The Daily Beast Podcast - Ivanka Is an Idiot but Unequivocally the Smartest Trump

Episode Date: August 28, 2020

It’s the last night of the Republican National Convention and former GOP operative Tim Miller joins Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast to break down what Rick calls “four hours of sweaty Castro-esque speechmaking.” The most surreal speechmaker of all may have been Ivanka Trump. “There were a lot of lies,” says Miller. “But I thought the lie that really stood out to me was when she talked about how much he loves his grandchildren.”Molly was impressed, sort of. “I did think tonight, Ivanka is an idiot, and she is absolutely unequivocally the smartest of all of the kids.” Aside from Trump, himself, the gang agrees that Rudy Giuliani gave the most despicable speech of the night. Former Giuliani staffer, Rick, says the former Mayor of New York was kickstarting a Republican race war that will run until the election. “There's never been a more perfect exemplar of ‘everything Trump touches dies,’ because that speech tonight; it was, at one point, everything but the n-word… They're coming for you, they're coming for you to your suburbs. These black lives matter…” And when it came to Trump himself, Molly says he was totally off-form: “He finds reading very boring. So, I mean, every speech where he's not saying crazy shit is him being totally bored by whatever they're making him read."Rick agrees “it was very low energy speech,” but predicts the calm—maybe even electable—Trump will not last long. “We all know something about Donald Trump. After he’s been disciplined and held down by his staff for a couple of days, he has an equal and opposite reaction and goes fucking nuts.” 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 respect.

Good evening, America. It's 12.25 a.m. on Friday morning. And I'm joined tonight by Tim Miller and Molly Jong Fast, and we have just seen four hours of sweaty Castro-esque speechmaking that will not soon forget. It's a night that has left us all with the conclusion that the only thing this show can be is one long fuck that guy. And somehow, I don't think America will object. So, welcoming Tim Miller to the show. tonight. About damn time. Tonight we'll be posing our questions in the form of a fuck that guy. Let's lead off with America's sweetheart, shall we?

What did you guys think of Ivanka? First off, I'm just going to make a bitchy fashion remark. Leggings at the White House? Hello? The fuck? I don't know. You don't know they were leggings. I mean, not that this is like the most important thing to be worrying about, but it was like some kind of black pants suit.

No, I think they were more leggings. I'm just, I know what we have a... Jiggings? Could they have been jaggings? They could have been jig. Well, I'm wearing jorts right now, so, you know. I mean, I wrote a piece about it today while it was going on, which is up already. Is it on the Daily Beast.com?

It's on the Daily Beast. I mean, the thing with her that I'm always so impressed by is that she uses many words. All of them are words. Some of them are said. And she has this, like, amazing McKinsey double speak. She went to Chapin and she went to Penn and she just very good at like corporate work talk in a way that is like... Superrific. You say a lot.

Well, you say a lot, but no actual things. Tonight she was jubilant and excited and she said to judge her father on his results. I know this is supposed to be all fuck that guys, but I do want to give her one compliment. And that is that she outshone her dad tonight, which I don't think was expected. I was surprised to learn, though, after three and a half years that she's the co-president. Right? Did you notice that set up, the handoff of the baton tonight? I didn't know that we had co-presidents here.

I thought there was only just one. In particular, there was one time where she was like, and the president asked Secretary of Agriculture David Perdue and his daughter, me, to take the lead on. It's like, what? What are you talking about? There's a lot of lies. I mean, she was very, she was painting a picture of the president that doesn't exist, but I thought the lie that really stood out to me was when she talked about how much he loves his grandchildren.

That was the one, too, because he had built a model of the White House. And the Legos are still there. Yeah. I'll put a nice steak dinner on the fact that he can't name all of her kids. Absolutely not. There's no way. There's no way. He has a lot of grandchildren.

He's had quite a few families. But Donnie Jr. has like 15 kids. Is that right? That's what I'm saying. Who would know? I mean... The hunting one. Right. Nobody knows. You know, Mitt talks about his grandkids a lot. Like, certain people, you know, discussing their grandkids as part of their thing.

I can't ever recall Donald mentioning a grandchild. Or we twice have now had Mary Trump on. And she is pretty much like they're... I said, well, he really loves Jr., right? And she said, no, I think he thinks they're all idiots, except for Ivanka, who he has this weird thing. I learned tonight somebody tweeted something that he didn't want to name Jr. Donald's because he was worried he's a loser. Too late. The irony.

But you know what's interesting about Junior? I did think tonight, Ivanka is an idiot and she is absolutely unequivocally the smartest of all of the kids. That is true, but here's the problem is Ivanka's speech was a direct conflict to junior speech. And like, Junior is the one that's in touch with the people that are voting for Donald. Like, let's be honest. And so that was very noteworthy that, you know, she was talking about emptying the prisons and Junior was talking about filling them. Yeah, but Junior speaks fluent dick.

And so he's going to be the one that the Fox audience will gravitate to in 24. And they'll say, Donald was robbed. We've got to have our revenge. But what's interesting about Junior is like all anyone talked about from junior speech. And I mean, maybe they're talking about different things in the Gateway Pundit Slack channel. But for the people I know, Molly, it's the Gateway Pundit SlackJaw channel. Exactly. But all the people I know are talking about, like, what drugs did Junior do before his speech. I just want to throw in there that I saw a lot of people on Twitter who don't, I don't think have ever done drugs making assessments of what kind of drugs John Jr. is on.

I'll just leave it at that. I thought there was some armchair drug commentary on Twitter that was maybe a little inaccurate. As someone who grew up in Florida in the 1970s and early 80s, I saw signs. Well, I'll defer to your expertise. So our next fuck that guy the evening is Crazy Eye Dan Skavino, who, in the weirdest, most like, please get a restraining order against me before I kill again, that stare was just mortifying. I felt like he was staring at me and like weighing my spleen with his eyes.

I'll have that for my supper. Hans Kavina, this is a real quote. I had to write this down for the podcast. It's the only quote I wrote down for tonight. You've done more homework than Rick and I combined. Donald, the president, is a kind and decent man who shows endless kindness to everyone he meets. That might run contrary to what Miles said.

You know, the endless kind is sharpen the fence spikes so it goes all the way through their flesh. Gas, the immigrants. Burning flesh gas on the borders. Where are the alligators on the moat? Yeah, Skavino was just, he was on my fuck that guy list. Not as like one of these plotting, crafty Trump world, you know, skeezy villains, but just as like this scary cult figure. Remember that movie Bob Roberts?

No. At the end, there's a character that Jack Black plays. This is a fanatic kid following this campaign around, and he's just like staring and staring. I was like, stop looking at me, Dan. It was awful. Can we just have one more second on Dan Skavino? No one has ever said this in the history of the world, but I just would like. Yeah, exactly.

One more second on Dan Skavino. But I feel like this is an important detail in just how, like, how professional this white House is he was originally Trump's caddy. And now he's the ambassador to QAnon and the White House Twitter caddy. With the voice of the president. And he's- And he's firing out police like he's making policy. And he's speaking at the RNC, which is probably not something that is all that common for your president's caddy. Why do you think Skavino made the cut and not gobbles Miller? No, what is, what day of the month is it? It's the 28th. No. Oh, stop it.

Stephen is in his molting phase. He's in his cocoon right now, and he's going to shed his exoskeleton, and he will emerge like a beautiful butterfly on Labor Day. If Molly got to go back to Skivino, I need to go back to one other things about it on top, because that was driving me crazy. I think that fucking,

everybody has this person in their life that doesn't like the president, doesn't like the tweets think he's an idiot, but like somehow they get, convinced that, you know, he really does these one nice things, that they really like Ivanka. And I can just picture this woman with pearls who I know in my life, who lives in North Carolina, who's a swing voter, who was convinced by that bullshit. And I just, I have to admit, it just really, really upset me in a very deep way during her remarks that

I, that, like, I do think, in a weird way, it was the only thing that might have kind of worked for at least a couple people. No? I don't know. I feel like this is more Rick's wheelhouse. I mean, to me, the granddaughter of the communists with the Ben Chon's drawings, like, this is completely insane. I would never vote for any of these people. Here's the characteristic of those swing voters. They are desperately trying to find a reason to stay with him. Right.

They're terrified. They watch Fox. They're still terrified. They don't like him. They don't like the behavior. They don't like the thing with COVID and the economy. They don't like the racism. But they're desperately terrified.

And they're looking for anything. So that's like last night. And honestly, the DC press does the same bullshit. Well, they're like, well, everything else is bat-shit crazy, but Melania read several remarks, which seemed completely saying, let's write a 5,000-word think piece on Melania's influence on the White House. And so these swing voters will do the same bullshit. And they will try to convince themselves, well, you know, maybe he'll learn in the second term. Maybe he'll mature and grow into the office.

Maybe, blah, blah, blah. That's what Ivanka's there for is to be that suburban meritocracy. and smoothed out ambassador from Trump, Trumplandia, when we all know that most of them are bat-shit crazy. That's exactly the voter I was thinking about Rick. And that's what pisses me off. Yeah. No, fuck her.

Fuck that guy. All right. So fuck swing voters except ones who might. I just don't want anybody who's a lying, who's a lying mendacious scumbag like Ivanka trying to fool them and thinking that her father is not. Exactly. I've been given a fuck that guy from the White House and the Trump campaign.

They have a fuck that guy. They're fucked that guy this week is the Hatch Act. Because tonight, it was everything but people wearing like jumpsuits with NASCAR logo stickers all over them on the White House lawn. The Trump pent signs. Right. I mean, as a guy who worked for George Herbert Walker Bush, if someone had come to him and say, hey, we're going to put giant campaign signs on the White House lawn and do campaign work here, they would have been out on their ass in a hot millisecond. The dividing line between Trump org and Trump campaign and Trump brand and Trump Inc. And the White House and the campaign, it's zero now.

I mean, they are unbelievably shamless. And I know part of the reason they're doing it is just to troll people like us to be pissed about it. And also just because they're criminals and I don't give a fuck. Can we talk for a minute about that Mark Meadows the next day saying that voters don't really care about the Hatch Act? Yeah, this is such bullshit. And I was a little mad at Rick in the intro. for calling it a Castro-esque performance. It's like a D-list Latin American Caudillo.

No, exactly. Who is the Paraguays, you know, Caudillo in the 80s? Like, that's what this was. I mean, it was tacky. Yeah. Like, they're on the White House lawn and the white chairs and the tacky-ass Trump signs everywhere. I mean, like, Castro at least had a little bit of, you know,

ambiance with his... Yeah, Pinoche. And this is bullshit. The people don't care about this. I wrote about this little bit. Like, this is the Clinton Lincoln bedroom scandal on steroids. And everybody cared about the Clinton. Like, everybody talked about it.

Rush talked about it for years. I mean, it was a dog Hillary all the way into the Lazio race in 2000. It was an issue. You know, and it wasn't appropriate, by the way. And it did dog them. And they changed it. So this D.C. conventional wisdom bullshit. Like, voters don't care about this.

Well, no. Voters will care about it if people will speak out about it. And if reporters take it seriously and write about it. And they're buying into Meadows's own BS. And this is like, it was, it was despicable what they did tonight. Like that picture made me want to wretch when I first saw it on Twitter. And then the fireworks on the lawn. Like, this is our lawn.

This is not. And it was very enabled by that playbook thing. I mean, that was not. I mean, I just think, you know, will voters care? Sorry, am I not supposed to say that? No, no, I'm just saying it. Playbook is very much sort of the conventional wisdom. And this Meadows line, as Tim said, it became the conventional wisdom like,

and who cares, whatever, moving on. You know what? Voters don't care about the Arms Expert Control Act, which I believe I need to violate now, just because voters don't care about it. There's a lot of things that voters don't care about pretty much anything. No, they really don't. They really don't. I mean, I know this is not in our theme of fuck that guy,

but I saw Kamala's speech during the middle of the day today. Don't ask why I was watching television in the middle of the day. But I thought, like, she really, made the case that Democrats sort of were not able to make last week about how COVID is much worse here than anywhere else. And that's because of Donald Trump. And I don't know who saw that speech at 2 o'clock in the afternoon besides me. But I did think it was a very well litigated case against Donald Trump. I saw the tweets about it. And I'm happy that she's out there doing that. We added our Republican voters against Trump ad. She was hitting on this. We got this ad run in swing states next

week, like how, you know, her job was as a deputy assistant secretary for threat prevention. And so they had a pandemic plan. They spent two months doing nothing because Donald Trump didn't want his stock market to dip a couple of points. And they had people in there that were trying to stop it. And I do think that this is, you know, a critically important case that people need to make. And here's the thing about this week, going back to fuck that guy. Fuck these guys for telling a fake and phony history of what happened during the coronavirus. Some of the media outlets have done an okay job of trying to hold them accountable. But the Democrats, and I'm happy Kamala said today, and this is what we're doing.

I know what Rick's doing, have got to spend the next three months reminding people just how bad he screwed this up. Because I'll tell you, in these focus groups, a lot of people want to give him a pass on this. And Elizabeth's inside story tells the real truth on this. And I'm happy Kamel was saying that. But, you know, this whole convention was like, you know, oh, the China virus. And now I'm getting an amazing vaccine. Like the yada, yada, yada, and over like half the year. Right.

That is amazing. The idea that the witness is coming out of the administration now from miles to all these folks that are coming out and saying this, I want them all to speak, but it is going to take a lot of work to get that message out. There are people out there who will still say things like, well, you know, he did the best he could. He gets a participation trophy. Yeah, and who could have predicted it?

It was bad everywhere. He keeps telling me the case death rate is good. Right. I don't know what the case death rate is. Oh, it's good because we have the most cases in the world by a million X. Oh, got it. And you hear it frequently in the focus groups. It's definitely one of those things we've got to just keep pounding and pounding and pounding on going forward.

But it is also, it's interesting to me that they can't thread the needle on like less people dead everywhere else. What is different? That they're not putting that together is why I don't work in focus groups. Because I would be like, I don't understand. how you can be. I mean, I know there's just, these people are just, like, the whole, all of Trump is like this weird emotional reaction that it has nothing to do with actual real stuff. Well, yeah. I think hopefully, you know, the numbers continue to change. I do think that when I've noticed in our groups, that the mindset on this has changed over the last three months. I mean, I think back in May,

pretty much everybody in the groups is like, you can't blame and what is he going to do? And now, you know, at least it's mixed. And I think that probably by the time we get to Earl, early voting, we're going to have worth deaths per capita than every country in Europe besides maybe Belgium. And so hopefully through our groups and other groups with some ads, we can be like, hey, you know, second worst? I don't know how much more than what you can say to that. But there definitely is a lot of self-delusion out there on that.

Second place is first loser, Donald. The new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these. So head over to New Abnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast

and podcasts like The New Abnormal. Thanks. Let me say two things. First off, as we all know, I am a former Rudy Guy and the arc of the tragic collapse of Rudy Giuliani into from crusading prosecutor to crusading mayor to 9-11 to the guy he is now, there has never been a more perfect exemplar of everything Trump touches dies. Because that's speech tonight.

It was at one point everything but the inward when he was going and talking, you know, they're coming for you, they're coming for you. You know, to your suburbs, these black lives matter. The weird part about that is that he had a brief at the very beginning. He had like one or two sentences that he was like, and George Floyd died. It was terrible. And then we had this brief moment where we had a chance for everybody to come together. And I was like, when was that?

Right. Right. I was like, when did the president? I was like, wasn't he tweeting about looters and like two hours after George Floyd? Right. And then he was like radical leftist. Democrats. Wanted to.

Yeah. I'm sorry. None of Rudy's speech made as big an oppression on me as Rudy's sitting there with whatever girlfriend or wife that is. And sweating. profusely. Now, remember, right now in D.C. Whiskey strikes.

Right now. Nobody else is like ringing out their shirt. Okay? You're sitting there. He's got like a... Wilbur Ross. That expression of Wilbur Ross's face was, I see the light now.

I will go toward it. I will leave, I will shuffle off this mortal coil. Can you imagine, though, if you're Wilbur Ross's wife, Okay, he's 8,000 years old. He recently got out of the hospital. He's had everything wrong with him in the world, and you're going to take him to a super spreader event outside with no mass. So basically, she's ready to get the money, right?

That's what's happening here. I mean, his case fatality rate has got to be pretty high after that event. The last big event like that killed Herman King. There were 1,500 people there tonight from what I read. Well, they wanted 1,500, but they were like 1,200. They had to move out some chairs. My quick, Rudy, fuck that guy is this. He literally said these words.

Trump's disciplined work ethic. Oh, fuck that guy. Disciplined work ethic. My God. All right, folks. Let's get on to the big fuck that guy of the week, the one who deserves it the most. The apotheosis of shitty presidents,

Donald John Trump. Molly, what is your fuck that guy for tonight's speech? Wait, what part of it? All 70 minutes of it were infinitely. Actually, I knew. because I was at a CPAC speech where he spoke for three and a half hours, that he did this one speech is the longest speech he's ever given and I was there. But wasn't some of that like riffing and improv?

Well, that's what all of his speeches. Even on this one, he started talking about the house. It's the people's house. It's gorgeous. I like to think of it as a home. He always does some amount of riffing, which is why that speech was 70 minutes and not 25 minutes. I don't know, the sheer stupidity and then him getting sweatier and sweatier.

and the orange makeup. I mean, Tim probably has something more insightful to say. Well, the fuck that guy is obviously for making me watch for so long. I mean, it literally went on forever. So we don't need to belabor that point, I guess. But, you know, look, I thought it was interesting how he didn't really seem into it. You know? Like, he didn't seem to have his heart in it.

It's like usual. You know, he seems to enjoy his ad libs. Like, he, like, enjoyed his ad lib when he, like, made fun of Joe Biden for being a pedophile or kind of like tried to winky cueing on. Joe Biden's a pedophile joke. Enjoyed it when he was like joking about how he liked his old life better. And like he enjoyed it when he like got to turn around at the White House that he was despicably standing in front of and be like, I live in there now. I get to rub it in. Most of the text of the speech, like the whole illegal immigrant section, which you would think would be this guy's bread and butter by now.

I mean, he was stumbling over the lines and slurring them. He wasn't landing the hit lines. speech was very much kind of a state of the union-esque, like, wrote. You know, I'm going to try to touch all these bases. You know, I don't know. Last week, Joe Biden gave his speech, and it was forceful and passionate. And the whole take from all the, you know, MAGA guys afterwards was, how hard is it to read a teleprompter?

Well, pretty fucking hard for Donald tonight. Pretty hard. You know, by the end of it, he was leaning very heavily on podium. But, you know, your point, Tim, is... But by the end of it, we were leaning very heavily on the podium. I mean, not to... But, Tim, your point is right, though. He, there was a low energy speech, if I may use a phrase, you and I are familiar with.

That's me. Yeah. That's triggering. It was a low, it was very low energy speech. He was not into it. You're correct. You know, the truth with Donald Trump is always in the asides. When he's reading a speech on prompter, you know he always wants to, like, look off and make a dick joke.

Or look off and say something that he thinks is going to, you know, make everybody, you know, pay attention. But he stayed on prompt. tonight and ground his way through it, but it was, it was, the guy was working at it. It was not a fun speech for him. It also, by the way, a brief mini fuck that guy for the White House speech writers. If you're going to have 16 people write a fucking speech, have one person look at it at the end and conform it. So it sounds like one person wrote the fucking speech. So that it sounds like one person's reading the speech. Too complicated. No one has time for that. There's golf and tweeting. But I was going to say, the thing that I'm always impressed with with Trump is that he has a lot of trouble reading.

Yes. You don't say. But I mean, when he gets up there, he's never practiced this speech because that's not, you know, his thing. And then he just can't, he sort of stumbles. And then he also finds reading very boring. So, I mean, every speech where he's not saying crazy shit is him being totally bored by whatever they're making him read. My favorite misread of tonight was we have pioneered the fatality. Yes, we have. Fuck that guy.

I personally am extremely worried about people getting COVID from this. Like, it is a pandemic. Like, just because you're not interested in it doesn't mean that these people won't go home and spread this to their. I mean, don't you think there's a chance that this could be part of like a much larger public health disaster? Well, I mean, he's the head of the largest public health disaster in history. But this could be certainly, there can be. be some ancillary victims from this tonight because they were all sitting cheek by jowl sweating. Yeah.

Yeah. I'm not saying I'm not worried about that, but I'm more worried about something else. And I'm hoping that Rick can talk me off the ledge here because maybe I just have PTSD. But as much of just a kind of rollicking, ridiculous shit show that all was for four days, I do worry about those voters Rick was talking about who are looking for an excuse to like Trump. And I worry that we see a little bit of a bump from him because this is the only reason. Because there's this group of voters who didn't like him, held their nose and voted for him. And for like five months now, he's just reminded him reminded them why they hate him. The tweets and the press conferences in Lafayette Square and Psycho Morning Joe.

And like for four days, it was pretty gross for all of us. But he kind of reminded them why they liked him, maybe. I'm a little worried. I'm more worried about that than the COVID Super Super. spreader. Let me talk you off the cliff. Okay, thank you. Donald Trump for four days has had the shock collar on him. They have been keeping him as much

in the box as they can. They've convinced him this is the big show that'll turn the numbers. But we all know something about Donald Trump. After he's been disciplined and held down by his staff for a couple of days on any item, he has an equal and opposite reaction and goes fucking nuts. And so he's going to tweet out some crazy shit tomorrow

about that kid in Kenosha, or something because he wants to go have fun now. And he's got no discipline whatsoever. So we'll be back to Crazy Donald in a matter of minutes. And whatever's happening in my role as the shitty Trump anthropologist, he is bored and restless and he will start talking shit because he just, he does it every time. We haven't talked about this yet, but the fact that they're down, they've pulled their ads down for the second time in a month, I suspect we're about to see a whole shit ton of race war ads

Because whatever wasn't working before, they pulled everything down. I think they're going to reset and go full on race war. And on that point, I know I'm not the host of the show, but I've only been invited on once, and I've had two bourbons, and I'm just ending with my fuck that guy. Of everybody who is dead on my fuck that guy is everybody that is defending that 17-year-old asshole with the long gun who showed up as a junior cop. And everybody who's defending the cop that unloaded his clip. into the back of Jacob Blake. I just, I have been, I thought I could not be astonished anymore,

but the amount of even like the quasi-normal, like on the more normal end of the spectrum, are all in on this idea that like Jacob Blake might have had a knife in the floorboard of his car. That makes it okay to unload seven shots into his back with his kids looking on. I mean, it's fucking insane. And it's like the widespread accepted view. in conservative of media the last two days.

And so anyway, I think that that's a preamble to what's coming. And I think that you're exactly right about where the ads are going, Rick, and fuck all those guys. But I do think that that's where it's coming, for sure. I mean, I think we see that. I think that police, they didn't think that police ad was terrifying enough. Well, some breaking good news on this front. I just peeked down at my Twitter and Jim Oconstis that a senior White House official told him that everybody's going to catch this thing eventually. I wish I was kidding.

On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from The Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. Who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFest. and he's the Rick Wilson.

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