The Daily Beast Podcast - Image of Trump’s Oval Office Humiliation Will Define His Presidency

Episode Date: February 16, 2025

On this episode of The New Abnormal, President Donald Trump’s joint press conference with DOGE director Elon Musk paints a grim picture of what democracy looks like in America today. “It looks like the president of the United States slumped over like a puppet while his master does the talking,” said co-host Danielle Moodie. Plus! Author Katherine Stewart discusses her new book, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, the rise of extremist religiosity and a turn away from democracy. 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 bonus episode of The New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with author Catherine Stewart, and we're going to talk to her about our new book, Money Lies in God, inside the movement to Destroy American Democracy. And boy, this is one you will not want to miss. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips?

I don't know, are you sending us alcohol? Like, is there alcohol in the mail? I don't think that Expensified the Daily Beast's partner for expenses is going to let that one get through their system, unfortunately. Clips. So in our last show, we talked about neutered Democrats. Unfortunately, we got to hear the sound of neuter, just absolutely having no fight in you. Here is supposed minority leader of the Democrats, Hakeem Jeffries. Trying to figure out what leverage we actually have.

What leverage do we have? They control the House, the Senate, and the presidency. It's their government. What leverage do we have? Step aside. Step aside. Like, if you can't figure out what leverage you have, you can't figure out what to do. You had four fucking years to prepare.

you had nine years given a preview of the first administration, and now all of a sudden, oh, I don't know what to do, step aside. If you don't know, move aside, because there are other people that do. It's their government? Yes. Yep. It's their government. I thought it was our government. Why is Hakeem Jeffrey's salary being paid by the public? I'm serious. Like, what is he doing? I have no idea. It's their government. Really? It's their government. And I want to say, there were people when he said that, and obviously there were a lot of people who were pissed about it, there were people saying, no, you don't understand what he's doing is he's not revealing what leverage he has. That would be a bad tactic. Stop. Stop it. They're not playing any kind of chess here. Just stop making excuses for them.

If you can't do the job, step aside. If you're not up to the job, step aside. I'm just going to say, this confirms my worst fears, which I sometimes try to, to silence to have faith in this party, which is that there is a wing of the Democratic Party that believes donors are more important than their constituency. This is him silencing the constituency because he believes the donors will save them and the donors are more important to appease and that they cannot raise voices like AOC who will actually fight on an oversight committee. And, you know, they claim that Jerry Nadler's too old to lead a committee, but really one of the congressman who is most for the progressive wing of the party.

And what they do is they sideline those people because they appeal to the people and not the donors. They don't make the calls and sit in the DNC doing fundraising all day. And I'm sorry, he just continues to show his whole ass that he thinks the donors will save this party. Step aside. Yep. You're in the wrong moment. The moment has passed you. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, speaking of inept politicians. This comes in the form of Ice Barbie, aka Christy Noem. I remember a time when Republicans were very careful about and worried about the government, particularly unelected people. We can't trust the government anymore. Having access to personal data. Yeah.

Oh, absolutely. You are the government. Yes, that's what I'm saying, is that the American people now are saying that we have had our personal information shared and out there in the public. But now Elon Musk has access to it. Yeah, but Elon Musk is part of the administration that is helping us identify. where we can find savings and what we can do. And he has gone through the processes to make sure that he has the authority.

You're totally comfortable with him. I am today by the work that he's doing by identifying waste, fraud, and abuse. And his information that he has is looking at programs, not focusing on personal data and information. Not focusing on it, but he has access to it. You know, we'll be continuing to talk to him about what all he has access to. But this audit needs to happen to make sure that we are going through a process. that adds integrity. I just...

I mean, I don't applaud Dana Bash ever, but well done on the reminder. I don't know if Ice Barbie has a glitch and doesn't realize that we have fast forwarded into 2025. So her talking points about the government being the enemy should now switch because you are the government. But, okay, well done there. Elon Musk is doing an audit. I didn't realize he was a CPA. Is he an accountant or one of his company's HR block? What audit is he doing?

What skills does he have to be able to do an audit over our agencies? And the 19-year-olds that he has in his little in-cell frat? Like, you know, I wish that like their stupidity would save us because they're so dumb that they won't be able to get half of these things done. but it's just like the stupidity coupled with like the amount of wealth that they have just makes this all catastrophic. Oh, God. Yeah. And earlier in the week that I said that there was going to come a time when it didn't matter

if there was a break between Trump and Musk because Musk was going to have too much power for Trump to do anything about it. I honestly think we may be there already. And I think you see that in Nome refusing to say a single bad. thing about Elon Musk and straight up lying about the fact that he has the authority to do all these things he's doing, which he absolutely does not. But we are at the point where Elon Musk right now has much, much more power than Donald Trump does. And I don't know that that's going to change. I think Lawrence O'Donnell won the week by saying the image of Elon Musk, standing over Donald

Trump with his kid picking his nose and wiping it on Trump's desk, was the most powerless image. of a president of all time. Yeah. Yep. I don't think the nail could be hit on the head more. And the other thing that I think is just such a striking, telling thing is when you have woke Mitch McConnell voting against people getting confirmed being the one outlier because he's the one person. Trump has nothing over because he doesn't care if he's running for reelection anymore. And the rest of these people know their career hedges on whether the richest man on earth buys ads.

against them and whether they stay in line and stay the course. Lawrence O'Donnell, really, I applaud him for that monologue. That's all I kept thinking about as I was watching the video over and over again is just Donald Trump slumped over the Resolute Desk, mute as this unelected stands in the Oval Office and tells the rest of us what we voted for, knowing good goddamn well, we didn't vote for him and telling us what democracy looks like. It looks like the president of the United States slumped over like a puppet while his master does the talking. He did wake up enough to issue an executive order against South Africa. Oh, yes, yes, yes. So where would we be without that? Speaking of that press

conference, let's listen to one of the things Elon said there that I found, well, concerning to use his words. You said on X, that an example of the fraud that you have cited was $50 million of condoms was sent to Gaza. But after fact-checked

this, apparently Gaza in Mozambique, and the program was to protect them against HIV. So can you correct the statements? It wasn't sent to Hamas, actually. It was sent to Mozambique, which makes sense why condoms was sent there. And how can we make sure that

all the statements that you said were correct so we can trust what you say well first of all some of the things that i say will be incorrect and should be corrected so nobody's going to bat a thousand i mean any you know we're going to make mistakes but we'll act quickly to correct any mistakes um so uh you know if if the i'm not sure we should be sending 50 million dollars with the condoms to anywhere uh frankly i'm not sure that's something americans would be really excited about i don't give a fuck what he thinks about whether condoms should be sent to Mozambique. Yep.

Who cares what he thinks? That's the point here is that, oh, I'm going to get some stuff wrong. You've got everything wrong. Everything you say is either a lie or misinformation. Like, if you say something that's true, it was purely by accident. But beyond that, who the fuck is Elon Musk to be saying, I don't think we should be sending? Fine. I don't care what you think.

I do not care what you think. People don't even get, like, the image, him, holding a press of the... Who the fuck are you? Is the question, who the fuck are you? You are on nobody's ballot. And you're standing in the Oval Office. You're standing in the American people's house

telling us where our tax dollars should fucking go. And people are not like outraged by that thinking that this is a good fucking look. While by the way, while you pay none... Yeah. Jesus Christ. And also like when he says, like, I should be corrected.

Dude, you are the single person. trying the hardest to defund news media, who are the people who correct you? Yeah, of course. You do anything you can to undermine it. So pretending that for one fucking second, that you want to be corrected when you lash out and fire everyone who corrects you.

Yeah, okay. Yeah. Well, there we have the Craven. Now we have the totally fucking inept and seemingly senile. Here's Donald Trump on Ukraine. Do you see any future in which Ukraine returns to his pre-9-20, 14th warriors? Well, I think Pete said today that that's unlikely, right? It certainly would seem to be

unlikely. They took a lot of land and they fought for that land and they lost a lot of, they lost a lot of soldiers, but it would just seem to me and I'm not, I'm not making an opinion on it, but I've read a lot on it and a lot of people think that that's unlikely. Some of it will come back. I think some of it will come back. Yeah, some of that land will come back. He has no idea what's going on. Yeah. I mean, that's all I got from that. Like, he really doesn't know what's happening.

Yeah, that was giving the teacher called on you in class and you did not do the homework. Yeah. Yeah. Not even, do you don't even have the book? He ran this campaign for one reason and that was to stay out of jail. And he succeeded. And he is basically at this point, he is the equivalent of being sent to a farm in upstate New York. Mm-mm.

Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to the new abnormal, the author of a new brilliant book, Money, Lies, and God. Inside the movement to destroy American democracy, you know the author Catherine Stewart for her brilliant book, The Power Worshippers, which you have come on, Catherine, to discuss before. talk to us about how money lies in God. I guess how maybe power worshippers was kind of like the prequel to money lies in God because in power worshippers you really gave us an inside view into what has become almost a political party of its own. The force with which Christian nationalism has taken over the Republican Party and kind of remade it in its image.

And now in this follow-up, you're kind of going inside the engine. So please, give us more insight into that. Sure. This is a movement that promotes the idea that the United States is founded not on any principles, but on a specific religion and cultural heritage. They promote the idea that America is on the brink of an apocalypse owing to the rise of equality and what they call wokeness and the radical left. It's really the idea that democracy won't be able to solve its problems and rules don't apply anymore. And what we really need is a strong man, an authoritarian leader who puts himself above the law and puts his cronies above the law. And it's going to seize the reins of power and scrap the law and the Constitution in favor of the iron fist. And I really hope I make clear in money lies in God, by the way, that this is not emphatically the idea of the best of the American promise. It's not the idea of Thomas Jefferson or Frederick Douglass or Abraham Lincoln and others who helped found America as we know it.

This is as anti-American as it gets. And how are they able then to cloak themselves in religiosity? In many ways, this Christian nationalist movement has been able to extort resources from the federal government, has been able to undermine our democracy as a way to kind of their tax-free benefits of, having their churches, of having the ability to spread their messages and their religious schools and what have you. Talk to us about how they have moved into this posture of democracy doesn't work, right? And that we need this strongman when in fact, in many ways, their religiosity has benefited over the exemptions that like government and democracy have given to them. Well, that refers to

the money piece of this in a way. I titled the book Money Lies in God, because first, money is a huge part of the story, meaning that huge concentrations of wealth have destabilized the political system in a number of ways. And the religious right that is, I would say, the largest and most important ideological framework for this movement wants to capture a piece of that. Second, lies and conscious disinformation is a huge feature of this movement. A lot of the deep-pocketed funders are pouring their money into essentially propaganda networks and disinformation projects. Some folks call them pink slime news sites. And what they do is they disinformed the American public.

They separate them from the facts, and that makes them easier to control. And then, of course, the exploitation of religion appeals to Christian nationalism are a way. that the sort of funders and the other leaders of this movement really get the rank and file involved. You know, the religious right is always claiming that the left plays identity politics, but they play it a lot harder. Religious nationalism is a form of reactionary nationalism. It's this idea of who properly belongs in America and who doesn't. What's really interesting, I think, is that what makes up this Christian nationalist movement? movement is not even people who subscribe to any actual religious doctrine. You're talking about

everyone from atheist billionaires and these pseudo-intellectuals and woman-hating, you know, in-cell types, and, you know, people that call themselves disciples of Anne Ryan. Like, talk to us about the hodgepodge that now makes up this Christian nationalist movement of people and how they have essentially in so many ways removed God and the tenants of any type of real Christianity from this new identity and philosophy. It's really important. I understand that the movement is made up of different factions that don't all have the same interests. Movement is really internally divided and in some respects deeply incoherent. So the policies that it ends up promoting are mainly geared towards satisfying the narrow and selfish interests of a financial elite of oligarchs

and tech bros. The rhetoric on the other hand, the religious nationalism, the appeals to faith and religion is intended to placate the base with these cultural distractions, with performative cruelty and other ritualistic activities that will satisfy this basis emotional needs or emotional concerns or tap into their often unexamined prejudices, but it's not actually going to benefit them materially. So what leaders of the movement are doing is confusing the rank and file with disinformation, toxic conspiracies. They're sort of basically picking the pockets of middle and working classes in order to fat in the pocketbooks of billionaire. and entrenching and empowering a sector of movement-friendly oligarchs, financiers, and tech bros.

I mean, so they're poisoning the well of information for their own people, right? Absolutely. So the people who, you know, throughout the last, you know, year of campaigning that we saw, that we've seen, frankly, honestly, since 2016, so not just in this past election, But the people who are wearing the Trump t-shirts, buying the sneakers and the Bibles and the this, that, and the other thing, these are the quote-unquote low rank and file folks. Absolutely. So what you're saying is that the 1% inside of Trump world are poisoning their own people with disinformation to distract them from what Lyndon B. Johnson told us so many decades ago that if you can teach the white man, right, the lowest white man that he is better. then the best black man, then you can pick his pockets.

Hell, he'll give you his money for free. Is this what is happening here? This is exactly what's happening. How do you persuade the rank and file, many of whom are actually struggling to kind of make it work in their own lives, struggling to have a decent, you know, economy, struggling to provide for their families? How do you get them to support the agendas of oligarchs

who want to, a road rights for the workforce who want protective policies for their businesses. They want, in many cases, tax subsidies and privileged contracts, and they want to eliminate any regulation on their, you know, often polluting industries that they're engaged in because a lot of the funders, many of the funders, not all, but many of them are involved in fossil fuel industries and other energy industries where they want to exploit public lins and the like. So how do you get the rank and file to kind of go along with this agenda? Well, you divide them internally.

You say, you're the righteous and they, that is anyone remotely to the left of you, is unrighteous. You seize control of religion and call the social gospel heretical, which, you know, recently, Danielle, I was at America Fest, which is an annual conference put on by Turning Point USA. It's one of the key organizations of the movement. and the head of Turning Point USA Faith, a guy named Lucas Miles, he literally called the social gospel heretical.

And he said, I've made it my mission to eradicate woke Jesus from the American pulpit, called it woke Jesus. And he said he's working with thousands of other pastors around the country in order to eradicate the supposedly woke Jesus and sideline the social gospel. I mean, it's really kind of extraordinary. He said Christianity started to go wrong. in the 17th century. So the funny...

What? Wow. Okay. I mean, the thing about this movement is deeply nihilistic if you really drill into some of the thinkers and their ideas. If you read their books, many of them don't seem to worship anything more than power. But, you know, power overall. And it's easier to destroy stuff and blow stuff up than to actually create stuff.

You know, they told us for a very long time that there were. were going to destroy the so-called administrative state, that they were going to dismantle the institutions of our democracy and eliminate the guardrails. And it's, you know, their visions of what they want to create really rely on fantasies of a sort of a mythical past that never actually existed the way that they think it did. I want to go back for a second to quote unquote woke Jesus. In another interview that I did for the new abnormal, we were talking with Jack Jenkins with regard to these new patriot churches that are popping up around the country, that are essentially rewriting the Bible and remaking Jesus to be mogified, right? That this idea of caring for the poor, of creating a sense of belonging for immigrants, for, you know,

the less fortunate for using religion as a tool to uplift humanity is no longer the gospel that's being spread. And so you've just essentially said again, oh, no, this is what they're doing. And it's going so far back to the 17th century where one, not only were my ancestors, black people enslaved, but to a certain extent, so were women. who were just objects of patriarchy. What is the end goal here? It is selling people on the fact that their own demise, right,

is going to be helpful in the long run. Like people are going to be hurting. We're already seeing the prices of goods go up. We're seeing, you know, workforce protections being rolled back. And this is all happening within the first month of this administration. So how do you continue to have those that are going to be? going to be harmed, who are in fact their base, grasp on to this new formed ideology and religion, essentially.

Well, they do it by creating this narrative that there's an us and a them, right? A pure versus an impure, an insider versus an outsider. And we, the so-called real Americans, need to defeat them, the quote-unquote different elements, the impure elements. You know, blaming the other throughout history is the preferred strategy of authoritarian leaders because it plays into people's fears. And Trump's people have been very shameless about that, pumping up these sort of wild stories, you know, pumping up these stories about immigrants or LGBT people for outrage politics,

sort of, and setting up that sharp contrast. And along with that sense of the pure versus impure, this identity politics, They set up this narrative that we, the good, true, white Christians are the most persecuted group in society and that we're standing on the edge of an apocalypse, an absolute apocalypse, it's an emergency, any means are necessary in order to save us from the forces of Satan or the demons or the Illuminati or what have you, which is something that they repeat at a lot of their conferences. they often call anyone to the left of them satanic, which is like a total othering.

And that clears the way for legitimation of a strongman who's going to break the rules and destroy institutions and break the norms because we need this kind of hard hand, this iron fist to save us from what they see as the heresy of democracy. The exploitation of religion is really at the core of this, because it speaks to the rank and file in a way that few other things, do. But, you know, religious nationalism, and I use that term deliberately, because it's not unique to the Christian faith at all. I would say around the world, when leaders want to consolidate authoritarian forms of power, they often use religious nationalism as a really effective tool.

They bubble rack themselves in the sanctimony. They say, look, I've got these holy men on my side. You can't, you know, you can't touch me. And they do it to guard against any investigation of their crimes, abuses, they're perpetrating against their own societies and governments against their own people. They do it in order to carry out. There are sort of kleptocratic, nepotistic arrangements, suppression of free speech, and suppression of political opposition. They do it to consolidate authoritarian power, or, you know, if we're going to be less polite, fascist power. I just really best understood something that happens to a political system rather than something that starts off as a a full-fledged political program that receives majority support.

So, you know, I see this movement as really a pathology more than a coherent program that's building towards something that's actually real and achievable. What I mean by that is there are these different pieces, different intros groups, sometimes working for different aims, but they end up reinforcing one another. They're all essentially rowing in the same boat, in a sense. but the outcome of these collective actions can be really unpredictable and lead to consequences that I think a lot of the rank and file who are lending their support to the effort to, they don't anticipate those results and they're not going to want them. You know, Catherine, it is what is old, really old, 17th century old is new again. And what I as a student of history have seen is that it is the same tactics that have been used.

that are being rinsed and repeated and used again, and it never ends well. It never ends well for the people at the top. What do you think about where the crescendo of this goes? Well, I think that ultimately these billionaires who are investing a portion of their fortunes in the destruction of our democracy are totally delusional. Yes, in the very short term, they may get a few more dollars and their pocketbooks, but they are not in the long term going to increase their wealth. I think, you know, they're making the world just terrible, not only eventually for themselves, but for their children and grandchildren, should we have any? But more than that, it's really astonishing that they're wrapping themselves in the flag and exploiting religion

in order to do so. I think that the oligarchs depend on the support of a huge part of the population that is eventually going to see what's happening. And I think it's really, really hard to overstate the degree to which the politics leads the theology that's being exploited here rather than the other way around. As one of the speakers at the most recent America Fest, which I attended, he said there's absolutely no biblical justification to vote Democrat. But here's the thing, what thereafter will simply never happen in America. We're too diverse, we're too religiously diverse, ethnically diverse, too politically diverse. So the best movement can really hope for us to grab a share of public money, impose their quote unquote values on the rest of society,

on the basis of government coercion, and essentially create a society in groups and outgroups and universal mistrust. Yeah. And so it is basically stating that one of the ways to resist and fight back is to not believe the hype and the lies and the pink slime that is being put out to co-opt God, like at all. Not a moment for us to sit on our hands. This is a moment to get out there and get engaged in any way that we can. We've got elections in two years. We have to remember that the country didn't quote, go MAGA. Trump got about the same amount of poor as he got in 2020. There was just a bit of depressed enthusiasm. for turnout on the Democratic side. So we really need to help to communicate to people what is at stake. This movement is damaging our democracy. It's damaging our long-term future.

It's damaging our shared prosperity. It's committed to undermining public trust. And it's bringing about authoritarian governance. So frankly, it doesn't matter who you are. You are going to be paying a price for this corruption and authoritarianism that we're seeing enter a politics right now. Catherine Stewart, as always, I greatly, greatly appreciate your time and your work. Folks, the book is Money, Lies, and God, Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy, pick up a copy now. Thank you, Catherine, and I hope to have you back again soon. 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.

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