The Daily Beast Podcast - Jared Kushner, Our First Android Vampire President

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

In the latest episode of The New Abnormal, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast discuss Baby Trump’s high chair, his low-rent supervillain of a Treasury Secretary, and whether Jared the K is undead or just a robot. Rick reveals that some of Trump’s own campaign staffers are afraid to give the boss real polling numbers. Plus! Philippe Reines joins our dynamic duo to discuss his week-long MAGA media diet, and how it feels to return to the land of the libtard cucks. Tune in! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly John Fass, novelist, an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. The New Abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leadership, and ideas. I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America, and we realize that putting our country over party and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this. We'll be joined by smart guests from media, politics, culture, medicine, and

science. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sands from invading our respective bunkers. Hey, so Molly, do you know who's been treated worse than almost any other president, especially even Lincoln? No, I don't. Can you tell me? I feel... No, I can't tell you, but you could tune in last night to the Fox News adjutop channel and watch a sacred American space, the Lincoln Memorial,

a place that honors the man who bound together the country, helped end slavery, and oversaw a calamitous war that barely resulted in the survival of our republic. We instead had a whining, titty-baby orange bitch on that chair. sitting there last night during that interview, screeching like a stuck animal about how mean people are to him. Did you know that he was the people treat him worse than Lincoln? That whole thing. I feel so bad for Lincoln. Like somewhere Lincoln is quietly trying to change his party affiliation. You know, he founded the Republican Party and Donald Trump destroyed it. So it's sort of a terrifying, horrible bookend there. Yeah. You know, when he said that he'd been treated worse than Lincoln, all I could think of was someone saying, so other than

that, Melania, how did you enjoy the play? I was very proud of you, because I saw in real time when he said that, that you did not make the assassination joke, which I knew it was killing you. It was killing me, because there were so many answers to it. Honestly, I mean, she'd probably just say, Venezuela Shuttle to New York. But no, I mean, but seriously, that whole thing, it was, first off, if Barack Obama had decided to have a political interview that was essentially an exercise in trying to protect his re-election. Propaganda.

In the Lincoln Memorial in front of the statue of Abraham Lincoln, I assure you, every Republican in this country would be racing out to buy pitchforks, torches, tar feathers, and build a gibbet outside of the reaction would have been apoplectic. It would have been cataclysmic. And yet, he went there last night. It was one of the most shameful displays, even for him. Even for him in this reality show that he's created around himself, you think your capacity for disgust is maxed out with this guy? It never really is. He can always go lower. One of my favorite moments was that they had him on this very high chair, so his feet didn't touch the ground.

And there was something about him on this high chair complaining about how his treatment had been worse than Lincoln, who had been assassinated in front of Lincoln. That was, you really saw what a small person he was. It also has this thing where it tells you that no matter what people want to try to project on him, he doesn't have that thing that affects every other president, no matter whether they're far right or far left, liberal, conservative, Republican, Democrat. It doesn't matter. The power of their office generates in them a respect for history. And since Trump has no knowledge of it or respect for it.

it. He was perfectly comfortable using a sacred space and using the memory and the iconography and the history of Abraham Lincoln to compare himself to him. I mean, it's just so low, but it's also exactly who he is. The thing I'm always impressed with with Trump is that he has no shame. Right? Like anyone else, even Ronald Reagan, I know you and I are on very different stance about Reagan and Bush, but even still, even Ronald Reagan, I think he would. it would have been a bridge too far to have said, I've had it worse than the president who was assassinated. And someone actually did try to assassinate Ronald Reagan and never became a point for him of self-pity. It never became a point for him of, oh, poor pitiful me, everything's so hard.

And yet, they'd good-naturedly bitch about the other team. But mostly they'd save it for the press club or they'd save it for the alfalfa dinner or whatever. The other part of it was he brings on the other game show participants, Mike Pence and Steve Mnuch. And it's like, it's a mystery date. Will he be a dream or a dud? And he drags them through this process. And Mike Pence has to do the usual, like, combination of terror and adoration.

I don't want to speak for the president who is the most glorious specimen of presidential man that I've ever seen. And Mnuchin, who is not a man who is built for television. No, he certainly is not. He just looks so uncomfortable. And he's like a like a low-rent super villain. And of course, the whole thing was in service to reopen the country, reopen the country, reopen the country.

You noticed last night Trump kind of like roll off it. Well, you know, now they're saying 80 or 90,000, which is bad. You know, I never said that. When it started, it was going to be, oh, it's 15 people. No problem. We got the senator of control completely. Now we are, as of today, damn near 70,000. Yeah.

And the CDC is saying there's one model of theirs, which could be 3,000 deaths per day in June. I don't know about you, but I don't put 90,000 people dying in one month down in the category of, let's fling wide open the doors and restart the economy. Well, I also think the false choice here is, and we've seen this out of the information this weekend out of Georgia, these people don't want to go out. So because people don't trust the government to keep them safe as well, they should not. They will not go out. And so it doesn't matter if you reopen everything.

In fact, if you do, it's going to cost people more money. I can feel my Friedrich Hayek back tattoo right now is energized. Because what you just described was actual market forces happening. And people comprise markets. And they're not going to go back into the market when they don't feel it's safe. In Florida, you know, DeSantis, who is covering himself in additional glory, and by that I mean not. Is he the least popular governor now? The least popular large state governor.

Yeah, it's like him and Brian Kemp, right? All these other governors have seen skyrocketing numbers because of the doctrine of radical competence. Right. Do all the right mechanical things. And the voters will say, oh, it's a good guy. Okay, cool. He's saying, oh, we're going to reopen restaurants and allow them to have 25% of their seats filled.

Well, every restaurateur in the state of Florida says, oh, great. Our fixed costs are such that we can't make money unless we have about $7. 70% of the seats filled with asses every day. And so why are you even bothering? So you can take credit with Trump. That's the answer. And unfortunately, the curve in the minds of a lot of Trumpers was, okay, there'll be a magical day sometime in April or May.

And then all of a sudden, it'll drop off to zero. That's never how it's going to work. That was never the scenario that was actually going to play out. So now we're percolating along. And it's like just reopening enough to spread the goddamn virus around some more. Excellent move, folks. Brilliant. I do think it's interesting.

that there's no plans still. Like we're months and months in, and Trump never has come up with a reopening plan. No, of course not. There is never any plan. One of the things that Trump supporters always impute to him is this great strategic genius. He's playing 12-dimensional quantum chess.

You cucks just don't understand the genius that is Donald Trump the best businessman ever. There's never anything there. That Donald Trump, as I've said a million times, is led by whatever captures his ego attention, gives him an erection, or makes him money. Those are the three things that Donald Trump pays attention to at any given moment. You could probably add on top of that now, you know, preserves political office. But he doesn't think through any of this stuff.

He doesn't have the cognitive or mental capacity to understand complex, multivariate, strategic problems. That's why he farms them out to people like Jared Kushner, America's first acting android American president. I don't want to be nitpicky here, but I think Jared Kushner is a vampire. Why couldn't he be an Android vampire? Wouldn't that be even more terrifying? I don't see him as a robot as much as I see him as like with those little teeth and the kind of ferreity mouth. And then he gets up there and he speaks in that same weird corporate business millennial speak that his wife speaks in, this sort of McKinsey via Columbia.

I say many words and gesticulate, none of them mean anything. Welcome to my TED Talk, where we're going to leverage synergies in order to in order to fully capitalize our human potential. Let's think outside the box. That's right. So, Rick, what's your theory into why they never have a plan? Well, they never have a plan for two reasons. One, they are the cult of amateurism.

They don't want a plan. They don't want to listen to experts. They don't want to listen to professionals. They want to do what owns the libs, generates tweets, generates headlines and eyeballs, and that fundamentally means you can't be disciplined, you can't be focused, you can't stay on an agenda. The other part of it is it's Donald Trump himself. His leadership style, if I may use the words leadership and style related to Donald Trump

in any way whatsoever, his leadership technique is always contingent. It's always in the moment. There's nothing that could change his mind except the next person that talks to him. There's nothing that could change his mind except seeing a story on Fox and Friends that changes his mind. He's got the attention span. I think you called it like the goldfish brain. Yeah. The attention span of a gnat on meth.

It's always like one second, one second, one second. And so everybody behind him is trying to make a plan like Fauci and Burks and the CDC leadership and all these of the people. They recognize that everything they do all day long can be washed away. with one impulsive tweet by this guy. And sure enough, he bred a White House culture that doesn't depend on having a plan. Their plan is bullshit. Their plan is to bullshit people every day. Their plan is to, when they're called on their bullshit, to come up with more bullshit.

Right. I think it's really interesting that we've spent all this time in our houses with the thought that they would come up with something and they've come up with some of you are going to die. Oh, I believe the plan is now a lot of you are going to die. But by God, we've got to get a bump back on the market, right? Right. The Dow bump. Actually, I saw this this weekend that Trump is doing less well with elderly people.

Well, you know, the guy fucking up a massive global pandemic that happens to kill, what's the demo I'm thinking? Oh, old people. Yeah. That could have an impact on it. That could be a factor. You know, you have a thing you always say that you say almost on every episode, but mostly because it's true, that. old people tend to vote. Yes, they do.

Look, and these battleground states that are coming up, Florida and North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, they tend to have an older, a whiter demographic that's going to come out on Election Day, which in Florida and Ohio, that is pre-COVID, was considered a net advantage for Trump. Right. Because they tended to lean more Republican in both those states. Call me crazy, but I feel like something that could be an existential risk factor in a lot of these folks down in, you know, Lee County and Pascoe County in Florida, they're in the heart

of darkest MAGA country. I mean, they are the Q&ON Central types. They're the ride or die Trumpers. Well, they might just die instead of being able to ride the polls this fall. But here's a question for you, just off the topic a little bit. How do you think COVID is going to shape the election? Like, we're seeing a lot of people die from this disease and a lot of older people. But a lot of people are disproportionately African-American, especially in Michigan. One of the cool things that Governor Whitmer did was she released the racial breakdown of the illness and found that in her state was a very high percentage of African-Americans were dying. What do you think that's going to look like for the election?

Well, look, I think that African-American voters, according to every piece of polling and survey research that's out there that doesn't come from like the Charlie Kirk Channel has demonstrated that African Americans have held a grudge against Donald Trump. So unfair. It's so unfair that when he praised a clan rally down in Charlottesville and called them both people on good people on both sides, it's amazing how they just, they're so ungrateful. I mean, this is just a shocking lack of gratitude to the greatest president of all time. But, you know, again, call me crazy.

But when you got a clan rally and David Dukes hanging around it and Richard Spencer and all these other jackasses, they might have taken a breath and thought, you know, maybe Diamond and Silk haven't convinced me to support Trump. And that's why their numbers are somewhere in the low single digits, asymptotically approaching zero. But, you know, I do think that there will be an effect on the economy because it takes away the greatest predicate of Trump's argument. The greatest predicate of Trump's argument was, I'm going to make the greatest economy

ever, never mind how I got there, which was borrowing money from the Fed, and you're 401k will go up and the stock market will be wonderful. Only I can do these things. Well, you know, the stock market is still in the doldrums. The economy is teetering on the edge of the Great Depression Part 2, Electric Bugaloo. And I don't think that's what they call the Great Depression. But look, the economy is going to be in a state of significant peril for a long time. And all elections are a referendum on the incumbent president, as I say, until I'm blue in the face. And right now, it's an incumbent, it's going to be a referendum on Donald Trump's handling of this crisis. That's why you're seeing slippage in these swing states. That's why you're seeing

slippage even among Republican voters. And Trump can say, the online Rasmussen poll says I have 99,000 percent approval. Everybody else in the Republican world, including Trump's own pollsters, by the way, fun story, one of the polling groups working for Trump, they're afraid to give the campaign real numbers. So what do they do? They are 50,000 footing things. They're giving hypotheticals. They're doing things like saying, Mr. Trump, we've asked some questions like, if the choice was between Donald Trump and zombie Osama bin Laden and Jeffrey Epstein's love child, who would you vote for?

And they're showing him those things. And he's like bobbing his head up and down. But he's pissed off. Look, he's mad. He knows it slipping. Even Donald Trump's reality bubble isn't that thick. Today, we have a special guest who is a good friend of mine and also a good friend of Rex and very smart. political consultant who has worked with numerous politicians, but most recently with Hillary Clinton,

both at the State Department and also during her presidential run, our guest today is Philippe Rains. It's Rhinis. Ryanis. You can say someone's a good friend and then just pronounced there a lot of state. Sorry, our guest today is Polite Rhinis. And we wanted to have you on today, Philippe, because you're doing this amazing experiment. Will you talk to us a little bit about this amazing experiment you're doing? I'm happy to, even though you're a bunch of snowflakes.

I will explain to you what I did. Welcome, Philippe to the Lib Tard Cuck Hour. So I tried to simulate the news and content consumption of a Trump voter. So what I did was anything that I watch regularly or read regularly, whether it was CNN or the New York Times, I couldn't look at. I could only read and watch things that I never do, like Fox Gateway Pundit. I couldn't make it simple for myself. I couldn't just not watch anything. I had to watch and read as much as I do normally. And I used Apple screen time to sort of make sure that I was doing at least the same. One of the problems is I have a really bad habit, partly from being an only child that I always have a TV on when I'm home. And since we're all home, I have CNN on from time I wake up until 7 o'clock. At 7 o'clock I shift. So I've had Fox on all the time. But there's been like two levels to it. There's been Fox, which is the obvious. But then there's been the next level of heinousness, you know, listening to Rush Limba every day, listening to Sean Hannity every day on the radio, reading crazy town stuff online.

Do you read Gateway Pundit? I read Gateway Pundit religiously. I might still read Gateway Pundit. He called me wicked today, thinking that's an insult. Here are the print outlets that I read. Fox News Online, One American News, O.N, Daily caller, Gateway Pundit, and Townhall.com. That was my daily diet of written content consumption. Wow, when town hall is the most sane of the bunch, you're really pushing it.

No federalist. That's too reasonable. I mean, everything but the hat. And by the way, the hardest thing about last week, so I did this starting a week ago this morning, starting fittingly with Fox and Friends, a week ago today at 7 a.m. And I ended it at midnight last night. So I'm only half a day back into reality. But the hardest thing last week was not going online and buying a my pillow.

Boy, is that guy relentless. And that song, you know, for the best night's sleep in the whole white world, my pillow. Dot com. Outstanding. What was the hardest thing? The truth is, it wasn't that hard. Is that the scary part? There's going to be someone listening to this who says, if you think X, you haven't been paying

attention. Believe me, I've been paying attention. I met Roger Ellis at the 10-year anniversary of Fox News. I've been on Fox more than 150 times in the last two years. I've been on MSNBC more than 150 times over the same. period. I get it. I get the bubbles. I think I'm one of the few people that actually travels between the bubbles. And there's nothing I can say that happened last week that's terribly shocking. It's what you already cerebrally know. But when you experience it, it's not incredibly harsh. I think it's

a couple of reasons. First off, you don't know what you don't know. Obviously, the night before it went into the simulation. I knew what was in the news. So I could tell what clocks wasn't covering their daily caller wasn't covering. But that wears off pretty quickly. You don't have a of something horrible about Trump or about the Republicans or anything that's at odds with the right-wing agenda. I think what really makes a difference is we all see Fox in the context of MSNBC and CNN showing clips, whether it's Don Jr. on Fox and Friends or Trump calling into Hannity. And it's always horrific. It's like a car crash. What we don't see and that you do see when you watch all day is that there's incredible normalcy. Fox and Friends

They have their cooking segment. And the daytime hosts are imperceptibly biased. They really rely on the guests and the search to do the heavy lifting. So Ed Henry is on it, I guess, 10 in the morning. He's not breathing fire like Tucker Carlson, but he's got Mike Huckabee on three times in the hour who's doing the heavy lifting. My question for you is what of the outlets did you find the most egregiously insane? Gateway Pundit, because they don't pull any punches in townhall.com. They don't pull any punches in the headline.

And they'll say Fauci and Burke's wrong yet again. Like that's the headline. Or Fauci proves he doesn't know what he's doing. There's just no subtlety in what they're doing. I think when you imagine the worst, you're imagining Gateway Pundit and Townhall.com. And I think Gateway Pundit is probably the most damaging of them all because it's not uncommon for other outlets, particularly Fox,

to cite, quote, a news source and talk about Gateway Pundit. That's huge. I think we've all seen that feeder network. before, where Gateway Pundit will pick up a tweet from Maga Flynn Fan 97249X5, then Fox will do a piece on their social on Fox News.com and say, they respected Gateway Pundit reports. And then it gets fed up to Fox TV itself. And that is a significant difference between then and what you would call the left media. There's no entity at the bottom that's just making stuff up. By the way, Rick, I think after this week, I might add three stars into my Twitter.

name. Mike Huling, boy, did that guy get a raw deal. Yeah, right. And Dunham is going to blow it out of the water. If only he hadn't lied to the FBI. You would never know that. Do you notice that Fox.com is much more conservative than Fox, the network? I hate to say it, but the dot-coms of Fox and what really surprised me was OAN, if I took

the URL off of it and pretended it was not the Wall Street Journal, but if I pretended that it was the Daily News or Daily Beast, I was surprised at OAN. I was really surprised. I thought OAN would be what Gateway Punded turned out to be. I could see why OAN would lowly into a sense. I started out the week, including drug report in my experiment. And within a couple of days, I stopped because my God, if you didn't know any better, you think you were reading some kind of news aggregator that was somewhat balanced. I think it's pretty balanced right now. He goes through periods. And you can see why Trump has hit him a couple of times, including within the last couple of weeks. I was looking at drudge and I would be clicking through a link and end up at a writer story. Good God, man. I know. This was very scientific. I had to stop.

Makes sense. Sometimes I spent a whole day watching OANN and I'm very impressionable. Did you find yourself at all being convinced of anything? Not convinced, but Fox, this is not as simple as bias because 10 years ago, you could have taken any news event of the day and they would have been on every channel and it just would have been covered differently, whether it was subtle or not. Now you're shifting to a situation where it's parallel universe and there are things that are happening in the real world that are not being covered and the, I don't even know what to call it the right-wing crazy town and vice versa. But what's not

being covered in mainstream media pretty much shouldn't be covered or should not be covered to that extent. So last Monday and Tuesday, you would think that Joe Biden was killing more people than coronavirus because all you would hear about was Tara Reid. And then starting later Tuesday and Wednesday, it was Mike Flynn. You would think Mike Flynn was Omar Bradley or Ike and that he should be given the Medal of Freedom, which you probably will at some point get. But to answer your question, you can have an argument or you can have discussion. And by the way, they haven't having the conversation in the discussion in the New York Times. You can have the debate about whether the New York Times and CNN were undercover some of these things like Tarree. And the New York Times has gone through their own usual self-involved naval gazing about it. But the answer to that is not overcompensating by making it the Tara Reid network. And they omit anything that's inconvenient. So this latest part of the saga that a second woman claims that when she was a teenager, Biden said something to her about her appearance at a Delaware dinner.

And it turns out he wasn't there. You'll see the first part. You will not see the second part. And they will just full steam ahead. And again, that's not shocking. But how would you know that? I don't know why I think this was so interesting, but they don't cover Cuomo. So I didn't know last week if Cuomo had suspended his press conferences.

I doubt it. I figured he was still doing them. They didn't cover him. I guess because he's just too critical or he's too competent. But Whitmer, she's witless. To me, the comparison isn't Jake Tapper more reasonable than Sean Hannity. Of course. So the five was intolerable to watch.

And it's on a five o'clock and it's hosted by Jesse Waters, who's full on. I mean, Jesse Waters has about as much of a filter as, any of the three of us do on Twitter. Anything that comes to his mind, he says, you know, I don't even know how they get away with that. So at 5 o'clock, you're hearing Governor Whitless, the parade of nicknames. There's no subtlety to it.

And my favorite part of last week was Tucker Carlson was interviewing. They were doing a lot of interviewing of business people who were disobeying their state's edicts and losing their shirt. Tucker had one guy on from Maine, who would decide that he was going to violate Maine's order. And he was reasonable. He's not yelling and screaming. And at the end, Tucker says, well, John, thanks for coming on. And John says, well, Tucker, can I just say one more thing? He says, sure, go ahead. He said, everyone should call the governor. Her cell number is 206-99. Oh, Jesus. I would remember. Tucker pretends that he's pulled, but he's cracking up. And look, it happened so fast. It's not much he could have done. I mean, that's the kind of thing that's hysterical. It's a lot more on the whole. Subtle is a bad word. But again, we see the most horrific instances. So we'll see Laura Ingram making incredibly racial remarks in her opening. Or we'll see Tucker do the same. But that's 95% of the time. They're not breathing fire. By way, Hannity is a compelling show. Laura's hard to watch.

Tucker is compelling and Hannity is comparing. Hannity's radio show sucks. And boy, Rush is easy to listen to. Listen to you. You're converting. You need to shake it off, man. You need to go read the New Yorker for a while. Well, thank God.

Rush was on vacation except for last Monday, so I wasn't listening to like the crazy standards he had. How much of the content there did you sense was feeding that sort of aggrievement culture? The libs are out to get you. It's the educated elites look down on you all the time. How much of that was there was sort of the undertone of their content? I hit the nail on the head. That's sort of the foundation, the bedrock of everything. What's been

happening over the last month, month and a half is made it somewhat easier for them because they can paint this as a Brooklyn, Queens, New York City problem, whereas, you know, these poor people in Des Moines are out of work. So they'll do a lot of, in Ohio, three million people are out of work, and neglect to mention if there's even a single death in Ohio. There's a lot of, we're all suffering for the blue states. The new abnormal is brought to you by you. Thanks to contributions from our Beast Inside members, we're able to provide coronavirus coverage,

including podcasts like this one, to everyone for free. Visit newabnormal. Dot the DailyBeast.com to sign up for a Beast inside plan today and help us keep it that way. We've now gotten to the segment called Fuck That Guy that has the, I'm trying to deliver it with the full Rick Wilson. Rick, who is your Fuck That Guy of the?

moment. The shopper at a Vaughn supermarket in California in Santee, California over the weekend, who showed up to protest California's mask rules wearing a clanhood. Right. What the hell is happening in California? I got to say, California is not notoriously famous for being a pro-clan part of the country. But the guy, and if you Google this, you'll see the guy's wearing a camouflage t-shirt over his rather rotund gut. and a clan hood. I'm sorry, but you know something? I get you're trying to do some clever civil disobedience, but fuck that guy.

That's a good one. My fuck that guy is the country of Sweden. Sweden has a whole country. Yeah, it's a whole country. Well, Sweden is the one Nordic country who has decided that they're not going to lock down like everyone else. They're just going to ride it out. Again, this idea of herd immunity, which herd immunity basically means you, kill off everyone you're going to kill off. There's no immunity, right? It's that people get sick and they

die. As we've seen from the biggest fan of herd immunity, Boris Johnson, who ended up in the ICU. And one of the things that's happened is they've had all sorts of, a lot of conservative outlets have been able to use them as a reason why social distancing is bad. And their numbers are about 10 times what their neighbor's numbers are in the number of deaths, right? So that is why Sweden gets the umbrella today. 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 you don't want to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Johncast, and he's the Rick Wilson. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover

what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast. and sign up today.