The Daily Beast Podcast - How George Conway Moved Into Donald Trump’s Head

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

In this episode of THE NEW ABNORMAL, Republican lawyer George Conway reveals to Rick Wilson and Molly-Jong-Fast what irks him the most about Donald Trump, and how he’s managed to troll the president so hard, so well. (Spoiler alert: Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale accidentally gave Conway the idea.) Plus! Rick and Molly discuss comic opera dictatorships, Facebook’s about-face, and the man who chews Trump’s food. The meme referred to in our George Conway interview: https://twitter.com/skolanach/status/1259511266000830465 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, bestselling 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. Molly and 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 ripped to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So, Molly, the White House has become a hotbed of the Rona. Yep, it's true. senior staff members are now popping up with positive cases of corona, including the aforementioned Mrs. Katie Miller, wife of Stephen Miller. 11 secret service agents at least have now tested positive.

A variety of other senior officials. President's valet who feeds him his meals. Yeah, including the president's valet who choose up his meals and spitz him. That's right. His taster. His royal taster. You'll never get that picture out of your head. Just face it.

No, it's really terrible. Would you have a food taster if you were Donald Trump? Yes, I would have a food taster for Donald Trump. But I don't understand. So it's not his food taster, obviously. The man who brings his food, though, which I mean is in itself. And other White House staff members are obviously testing positive. And, of course, it's a handy time for senior staff members at the CDC, the HHS, and the National Institute for Infectious Diseases to all have to self-quarantine.

And all because the various White House spreaders. But Fauci has been exposed now. And he's 79 years old and probably one of the few people who could actually help get us out of this disaster. Right. We're in a situation now where you've got to know that Donald Trump's paranoia is ramped through the roof. Notorious germaphobe Donald Trump with a White House full of people all bearing the dread mark of the Rona. It's fantastic. And I got to say this.

You know what? A lot of Americans who are sensibly still very concerned about the whole like fling open the doors and go back to let's get back into normal life. They've been living in a degree of fear for three months now because of the bad leadership at the top. And they've been wondering, you know, if I go out, am I going to get it? I'm going to give it to my kids, my dad, my mom, my husband, my friends. I'm kind of happy Donald Trump has to be thinking now just how serious the disease he said was under control, you know, really is. I think the larger issue is you can't be up there saying we have it controlled and then not have it controlled in the White House. And I will say this, you know, the president's

responsive, I get tested every day. They're testing me constantly. How's that working out for the rest of America? Can you get a test instantaneously? No, you cannot. I cannot. No one else can either. And the larger issue we keep coming back to is just because there's testing, there's still no real definitive treatment, right? We have over the weekend, early last week, the Gilead drug, Remdesivir got approved. But it still is not a magic bullet by any such of the imagination, though it does work better. it seems than the malaria drug that Trump and Laura Ingram have been pushing for mons. Well, I mean, I'm hopeful. Everyone wants a cure. Everyone wants a treatment.

Everyone wants something that'll mitigate the damage this thing does. I hope Rimdesivir works out, but it's still not a treatment for the virus. Well, it's a treatment for the virus, cuts down on the hospitalization. It's only once you're hit, okay? It's not prophylactic to the virus itself. So, Molly, you know, I've noticed our friendly friends at Fox and Friends all seem to be advocating for the instant reopening of the economy, and they're pushing really hard to ramp up that message of everybody get back out of your houses.

Can you tell me where they're broadcasting that hopeful and optimistic message from? I'll tell you where they're not, right? They're not on the curvy couch on 6th Avenue. Really? Because they're not there. They're at their homes being safe. Really? That is just a...

I know that Fox is a totally unironic network on almost every way. These are not people who are familiar with or comfortable with the concept of irony. But damn. So who's the one that doesn't wash his hands? Pete Haxeth. That's a role model for the youth of America. We've been talking about this a lot, but this idea that it's such a false choice that you can convince people that the virus is okay, right, that people will go back to their usual consumerism if 2% of the population is dying. Right. This is the replay we're seeing in Texas, in California, in Florida, in all these other states where the... In Sweden.

Yeah, right. Where the open now crowd is going crazy. It's deeply ironic that these people who are supposedly conservatives who believe in market forces don't understand the market force that's keeping people home. It's called death. Right. It's true. They prefer not to purchase death when they're out shopping.

This last weekend was not, globally speaking, chock full of good news. Right. No, it was not at all. We were talking about this earlier. You know, we've got a new outbreak. China, which obviously is a bio weapon from a secret laboratory, duh. Started by Bill Gates. Or it's just a horrifying virus that continues to spread.

Where else do we have bad news? South Korea. Right. Well, South Korea, they caught it, though. I mean, they tested and they caught it. All of these countries like South Korea and New Zealand and Australia, they've got it. Like, they've done it. They no longer have the virus.

And the rest of us are just completely screwed, for lack of a lot of it. better word. I think the idea that CDC source gave me the piece of really interesting wisdom a couple weeks ago. When you shut down the idea of social distancing and put everybody back out to work, if you have a second bounce to this, if you have a second round, if it comes back, you're not starting from where you left off. You're starting from zero. You end up then having to go back and do weeks and weeks and weeks to start getting the payoff of a flattened curve or decline like you have in New York. And although you've got a decline in New York, God bless. Thank you. goodness, right? The rest of the nation is not flattening out. We're peaking maybe with reporting

being so squirrely in some of the biggest states and the numbers rising. I mean, I hate getting numb to this. I hate that feeling that I'm like, oh yeah, it's 80,000 now. Okay, well, it'll be 100,000 next month. And one of our first podcasts, I had been told by a source that we could expect 150,000 people by August. By August, yeah. Well, at this rate, we're going to get 150,000 people in July. I have been really impressed with this administration's obsession with selling death, even despite the fact that they're, quote, unquote, the party of life, right? Like, they'll remember Terry Schiavo, right? They've completely forgotten that they're the party of life.

And now they're like, well... As a Florida guy, I can't forget the Terry Schiavo scenario. And I will say this, I was told growing up as a young Republican that life was universally precious regardless of age, status, condition, etc. Which has been a kind of really smooth transition for them from life is precious in all circumstances to, yeah, listen, my hedge fund is not doing so great. So if you could get a bunch of people in the 65 to 75 range to just kick off, so we don't have that long-term Social Security thing to worry about, that'd be great.

Well, you've had a good run, grandma. We need you to die for the Dow. And I mean, that's the thinking there. I mean, they were killing doctors who performed abortions, right? So a five-celled organism is life. Let's be fair. The irony of a pro-life party was always lost on a lot of evangelicals and Republicans who said one thing and did quite another. But it wasn't the murdery edge cases that I think are the biggest irony here.

It is that evangelicals looked at Donald Trump, multiple adulterer, a guy who owned both casinos and beauty pageants, for whom many have speculated that abortion is not an unfamiliar item on his American Express card over the years. Not sure you can put an un-American express card, but okay. Yeah, you might. I don't know. I don't know. What do I know? It's possible. Get points.

Oh, my God. If you told, don't tell him that. My God. But let's just say this. They looked at this guy, knew who he was, held their noses on some cases, but in a lot of other cases, basically wanted to just run the grift. It's one more aspect of the former Republican Party that revealed itself to be basically a line of BS.

and pro-life right up until it's important to keep the S&P and the NASDAQ pumping. Right, it's true. He really did pivot so quickly. It was kind of impressive. And again, there are people around him who will pull their hair out saying that he is a staunch conservative and he believes in all the principles and blah blah blah, blah, blah, blah, in public. Who know he's not that way. They've got to now own that he has this very utilitarian and transactional nature.

he's willing to take a certain number of deaths on the ledger in order to get the market moving. And my problem with that is you want to talk about a slippery slope. You want to talk about the sort of same things they project onto American liberals who are, by any international standard, sort of squishy moderates. You know, they always have this projection

that Barack Obama was a Maoist just waiting for the moment he could open the death camps. And this is a guy who is on his ledger. If everything works well, 150,000 dead Americans because he spent four months jacking off and lying and denying. And it may be a much higher number. So if you're a pro-life party, maybe you don't do a couple of things. Maybe you don't lie about a terrible virus that's spreading across the world and could kill a lot of people.

Maybe you actually start doing things well in advance, months in advance, when you've been notified about it, instead of saying, my travel ban has taken care of it, I've got it. It's, we've isolated it. They're not coming off that cruise ship because I don't want my numbers to go up. Right, right, right. Not be the only Trump impersonation of this episode. Continue. It will not be, I'm sure. But I both hate that I'm trying to do a Trump impersonation and also because we know he's listening.

Hi, Don. I want to make sure that he hears me mocking him. Good. So today we have a guest who is actually a really good friend of mine and who I have been trying to get on this podcast since we started it. And I'm never going to get credit for this. I introduced these two people to each other, Rick Wilson, and our guest. Yes, you did. You get credit.

Conservative lawyer and pundit, George Conway. Hi. Hi, George. Welcome to the new abnormal, George. Thanks so much for coming on today. It's not like you and I were going to talk like a hundred other times today. No. I'm glad you came on.

I mean, it's been abnormal for a while, I think. You know, I think we're just trying to capture the zeitgeist, as they say. I think you have. Let's talk about Morning in America and how that. ad came to be and just a little bit about how you two met each other and at lunch. You mean the ad that has now caused a fifth consecutive day of Donald Trump losing his damn mind and tweeting about it? You mean the ad that has allowed George and I to take up adjacent apartments in Donald Trump's brain? I'd really like getting to meet President Obama and Senator McCain.

I'd never gotten to meet them before. It's really been quite a remarkable experience because watching Trump, kidding aside, George and I and the rest of the team, we've been batting these ideas around for it. Molly does deserve credit. Okay. She does. Absolutely. Last year, I was mulling over the president's psychological disorders because I was writing that 11,427 word piece of Atlantic, for which I got $500. $500. $500. Hey, that's why we're all never Trump, George. It's the big writing bucks. My kid spent that in about 30 minutes. And I was thinking about how, and I tweeted this, I think a number of times about how I thought that campaigns in 2020, whoever was the Democratic nominee and whatever super PACs were going to be running ads against Trump, they should be running ads to get him riled up.

For a couple of reasons. One is throws him off the message that he should have been on, which is then the economy. And it also will show how nuts he is. I was thinking about all this. And I found out one day, I was in my office and I found out that You guys were having lunch over at some steakhouse at like 2.30 in the afternoon, some undiculous hour. I mean, the rest of us that already had dinner and you guys were having lunch. And I'd wanted to meet Rick to sort of bounce some stuff off him. You know, I asked if I could crash the lunch and I went and I crashed the lunch. I sprang this idea of like just running ads in part to annoy them, a part also to persuade voters. But I also sprang this idea that I'd gotten actually from Brad Park Scout. I was at Trump Tower in 2016 when Pascal came groveling up to my wife to apologize. His people had bought ads in the District of Columbia, which you don't do in a presidential election. There are no persuadable voters in the District of Columbia, right? I mean, you don't have to be a political consultant to know this.

So this was a grave error, a huge waste of money. They meant to run the ads, I think, in Northern Virginia. But if you run it on a cable provider in the district, you get the district and you get basically 90% Democratic voter. So what's the point? That's had stuck in my mind. And I was thinking, well, why can't you just run an ad on the cable provider for the White House so that some certain individual would see it? We talked about that at lunch. I sprang some ideas for some ads. And then you came up, almost instantaneously came up with the greatest ad slash stunt in the history of politics, if it ever comes to fruition. So we're not, we're not revealing what that is. But the idea was like,

you know, just run an ad. So we're just run an ad. So we're not. So we're not, we're not revealing. So we're not. It's, it's he could see it and he'd go patch it. I remember saying to you that you could get Donald Trump to trash Jesus Christ just by running an ad saying, Jesus says, love thy neighbor, but Donald Trump doesn't, you know, and he would say, well, you know, you could see Trump coming out saying, well, Jesus never had to put up with the abuse I have and so on and so forth. I mean, you could just see him doing that. And so that's why I said you can create all sorts of ads and just drive him nuts just by running them in the District of Columbia for, I thought it would be more than $5,000.

It was pretty de minimis, honestly. That's one piece of it. And then the other piece of it is the way Morning in America came about was Reader India. Right. Windsor Man. Windsor Man just DM'd me randomly one day and says, why can you guys do an ad called Morning in America with a you? And I just started to laugh. And I said, I like. And then I texted the group and everybody said, that's a great idea.

And then you guys brilliantly created this. The visuals were the key, obviously. because the visual were the key to the original ad, and the rest is history. The reason it resonated so much is because in Morning in America, in 1984, Ronald Reagan wasn't trying to sell people that the economy was turning around and it was a better time. They believed it already. They felt it already. And so that's why this ad hurt Donald Trump so psychologically is because he got it in his head

and he said, oh, hell, they've got my number. And that's the thing that always struck me as a nonprofessional, just the person just following along politics for 45 years, is that the best and most effective political advertising is telling people things they already know. That's what the Bear ad told people something they already know. Can you trust the Russians? The Dadaezy ad, it played on people's existing fears of nuclear war and of Barry Goldwater, some of the things that he had been saying at the time. Man, remember when all we had the fear was nuclear war? Oh, man.

Yeah, now this man has control of the codes. It's really, really, really. really. So I guess one of the things that people ask us about a lot is like what else you have in store, what's coming on the line. George and I're just going to tease it right now a lot. There are almost too many ideas. That picture you texted me this morning, George, the phrenology picture. I mean, Rick can answer this too, but like you're in the president's head, George Conway. I'm not the only one. There's a lot of empty space up here, but there are also a lot of people. Man, I wish IKEA would open up again, a restoration hardware. This place. is desperately need of redecorating.

George, how do you decide to take this risk and speak out? Can you talk a little bit about that? You know, I didn't really make a decision. It just sort of happened. I mean, I just started kind of expressing my views, and at some point I just decided that's what I was going to do. My view of it is this. This guy won by 77,774 votes in three states.

And I don't know what influence. I can possibly have on persuading any of them, but if I can persuade a few, and they persuade a few, and if we all felt that same way, that 77,774 vote margin is gone. That's the way I think people have to look at this. I mean, I wish that there was an alternative that was more ideologically suited to me, and I'm sure Rick feels the same, but when you just make a list of all of the incompetence and to me as a lawyer, the denigration of the rule of law, notwithstanding that I like the judges, but his absolute contempt for the rule of law when it comes to his own personal conduct and protecting himself from personal liability and also when, and it comes to his treatment of

his Article 2 powers, there's just no question. The damage that he's doing far exceeds any benefit that he possibly could be conferring. And now it's all come home to roost. You know, George, You mentioned that the rule of law partner, we've all talked about this a lot. But it's hard to be shocked in the Trump world. But Bill Barr and the Mike Flynn case right now and Judge Sullivan, it's to a point where it's like comic opera dictatorship. It is so over the top. Were you shocked by that, George?

I am not now, but I would have been a year ago, six months ago. I mean, it's just absolutely absurd. I mean, the notion, the arguments that they are making to, vacate the conviction of Flynn are just absolutely absurd. The notion that his false statements weren't material to an investigation. That argument never works for anybody. Never. The Justice Department would have never accept this argument if it was made by private defense counsel for somebody who wasn't favored by the president. Defense lawyers are looking forward to using these arguments in the future against federal prosecutors, but of course they're not going to listen.

And so this is basically a one-shot-only abuse of the law to save one. guy who was lying his ass off and subjecting himself to potential blackmail by the Russians and was quite reasonably the subject of a federal investigation because he already was because of his prior conduct during 2016. As national security advisors do, he was also plotting to kidnap someone and return him to Turkey to be murdered. Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Of course. Here's my question for you. Are you surprised that he didn't just pardon Flynn? I think what happened might have been that Barr was trying to prevent Trump from being put in the position of doing that. I'm just guessing. That might have created more of a political problem for Trump because it would be something that he himself would be doing. Barr was in a way protecting Trump from himself. I don't mean that in a good way. That's insane. One of these days, the people who actually will write the histories who are not going to be favorable to Bill Barr will tell us what really happened here. I somehow think the judgment of history will not be as kind to Bill Barr as Donald Trump will beat a bill bar.

Yeah. Well, I don't think anybody really gets their reward from Donald Trump. As a certain author, that's right. That's right. I always have to put the disclaimer out these days. When I turned everything Trump touches dies into an iron law of American politics, I honestly didn't mean it for everybody. And I didn't mean it literally. But here we are. I mean, it's like physics. Some principles turn out to be just universal. Yep, the Trump constant. You're a pretty conservative guy, though, George. I mean, you and I talk about this a lot because one of our favorite things to argue about is abortion. Can you just explain, I think to myself, like, how hard it would be for me if I were a conservative who had spent my life in the law watching the Trump administration? It's hard to watch all the lying and the incompetence in particular. And I have to say, I mean, after all of the writing and commenting that I've done and others have done on the president's diswerect. ordered mental state. The thing that sometimes irks me the most about him is just his utter

stupidity. I mean, he's just one of the dumbest human beings ever to enter public life. One of the most successfully demagogic people, but just in terms of his ability to retain and process information and articulate it, it's incredible how stupid he is. What makes that worse for Donald Trump, George, I guarantee you when this podcast airs, he will listen to this and he will hear us call him stupid and he'll know we're right. Isn't that right, Don? I'm a stable genius. Nobody's been smarter than me. I have a big brain. My uncle was a professor at MIT. I know this stuff. Do you think he knows how to listen to podcasts? Rick is going to send him a link. I'll send him a link. I'll send one to Corey because Corey's been listening a lot lately. Haven't you, Corey? Because I know

things. How do you feel about these Republican senators who continue on? I've expressed that many times. I think it's contemptible. They violated their oaths of office. In refusing to remove Trump, I mean, there's no question. I mean, the test of that is what would they have done if they had not been members of the president's party? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, and if they had truly been objective. Just assume it was somebody they didn't hate for some reason, just an independent president who somehow had unified the country. They would have voted to convict. There would have been no question they would have been voting to convict. They were terrified in a hot minute. That's the ultimate. test. And that's what the second oath that they took, not the oath of office, which is a constitutional

oath in and of itself, which requires them to convict people for high crimes and misdemeanors, because that's consistent with the Constitution. But they took a second oath at the beginning of the trial, in which they specifically promised before God to do impartial justice. And impartial justice means you look at the facts, you look at the evidence, and you render a verdict based upon that and not based upon who the person being charged. is, and they didn't do that, not even close, not for a minute. You had Marsha Blackburn reading a novel or some such, or a book is on the floor of the Senate. I mean, what a joke it was. You had Mitch McConnell basically saying he had the votes from the very beginning and telling Trump, it was a joke from the

very beginning. And they made it a joke, and they took a solemn oath. I mean, the reason why these oaths are required, and the Constitution specifically requires that when senators vote on an impeachment, they shall be upon oath or affirmation, is that they took oath seriously. There was a question of honor, a question of honor before God and before country. And you put your personal biases and grudges and loyalties aside to do impartial justice and to follow the Constitution. They didn't do that. They didn't abide by that very basic requirement that they act honorable.

And for all of them except for Mitt Romney, I have nothing but. contempt. Tell us how you really feel, George. But I think George has hit that, Molly. This is one of those things that as conservatives, one of the things that led us to the old iteration of conservative politics and the Republican Party was the idea that you followed the law, that the law meant something, that the Constitution meant something, that your personal oath meant something, that your integrity as an elected official meant something, and that you could render a judgment against people in your own party if called upon to do so. And we don't have to a lot of these cases, but we had Democrats who had the guts and the courage to come out when Bill Clinton was stepping interns and say, this is wrong. We cannot abide this. We had people during Richard Nixon who came out. We had people during Ronald Reagan, during a Ron Contra, who said, this is wrong. We cannot abide this. And that's why Nixon had to resign, because there were sufficient Republicans who were honorable enough to say to their party leaders, I'm going to have

to vote to convict this guy based upon what I've just seen. And there were honorable men and women in the house, like Governor Hogan's father. When you look at all these prior scandals, none of them rose to the level of assertive, ongoing obstruction that Donald Trump did. Even Nixon couldn't manage to do as much damage to the rule of law in the country because he didn't have a Bill Barr doing his dirty work. He didn't have a Fox News doing his dirty work. He didn't have a Mitch McConnell doing his dirty work. He didn't have a bunch of Trump hotties wearing bomb vests in the house, willing to do absolutely anything to try to disrupt and stop the course of justice. And what kills me about this all is that they're all debasing themselves for whom, for a man

who can't even do his job. I mean, if they thought he was really doing a great job, that would be one thing. They don't believe that for a moment. I was speaking to a journalist in the recent past. I won't say how recently, but within the last several weeks. And the journalist was doing some sort of a big piece and had been speaking to former Trump administration officials. And what this journalist told me was that when you talk to them and they go off the record, they go off the record to tell you that, yeah, he is crazy. He is incompetent. And they admit all the things that we know, but the Republicans just won't talk about. That's why you just don't see them standing up for the president very much. You saw that memo to the senators where they said, don't defend Trump. They do that

because they know he's nuts and they know he's incompetent. And they're just sort of hoping that he just kind of slides by and they can kind of slide by behind him. That's who they stuck their moral necks out for in January and February. It's just astounding and incomprehensible. I think that we're in this really interesting transitional moment because right now, the things we're doing in the Lincoln Project are starting to impact some of the candidates for U.S. Senate. They're starting to realize that we're not BSing them. We're telling them the truth. I mean, John James running in Michigan against Peters. God bless him. Suddenly calling out Donald Trump, it's as if by magic.

And the ones that have dug so far in like Martha McSally and Corey Gardner and even Sue Collins, it's going to be really tough for them to back and fill and to try to pretend, oh, it never happened. What are you talking about? I was never blah, blah, blah. Well, she expressed concern. Well, per her to brow, at least several times. There were moments when she was considering writing a sternly worded neutral memo. Maybe she even sent a draft or draft box inbox.

Right. Draft email, right? After her inbox. Well, yeah, she's, she's in a bit of trouble. Yeah, she's in trouble. I mean, McSally is underwater right now. Gardner is toast. And Gardner is, I never try to jump the gun too far, but Corey Gardner, you would rather

be running to be like second in command of Al Qaeda than to be Corey Gardner right now. It's an ugly spot to be. Yeah, he might as well just self-quarantine and never be heard from again. Semi-permanent self-quarantine. What do you think happens in 2020, George? I think it's going to be a pretty substantial blowout of the Republicans. And I think it's going to be a deserved blowout. But nobody can take that for granted.

If you take that for granted, that's when bad things happen. It's very true. Every time people send me polls, like, it's great, it's great. We're winning in wherever. I try to keep a damper on all that for everybody because we've got to outwork and out hustle. As George has suddenly become part of our pirate ship of political consultants. Hey, I'm not bad from an amateur, right? You know, you've got massive skills.

You picked up very quickly. You know, we never take a foot off the gas. You know, even when you're not seeing something new every day, the wheels in this machine are running very quickly. No, it's amazing. You know what? I will just say one more time, hi Donald. I don't understand. Why do they get a podcast?

Why are they allowed? Why can they talk? This has to stop. Corey. Curry. Brad, Brad, do something. Do something. Send up.

Tweet him. Brad's too busy cruise in Fort Lauderdale and his Ferrari. Give them some chloroxin high hydroxychloric. I have another question for you. Are you worried about this coronavirus cluster in the White House? You know, it doesn't make me happy. It is worrisome. But it's worrisome to go to the store.

Never gone to the store and filled up a grocery cart the way I filled up a grocery cart these days, right? Because you just don't want to make that many trips. There are just so many potential risks out there. It doesn't make me happy. So the coronavirus has left everybody sort of bunkered in. I'm going to ask a delicate. Is your spouse working from home or mostly at the White House? I think the most of the senior staff is still working at the White House.

And they've been going in every day. My understanding is that they had been tested every few days until quite recently when they started being tested every day. And I'm not saying anything that's not public. That's all part. Right, right, right. I mean, the problem with that is you can't guarantee anything. These are instant tests. They're not fully, they come up with lots of false negatives and can be tested at 2 o'clock in the afternoon, go to a safe way at night, contract the virus.

And then it won't show up the next day that you're tested, but you may start shedding in the afternoon or the next day before you show up positive on a test. And that sort of thing happened. And with testing being every five days, I mean, that's probably what happened with the most recent incidents. And, you know, it just goes to show that it's not just the testing. You have to have the testing, but you also have to change the workplace to adjust for that. And the West Wing, as you know, having worked there, it's a very, very, very small place and everything's cramped and you can't spread out and they're not wearing masks. And as our friend Reid Galen wrote about this morning, he's a former advanced guy. He's a former White House advanced guy. And so as he's noted, he goes, look, when you do this, you end up with 10 people going out from the advance team followed by a bigger team with Secret Service and everybody else and all the White House staff. And an evolution like his trip to Arizona last week ends up with this potential gigantic ripple effect of people spreading COVID unknowingly. And everybody is in an aluminum can flying across the nation.

And even if it's a wide-body jet like a 747, you're still inside in a seal aluminum can. There was this picture, I think, in the Washington Post of what happens when somebody in the middle seat of a 767 cost. Haunting. Haunting. I think about it often. This is why I recommend private general aviation travel to all my friends. I will say, though, I think if I were married to somebody working in the White House, I would be fearful that COVID would come back from the hot spot. I mean, I'm sure the president knows it's closing it on him.

It's going to eventually, you know, touch somebody that has it. If you appreciate knowing the good, the bad, and the bat shit, become a Beast inside member. Your support gives voice to podcast just like this one. Visit new abnormal. com to sign up today. All right, so Molly, who's your fuck this guy for the day? Mike Pence, because Mike Pence, despite the fact that his press secretary was diagnosed with COVID-19, which would mean in a normal world, that person, if you've been in close contact with someone who's been

diagnosed, you would quarantine yourself, but Mike Pence has decided he is not going to quarantine. And as we saw last week when he was with those elderly World War II vets and not wearing a mask, it would seem that Trump and Pence refused to wear masks whenever we see them, Which is sort of interesting because this weekend, I know your favorite Brad Parskow, was wearing a mouse pad. That was a mouse pad on his face. It was a neoprene mouse pad cut out in the shape of a face mask. Right. It's like, Brad, get a fucking hobby, bro.

But I thought it was kind of great because it was like the one time, right, they hate science so much. But the only thing they like more than they hate science is the grift. Oh, look, if they could sell the medieval plague doctor snout masks, they would. I mean, Trump-branded coffins seem on the horizon. Inevitable. Trump mausoleums. A Trump body bag. That's right.

It's a windbreaker, but it unzips into a full body bag after the rally. I like it. It could work. We're getting very edgy here. It's this whole strong man autocrat thing where they don't feel they have, even though everyone else has to be, you know, is vulnerable to this virus. The two of them somehow aren't. And so he said he's going to be tested every day and so he doesn't need to quarantine.

Even though you can get it and start spreading it just by contact before it even fully infects you. I have a question, Molly. Is mother going to let Mike Pence spend time alone with a virus? We don't know if it's a girl or a guy, right? Well, Molly, one's just adultery. The other is an abomination beyond all words. That was me quoting Mike Pence, people. Don't take it too seriously.

Did he really say that? No, I don't know if he said those exact words, but my favorite evangelical thing ever, ever, ever. I was in this campaign. This is like 15 years ago. And we had a candidate who was perfect for this particular seat, okay? A little more moderate than the average Republican. But it's okay because it was a fairly moderate location. I'm not going to specify too deeply.

I had an evangelical come to me just losing his mind. And he says, your guy is not perfect. I'm like, he's pro-life. Well, he's not active about it. I'm like, well, he's pro-life, as he told you. And then he's like, well, I also have determined that he refused to vote on several bills that would have kept homosexuals from adopting children. I'm like, the what?

The what? What years is this? This is like in 06, maybe. And I was like, what was that word she just used? And he looked at me, he goes, homosexuals. I'm like, okay, we're done. Thank you. Thanks for playing.

And yes, we won the primary and the general. Boom. Ay, aye, aye. Is she still in office? That person is no longer in office. Oh, well, that's a bright spot. The person I'm talking about, the elected official that we got elected was the moderate Republican. and this was a prominent evangelical leader.

Ooh. And it wasn't baby daddy or the strangler. Wait, oh, no. At some point, right, Rick will talk about the baby daddy and the strangler, some of his favorite evangelicals who he's encountered through his unseemly time with the GOP. Will you tell us what your fuck-this-guy is, right? My fuck-this-guy this week is our friends at Facebook. You know, in a prior episode, I gave Facebook a little bit of credit for bumping off some of these idiots.

who were organizing violent rallies. These people that were saying, you can't get COVID, it's an illusion. So come to our rally. Well, Facebook has crossed me this week. First off, they are still continuing to allow an absolutely gigantic amount of anti-science propaganda on their site,

pro-anti-vaxxer things. In the form of Plandemic. Right, now they're taking Plandemic off their archive now, but they're still allowing other people to repost it from YouTube and other places, and it is taken on a life of its own. And pandemic, of course, is a piece of psychotic anti-vax adjut prop.

While at the same time, they decided to censor the ad I made last week with my team at the Lincoln Project called Morning in America. They're saying that because an outside fact checker has said that one of our claims in the ad was false. What was the claim they said was false? The claim was that Trump bailed out Wall Street, not Main Street. And our assertion was that Donald Trump has given the financial service. services industry through the Federal Reserve, over $10 trillion of support, and that the $320 billion in the PPP program and the CARES Act have reached very few Americans and very few small businesses and that American businesses are collapsing left and right. But Facebook took this

outside fact checker. Can you just tell us what company the outside fact checker works for? It was Politifact. Oh, it was. Facebook uses such reliable outside fact checkers as the daily caller as part of their outside group. But they censored the ad. And now they do not censor Donald Trump ads that are full of outrageous faragos of utter bullshittery. And they don't take those ads down off of Facebook. But I'm irritated by that. But I think that the danger that they pose by continuing to allow these people to use their platform as a propaganda tool that is so enormously dangerous and it's telling people a set of outright lies. It's no problem. Go back to work. The disease is over. It's nothing.

It's the flu. It's a Russian plan. It's a Chinese virus. It's fake. It's not real. It's just the left trying to make you into a submissive and compliant drone worker. All this crap, they are going to cause this second wave of this disease and they're going to get people killed. So they were briefly on my not shit list and now they have returned fully to the pinnacle. of shitless mountain. So fuck that guy. Well, you see Facebook's has all sorts of, I mean, it's really the drags. There's no accountability there. They just spread false information. Well, I don't think that the harm they're doing has been fully calculated yet. So that's my

fuck this guy. So sometimes we talk about people who are sort of the good guys. And this week, we actually had a number of deaths. We want to talk about Jerry Stiller, who died at the age of of 92. Not of the Corona, but, you know, if 2020 was trying to confirm for us its level of actually being the suck year, talk about a guy who was a legitimate comic genius and who was like a presence in television and entertainment for 70 years. I mean, that's just crazy what a legacy he managed to create.

Yeah, it's true. And he was really great. And then also we had little Richard die of Corona. He was older, but it's still really terrible. And then also Roy, the real Tiger King. This is not a celebrity show, per se. But I mean, the fact that Corona took two out of the three of those big names says something. Well, and they're also just cultural icons.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. Everyone always has like a response to a celebrity death because you feel like you know these people through television and movies and entertainment and everything. We may be at a point where we're seeing so much loss, so many names out there that in some ways they're not as important. then you realize like the body of their work. It's really kind of amazing. Well, I also think it's this idea, and we were talking about this before, of when you live through a pandemic like this, there's this loss of humanity, right? People die so much, right? Trump is selling 80,000 deaths, the same way he sold 20,000 deaths.

We've lost a sense of what a death means. Yeah, I agree with that. It's like the number gets so distorted in your head. And I said it's like, you have to check yourself sometimes when you see like, oh, it's 80,000. Okay, well, fuck. That's a football stadium. Right. I mean, I think in New York, the number that hit me, and this was a couple of days ago, so I'm sure it's up now, but, like, I think was one in one thousand New Yorkers have died.

And I saw numbers this weekend that said that one in 135 of us have been hospitalized in New York. And it's completely crazy. It's funny because I know so many people who have lost their fathers. I mean, I know you really do see that it is very. It's just everywhere. 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

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