The Daily Beast Podcast - Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker Slays ‘King’ Trump in Rousing Speech

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

On this episode of The New Abnormal, Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker slays “King” Trump in a rousing State of the State address that left some House Republicans heading for exits. Plus! New York Magazine senior writer Sarah Jones, author of “Disposable: America's Contempt for the Underclass,” discusses the politicizing of poverty, suffering, and systemic failures laid bare by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday edition of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here.

Today we have an extra special guest with Sarah Jones, senior writer for New York Magazine, and author of Disposable America's contempt for the underclass. And she'll join us to discuss how the COVID-19 pandemic laid bare America's systematic inequality, why poverty and suffering, remain a political choice. But first, let's have some. fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Yay, clips. You guys should be cheering. There's some very good ones here, such as you just watch there, you just watch.

Buddy. Governor Pritzker. Okay, yay, woo. One of my faves. This speech, Bravo, really, one of the few politicians rising to the moment. After we've discriminated against deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and

lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities, once we've ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends, after that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face, what comes next? All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don't want to repeat history, then for God's sake, in this moment, we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. I do solemnly swear that I will support the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of governor, according to the best of my ability. My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don't have kings in America, and I don't intend to bend the knee to one. I'm not speaking up in service to my ambitions, but in deference to my obligations. If you think I'm overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this. It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic.

And all I'm saying is that when the five alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control. Yeah, that's the good stuff. Yeah. what's crazy is that standing up for what is right is not rocket science right like it is not hard to encourage people to enlighten people to stir people into action and so like take what pritzker did and then what we have heard other democrats say well what can we do what leverage do we have

That's the fucking leverage that you have. You stand up in a moment and provide light when darkness is all around us. That's what you do. Bravo to him. Like, I need more of that every day. Yeah, Prisker is not making the mistake that most national Democrats are making of, you know, as we've discussed on this podcast, running campaigns warning of the fastest threat of Donald Trump and MAGA. then once they won the election, pretending they can be worked with and that there's nothing

abnormal, if I'm allowed to use that word, about what's going on here. And Pritzker is sitting there going, hey, this is what we were talking about during the election season. This is what we were talking about during the campaign. This is what we warned might happen. And it's such a stark relief, a stark difference from far too many national democratic politicians. And like you said, Daniel, it sucks that this speech stands out. Mm-hmm. Yep. And that's not a shot at Pritzker. God bless him for saying all of this. It would just be nice if he were one of many voices. And if it weren't just him and the handful of national figures, the AOCs, the Jasmine Crockett's that we've talked about on this show. And I do want to highlight. And then I'll shut the hell of

up. The House Minority Leader in Illinois is a woman named Tony McCombie. So she was sitting there while Prisker gave this speech. And she said afterwards, I guess she noted that some of the Republicans headed for the exits when Pritzker was talking. And she said, it was hard to sit there through that. To sit there and basically be called Nazis, not only Trump, but the Republican Party. And it was disgusting. Look in the mirror. Really? At this point, the question has to be asked, Why are you mad at being called Nazis? Look at the policies that you are in favor of and honestly explain why you are saying that you don't like being called Nazis because you sure seem to want to emulate them. I'm starting to get a little baffled as to why they're so upset about being called the thing that they clearly are trying to be.

Yeah, explain to me how the blueprint's different. And then we can have a conversation. Just please, please. Would love to see that. All right. Let's go to some more lighter fare. By light, I mean an intellect, because we now have the person and he calls the dumbest man on cable news, Jesse Waters. Oh, Jesus.

We haven't heard from him in a while. He's going to say the quiet part out loud. That he's an idiot. We're asking a little much for him to understand that. It's not really the same. Dana, we are waging a 21st century information warfare campaign against the left. And they are using tactics from the 1990s. holding tiny press conferences, tiny little rallies. They're screaming into the ether on MSNBC.

This is what you call top-down command and control. You get your talking points from a newspaper and you put it on the broadcast network and then it disappears. What you're seeing on the right is asymmetrical. It's like grassroots guerrilla warfare. Someone says something on social media. Musk retweets it, Rogan podcasts it, Fox broadcast it. And by the time it reaches everybody, Millions of people have seen it. It's free money. And we're actually talking about expressing information. They are suppressing information.

Are you dumb? Did he just say that what they're doing is about expressing information and what the left is doing is suppressing information when he just gave you the connect the dots blueprint to their fucking MAGA echo chamber? Yep. Well, yes. and just said that we that we take what information from newspapers and then regurgitate that but they get it from a tweet and then Elon Musk ampl like oh my god and then Fox News amplifies it okay got it wow there's two things here first of all the thing he left out is that the information that starts with a tweet is 99.9% of the time false bullshit a lie and then you

Yes, Elon Musk amplifies it because that's what he does. He amplifies things that are bullshit and lies. And then, of course, Joe Rogan, who is among the most credulous people in the world and just believes the dumbest possible shit. He amplifies it. And then, of course, Fox News amplifies it, as Jesse says, except that he somehow thinks this is a good thing when what he has just described is the absolute cycle of right-wing disinformation that is destroying this country. And I don't even know where else to go with this.

It's like basically I saw so many people who cover disinformation, journalists who cover disinformation, basically saying things like, I've been trying to get people to understand this for years that this is how this works. And he just said it. And they're absolutely right. Look, Jesse Waters, as I have pointed out ad nauseum, is the single dumbest person on cable news. So, I don't think he fully realized what he was doing. No, he definitely did not. Yeah. But on top of that, there is also sort of this just gleeful admission of what they do on the right.

And we see this all the time. We see it with people like Chris Rufo, who somehow gets fawning coverage in the New York Times. And then basically comes out and says, I put this stuff out there. And so it becomes a conversation. I say all this ridiculous shit. And then it becomes a conversation. And we see this all the time. that this is how they operate. It was, I guess, nice of Jesse Waters to just flat out admit it,

even if he didn't realize quite what he was doing. The fact that Dana Perino, who is a smart person and who I knew fairly well and liked, can sit there and not push back on any of this. She is among the more disappointing people at Fox to me. She does know better. Most of them don't. She does. Well, she definitely knew how propaganda worked when she spread it. But I think that, you know, the thing that gets left unsaid here is, Adam Curtis pointed out in 2015 in hyper normalization that this was Putin's plan to get people

disengaged with things and when people cite Steve Benin saying flood the zone with shit, what they are not pointing out is the root of that which is when you flood the zone with shit, people become so confused, they become beaten down, they don't want to participate and this echo chamber creates confusion

when Musk gets $8 billion versus $8 million wrong. It's not because he's a fucking idiot. It's because they don't care because both ways, work. Both accuracy, inaccuracy does not matter. What matters is that echo chamber will flood the zone with shit. People won't know what to believe and then they will feel beaten down and not participate.

Mm-hmm. 100%. That's the goal. That's the goal. So now we have our Commerce Secretary, Howard Lutnik, yet again, saying what they're really doing here. Well, when I set up Doge with Elon, so back in October, Elon Musk and I, I flew down to Texas got Elon must to do it. And here was our agreement that Elon was going to cut a trillion

dollars of waste, fraud, and abuse. Think about it. We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements, and no one's ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong. You know Medicaid and Medicare wrong. So he's going to cut a trillion. And then we're going to get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America. And we're going to raise a trillion dollars of revenue. And our objective under Donald Trump is to balance this budget. And I'm telling you, You watch it. We're going to do it. Going to raise a trillion dollars. We just throw around numbers.

Why don't we say bagillion? Good thing he's in charge of commerce. Yeah. The only hope here is that once they start touching Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid and things like that, people aren't going to stand for it. And by people, I mean people that voted for Trump. I think that's one of our only hopes here. And we're starting to see this a little bit with people.

I know Jesse Waters was upset that somebody he knows who's a MAGA guy lost his job at the VA because of Doge. And he was he was begging Donald Trump to take care of this guy. And I feel like there's going to be many such cases, as they say, going forward. And a lot of people who voted for Trump because they thought, oh, he's not talking about me. He's going to take care of those other people. he's going to deal with those other people who are the problem, but I'm not the problem. And now they're finding out that in the eyes of people like Musk, et cetera, they are the problem. At this point, I hate to root for spectacular overreach because a lot of people are going to get

hurt when it happens. But it may be the only chance we have of getting the country back. Yeah. For too many people, misery is the formal policy of the United States. So begin Sarah Jones's new book out this week, Dispositive. America's contempt for the underclass, a searing portrait of how the COVID pandemic exposed the systemic equality in this country. Sarah is a senior writer for New York Magazine and she joins me now. Sarah, thanks so much for coming back. Thanks for having me. Early on in the book, you write movingly of your grandfather who died of COVID and your own family and you say,

quote, perhaps I can understand what killed him. Was that the impetus for writing this book? It was a large part of it, yes. You know, I'm a journalist. And when my grandfather passed away, it was a tragedy for our family. But I also recognized it as being part of a much bigger national story. And I had already, you know, I'd been reporting on issues around class, labor and politics for years. And even during the pandemic, had been talking to essential workers who were on the front lines. And that's how it really came together in my head. I wanted to get at the roots of what killed my grandfather.

But I also wanted to connect that what happened to a bigger story. I remember saying some years ago, and I think this was pre-COVID, it was something along the lines of anyone who isn't radicalized by contact with the American health care system needs help, which they probably can't afford. And reading disposable brought this back to my mind. It's story after story about how we have, at best, we have a two-tiered health care system in this country. Talk about how the stories in your book of people who were affected the most by COVID, that all of this is. is reflective of systemic wealth inequality caused in no small part by systemic racism in this country? Absolutely. We really saw that, especially during the first year of the pandemic, before vaccines were widely available. It was hitting communities of color particularly hard. And of course, we know that people of color in the United States are more likely to live in poverty because of that systemic racism, because of that baked on inequality in the way in our political economy. And we saw that, you know, it's never been an abstract sort of academic issue, although it can sort of be discussed in that way, I think.

It's always had life or death stakes. And during COVID, we really saw that play out in a dramatic fashion. Yeah, you tell so many stories in the book that really make this hit home and that also make the title of the book, Disposable, hit home. The way COVID affected people of color, the elderly, people with underlying medical conditions, the intellectually and developmentally disabled, et cetera. all of these groups who are already, were already victims of income inequality. And to me, what really drove home the point of disposability is how so many others, particularly on the right, really did view these people as quote unquote sacrifices. Talk about, I don't know, for example, Texas lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick.

They literally said it out loud. They did. And I found that really remarkable. I mean, I think we're used to sort of this implicit reality in the United States where and certain people are disposable. And I think I write this in the book that we've become accustomed to a certain level of, you know, excess death in this country, unnecessary death in this country. That status quo has always had its defenders, but they're rarely so blunt about what that

means for people. And then, of course, during the pandemic, you had people like Dan Patrick and some others on the right really argue quite out in the open that in order to salvage the economy, certain classes of people, might have to be sacrificed or inconvenienced. you know, forced to stay in isolation with no thought about what that isolation might mean for that person, just really downplaying the human told disposability in a way that really struck me as a reporter and leader as someone who lost, you know, a loved one to the pandemic. Yeah, and as you write in the book, this really is nothing new.

You wrote the idea that weaklings and mooters must die on the laissez-faire altar is nearly as old as America itself. And absolutely, there's this pervasive and perverted part of the American dream. that teaches us that people are poor because they're either lazy or stupid or both. And COVID really showed just how this belief has substantive real-world effects, didn't it? Absolutely. I write about this in the book, too, but often when people talk about poverty or really any sort of financial distress that a person might be experiencing, you know, a failure to pull

themselves up the ladder of the American success story, it's their own fault. It's immoral failing. There must be something wrong with them. as a person in order for them to sort of be viewed as a failure in this way. And that's not a benign belief. And I think COVID really drove that home. Yeah, it's like, you know, we've made the whole country out of the prosperity gospel or something like that. There's some rage in the book. And I want to get into some of the stories you tell. And I'm thinking when I, when I think of the rage, I think of a woman named Kayla Fernandez, whose grandmother died of COVID. And she says she's still angry because

it felt like nobody cared, including the once and current president of the United States. Talk about this story. It's an incredibly moving story, and I'm so grateful to Kayla for sharing it with me. But her grandmother, Guadalupe, contracted COVID. She thinks from essential workers in the family, you know, with COVID, it's kind of hard to prove definitively where you've gotten the virus, but that's what they think happened. Despite taking precautions, despite being so careful, you know, people had to report to work, despite the risks.

Her grandmother had had this just incredible, complicated life immigrating from Mexico, a very complex, I think I would say even difficult marriage. But really close family ties, a really bonded, extended family, and COVID came in and really fractured that in an emotional way. On a personal level, I really resonated with what Kayla said about that anger because it's something I had experienced too. and she wasn't the only person who would express this mix of anger and grief over what happened to their loved one. Yeah, no, it was an incredibly moving story, as you said. And it really does seem like the only time, and there's sort of an awful and bitter irony in this, that the only time a lot of folks like Guadalupe Fernandez weren't considered disposable was when they were designated as essential workers. They weren't disposable only as long as they could keep showing up to those jobs.

So there's almost this irony in like the one time that maybe they're told they're not disposable, no, we need you. That's what killed them. Yeah, absolutely. They were essential, but they were still disposable in a very real way, especially when we're talking about like the lower on the income scale, you know, not necessarily, you know, physicians working in a hospital, but, you know, we can just replace you with somebody else who needs, who really needs a job.

And I think that's how large corporations, like Amazon especially kind of operated during the pandemic. And it had really disastrous consequences for people. Talk some more about Amazon because they really, at least in the book, come across as one of the worst offenders here. Absolutely. So, you know, I talked to some folks who worked for Amazon and other warehouses. And there was very much this sense, you know, Amazon kind of puts on a show of caring about workers and taking certain measures. and of course it did implement certain precautions in the workplace, but the pandemic was really lucrative for Amazon. People were relying on e-commerce. I know I did and so many other people did just to get

basic household supplies. So while Amazon was making money, people were really sacrificing themselves again to this machine to keep it running. And some people got really sick. It also led to some organizing efforts by Amazon workers, which I think is really important. So it wasn't like this universally depressing story. We did get some good organizing out of it, but I think that that organizing, we need to understand, it came from a real sense of rage and despair at the way the company was treating folks. Yeah. There was another story that I think it was particularly moving to me because both of my parents were public school teachers. And that's the story you tell of Ebony and Terrence James. Can you share that here? Absolutely. I really love talking to Ebony about her husband. They had such a

beautiful relationship. And her love for him was still so evident when I, when I spoke to her. And I, I, I just thought that that was so moving. And he was a public school educator. They had tried to get ahead, you know, become homeowners, take care of their family and really achieve that, that dream of a middle class life. And then after Terrence contracted COVID and ultimately passed away, that middle class life was made very precarious, or rather, I think it kind of revealed how precarious it

was in the first place for them. And, you know, they, she had to deal with foreclosure, losing a car, on top of just the emotional burden of losing her husband and the father or her children. Yeah, it really was. I mean, as you said, their love for each other as described in the book, it's really, it's kind of that storybook thing where it's like they are each other's best, they were each other's best friend. Just, it was gut wrenching. And Ebony herself got COVID, but she luckily survived, right? Yes, she did. I want to talk about what I said earlier about there being sort of a two-tiered, at best, health care system in this country.

And the book really does talk about that a lot. And explain why the differences in health care were so stark between different economic classes during COVID. Right. As you've said, you know, this was true going into the pandemic. And while, you know, I write about the Affordable Care Act and how important it was to sort of remitting some of those. and inequalities, I think that it didn't sort of eliminate that basic tiered structure to the healthcare system. I think that became really important during COVID. I tell the story of a woman who put off going to the emergency room for care because she was so afraid of the cost

and the burden it would be on her family. And her husband is now feeling like, oh, maybe I was too stingy, but he wasn't stingy and it wasn't his fault. The fault lies with the healthcare system and the fact, but it is so expensive for so many people to go to the emergency room. And it's even if you have health insurance, it's so Byzantine to navigate that I think it sort of leads people to continue putting off care because there's a lot of things that people don't know or understand. I mean, I'm a reporter and I've seen this play out of my own family and I don't always know what to tell my mom, you know, and she's trying to figure out how our insurance works. And I think that has real life or death consequences for people. Yeah. And then you have, you know, as you described in

the book, when Donald Trump gets COVID, he gets flown to, I think it was Walter Reed, gets the best possible care and survives, obviously, and then comes out and basically acts like he's Superman because he beat COVID, which again, goes back to the idea that the people who didn't beat COVID, it was because they were somehow weaker than Donald Trump or not as much of a fighter as Donald Trump, when in fact, the reason is the disparity in health care. Absolutely. And the way that some people continue to talk about COVID, you know, people who I would argue are minimizing, if not right out, denying the effects of COVID. We'll talk about the death toll and they'll be like, well, those people had preexisting conditions or medical conditions. What do you want? And it's like they were people. They had lives. They had people who loved them. And those lives were just as meaningful as, you know, Donald Trump's. But, you know, this goes to the whole notion of disposability that we don't treat those lives like they really matter. Well, and that gets into something you talk about near the end of the book, which is COVID minimalism. And I think obviously that we're still seeing that now. And I suspect we're going to be seeing a lot more of it in the current administration with people like RFK Jr.

in charge of health and human services with the CDC and NIH being gutted and neutered. Explain exactly how COVID minimalism works. Yeah, I think it's somewhat distinct from outright denialism, although we're seeing a lot of that, especially on the right as well. But I would define it as like people who are just sort of downplaying the death toll or how COVID spreads or how effective masking was, people who were sort of urging this return to quote unquote normal perhaps before it was fully reasonable to do so. And I know that's somewhat a matter of opinion. And the science may not be as fully settled as I would like it to be. But the examples I cite in the book, I think it was a little premature. And then the flip side of that is like talking about people who might have disabilities and

are still masking, especially in medical settings, as being overly cautious. And I'm as though that's a personal affront to them. And it's infringing on their own rights. When, in fact, they're kind of exhibiting a care for their fellow person that isn't infringing on anybody. So I've seen that play out a lot on social media. But I think it's connected to real world trends as well. Yeah, for sure.

And that really is the masking thing is one of the more bizarre things that we've seen where it's not even enough for people to themselves decide it's too much of an effort to wear a piece of cloth around my mouth and nose to maybe protect those who are more vulnerable. But it is, like you said, it's become like a personal affront to them when someone else chooses to wear a mask. And I often wonder if it's because deep down inside the people who don't wear the mask know that what they're doing is selfish and they don't like being reminded of it. That could be. I write about this in the chapter about my grandfather, but it was so hard, because this was 2020, but when there weren't vaccines, it was so hard to know that he probably wasn't going to survive COVID at that point and then go into the grocery store and just see so many people who weren't wearing masks. And I'm from a very conservative area. There was a lot of misinformation spreading about masking and eventually vaccines. That was really hard, emotionally, politically. Like, not just saying it as like, a lot of misinformation spreading. It's like, a lot of misinformation. an insult to myself personally, but knowing these people putting themselves at risk themselves and, like, we're potentially going to suffer for the decisions they were making. It's really difficult. Yeah, for sure. Because you talk about it in the book. Talk about sort of how this has

all affected you personally as someone who has what we, I don't know if you want to say euphemistically call a comorbidity or an underlying condition. Yeah. Yeah, this is an interesting thing to navigate as a journalist because, you know, traditionally journalists, you know, you don't want to be the story. But with COVID, it was just so impossible to avoid, not just because I lost my grandfather, but because I do have an underlying condition as to two other members of my immediate family. And I wasn't sure, especially in the beginning, how COVID was got to interact with that. So I was, you know, I was really afraid. And I started working from home quite early because I didn't know how it was going to affect my health.

and I'm very grateful for the vaccines, which kind of allowed me to go back to my normal activities for the most part. But yeah, that fear and that sense of isolation, I think, ultimately came to shape the reporting for the book in a big way. Yeah, absolutely. I want to read a quote from the book that really stuck with me. Poverty doesn't even have to exist. It is a political choice, and it kills Americans even in the absence of a pandemic. Outdated notions about who deserves help and who deserves nothing aren't just antiquated but deadly. That was just such powerful writing to me and something that is going to be front and center in my mind as we go forward with this administration that seems to very strongly believe in

these outdated notions. It's really disturbing to watch that play out in the political sphere right now. And you've mentioned these attacks on public health institutions and sort of backed up by this concept of government efficiency. And, you know, as a person who does have a. underlying condition and who, you know, just finished reporting and talking to other people who have underlying conditions. I'm very conscious of the fact that people who have needs are often deemed inefficient. That's historically been the case. I think it's still this case. And I'm very

concerned that what we're seeing now is just going to reinforce and expand disposability to more people rather than remedying it. The book is disposable. America's contempt for the underclass. It is filled with very, very powerful stories and is a very, very good reminder because apparently this country needs it of just how awful things were a handful of years ago. Sarah Jones, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Hope you enjoyed checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going.

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