The Daily Beast Podcast - How to Kill MAGA Nation’s Brain Worms

Episode Date: January 19, 2021

How will we bring the Trump supporters who live in an alternate reality back to the real world?  A recent Pew poll asked who respondents thought was to blame for the Capitol riot—and an “astounding” number said President Donald Trump bears no responsibility, Rick Wilson told his co-host Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers “really want to close their eyes and say, it didn’t happen. Oh, it’s just going to go away. Well, it did happen. You made it happen. It’s not going away. It’s going to be with you for a long, long time,” Wilson said. “They’re forgetting that this particular party now has a base of people who believe in the craziest fucking things you’ve ever heard of,” he added. “And who hate Republicans if they’re not named Donald Trump.”  Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and Atlantic staff writer Anne Applebaum, joined the co-hosts to offer historical examples where societies were able to come together after insurgencies and civil wars.  “We need to find some way to reach people who now live in this in an alternate reality,” she said. “In December, something like 35 percent of Americans said they had doubts about who won the election. More recently, something like 21 percent approve of the storming of the Capitol. So somewhere around those numbers, we have a number of people who don’t accept that the election was won by Joe Biden. Therefore, they don’t accept the rules of American democracy. Therefore, they think it’s OK to commit violence against the institutions and people who compose that democracy.” To reach those people, Applebaum said, “All the lessons are about getting people to focus on practical and real issues and getting them away from the culture wars. So you will not win by shouting at people, ‘You are fascists!’ even if they are… and you will not win by arguing your case. You will win by getting people to talk about fixing the roads... getting people to refocus on some real project in the real world that a community can do together.  Most important of all, said co-host Molly Jong Fast, is to avoid focusing on Trump. “If you’re building a bridge or doing something else, at least it’s not about Trump,” she said. “And I feel like when you talk about Trump, you just lose no matter what side you’re on.” To ensure the MAGA mob doesn’t rise up again, the co-hosts agreed that the Capitol insurrections and their enablers in Congress and the White House needed to face justice. “If Democrats who now control the Senate, even though it’s by very small margin, can’t do something here to punish people for doing an insurrection, then they’re just going to do it again,” Jong-Fast said. Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, and editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. From the mystic heirs of the distant past comes one figure whose powers of premonition are unrivaled, whose ability to see the future urged in 2015.

His name, Rick Stradamus, is philosophy not in quatrines, but in a simple phrase, everything Trump touches dies, dies, die. So very modest, Rick Wilson. The usual, the patented Rick Wilson modesty going there. You know, I just try to keep everything real and, you know. But you happen to be right. For once in my life, I happen to have the advantage of being absolutely right. Everything Trump touches dies is now in its, now in its fifth year.

And it's grown up so fast. Yeah, no. I mean, this weekend is not changing anything. the destruction of everyone around him is continuing. The destruction of the country is continuing. It's fantastic. So Rudy Giuliani, he's not technically dead, but he can't be the lawyer for Trump because he has to be a witness. Right.

So let me just say this. And I'm going to speak Southern for you all for a few minutes. Oh, good. If I was hoping you might. If you're driving down Highway 319 on the west coast of Florida. in the middle of night. Will a possum be involved in this? There is a possum involved in this.

Of course, but of course there is. Yes, continue. The least edible of the roadkill, as I like to call it. Second to the armadillo, which is the least edible of the ricklellan. Well, good for the armadillo. You can eat an armadillo, but do you want to? No. And you can eat a possum, too.

Oh, this is, things have gotten really dark here. I had fricciccated possum one time at the farm that my grandmother. No, no. Just turn around the car. It's enough. We've gone somewhere very, very bad. If you're driving down Highway 319 in the middle of the night, as one does, and you hit a possum, you know it's dead because you're going 90 miles an hour in the dark, in the darkened night. You know that possum's dead.

Now, it may still be making motions if you decide to turn around and go look at it. It may still be twitching a little bit and like gaping its grotesque possum jaw at you. But the possum's dead. Rudy is the possum, okay? He's still moving around and twitching and his jaw still flapping now and then and his eyes. roll back and forth, but he is a dead possum. He's a, he's roadkill on the Trump train. This is done. They will, they, they're going to fuck him financially. They have humiliated him publicly. This thing of, I'm a witness and I therefore, come on. You know, maybe that's true,

but has, has, has legal nicety stop them from doing anything else ever? Has a rule or law ever once? In Trump, they go, oh, that's a bridge too far. We can't do that. That would be illegal. You go, come on. Yeah, that's not something they do. Yeah. That's not really their thing. Yeah, they're not so, yeah. All kidding aside, the destruction that I predicted and outlined, because it wasn't hard, folks.

It wasn't like some deeply scientific experiment. You observe a person like this who is an abusive, narcissistic psychopath, who is a grifting con man for his whole life, who is a scumbag of the first order, it wasn't hard to predict. But the normalcy bias in Washington of all these regular people thought, well, I'm just going to, you know, I'll be the one who helps steer the ship. I'll be the one who comes out and is looking good. I'll be the guy. Everyone says, hey, he squirred things away. He made Trump a more mature and stable president. Get the fuck out of here.

Come on. Who are you kidding? It was never going to work, people. And now what you have is an administration where people, according to all the reporting, in this last 48 hours, hours, they're hiding from him. They're hiding. They're taking their terminal leaves of absence. They've cleared out. They're sitting in the White House of Mass, or they're over in the old executive office building in a conference room praying he doesn't remember their name and call them for a meeting, which could put them in legal jeopardy. This thing is ending exactly as it was predicted. There is no

question how it goes. And the stories this weekend, and I just want to pour one out for all of our people in the Trump administration who are just so stunned and hurt that they can't get jobs in the entertainment industry and they get jobs at major corporations to do communications. Oh no. How did that happen? I mean, aside from the fact that you are a bunch of lying mendacious scumbags who, of course, enabled every fucking thing Trump ever did. Other than that, could you think of a reason?

It's like, it's like, you come home with the car wrecked and the front end's caved in. You're like, I have no idea how that happened, Dad? How do you think this plays out? Did people get, like, what happens to a Kaylee McAnney? What happens to... Dad, Niedermeier, dead. What about the guy with the toupee? Hogan Gitley.

Is it Gittley or it's actually Gittley? Gittley. I'm sorry it's Gittley. Gittley driving Gittler from it is more pleasurable to say. Yeah. So Hogan Gittley, he is another one of these guys where he either lives on in the Trump Demi Mom. where he becomes executive vice president for communications for Trumpco.

Or he tries to go back out into the Republican world and tell stories and say, oh, it was crazy, man, you could never believe, how nuts it was. But he's never going to go out now. As a lot of White House people have in the past from both parties, he's never going to be able to go out now and rack up an amazing position in a Fortune 50 company. He's never going to go be the senior vice president communications for Uber or Google or Facebook or the heart breaks. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, the heart breaks. You really, you really have to feel a moment of go. They should go fuck themselves. For the suffering, their, their experience at the hands of that

liberal counterculture. And by liberal counterculture, I mean, people who don't suck. But these guys, they are all bitching and moaning. Now we're hearing it in our in our circles now of, hey, man, you got to take it easy on so. And so he was just the, you know, undersecretary for whatever. You know what? I've said this before. I don't care about some kid who. was a GS7 or a GS9 or a GS, you know, at the Department of Commerce, I don't care about that, unless they were actively engaged in some sort of horror. What I care about are the top-tier White House people. What I care about are the comms people. What I care about are all the people that are going to try to come out of this and normalize it and pretend it was okay. And that,

especially on the Senate, includes Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley and Rick Scott and Ron Johnson and the rest of these idiots. I mean, look, Tuberville and Cindy had some, Smith. Are too dumb to know where they are. I wouldn't trust them with a toaster. Okay. You know, I wouldn't trust them with a toaster. These people are not smart people.

Yeah. Tuberville seems really to have no idea where he is. No, he's sort of out of it. And basically, you know, it's like, a lot of watching the guys run down the field. They're played good. They played really good than that. It was a good game.

Yeah, that's Tupperville, right? But Sidney Hat Smith, who the fuck knows what's in that woman's brain? And if anything, she is an embarrassment in every conceivable access, but she's going to continue to be an embarrassment because, of course, Mississippi has sent her to the U.S. Senate and she is from Mississippi, and that is a red state with red people in the red state. It's not going to be easy to unseat her. Right. But I think that should Holly and Ted Cruz be punished for their, I mean, they were actively pro-insurrection? It won't happen, but they should be expelled from. the body. But they could be stripped of their committee stuff the way that...

As they should be. The way that Steve King was. Talk about a racist shipbag. Right. But at least they stripped him from his committees. And I mean, I think that would make a lot of sense for Holly and Cruz. And then Cruz just got reelected, but Holly is up again soonish. Well, they both want to be president in 2024. So you're going to see both of them in acts of stompy foot defiance for the next next few days, but, you know, things like the Lowe's decision and the corporate decisions that keep coming down on their heads over and over again, these guys are shook and their own staff are shook and their donors are shook. And like Josh Hawley's, all his major donors back home, they're hearing about this. And the pressure's running uphill now. Like, why are you doing this,

man? And Holly can manage that for a while. He could talk his donors back off the cliff for a while, But there will be a point where he can't keep talking his donors off the cliff. And it's taking a lot of time away from his plan to lead the Senate little fascist caucus and to do the things he wanted to do to establish himself as the definitive, you know, Trumpy candidate for 24. It does seem that if Democrats who now control the Senate, even though it's by very small, margin can't do something here to punish people for doing an insurrection, then they're just going to do it again. I promise you, the more you give people the opportunity to commit crimes and do crime and insurrection, still, even in this country, is a crime.

The more you give people space to do that shit, the more they will do it. If you don't think they're trying to get away with this, and I mean get away with it without a lick of consequence, you're insane. Those people want to do more of this. And remember, folks, there's an agenda here that you may not be thinking through all the way. Mitch McConnell is absolutely determined to fuck Joe Biden and to recapture the Senate majority. He will do everything he can to train wreck the situation. And it's not going to be easy to convince Mitch McConnell that he should go through any process that holds any of his members to account, no matter how right that is. And if there had been Democrats in the Senate and an angry mob outside and Mitch McConnell,

Connell was the majority leader, even with one vote, he would have brought down holy fucking hell and raise the political price of doing that through the sky. Yeah, I agree. He would have caused a gigantic hissy fit, and he would have lost his mind all the time every day. And they would be fundraising off of it. They would be like Democrats tried to storm the capital. Correct. Give us $500,000. So, I mean, that's the thing is Democrats, I always feel like, are not tough enough. and especially with this, and it's going to end up being democracy that's on the line. This remains a moment of enormous political risk for this country, an enormous moral risk for this country.

We have to decide if we're going to hold Trump to account and his enablers in the Senate particularly, but also Kevin McCarthy in the House. Yeah. If you want to talk about one of the most disappointing, weak-ass leaders in the history of this country, Kevin McCarthy's caucus. is completely out of his control. Right. Utterly fucking bonker-palooza out of control. He doesn't have either the mental capacity, which is an easy argument to make, or the moral capacity to say, cut this shit out, this is a bad strategy,

your insanity is showing, shut the fuck up, or you will be on the committee of toilet seat standards for the rest of your career. And he has the power to do that, but he doesn't. And he won't constrain the maniacs because he's afraid of losing his position to speaker. And he literally, the other day, was on a private call, wasn't that private, Kevin, on a private call with a number of members of his caucus who talked to me. And he said something to the effect of, well, you guys either stick with me or, you know, they're going to take over. It's going to be Gates or Gohmert or Jordan or one of these crazies will take over. Wait.

I'm like, what the fucking different? What would the fucking difference be right now if Matt Gade or Jim Jordan or Devin Nunez or Louis Gomer was the fucking speaker? What would the difference be? Would we be having a caucus that's engaging in insurgency? Yes. Would we be having Q on people front and center without any discipline from the leadership? Yes. Would we be having conspiracy theories all over the place that are fueling the insanity of these fucking people?

Yes. So what's the difference? What's the meaningful delta between Speaker Gates and Speaker McCarthy? There's none. Yeah, there really isn't one. So, and right now, he has spent more hours in the last few days dealing with his, dealing with, with his caucus wanting to destroy the 10 Republicans who voted in favor of impeachment. Right. Because they want their people out, beaten to death with sticks. You know, their bodies cast into the sea, their heads mounted on pikes. That's what they want.

They, you know, disloyalty to Trump, you must, you must perish. We've sort of found ourselves an incredible place because there are two MAGA congresswomen. There's a lot of, there's a lot of supposition. And we don't really know that there may have been some involvement from one of them that we don't know in this armed insurrection. I mean, and then we had Mo Brooks who was speaking at the rally. So you don't get much more in it than that. And then we have Allie, Alexander, having fingered three of them. Like, what do you do?

I mean, how can you have these people continue in Congress? It seems inconceivable. The ones who were actively engaged in this edition, actively engaged in encouraging these people to come out and storm the capital, actively pushing the idea that there's been some massive conspiracy that, you know, has taken this election, this legitimate election away from Trump. Those people did this since November. Remember, over and over and over again, if they had any shame or decency, they would quit.

Right. Now, we don't have shame or decency in this country in that scale anymore. Sometimes when people do something shameful, they quit. They leave. They say, I have to restart. I have to reboot. But even Mike Pence was shopping the lie. I mean, you can't unring the bell that's been rung here.

And you still have a pretty large percentage of Republicans who believe it. So, I mean, I don't know what you do with the country where, you know, a large percentage of people actually believe something that isn't true. Well, and you also have a problem where a large percentage of people in the Republican Party, not only believe that what happened wasn't wrong. Right. They're proud. But that there should, that it was an upside. There was a benefit to it. Half of the Republicans, okay, in the Pew poll over the weekend, half, half said Trump has no responsibility for what happened on the Hill.

Get the fuck out of here. Right. You guys get the actual fuck out of here. That is astounding. And, you know, the idea at one point, and I take this out of the religious space, okay, completely. There was an idea at one point that the Republican Party had a moral center. And it believed in things like responsibility and accountability and integrity and honesty.

And not one of those traits. Not one of those traits is present right now in elected members of the leadership in the House and the Senate. The leadership in both of those places, they really want to close their eyes and say, it didn't happen, didn't happen, didn't happen, didn't happen. Oh, it's going to go away, it's going to go away, it's going to go away. Well, it did happen.

You made it happen. It's not going away. It's not going away. It's going to be with you for a long, long time. What do you think happens now? Do you think, like, will Liz Cheney be able to stay as number three? Will they be able to? They'll fight a lot harder to punish ideological deviations from Trumpism inside

the Congress, then they will to fight people who encouraged a bloodthirsty mob that killed cops. Yeah. That's the reality. These people will never let it go. They will come at her. They will come at Kinsinger. They will come at Herrera Butler. They will come at anyone who did not tow the line.

So what will happen eventually? Well, eventually just... Well, listen, if you strike a cheney down, they will return more powerful than ever. That's just a rule of the universe. episode. You notice Jesse and I are just, we're not going to say anything. I know. Yeah, that's because I'm staring into an abyss.

You're both like glorified of yet. Oh, my God, he's right. Well, we know you're right, but we don't want to encourage anything or anyone. Me being right. You know, the McKay Coppins piece today was very smart about the Republican, oh, you'll be surprised how much this never happened. We're just going to forget about it. We're just going to move on.

We're going to go back to our roots. Well, that's great in the drawing rooms of D.C. That works when you're spinning a story to McKay Coppins from the comfort of the Capitol Hill Club. They're forgetting that this particular party now has a base of people who believe in the craziest fucking things you've ever heard of and who hate Republicans if they're not named Donald Trump. Yeah, so what happens there? So look, the base is eventually going to say, well, I don't like that Rob Portman, fella. I'm going to have this guy who is a, you know, former QAnon lunatic primary him. And the primaries, a few of them will not work out.

They'll be a little rough around the edges at first, right? And then they'll come it up a little bit. And they'll make it look a little shinier. And then I'll say, well, Q&N was interesting, but I'm really here to talk about MAGA values. And those people will start winning primaries and they'll be insane people. And then they'll start losing general elections. Because, you know, the Trump base is always chasing the drag. They always want more transgression, more insanity, more abuse, more horror, and they can't get enough of it.

This is a cognitive addiction to transgression that they are being fed as of this minute still by this administration. And no one else can provide that for them and retain office over time. So they just get worse and worse and worse, and then they lose general elections. But what about the people like Marjorie Taylor-Green? and Laura Boper and I mean, Mo Brooks is a different animal, but what about those two? Those guys just got, and

what a Mason Cartwright or whatever his name is? Madison Cawthorne. Whatever. I mean, what happens to those guys? I'm sure Madison Cawthor sounds better in the original German. You know, he is the definition of what the alt-right fellow is called Fashy.

Right, exactly. He's able to, you know, present himself in a way that doesn't look completely, He's not one of these bloated dickweeds in a badly fitting LBV and, you know, with a patches all over himself for his various imaginary wars he's fighting in like the Punisher's Scud. This is, he is a guy who's clean cut and he looks he looks like he's not, you know, an insane person at first. I tell you, of course, he opens his pie hole and then you realize he's, you know, a little wee Nazi. So as we tape this, I'm looking at my Trump administration countdown clock, and we just crossed that we're under 2,000 minutes left of this. What do we think is going to happen in those 2,000 minutes?

That motherfucker will be gone in 2,000 minutes. Oh, God, I hate fat ass. I was glad that yesterday there wasn't more violence, because yesterday was supposed to be a day of MAGA marching on state capital. and a lot of people were worried about that, and it turned out to be a pretty poor showing because of football. Well, it was also because... Right, they were ready for that. The FBI has been arresting the shit out of these idiots

who stormed the U.S. Capitol. Yeah. And you know what? When there's 50,000 people or 5,000 people, however many try to get in the Capitol, it's one thing. When they videotape themselves, it's another. If it's just you and the 16 members of your League of the South chapter, you're all going to get arrested.

and some of you might get done killed. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement was at the Florida Capitol. I suspect those guys would not have hesitated to take action if people tried to storm into the Capitol. I mean, nobody's here right now. We're not in the legislative session right now, but they might have tried,

but there wasn't a person out there. I was like one Yahoo at one point. So that is a good sign. We still have to get through the inauguration and today's inauguration, the practice inauguration was, I mean, if you want to talk about peak dystopia, there was a fire at a homeless encampment that was nearby, which ended up causing a lot of, you know, drama, and they ended up interrupting the practice. But so far,

so, I mean, that is really sad and dystopian, as is the brand of 2021, but it wasn't terrorist-related. By the way, I don't know if you saw, speaking of a freakishly dystopian. With the crematoriums in L.A. Where they have to stop burning people because it's affecting the air quality? No, tell me. No kidding. I've done an interview with Phil Rucker and Josh Dossy about Trump living in Florida. And there was something in the story that just blew my mind.

Trump is expecting a $2 billion presidential library. Yes. Where is he going to build it? Where is he going to build it? The $2 billion, $2 billion presidential library. First off, Donald, they don't read. He doesn't read.

The library will be dedicated to performing various tableau vivant of Donald Trumps and I call this one building the wall. I think it'll be a Trump library and casino, right, with an omelette station. Why don't I just convert Maralago into the Trump presidential library? Right. I mean, there's no way there's going to be books there. It'll be like a casino, horse racing, maybe some kind of pornographic activity. Maybe they'll have like an interactive display where you can pretend Donald Trump is still on Twitter.

I don't, I mean, I think it'll be an omelette station. There'll be an opportunity to buy lots of Trump branded merchandise. Right, right. And that'll be it. But $2 billion sounds like there's going to be a lot of skim, huh? I would put the skim at $2 billion for the Trump Library at roughly $1.94 billion, with the remainder going to buy a trailer park outside of Oka, Humpka, Florida, where they will put one wing for the Donald Trump presidential records and another wing for the audio-animatronic Trump family figures all sitting around

a television watching reruns of The Apprentice. So we're talking about impeachment here, and since we've, recorded on Thursday. It went through the House. It's waiting to go to the Senate. It's going to come up the day after the inauguration, I think. And it's sort of going to be set up as a kind

of afternoon activity, it looks like. Rick Wilson, what's your take on this? Ain't going to happen. I mean, Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell, he probably will get censured, which is horseshit. Right. Okay. But if he gets

censured from running again, that's not horseshit. Yeah, but but censure is like the hand job of punishments for this guy. Yes, that's very classy. He doesn't care about a censure. Yeah, I know, I'm tasteful. But he can't run again. Well, not necessarily. You may still end up with them censoring him, but not removing his right to run again. That would be bad. It'd be bad. That'd be bad. I think there's a degree to which Mitch McConnell will be held in history as someone who had every bit of this power in mind. Look, these people are like a pack of trained.

dogs. Mitch McConnell says bark and my dogs are walking. You're welcome America for the sound effects. They came to you without, we're free of charge. So we've talked about that there will be a Senate trial. There probably will be witnesses. It may not result in anything, but it might. I mean, you have enough people who are pissed. And remember, you only have to have people show up. So if you have Republican senators not show up, it's a vote of the people who are there. Yes, but I think, unfortunately, for the Trump guys, they're going to realize that they better be there. A no-show is a vote that the Trump world will take as a betrayal. Right.

But those people, but don't you think Trump is already so angry? I mean, are there any Republicans in the Senate that Trump doesn't sort of hate at this point? I mean, besides Tommy Tuberville, who's too dumb to know where he is? Look, I think he's kind of probably okay with Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz right now because they're not fucking. him overtly. It's easier to people to know the ones he hates and the ones he likes. Right. And of course there's Lindsey Graham. I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you.

I love you. I hate you. I love you. I hate you. I don't think he has a lot of fans in the Senate right now. He does not. And a lot of them realize they need to get past this. They need to try to start, you know, getting back. Look, the 22 races we've talked about is going to be a harder map, a much more difficult map. That difficulty

is real. It's intense. It's bad. And so they need to run up this razor's edge on the one hand. It's like, oh, we've got to get rid of the filth of this, of this, like all this crap that Trump pushed us in. And on the other hand, they're like, we've got to keep the Trump base on board. And if you get Trumpism without Trump, it would be amazing. Yeah, we'll see how that works. Hello, new abnormal listeners. Producer Jesse Cannon here. I want to remind everybody that tomorrow, on inauguration day that we're going to be doing a special live bonus episode with Rick and Molly and the Daily Beast Michael Tamaski. In order to attend this, you need to become a member of Beast Inside the Daily Beast membership program. To do that, head to new abnormal.

That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com. That's new abnormal. Thedailybeast.com. And we hope to see you tomorrow at 10 a.m. on inauguration day to celebrate Joe Biden being inaugurated with the new abnormal. Anna Applebaum is an American journalist and historian, particularly known for her excellent book, Twilight of Democracy. And we're going to talk about some of the subjects around that book today. It feels to me of the people we've talked to and we talk to Mash a guest about this, that there's this sort of, and again, I'm sure you read this weekend, that there's this, we're sort of in this weird, scary post-truth time. Do you see that? Do you see the parallels?

Oh, I feel very much that we're in a post-truth time. I've actually spent the last couple of days wondering, you know, what the precedent is and what we can compare ourselves to. The historical examples I'm coming up with are sort of post-conflict situations, you know, where you have a civil war that ends or where the insurgency ends, and then you have to reintegrate the country, but people have different ideas about what the country is and what it should be. I mean, if you look at Columbia, for example, where you're a where they have the FARC, they have an insurgency that's been running for years and years. And they have to bring the FARC people back into the mainstream of society. I almost feel like we need something like that too. We need a re-education program, although that sounds, you know, we need to find some way to reach people who now live in an alternate reality. Yeah, I'm really, really, really glad you didn't say, like, Germany, 1931.

You know, there are ways in which our form of insurrectionism resembles those 1930s and 1920s movements too, but it's not really an exact parallel because we're not living in a time of mass violence or mass street violence. And so the correct parallel is really the reintegration of something or what happens when a part of society splits off or essentially lives a quarter of. to different rules and according to a different truth. I mean, we now have, I mean, it's hard to say exactly how many people it is. You know, I've just been looking at numbers. There's, you know, something like in December, something like 35 percent of Americans said they had doubts about who

won the election. More recently, something in like 20, 21 percent approve of the storming of the capital. So somewhere around those numbers, we have a number of people who don't accept, that the election was won by Joe Biden. Therefore, they don't accept the rules of American democracy. Therefore, they think it's okay to commit violence against the institutions and people who compose that democracy. Therefore, we need some way of, you know, reaching them or mitigating them or finding. There are too many of them for it to be a kind of criminal story where we lock people up. I mean, that's not what this can be. This is not, these are not tiny terrorist groups.

So we need to think in a much broader way. Right. No, I agree. I mean, I do think that, I do think that that, I mean, we can't have a large percentage of the country believing the big lie, which is that this election wasn't. I mean, you know, I don't know how you can live like that. How we can live like that. And also, there are a lot of dangers inherent in this situation. I mean, for example, the Georgia officials who certified the election, despite very active pressure from the president and from the media and from people around them, they all got death threats.

We are very lucky that they were all brave and honest and upstanding civil servants. Next time around, we might not have that. We might have people who live in the alternate reality or people who no longer believe in democracy or in one man, one vote. Quite, you know, quite a number of these people don't. And then we're in trouble. I mean, in a way, you know, this election went a lot better than it could have done. And we didn't actually, everybody did certify the vote. And actually, there was no violence on election day.

But just because we were lucky this time, lucky up to a point, doesn't mean we will be next time. I just actually read today a story of a, in Michigan, the Michigan Republican Party wants to deselect or remove a Republican from something called the Board of Canvassers. This is one of their electoral institutions because he's one of the guys who certified. that Biden won the election in Michigan. I mean, that means they're going to put in someone else. That means that they're going to put in someone who lives in, you know, in the online alternate world. And then we could be in trouble with the next election. That is really, really scary. And that seems like there are a bunch of states where they're so divided, like Pennsylvania and Ohio and Michigan. And the right, the far right there is really, really sort of emboldened in a way.

that is just totally terrifying. I'm curious to know, in your experience where you're living in Poland, has this sort of transfer back to more normal American democracy, or at least the promise of it, affected Europe? It will. You know, just the end of Trump and the disappearance of Trump, even if nothing else happens, changes the atmosphere a lot. The free world is not led by a proto-authoritarian who lies all the time, attacks the media, attacks the judiciary, and seeks to undermine democratic institutions. And so that already, it just shifts the balance of emphasis. I mean, it's very important what Biden does in the next few weeks and months. You know, I know that he is hoping to make the international conversation about democracy a centerpiece of his foreign policy.

I mean, that's in theory what he's planning to do. Events could bring him down or distract him, it's very possible. And it's also very important that if he does that, I mean, there's talk of some kind of meeting, maybe in the spring or the summer of leaders of the democratic world and a conversation about things we can do together. There's a danger that that could be kind of fluffy. It could be, it could just be people reciting cliches and people from the Obama administration feeling nostalgic. It's really, really important that the democracies focus on fixing some of these problems together, that they all suffer for, you know, the most immediate and obvious one being the problem of not just social media, but the internet more broadly and how we're going to regulate it.

Fix that, fix clipocracy, you know, fix climate change, a few other things. There has to be something, right? We can't continue on like this. Do you think that we saw this rise, and you write about this in the book, we saw this rise of this all right, E, kind of, you know, autocrats in the world. Now that Trump is gone, I mean, we still have Erdogan, we still have, I mean, what's happening in Russia. You want to talk a little bit about what's happening in Russia and how that's affecting you guys? Because I bet, yeah. Sure. I mean, the arrest of Navalny is, of course, really is very shocking because of the blatantness of it and this shocking scene of him flying back to Russia with his wife knowing he would be arrested and having no idea what would

happened to him. And the bizarre behavior of the Russian state, you know, they, that he was supposed to land at one airport and then they moved it to another airport because they were afraid of his supporters. I mean, they're really afraid of him and they're afraid of the emotions that he raises and they're really afraid of their own people now. And that fear has made it, has made Russia even more violent and even more aggressive than it was in the past. I mean, for, you know, Putin actually, of course, was the master of disinformation. I mean, this is. this is how he runs this country. You know, I think it's fair to say, I mean, there's a symbiotic relationship between Russia and the American alt-right and even the American PR industry.

They learned some things from us, and then we learn some things from them. I mean, it's clear that the Russian style, you know, the mockery and the, and also the use of disorientation, you know, when the plane crashes over Ukraine, put out a thousand different explanations. you know, some crazy, some plausible, some implausible. And the reaction of people is, oh my God, there's so many explanations will never know what happened. Right. It's impossible to know. And if you put out so much information, so much contrasting different views and opinions, then you leave people with the sense that there is no truth. You can't ever find it out and you'll never know. And that insight that the quantity of information overwhelms the truth was really Russia's important

inside and that's what it contributed to the alt-right, to the far-right, and then eventually to the Trump presidency. I mean, Trump, you know, Trump lied how many times a day? I mean, I don't know, a dozen, two-dozen. You know, he made stuff up all the time. I mean, if you go back and think about it, you remember him drawing on the hurricane map? You know, I mean, constant non-stop lies. And it was that process of lying all the time that had the effect in the United States that Putin's propaganda had in Russia, namely to undermine any sense that there's any truth. I mean, there's now as significant, as we've discussed, significant proportion of the American population who doesn't believe anything except what their cousin sends them that they saw in parlor. Right.

It's a truly Russian way of seeing the world as a Russian way of doing politics. The influence of authoritarianism and authoritarian disinformation, you know, on Europe and on America in the last four years, I think we're just beginning to understand how serious it is. You know, I noticed today, if you've seen it yet, that Parlor is now back online because it's broadcasting through Russian servers. Which means, of course, the Russians will have, you know, first eye on all those people and, you know, all those movements and so on. It's a new form of anti-patriotism.

These, you know, their large numbers of Americans are now more loyal to a foreign dictator than they are to their own country. How do we, in your mind, prevent ourselves from becoming. Russia in 2024. So I've been thinking about this a lot, and I'm trying to write something right now. Every lesson that you get, whether it's from, again, post-conflict situations or post-Civil war situations, you know, or even places like Northern Ireland, all of the lessons are about getting people to focus on practical and real issues and getting them away from the culture wars.

So you will not win by shouting at people. you are fascists, even if they are. Okay. I mean, you know, and you will not win by arguing your case. You will win by getting people to talk about fixing the roads, you know, or building a bridge or something, or solving some particular community problem. Infrastructure or whatever, health care, or getting people to refocus on some real project in the real world that a community can do together. This is what, you know, everybody who's ever done peacemaking, as I said, or post-conflict says these are, you know, these are the best thing. You know, don't talk about the thing that bothers you the most.

So don't talk about the civil war, whatever it was that started the civil war. Talk about something else. And then you can at least get people in the same room who would otherwise not speak to one another. Well, I also feel like the problem of Trumpism, I mean, I think what you've said is really interesting and I've never heard it, but it sounds completely right. I do think the problem with Trumpism is that ultimately you're arguing about Trumpism. Right. These two, I mean, and if you're building a bridge or doing something else, you can at least, it's not about Trump. And I feel like when you talk about Trump, you just lose no matter what side you're on. Exactly. So let's stop talking about Trump. I mean, it seems to me, by the way, that Biden instinctively understands this. I mean, this is what his election campaign was about. Yeah. At least, you know, there were other parts. There were some people running a slightly different version of the campaign, but he was mostly talking about real issues. You know, he made videos about helping family and solving the coronavirus. And I think he gets this, whether he gets it as a subconsciously

or a consciously, I don't know. But his instinct seems to be let's do stuff. You know, let's do and let's do some stuff that unites us, even though it's going to annoy some of his own party. Well, he loves trains too. He loves trains. Maybe he'll invest in some more trains. That would be good for us. Where you are now, you're in Poland. I'm curious to know, like, what just this sort of landscape looks like. Because in America, we get such American news, and we don't really get to see what the rest of the world is like. So I'm curious to know what you're sort of seeing right now.

Probably the most important story in Europe at the moment is one that isn't reported at all in the United States, which is the contest for who will succeed Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany. And this matters a lot because of Germany's role inside Europe, but also in the world. It looks like her party, well, her party has selected. somebody who's a who's a who's a who's a who's a very centrist which I think is both good and bad I mean I'm I'm a little worried that Germany still doesn't get it in other words Germany still doesn't get that America is distracted now I mean even Trump is gone but we're still you know we're still distracted and it doesn't get that you know Europe is going to have to lead in some other ways I mean I was hoping for somebody more more outward looking

but funny enough the Germans choose the person who I wanted them to choose. I mean, again, the big stories are, you know, what directions, you know, how will Europe cope with the coronavirus? Right. A lot of money is going to be spent here by the European Union on there's sort of new funding mechanisms, you know, once the thing is over. Second big issue, actually, the, the, in, here in Poland, we're still, I mean, it's funny, my, my, my Polish husband said to me, you know, the other day, well, you know, right after the capital insurrection, he said, well, this is all really terrible, but at least you, at least they're going to be gone. Right. Whereas here, they're still there.

Oh, yeah. Here in Poland, we still have a, we have a kind of, I don't know how to describe them. Far right. Catholic, Catholic nationalist far right government, you know, who are extremely incompetent, have bungled the coronavirus, of course. Have it yet been voted out? I mean, I think they should be next time, but, you know, here we have the problem that the opposition is divided into smaller fractions. And, I mean, there's their political reason why it doesn't happen. And you, and you have a growing tension between.

the countries that are still run by far-right leaders, Poland and Hungary, and the rest of Europe as well. And that may come to some kind of fruition in the next year or two. I mean, the landscape here is, will Europe recover? What will it do about, you know, its own little insurrectionists here in Poland and Hungary? And what will its relationship be to the United States? Right. Oh, Jesus. It's so much to worry about.

I can't even, you know, I don't know where to start worrying. But look on the bright side. I mean, what if Trump had won? Right. No, I know. I would not have been good. Then we'd be, you know, really talking about the end of the American Republic. Yeah. Or not. So it's a better problem to have than some that we might have had. That's certainly true. Oh, this was so great. Thank you so much for joining us. This was amazing. 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. dot the Daily Beast.com to become a Beast inside member now. That's new abnormal. dot the daily beast.com. Kurt Anderson is the former editor of Spy Magazine, the host of Studios 360 from WNYC.

And the author of the new audiobook, Asta La Vista America, which is a Trump Farewell Address, performed by Alec Baldwin and written by Kurt. Tell me about the book. You mean this Trump Farewell Address that we're talking about? Yes, you're the mini book. It's a very mini book. And book sounds like homework and difficult. This is only 42 minutes to listen to. So it's easy.

It's a podcast, really. It really is a podcast. And a podcast you have to pay 99 cents for, or otherwise you wouldn't value it sufficiently. That's right. But my old friend and former colleague Jacob Weisberg at Pushkin came back in November, said, hey, he saw in page six that Donald Trump obviously posing as a source close to Donald Trump had said, I'm getting $100 million for a memoir. Yes.

And said, hey, Kurt, I know you've already written this previous Donald Trump memoir in 2017 with Alec Baldwin. and maybe like to do this again, and we can do it as an audio book. I said, nah, I don't have that much appetite to channel him again at a book length. Then my pal, Alec Baldwin, said, when I told him of this proposal, he said, well, maybe just a chapter or two, maybe just a short version. And so he made me think, yeah. And so I told Jacob that Alec was into it and I was into it if we could do it short and soon and quick rather than wait until next spring, that is to say this spring when nobody would.

I hope, give a shit about Donald Trump anymore. Let's get it out at the end in the final days. And so I wrote it. I like brilliantly performed in Reddit, and the wonderful producers gave it all kinds of great sound effects and music and cool stuff. And here it is. And tell me what it's about. It's fictitious.

It is fictitious, although as with Donald Trump and all Trumpian satire, it's always tricky to know to keep just a. head of reality, right? And even literally as we, as I was writing it, and then as we were recording it, reality threatened to catch up, you know, as, for instance, I've had a joke about, which is still there, about wanting to raise money and so forth. And even if the Democrats came after him and stopped his secret service protection, he would have these Trump's Second Amendment Avengers that there's thousands of guys already begging to sign up. Well, that's fiction, but then, of course, January 6th happened, and it was no longer fictional. So, yes, it is

fictional. It is, it is, it is his farewell address. He talks about Washington, his, what he calls his second inaugural. He talks about Lincoln. It is his state of the union address. It is also glimpses into the book he's going to get $100 million for. So he talks about the people he fired and the traders and his family and so forth. So it's, it's everything. It's, it's a million things in one in 42 minutes. What do you think, I'm curious to know, how do you, since you come from spy magazine,

and you've predicted many of the elements of this, like what happens next? I've been thinking about him a while. That's true. And I have, and this previous, you know, book length, essentially novel, I wrote about how it would end. And that, which we published in 2017, which is called,

you can't spell America without me, ended with him going mad and fortifying himself in the book. He fortifies himself in Trump Tower, but, you know, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the bunker of the white house could have been the same, which he's doing now. But, but goes mad. And, uh, but how do I really think, uh, I, I, I don't think I have anything different than anybody else. I think he, he's going to try to, he's now down to the, the, the, the, the, the mad, hardcore Qan honors and, and, and obviously a large fraction for a while of the Republican party, and he'll keep trying to make money from them and keep trying to arrange these massive

spectacular spectacles where he can feel their love, which is the only love he feels in the world. So that's it. You know, nothing. I mean, will he go to prison? Your bet is as good as mine. Right. Nobody knows. Probably no, but I wouldn't, it's an, as they say, a non-zero chance. I wouldn't give it 50-50, but I wouldn't, you know, I think there's a significant chance he could go to prison, but, you know, we'll see. Right. But I do think he goes to Florida, which is not so different than prison. Yes. Right. And he can never leave there, right? I mean, unless he runs again. Well, he will be in, as I have him call it in the previous, my previous Trump fiction, the Southern White House, which of course literally is what the builder intended, what he has and

what it was intended to be a Southern White House for somebody. So that's what it will be. He'll be there. and he'll get the praise and sick of fancy. Still, I would suspect, from the people who've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to be members of his club there. Now, will the city of Palm Beach kick him out because that's not how it's zoned and stuff like that? I mean, we can all, you know, all of those things will be the post-game pleasure of watching because he won't be president anymore.

It'll be, you know what, he'll be, he'll be, he'll be just. a big joke again like he was in the 80s and 90s when we made fun of him at spy. Right. I mean, that's the thing is we went, he went from like big joke to fascist autocrats so quickly. Yeah. Right. I mean, but I guess he goes back to big joke now that he doesn't have power, though he controls the Republican Party. He does, which is an interesting combination. The Republican Party in the form of, you know, the Mitch McConnell of the world won't like and would like him to drop dead the day after tomorrow, if it all possible. Yeah. The question is, does he also did that middle thing he did between big joke and fascist autocrat, which is reality television

star. Maybe, maybe, you know, I mean, the thing is, as my wife, Ann said to yesterday, he said, you know, we have all watched everybody, you, me, everyone in America on the world has watched every episode of the Trump reality show for the last five years. We have. It's riveted us. And so it'll be a blessing and a pleasure for most of us to stop, but, you know, there's going to be X millions of people who want to keep watching. You know, the question is, once he's no longer a president, who but the cult really cares? You know, I mean, it was a weird combination of Donald Trump,

crazy, fascist, crazy like a fox, what is he, what will he do next with being president? Once he's just a guy, you know, saying untrue, and saying how great he is or saying whatever the fuck he's saying, I just feel like the interest, the audience shrinks rapidly and significantly. But again, not to zero. He'll still have enough people to grift and, you know, make plenty of dough to pay his lawyers as he actually has to defend himself against various attorney generals and district attorneys.

Yeah, I mean, it is kind of amazing. So do you think that he will have a reality television show or a news network? Some kind of TV thing he'll have, and certainly as long as Twitter keeps him off, he will be desperate for some platform of attention. Because as I was saying, you know, 30 years ago when we were doing spy, I had never come across a human being or known about a human being who was so desperate like an addict for drugs for attention, for public attention, for press attention. It's his whole thing. And so to go from, you know, being in everyone's heads, being the most famous guy, essentially, whoever has been for these last four years, you know, he's going to need something. And I don't think a network is going to put it on, but, you know, there's hundreds of channels and the internet. And yeah, he'll have some kind of television thing.

And will Don Jr. and Eric and Ivanka be part of that? I don't know. We'll see. Yeah. So on a much more positive note, in a little less than 2,000 minutes, we will be done with Donald Trump. Oh, I like that, that calculation. Is there anything that you would really like to see Biden do? I mean, there's all kinds of things. I think he's, you know, if to the degree he's doing a cover version of the New Deal and a cover version of FDR, only 20x years older than FDR was in 1933, he's already doing a fairly good job, like trying to. to solve the immediate thing, which is to say the pandemic and its depression as the depression

was 75 years ago. And then moving on to saying, look, look how good this new big government is. It got the vaccine out. It started testing. It did all this stuff. And we're giving you a lot more money to get by big government. Not so bad, right? And then, you know, go in the direction of trying to restore the faith in government that Republicans for 40 years. have made as the central part of their project trying to destroy and undermine. Yeah. Well, no, I mean, it's definitely true. And if there ever were a time when we need government, it's right now.

Yeah. And I do think, I mean, again, all you have, not all you have to do, you have to be competent. And you have to be lucky in pass bills that send out the $2 trillion and get it in people's pockets and get it to states and cities and get the thing working again. So it's not just, oh, it's nice to be done with the hideous drama bullshit of Donald Trump every day. Look, the government is actually doing these things that he couldn't and wouldn't do

for certainly the last year of Pandemicistan, you know? And I think that will start making people not just go, oh, yeah, I was tired of Trump. I'm relieved that that's over. But hey, this Democrat thing is for real. And, you know, my life's a little better because I got an extra grand or my got my earned income tax credit or whatever it is. This was amazing. Thank you so much, Kurt. Oh, darling.

Thank you. Hey, Molly, John Faskin's your fuck that guy today. My fuck that guy is the barrel chested, terrible, terrible diplomat. The man who is planning his 2024 race right this minute, Mike Pompeo. What's he racing for the breakfast buffet? I mean, we can't body shame Mike Pompeo, but we certainly can personality shame him. Can't I, though? His schick is like, he's sort of, he's doing this sort of, he's already started running,

and he's got this kind of, you know, sort of absolutely, I can't, I think it's sort of inexplicable, but a bravado that is just unbearable. And the irony is he's just. On the way out, he's sort of ruining whatever diplomatic relations we have left as a country, and then getting ready to run for president. So Mike Pompeo, fuck you. For the very last time, I hope that I can say a final, fuck that guy, to my pillow entrepreneur, Mike Lindell.

Mike Lindell entered the White House on Friday with a notepad that a telephoto lens managed to capture. It included phrases like declare martial law. That's right. Send Cash Patel to run the CIA and a whole variety of other wakadoo loony bullshit. Will you explain who Cash Patel was the trusted aid to? Because I think that's an important detail. Cash Patel once worked for Broken Brain Devin Nunez. Yes.

He was part of the ongoing cover up of Donald Trump's ties to Russia. He is a master of bureaucratic fuckery, and he's currently at the Department of Defense being a bureaucratic fuckery expert. Yeah, trying to find anything he can to leak, probably. Yeah. Lendell goes into the White House. I want to say this in four different trenches of what the fuck is. The first is that the president of the United States is taking meetings with a pillow entrepreneur with no background, anything whatsoever, having to do with, I don't know, the government, management, foreign policy, the Constitution. But he has smoked a lot of crack.

There is that. We can't body shame him, but we can crack shame people. I mean, as someone who's sober, I am perfectly comfortable shaming people for having smoked crack. Okay. As a, you know, as someone who's had a horse in that race. Okay. Now, the second tier of that is what the fuck is going on to the White House counsel's office, where they thought, Oh, this is a good idea. Let's have this fucking guy come in and propose martial law.

The third tier is, is there not one fucking person in this white house? Just not one person, just one, just one person who in the last 48 hours will keep his finger off the butt. We'll keep him from doing completely fucking insane things. Tomorrow we're going to have day of 100 pardons, apparently. That's tomorrow right before he leaves. That's tomorrow. Finally, you know, vanilla ice is free or whoever, whatever the fuck needs a part. The early reporting is that it's 100. Yeah, that's 100.

Now, they're saying it's not Trump family members. I'm not buying it. I mean, how can it not be? It has to be. Except the only way I think it could not be him and his kids is if there's, if he's worried that he'll be culpable for, like, legal, you know, if he can be sued because he's admitted guilt for the capital riots. I think that is definitely a pendant question in his mind, because what with the whole cop being beaten to death thing and people storming the Capitol trying to kill Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi? What if this is Mike Pence's great supervillain origin story? What's Mike Pence's supervillain origin story? Right, right. I was with Trump for four years, but now I've seen the error of my ways, and I will tell you, I will fight against extremism at every turn, especially someone who's not as far to the left as AOC. see, she's just too accommodating. She's just too dangerous.

I'm my parents. I'm a progressive. 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

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