail. Palin is pretty much embraced her sort of stance as a grotesque reality. television star, and we can see this here.

Sometimes, folks, my Fuck This Guy segment is lighthearted and sarcastic and tries to put some black humor on a terrible situation. Today's is not, and my Fuck This Guy is directed at two people directly and some other people around them. Gregory and Travis McMichael in Brunswick, Georgia. Gregory and Travis McMichael, as you've probably seen by now, are the two men who chased a young black guy in their pickup truck, one of them riding in the back, with handgun, the other in the front seat with a shotgun, chased him down a street in Brunswick,

blocked the road, jumped out of the vehicle, and shot him to death. That's outrageous, and it's horrifying, and there's no force of law or judgment or reason that says that they should have done this as a citizen's arrest because they thought he was a suspect in something. He wasn't, but they killed him. And then we proceeded to discover that they're not going to get prosecuted or weren't going to get prosecuted because one of them works for the DA, and apparently there's some other family relationships or something in that. And it took days and days and days of growing national outrage to the point where they finally is a grand jury in the case. But I got to tell you, this is one where the overt racial characteristics of this killing, these guys hunted this kid

down and killed him and fuck them and fuck everyone who thought that they didn't need to be prosecuted and fuck everybody who thinks that this wasn't an outright, unequivocal hate crime. 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 we don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Jongfast and he's the Rick Wilson.

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