The Daily Beast Podcast - Kamala Has Picked a Winning Strategy With ‘Weird’

Episode Date: August 6, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, why one word has taken such a toll on Trump. Then, Andrew Lawrence, Media Matters for America’s deputy director of rapid response, joins the show to explain why the word “weird” is working for Democrats. Plus! Asawin Suebsaeng, a Rolling Stone senior politics reporter, delves into Donald Trump’s involvement with Project 2025. 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 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 Kedden, 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.

What an excellent show we have today. Rolling Stone's senior politics reporter Aswin Subasag is here to talk about how involved Donald Trump is with Project 2025 and why he keeps claiming he isn't. Then Andrew Lawrence, Media Matters for America's Deputy Director of Rapid Response, joins us to talk about why calling Republicans weird has been working for the Democrats and why it seems to be really hurting Republicans. But first, let's have some fun. Danielle, welcome back.

We had a little sort of vacation last week. Mm-hmm. I know you did some traveling. I also had a very, very accomplished week off. I organized my Blu-Rays. That sounds fun. It was fun. It was fun.

Okay. And now it's back to the fun and friendly and kitty cats and flowers of America. I'm so excited to be back. But I think in all honesty, look, when we left for vacation, I was feeling much better than I had been. Oh, what has it been? Oh, eight years. So I've been feeling much better over the last two weeks. And do you know who's not feeling that great right now? And who I think, tell me if I'm wrong, Andy, but I think that for the first time, since Donald Trump came down that God-forsaken escalator, that his campaign, is on the defense. And it is showing up in his recent poll numbers that he hasn't won a round of polls

in a week. And that says a lot. Look, I'm not saying, you know, let's all pack up and go home. The election is a wrap at all. But this is something definitely worth note. Yeah, for sure. I mean, look, the last couple weeks have been very good for Democrats for the Kamala Harris campaign. And look, it's, you know, you want to feel good about it. And you should feel good about it. But you also just, you know, you want to guard against the idea that this could be a honeymoon phase and, and we still got a bunch of months ahead. So not that I think anyone is doing this, but, you know, I just, I think cautious optimism is the way to go here. And I think you're right about Trump. And I really think that, you know, there are a bunch of polls that have been coming out

that show Harris either cutting into a Trump lead or outright ahead of him in various states and and doing much better among black and Latino voters than maybe Joe Biden was. And all of that is obviously fantastic. And I really do. I have to give a shout out to the Harris campaign for, I really love the strategy of painting the Trumpist as weird. And I'm not just saying that because we've been saying that for years. And I was curious and I went and I dug up like old tweets or whatever from like two, three years ago where I'm just sitting there going, they are all so weird. And I know you've done similar things. And a lot of people have. I'm not patting myself on the back here. This has been like a thing for a long time. But it's never been this sort of official push to

point out over and over again that a lot of these positions are bad policy. A lot of them are downright evil. But a lot of them are just straight up weird. The things that they are into is weird. And I really think that this strategy is a winning one. And I think, you know, I don't want to say that the polls are changing because of that strategy. But it goes back to what you said about Trump and the Republicans are on the defensive now because the Democrats are doing something that they didn't do under Joe Biden because it's not really his personality. And they are attacking. And it's really nice to see. It is.

And I mean, I think that we have called this group of people, the Republican Party, this cult, you know, and the sycophants, I think that we've said a lot of things about them. We've said that their policies are disgusting, they're demeaning, they're oppressive, they're fascistic. We've said all of these things. And I think that why the word weird is registering is because it's easy. And everybody kind of knows what it means. Like when we talk about, oh, well, this sounds like a dictator or this sounds authoritarian, I don't think that most Americans really understand what that means. But when you say, yeah, so J.D. Vance is sitting around and can't stop talking about women's uteruses. Can't stop talking about the fact that he wants some type of

menstruation, you know, reporting system or national database that will round up all of these cat-having childless people. Like when you look at the things that they are talking about and the policies that they want to nationalize, it's weird. And so for her, I think that it's smart. I think that that's smart for once we've been saying for so long, like fight back, fight back very clearly with the things that they are saying, just use their words and turn them into ads because it doesn't require a lot of work. No, for sure. And I think a lot of this comes down to just, it's personality. That's not Joe Biden's personality. Joe Biden was always, you know, work across the aisle guy. And look, that served him well for a long time. It's not really where we are in 2020's America.

I mean, you know, you can't reach across the aisle and then, you know, you put out your hand and what you're getting in return is Nazi salutes. Yeah. It was like shrapnel? Yeah. I mean, you know, how do you work with Marjorie Taylor Green, Matt Gates, you know, Lauren Bobert, Jim Jordan. The list is endless. And I think the Harris campaign, it was interesting. I actually read somewhere that it's mainly the same people like doing the social media and doing all this stuff.

It's just that they've sort of been turned loose. And they're doing things. like you said, there was a great post from the Kamala HQ that just transcribed a little thing that Trump did in a Fox News interview about Google. And it's bizarre. Like, it's weird. It's bizarre. It makes no sense. And all they did was transcribe it and tweet it out. And that kind of stuff is fantastic. It's sort of where modern campaigning needs to be. And under Joe Biden, none of that was happening. It's such a breath of fresh air. And look, the weird thing is, for whatever reason, it's hurt them.

And by that, I mean, they are upset about it. They're deep in their feelings about it, which is, I mean, given all of the things that the Republican Party has said, said about Joe Biden, said about any of their opponents, like the disgusting, horrible things, the mocking of disabled people, the mocking of, you know, of veterans. The groomers slur. Right. All of these things.

But you use the word weird. And now they're like having. a fit. And it's because I honestly think they prepared very well for one type of campaign against one person. And that was Joe Biden. That was it. And the reason why I think that Biden didn't hit back in the way that he did was because they were just going to turn it around and be like, he's old, he's this, he's that. So it's just like, just keep your head down and do the work. But with Kamala, all they have is what? Her laugh, you know, like she likes Ben diagrams. Like, that's kind of where we are with her. She's very vetted. So it's not as if they're going to unearth something

that didn't come out in the first couple of runs for the Senate, for vice president, for the presidency, all of these things. And so they have nothing. They have absolutely nothing. And I think that the more that we can point out this fact of what it is that they're doing and the kind of America that they want is not just dark and, you know, an authoritarian that it's weird. And do you want this? I think that the more people are going to be like, yes, so no. And that's what the polls, I think, even though I'm not a big believer in polls still this far out, it's, I think that it is going to make Donald Trump and his team nervous and sweat for the first time in a way that I don't think that they have before. And we're seeing this with Trump trying to play it, you know, his little game with the debate where he announces that there's going to be a debate on September 4th with Brett Bear and Martha McCallum on Fox News. And Harris is like, no, the debate. it's the following week on ABC. That's what was agreed to and not backing down and not saying,

okay, you want a debate there. I like that they're just, they're pushing back. I think it's fantastic. Yeah. And it's about friggin' time. Speaking of things that are weird and ridiculous and probably, oh, I don't know, should be investigated and added to the list of things that Donald Trump has done with the presidency is just the grift.

We're still unearthing things like this story. right now that is up at the New Republic about Donald Trump's grifting going back to 2017. So with this, it is now all attention is on Egypt. And the Egyptian government, according to the New Republic, may have given Donald Trump $10 million, $10 million in 2017, which would have been, you know, a violation of the law. But of course, the investigation and the payments were squashed by bill bar. And so now we're learning about this. And again, the amount of criminality, the amount of money that changed hands, even using the hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, his hotel that is now gone,

as like a money laundering operation, because that's what it was. And we're just, we're still learning about all the ways in which these people have covered up. And I'm just like, I wonder if we'll ever get the tally. How much money from Kushner to try. Trump, like how much money they brought in in four years? Yeah, I mean, the funny thing is, like, I'm reading this and, or vacation, I think the Washington Post was the one who first broke the story. And part of me is like, really, only $10 million? Because you look at, like you were saying, you look at Jared Kushner's deals with the Saudis

and God knows what else. And we're talking like, you know, 10 times that or 20 times that amount of money. And it almost feels like, you know, this was like them putting their toe in the water and getting the small scale bribe, not that $10 million is a small amount of money. Can somebody try and bribe me? I know. I know. Like everybody's out here getting a bribe.

Nobody ever wants to bribe me. I know. Because they know you're too principled for that, Daniel. That doesn't get us anywhere. But there is absolutely this pattern of the foreign influence and everything from the hotels in various countries and the golf resorts to everything with the Saudis, to working with Putin and stuff. like that. And now it looks like, you know, at the very least, an investigation was sort of put out to pasture by Attorney General Bill Barr at the time as to whether this $10 million that was, I guess,

taken out of the bank or withdrawn by an organization that's linked to the Egyptian intelligence services. And in a normal world, this would be, and not that it wasn't covered, it was covered, But then it's like it already feels like a lot of people are just shrugging at this. Like it's not a big deal. And we get a sense of, oh, they all do. No, they don't all do this. The ones who do, like Bob Menendez, hopefully get caught and have to leave office and, you know, maybe go to jail or whatever.

But the bottom line is they don't all do this. Yes, there's a lot of shenanigans in Washington. I'm the last person who's going to sit here and pretend that politicians are mostly in it to help other people, because I just don't think that of a lot of them. But this is just, it's so raw and it's so naked. And everything he does, as we've discussed ad nauseum is just transactional. And this is all part of that. The idea that Trump's own attorney general slow walk this and basically shut down the investigation,

which this, by the way, is a hint of what's to come under a second Trump administration when he wants, you know, and as Project 2025 called for it, for the Justice Department to basically be subservient to the president and not an independent body that investigates crimes. Yeah, because you don't need that if you have a dictatorship. And honestly, what I think is so brazen about these claims of corruption that were squashed is that it's happening in broad fucking daylight. They're not hiding it. This is not stuff like when asked to return the documents, he said, no, they're mine.

Like, oh, I made the phone call. It was perfect. That's how you normalize this type of criminal operation, is that you're just very open about it. So that we do become desensitized and we think that all politicians move in this way. See, they're all corrupt. And it's like, no, because guess what?

Menendez is actually going to go to jail. Donald Trump, now because of the Supreme Court, we're like, mm, prob's not. So he just will get to live, continue to live off of this grift. The last of it being in three months from now, if he does not become president of the United States, It's like, then what happens? Is it more, is it a can of worms that opens up?

Does a Republican Party wash their hands? And he just, you know, becomes the use car salesman that he is, you know, selling, hawking his Bibles and shoes or it becomes like an evangelical preacher? I have no, nothing would surprise me at this point. But the fact is, is that he's normalized this behavior because he's put it out in the open. Yeah. And look, what you said about the corruption taking place right out in the open, Trump was in Georgia over the last weekend.

And I'm quoting him. He said, I'm for electric cars. I have to be because, you know, Elon endorsed me very strongly. So I have no choice. And he says these things and people go, oh, he's joking. He's not joking. He's absolutely not joking. Musk is setting up these super PACs and these bogus voter registration sites,

which I'm going to get to in a minute. You know, he's turned Twitter into a MAGA slash fascist. hangout. And Trump knows all this, and he wants to stay on Elon's good side. And so he says stuff like that. And again, we sit here and a lot of people will just say, oh, no, he's just joking or he's, you know, whatever. He's not joking. This is how he operates. We say it. I said it earlier, but we've said it over and over again. Everything with this guy is transactional. And that includes bribes and that includes reading classified documents to the Russians and everything he does is transactional and this is just another instance of that. Yeah, the thing is is that people have to understand that

when Donald Trump says these things like, oh yeah, of course I'm for electric vehicles, of course I'm for this, of course I'm for that. It's the same way that he walked in and one second he was for the ban on TikTok and then he sits down with people who have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in TikTok, and then he's like, no, TikTok's the greatest thing. You cannot trust somebody like this. And I don't understand why people continue to throw money at him, knowing that all you have to do is show up with a bigger check or a bigger following, and Donald Trump will go in that direction. He has no ethics. He has no code of conduct. And so one minute, he's for electric vehicles, and then if the, you know, if the folks at whatever, General Motors or Ford or whomever come out and say,

no, no, no, here's $100 million to say that, like, you're for gas and gas only, that's where he's going to go. He has no loyalty. And so it's still so shocking to me that this cult is so loyal to him, knowing that he will sell them out as soon as he has the opportunity to. Yeah, absolutely. And to go back to another person who has absolutely no ethics, I want to bring up the Elon Musk thing that I mentioned earlier. He has set up this super PAC called America PAC. And And it is supposedly a door-to-door canvassing operation because if it's set up that way, it's allowed to work in direct coordination with the Trump campaign. But what they've done is, so they put out a series of ads digitally. They tell people to click on their site to register to vote.

And as a CNBC report revealed, if you do this and you're in a state where everyone knows it's either going Democrat or it's going Republican, then they actually do it. you to a voter registration site. But if you click on it and your, you are, you know, your IP address or whatever is from a battleground state, you get directed to a different page where you put in your phone number, address, and age, and then you get a thank you at the end of it. To be clear, this does not register you to vote, which is what the ad is saying it would when you click on it. What it's doing is giving your information to this Elon Musk super PAC that, is aligned with the Trump campaign so that they can then go door to door and talk to you. And in addition to the door to door stuff, they have your information.

They can target you on social media. They can bombard you with emails. At the very least, it's vaguely illegal. At most, it's wholly illegal. Who's going to say at most? It's just illegal illegal. Yeah. This is who we're dealing with.

And like you said, there's no ethics. and everything is okay in pursuit of what they believe is the greater good, which is, you know, the greater good for themselves. And this is where we are now. Yeah, this is where we are now. It's the new abnormal, Daniel. Folks, I'm very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal senior political reporter at Rolling Stone, Oswin Sub-Seng, whose recent piece highlights for us all the ways that Donald Trump continues to lie about his involvement in project. Project 2025, if you all remember. Donald Trump said about Project 2025, oh, I don't even know who's behind it. But then it was, I agree with some things, but other things seem absolutely crazy.

Then he's gone so far as to call the people involved in Project 2025 lunatics and has had his crowds recently boo at the mention of Project 2025, which I find really funny, Swin, because I think it is about over 140 people that are involved in Project 2025 also worked in the Trump administration. So how is it that this man is saying that he knows nothing about this project? And yet, he is pretty much the architect of it and the reason why it is so extreme and conservative. Well, it's not just that there are a bunch of veterans of his administration who are working in it. It's that some of the key architects of the project, whether it comes to the personnel or transition-related initiatives or the policy-making initiatives that were included in that gigantic

book that they put out a while ago, several of those key figures in Project 2025 still advised Trump closely to this day. It's not like, oh, they used to work in my administration by barely know them. No, there are people like John McEntee and Russell vote who are still very, very close to John Trump, speak to him regularly, including on the phone about all sorts of issues. and especially with someone like Russ Vote is virtually guaranteed to be a chief lieutenant in Trump's administration if he is reelected at the end of this year. So you can't really put the toothpaste back in the tube on this.

These are his people, to lightly paraphrase a project 2025 contributor who we spoke to for our reporting, 70 to 80 percent of the people involved with the project are almost certainly going to be in a second administration. If he gets one, you cannot rationally look at this book or any of the online materials about Project 2025 without seeing that these are not just Republicans.

These are Trump's people. Him trying to disown it because he thinks it's better politics right now with critical female voters, suburban voters, wing voters in critical battleground states. Him trying to distance himself from this initiative right now is

about as reasonable and based in fact as me trying to say, I have nothing to do with national political reporting in the United States or being Asian American. It just does not scare. It just is not true. It is saying two plus two equals 11. Basically. But this is the reality that they always want us to live inside of. We know the things that Donald Trump says. We understand that when he says things, he actually means them. So he wants to back away. from Project 2025 in a lot of ways with regard to abortion, right? Because we understand that since the overturning of Roe v. Wade,

because of the three justices that he got to seat to purposefully overturned Roe v. Wade, that every time that it's been on a ballot in battleground states, abortion wins because people want to be able to have bodily autonomy. So talk to us about how he's trying essentially to have it both ways, which is what Donald Trump has done his entire life. Sure. And something you were saying earlier during this segment, he has in some of his statements, slagging Project 2025 in recent weeks, come out and said, I think some of the things in the project are despicable and atrocious, blah, blah, blah. But he's pretty vague on what? So that kind of piqued our interest here at Rolling Stone magazine. So we went about talking to our sources, trying to figure out, okay, what does Donald Trump meet? which policies is he talking about, particularly when he's venting about this in private,

to you or other confidants. And the answer was across the board, abortion. Shortly before he put out in early July, through social post or some sort of statement of that nature, are knowledgeable sources on this. It was saying that when he was venting and rambling about how Project 2025 was damaging him during this election, he was talking almost exclusively, if not exclusively, about the abortion-related policy prescriptions embedded deep within Project 2025. This includes, but is certainly not limited to, increase so-called abortion surveillance,

policies that would bring about a de facto national abortion ban, and even going as far to ending federal approval for abortion pills. Like, this is stuff that is ambitably unpopular, not just with Democrats in various parts of the country, red, blue, and everything in between. So this underscored to us when we were going about reporting on this, just how much to this day, even when Donald Trump is out there giving all this bluster about how he's definitely going to defeat Joe Biden and now Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, he is still essentially petrified that Project 2025 and particularly abortion-related politics could actually

seriously damage or maybe even tank his 2024 presidential ambitions. And for a guy like Donald Trump, that doesn't just mean possibly the end of your political career. It could also mean actual prison sentences on the other side of this election because of the trials that he's awaiting. So the stakes for him on a viscerally personal level are insurmountably high. And if he does end up losing to Kamala Harris, obviously it's incredibly tight right now in the polls. Your listeners can cradle or maybe even on some level appreciate the fact that the ripple effect through time and the darkly humorous, some would say, butterfly effect of Donald Trump

getting rid of Roe v. Wade is that years later, he might actually get sentenced to prison. We are living in a timeline where there is a non-zero chance that that is actually the cause and effect here. I love the phrasing around the butterfly effect because what ushered Donald Trump into the presidency in the first place were white evangelical Christians. For 50 years, they'd been trying to overturn Roe v. Wade and chipping away at it, state by state, measure by measure. Then he gets this opportunity, because of Mitch McConnell, stealing a Supreme Court seat, has the opportunity, and stealing actually two, because I count Gorsuch, which he held up, which was supposed to be Merrick Garland's seat, and I count Amy Coney-Barritt's seat,

which should have never happened and should have been fought back against because she was appointed and placed after the election of 2020. And so when we look at this and you look at the fact that he takes these three judges who sit before the Senate Judiciary Committee and lie and say that they believe in precedent and all they have done on the Roberts Court is just eviscerate precedent, which means absolutely nothing, whether it's a 100-year-old gun bill that's in New York or 50-year abortion rights, it's gone. And so now, as he's trying to make moves away from this, because there are some, people you see when they're interviewed on cable news and they're asked about abortion. They really,

some don't understand that it is Donald Trump who overturned Roe v. Wade and not Joe Biden because we don't really do a great job of teaching civics in this country. So I wonder how much of his, how much of his, this is not really about Donald Trump's base because what we know about the presidential election is that he can't win with just his base. He actually needs more people. And so when you think about how he's phrasing, you know, Project 2025 and talking about abortion at his rallies, because the other day he said, people, oh, no, it wasn't a, it was at the NABJ disastrous interview that he did with the National Association of Black Journalists when he said, people love that abortion is back at the States. It's all they've ever wanted. And I'm like looking around,

I'm like, what? Who wanted that? Who said that? And so how do you see him continuing on this path, but also it potentially being a huge advantage for the vice president for Kamala Harris in really showcasing what Republicans want for women in this country moving forward. As you kept touching on earlier, this is a profoundly stark example of Trump getting exactly what he wanted and exactly what he promised to do in 2016, getting elected president and appointing conservative judges and justices who would take a hacksaw, if not worse to abortion rights in this country. And now he's living through this period, this incredibly high-stakes presidential election for himself and potentially even his own personal freedom,

where this is just biting him in the ass relentlessly. I mean, he knows just as well as anybody else how much of a political liability this is to him. He has been hosting private meetings since at least 2022 with top evangelical leaders and anti-abortion activists and players. in that political realm. A couple of years ago or so, we did some reporting on these secret meetings for Rolling Stone. And the message he kept trotting out to them. And this was significantly before he became the 2024 Republican nominee,

was that, look, and these are his direct words, we're getting killed on abortion. Like all these different candidates, including the ones I endorsed in different elections, including in the 2022 midterms, which were, of course, an epic disaster for him and the Republican Party on a historic scale are just getting slaughtered because primarily, if not more so, on this issue. And we have to adjust our messaging. We have to

front load constantly things like exceptions, exceptions, exceptions. And I don't think I have to tell you or many of your listeners that when Republicans talk about exceptions, exceptions that they talk about are grotesquely, monumentally different than exceptions that a Democrat and a normal person. of my talk match. The fact that he was recommending them front load that is something that is not really built on anything more than sand. And by sand, I mean a substance made of, please vote for me and don't be mad at me

because of the things I've done and what I am obviously going to do. So the funny things about these meetings is he was constantly lashed as gently and diplomatically as you would with a guy as mercurial and as a leader as Donald Trump, that we need more commitments from you. We arguably were the ones who got you elected in 2016. We were there for you in 2020 through thick and thin. And if you have any chance of us being there for you in 2024,

if you are the Republican nominee, which he, of course, now is, we need something stronger than that. Like they were saying coded versions of you're starting to sound like a Democrat, and we would really like that to be avoided, please. But he stood his ground and called the bluff because he calculated that they did not have the leverage to call someone like Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley or Tim Scott or anybody like that over the finish line in the 2024 Republican primaries, which of course they did not.

So now they're stuck with him and he's kind of running the show on this like cynical, triangulating messaging front. But look, like if you're a top evangelical or anti-abortion leader in the United States, and I think a lot of them realize this now, you can sit tight. You don't have to like blow a gasket over. this guy's triangulation because if he is reelected, there is nobody in the know in Trump world who isn't monumentally 110% convinced that these anti-abortion leaders are going to get basically everything they want out of a second Trump administration. It's not even going to be like a basically

everything that they want. They're going to get everything that they want and more. Like it's going to, it's going to be, you know, a white Christian national Christmas for them every single day. And one of the things that I want to ask you about too is, you know, the other liability that he has, which is J.D. Vance. Coolest vice presidential pick in the history of my opinion. I mean, which is, which is major considering Palin. Like, so when we look at J.D. Vance and the things that he has said on record with regard to having a national monitoring of women's menstrual cycles, a, you know, people who don't have children paying more in taxes. Talk to us about the ways in which you have both Project 2025 that a majority of Americans have now woken up to and are conscious of and understand and are Googling this,

no matter if the Heritage Foundation wants to remove it from their page or not or lay people off. And you have J.D. Vance, who is being played over and over again in talking about his in-cell-like thoughts with regard to women in this country. Well, what might seem like opposition research or something that Democratic operatives or people in the press dug up through deep investigations to try to prove how unpalatable to the average voter a lot of J.D. Vance's positions, particularly on this issue, or I guess some of it that's out there is a form of research, but this is much less a form of like deep investigation on these matters than it is something more akin to looking at the last five and a half tweets that J.D. Van or people like that have put out. This is stuff they've been saying for years because they're proud of it. This is what they believe.

And look, I can't see into his heart and mind on things like this, but my read of the landscape on a lot of prominent Republicans who pitch stuff like this constantly, who are less so-called savvy or whatever you want to call it or as cynical on the messaging

as someone like Donald Trump is. A lot of them seem to have drank their own Kool-Lade and gotten high on their own supply, sorry for mixing, uh, figure of it. because they had this mammoth victory of absolutely oblitering Roe v. Wade, that their positions on this issue are way more popular than they actually are across the country. They still have not, even years after the destruction of Roe,

come to terms fully with the fact of how just absolutely grotesquely disgusting a lot of this is to not Democratic voters, not not liberal MSNBC bingers, your average voter, including swing voters, in critical battleground states. And because of that, that is why you have so much tape and so much literature, not from 10 years ago, not from 15 years ago, not from a college newspaper article they wrote when they were young, but of like very close to yesterday of these guys putting this stuff on the record. Yeah. We're in a really interesting place as we are now less than 100 days until the election. We have the Democratic Convention coming up

where we know that Project 2025, abortion rights, all of these things are going to be center stage. And I think, you know, my last question for you, because we just have about a minute left, is, you know, whether or not you think that Donald Trump has already is, like, had reached his peak and is now, you know, on the dissent. Like, do you see him having another moment?

Because what I'm seeing is that since convention, it has been downward trajectory since then. Don't count Donald Trump out of, of any presidential elections. There are, in many ways, three short months left to go until election day, but in much more meaningful ways, there are a very long three months left to go. Certainly, Kamala Harris has significantly cut into his leave that he had with Joe Biden shortly before the president dropped out of the race. And certainly there is a good deal of momentum on the team Kamala side. No one honestly speaking about it can deny it. And that includes people like Donald Trump,

when he talks about it privately in recent days and weeks, where he genuinely does seem, according to his confidants who have given us readouts of these conversations, genuinely caught off guard by the fundraising halls that the Harris campaigns had so far, the ease and rapidity at which the Democratic Party rallied around Kamala Harris, and the degree to which the Democrats do not seem to be tearing each other apart, but they seem to actually be very jubilant and fired up, particularly among their voting base, that Joe Biden was partially facing. planting with up until the very end of his 2024 campaign. So my cop out on this because I don't want

I make any predictions of whether Trump is doomed or isn't doomed. Oh, no, no, no. It's not a prediction. But what I noticed for the first time, you know, in all of these years, eight years that we've been in this hellscape of Trumpism, what I've noticed is that like for the first time, he's not bumping back up. And it's the first time. I'm not saying that it's not going to happen, but that his media edge and the kind of bravado that his campaign and followers have had seems to have wane. And that is the first time in eight years that I have noticed that. Oh, he is currently very clearly on the defense right now after he and his most senior level staffers have been planning for a potential landslide or just being constantly on the

offense, particularly during these last crucial three months. But they know they are currently playing defense. Maybe that changes in the next days or weeks or whatever. but right now they are on a defensive footing, which is absolutely 180 from where they were expecting to be at this time. And you can tell that whether they like to admit it publicly or not, they are sweating. And that's not nothing. Yeah. Well, Swin, we will leave it there today, but absolutely appreciate you and your reporting and hope to have you back again before Election Day. Enjoy the rest of the hellscape. We will.

For the past couple of years, I've had Andrew Lawrence, It Matters for America's Deputy Director of Rapid Response on the show in December to talk about the dumbest conservative quote-unquote controversies of that year. So I thought, who better to talk to now about the new Democratic strategy of going after the MAGA right as weird? Andrew, thanks so much for coming on. Yeah, of course, it. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me. So I saw a thing that you did on Sirius XM Radio where you talked about how right-wing media, Fox News, et cetera, is really responsible for so much of the weirdness that we see on the right. And I thought instantly, I was like, yeah, well, that's 100% true.

So let's talk about that a little bit. And the Democratic attacks, as weird, which I guess Tim Walsh was really the first one to do this, they sort of echo what a bunch of us, and I will include you in this, have been talking about for years on social media and elsewhere, which is just how weird these people are and how. weird, you know, the right-wing media sphere is. Sure. Yeah.

And, you know, I think that the weirdness of the right-wing media sphere, the bubble that they've created for themselves, has created its effect where Republican politicians are now trying to sort of outweird themselves. I mean, you have to understand, like, this manga movement, they are booting people out of the Republican Party through primaries. And if you are a Republican politician and you want to win your primary, you have to go on on Jesse Waters.

You have to go on Charlie Kirk. You have to go on Steve Bannon's podcast. And in order to get on those podcasts, you have to say some really weird, I'll end this stuff. You have to say that the election was stolen. You have to say the Democrats are trying to steal gas those. You have to be mad about the barbing movie and about Sesame Street and Almo and all these things that once you get outside of the right wing bubble,

it looks really weird to people who aren't consuming this stuff, day every day. And so there's this, this catch 22. Then they've really painted themselves into a quarter here because if you're not going on those shows, somebody is going to say something weird enough to get on those shows. Your primary opponent is going to be on those shows. But then at that point, you're hurting yourself in the general election. And it's just, it's this snake eating its own tail that I've been seen. And it's really fascinating to see, I think. No, it's just such a good point. And when J.B. Vance, when the whole, you know, the childless cat lady thing started cropping up, instantly I was like, this is going to backfire. Like, people are not going to like this.

And my sort of concurrent thought was, this is such a Fox News thing. Yeah, 100%. The comments that were coming out, the first that it was on Tucker Carl's. And this was years ago, you know, two, three, four years ago. But it was confined inside that conservative media bubble. You know, the people that would think that stuff is weird. We're watching Tucker Carlson at the time because it's a weird. show, you know, and they have other stuff going on. But as soon as it breaks down to that bubble, I mean, this attack on people without children is a very mainstream thought in Republican and

conservative and far right politics. But once it breaks outside of that bubble, you know, and as you see it, I mean, I think this goes back to what we just said, you know, Tucker Carlson's endorsement and friendship with JD Vamp is a gigantic reason why he just got that vice presidential nomination. Right. But in getting that vice presidential nomination, now, you you've got somebody on the ticket who has sent this childless cat ladies like shouldn't get to vote. They have painted themselves in the corner and I don't really see any way that they can get themselves out of it. That's a really interesting point. I think you're right. I don't see how they get themselves out of it. You go from like Tucker Carlson on Fox News. I don't even remember what the whole thing was,

but there was something about tanning your testicles. Yeah, testicle tanning. Yeah. And that was, he did an entire one hour special. It was supposed to be about health, you know. And a giant thing was about testicle tanning. I think another famous example of Tucker being weird is when he got very angry that Eminem made one of their candy mascots a little bit less sexy. You know, they put her in tennis shoes instead of high heels and he got very mad. And like, that's really good for getting eyeballs on a TV screen. And it's really good for going viral and on TV, whether somebody's laughing with you or at you, it doesn't really matter. But if you're a politician, if you're a political party, trying to win votes, win over independent voters, win over soccer moms, you know, then like,

you know, laughing at you or winning, like it does matter. You don't want people laughing at you. And there's just a difference between attracting viewers to a conservative news station and trying to win over voters. And I think that's the real issue with the Republican Party right now. Yeah, you know, some of the stuff we're seeing now related to race and Kamala Harris is, in addition to just being straight up racist, it's weird. The whole Trump line of attack that he used, at the National Association of Black Journalist thing, where he, like, pretended not to understand that someone could be of mixed racial dissent

or mixed ethnicity. Like, to me, that shit is also just weird, and especially, like, so much of America now is like that. And I say to myself, these guys are doing this, and I hope it's going to backfire because I think most people don't walk around all day saying to themselves, you know, well, she's both South Asian and Black,

That's weird? And then they think they're supposed, no, that's not weird. It's weird to point that out. Right. And like, I think most of the public understands that biracial people exist. But, like, going back to the tie-in to conservative media, you know, the days after, the couple of days after that interview, they were all about it. You know, they're out there.

You've got more Lumer on Twitter pushing out Kamala Harris's birth certificate. And you have Fox News and the Five and Jesse Waters of the Moore Ingram. They're all, like, trying to call her a phony, you know, because of this, this attack that Trump is launching out there. And the Republican Party, the one in 2016, God bless them, they've lost every single election. Elections that were winnable that they could have ensured of won. And this is why it's because of this weirdness. And they just can't get past it. They just can't get past it. And without then standing up to conservative media and saying, like, you need to stop doing things just for ratings, which is never going to happen. Like, I just don't

see how this is. This is maybe a lighter example. But Laura Ingram did a thing. And she went, off on Kamala Harris for being a hugger? Right. Yes, just for hugging people. And she showed clips of them. And one of them was at like a rally. One was at a sorority convention. And one was she hugged Bill and Hillary Clinton at the eulogy for long-time Democratic Representative Sheila Jackson Lee.

Like you're making fun of someone for hugging at a eulogy? Right. You know, and if you're a Fox News viewer and you're sitting there and you already hate Kamala Harris, Democrat and all of that, you're sitting there. You're sitting there watching it and you're just watching it. It looks normal. It's fine. Anybody out of that bubble who is not consuming this stuff 24-7 looks at that and they're

like, what is wrong with you people? Like, stop, just stop, stop doing this, please, but they can't. Like, because it's all they know. I think this goes back to the Tea Party and the way that they went after Barack Obama and the success that they saw. And I think they just got addicted to this type of vitriol, this culture war nonsense because it's just, it's nonstop and it's all that they have right now. Yeah, for sure.

And listening to you when you were talking about how all of this was sort of birthed in the conservative media bubble got me thinking about maybe the beginning of this was, and tell me if you disagree, was Glenn Beck on Fox News? Oh, I agree 100%. I always trace this back to birtherism. You know, I think that if the Republican Party back in 2009, 2010 would have just excommunicated the birthers and just said none of this, it's non-of-this. We could have avoided all this. We could have avoided all the Trump years and all of that. But they saw the way that their base. reacted. They saw how furious it many people. They saw the ratings for Fox News go up. The conservative podcast started getting more subscribers. And it just kind of builds on on itself. And then at that point, you really have to kind of out crazy the next podcaster, because if you're not saying it, somebody else will. And your viewers will go there. We saw that with the Fox News Dominion Law. So where they all recognized that what they were saying was wrong and not true. But they also recognize that if they don't say the words that they're that their viewers and listeners want to

hear here, they're going to find another outlet that does. And this conservative media complex, it has had great benefits to the Republican Party, but I really think that it's kind of carrying it apart from the inside of this point. Yeah, absolutely. And I was looking at Jesse Waters, who longtime listeners to the show know that I repeatedly refer to as the dumbest person in cable news. I want to read a quote that he said about Kamala Harris. He said, she likes wine. She likes food. She likes to dance. She's just not at the level of what you would think would be a president.

I see this and I'm like, so you're saying she's a normal person who likes wine, food, and likes to dance. And you're trying to portray that as a bad thing. And if you're doing that, how do you not realize how weird that is? Right. Yeah, exactly. And then, but you know what? If you want to get on Jesse Waters show now, if you're a Republican politician, you've got to say that type of stuff.

You have to be upset that she's hugging too many people. But, you know, the people that the lower information voters, the independent voters, they just aren't Fox News viewers. And they are going to be turned off by this. And again, you know, I'll point the 2018, 2020 and 2020, the election results to prove to this point. I think that this is really hurting them. And, you know, like, I even go all the way back to Christina O'Donnell, if you remember her, the I'm not a witch woman. Yeah, absolutely. In Connecticut. And there was a point in time that Republicans would try to distance those. It's all true that's crazy. But you see Marjorie Taylor Green in positions of power now, you know, with plum committee

assignments and Lauren Bowler going on Fox News. I mean, these are the faces the Republican Party now as well. And I think that's why this weird attack from Democrats has had such staying power because it is weird. Like it just, like you said, the hugging, the eating, the catasinger for eating and drinking wine. It's very bizarre and strange. I agree with all of that. But also there is something in the sort of, let's call it an.

authoritarian mentality that sort of above all else cannot handle being mocked. And you see this all the time and you see it, even with Trump who, you know, you can argue about whether or not he's funny, he occasionally evinces a sense of humor, but there's never self-deprecation. This goes along with that because what you're really doing is, you know, when you're calling them weird, you're just straight up mocking them. They constitutionally cannot handle that. Yeah. And I think that, you know, I saw this with Tucker Carlson when he was at Fox News a lot in that, like, a lot of his power came from being seen as like a little bit dangerous, a little bit edgy. And the feeling that the viewers got through that, you know, by being a little bit dangerous, a little bit out there,

you know, maybe not necessarily in the mainstream. And this weird attack, it just, it cuts them down, you know. And while the Republican Party and Project 20 to 25 and all the plans that they have are incredibly dangerous, it also is very weird. And when you cut them down and you sort of take away that power, you take away that danger, that edginess away from them, I think you take away a lot of the appeal from the Republican Party as well. Yeah, absolutely. And when you point out, I think also that so much of their beliefs, whether it's the

transphobia, the homophobia, the seemingly wanting to be the genital police, the wanting to track women's periods, all that stuff. In addition to being just reprehensible and, you know, straight up evil, it is all deeply deeply weird. It is. You know, I think about immigration a lot. And, you know, if you look at the polling for immigration, the majority of Americans want the southern border, quote unquote, close down, you know, and that is a Republican issue that they do and they win on. But I also think that their message on this about a deportation force, about rounding people up, you know, about concentration camps and stuff like that. Like, I think when people dig into the weeds of what the policy actually is, they see it for what it is,

which is authoritarian and weirdness. You know, I think. think you mentioned trans people as well. And, you know, I think most people, you know, my personal views aside, I think that most people have, you know, questions about sports, trans people in sports and all of that, which is, again, you know, the Republican position. But when you start talking about having a faceless government bureaucrat, look at your child's genitalia before they can play sports, like that is weird. They take it to the next level. And they have to kind of outweird themselves in order to get up there. And in order to win elections, and it just builds on itself exponentially.

They have to just keep out doing each other, and it really is hurting them, I think. Yeah, and I think we're seeing a little bit of that now with what's going on at the Olympics with the Maine Khalif, the Algerian boxer, where it's not enough for them that the IOC has decided she, I mean, she's not even trans. She's a, she's a cis woman who has lived her whole life as female, but they have appointed themselves as sort of these police of who gets to be a woman. And like you said, even though there does seem to be, as you said also, my personal beliefs aside, yes, there are people who have concerns about sports. I'll just say concerns I think are generally unwarranted.

But this isn't even that. This is just a woman who they've decided maybe, I don't know, I guess looks a little too masculine for them. She is exactly what they want. They want people to play in of sport under the gender that they were assigned at birth. And that is exactly what this is. And rather than recognize that, like, they're just straight up lying. I mean, I'm watching on Fox News, a news station. They haven't issued any corrections or anything. And they're calling her and g-geendering her and saying that she's really a man and genetically a man and stuff like that when she's exactly what they want. And that's what makes it so frustrating. But I also think that amidst this entire attack from Democrats about weirdness and how Republicans are weird and all of that,

Their response has been to, you know, question Kamala Harris' Heritage and to go off about genitalia in the Olympics. Like that, that is really weird. And whether or not, like, you know, I got to think that lower information voters, independent voters, people that are just so busy, they're just walking by their TV and they're hearing this or they're seeing it on Facebook. I've got to think that they're just going to think this stuff is weird. Yeah.

I think we tend to forget, particularly those of us who work in media, whatever, that, yes, Fox News is by far the most popular cable news network, but it is watched by such a tiny fraction of this country. They're most watched shows. You're looking at like two and a half, three million people, which is about one percent of the population. Right, which, again, is, you know, great ratings for a cable news show and for a cable news channel.

But in terms of they've sort of been able to pull this thing off for a lot of years as they are the voice of quote unquote real America. And I think a lot of this, what we're now seeing from, you know, the institutional Democrats is sort of pushing back on that. And I think the weird thing is part of that. And it's like, no, you don't represent real America. You people are freaks and not in the good way. And more people need to know about this. 100%. I have been encouraged the last couple of years. I've seen Democrat politicians going after her conservative media, Fox News. I'm noticing Kamala's campaign trying to tie some of the most extreme members of conservative media to Donald Trump, calling them Trump allies.

and putting out their most extreme statements, which I'm incredibly encouraged by because these people are generally political consultants for the Republican Party. And so it really is important to see and hear the crazy things that they're saying when they have the nominees' ear on politics, you know, that type of thing. But it's such a mess. And I think the real issue here is that there's a difference between getting viewers on your cable news show, you know, 1% of the population, like you said, was just trying to win over. 20, 30, 40 million voters that you need to win elections. It's a different message. It's different stuff, but somewhere along the line, the Republican Party and Fox News and conservative media,

all kind of mesh to where they're saying the exact same thing to all the exact same voters. And it just doesn't work outside of the bubble the way it does the talk. No, I think that's absolutely right. And there's a difference to me between Good Weird and what I'll call Fox News weird. And I think that's important. Like, when you're calling them weird, look, a lot of marginalized people have been called weird, particularly right now, trans people and gay people, are called weird by these people. But to me, there's such a big difference there. And it almost like, you know, on a personal level, it's like the arc of Greg Gutfeld's career.

Like he sort of went from good weird to now he's just Fox News weird. 100%. Yeah. You know, there is a difference between somebody that wears a two to the grocery store. versus somebody who's weird because they want to monitor the menstrual cycles of women or not let pregnant women cross day line, you know? I think that's that's why that's has such staying power is because people understand that. You know, I think people understand when Democrats are calling Republicans weird,

they mean like they're fruits. Like these people are weird freaks that like want total control. They want to look at children's janitals before they can play sports, you know, that type of thing. Versus, you know, yeah, my Twitter mentioned I'm getting right-winger just applying with pictures of trans people. And it's like, all on the scene is a person minding their own businesses is wearing the clothes that they want to wear, you know? They chose what they wanted to wear.

Like, yeah, maybe that's a little keep Austin weird, pineapple on pizza kind of weird. But it's not like the dangerous weird. And so I think that's really why this has staying power. I think it's why it's been effective. I think it's why the independent low information voters are kind of going this way now. Yeah, could not agree more. Andrew, thanks so much for being on. It's always a pleasure to talk to you.

And hopefully we'll talk again in a few months for our annual year-end wrap-up. in stupid controversies. Absolutely. I actually, I've been thinking about that and putting them together already. Oh, excellent. It's always fun. I love doing this show.

It's always fun, Andy. Andy Levy. Daniel Ludi. How are you kicking off our week back from vacation with your fuck that guy? Oh, most people probably know about this already. But if they don't, there's a whole thing at the Olympics with a boxer from Algiers.

Yes. named Eman Kellef. And the whole thing is so stupid, but I think it needs to be brought up. She is a woman. She is a cis woman. And we have been now bombarded for like, I don't know, four or five straight days with a bunch of lunatics on the right. Again, these are the weirdos who are just obsessed with stuff like this. And this is people like J.K. Rowling. This is, unfortunately, Martina Navratilova, who has fully bought into the anti- I trans stuff. It's Donald Trump. It's Elon Musk. And it goes all the way down on the right wing ecosphere. And they are insisting that she is a man and that it is unfair for her to be boxing.

Their quote unquote evidence for this is that she was disqualified from the 2023 world championships by the International Boxing Association. The International Boxing Association has been since then suspended by the International Olympic Committee for corruption. And the IBA was run or is run by a Russian guy named Umar Kremlin, who suddenly, after Iman Kellef, defeated a Russian boxer, claimed that she needed to be disqualified because she had, he claims, X, Y chromosomes. None of those tests, by the way, have ever been revealed. I don't want to go too deep on this, but because my main point here is it shows the absolute,

just the hatred. and the awfulness of these people on the right who, I mean, this poor woman who, by the way, has, it's not like she's an undefeated boxer. I think her record was like 37 and 9 coming in to the Olympics. She's pretty decorated. Yeah. I mean, she's good. And she's in the medal round, but she's not unbeatable.

And they're making it sound that they are portraying her as some sort of, in the way they do. Instead of a woman, they've turned her into some sort of creature, some sort of monster. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And this, by the way, would be equally bad if she were trans, which she's not. She's cis. But it ultimately doesn't even matter. And it clearly doesn't matter to them.

They claim all this stuff is about keeping cis women safe from trans women. But here you have a cis woman. This is a person who was born a girl, raised as a girl, is now a woman. And they're acting like none of that matters. It is so off-putting. And to use the word, it's just. weird. It's this policing of gender norms and stuff like that. It's all bizarre and it's all hateful. And I just wanted to give a big fuck that guy to all the people engaging in it.

Yeah. They're disgusting. They're transphobic. And what is what is worse is that moments are being stolen from people. This was supposed to be a major moment for her and her family. And instead, her father had to defend her in an interview. How disgusting is that? You know, people work their entire lives to get to this moment, to be at the pinnacle of their careers and their success and their athleticism and then to turn it into a political bullshit like scrap fight around nothing because of appearance is just disgusting. So yeah, fuck those guys. Yeah. And I just want to point out, like, she's from Algeria. Like, you don't really think of woke and Algeria in the same breath. Props not. So they like, they think they're fighting some kind of culture war and it's like,

Dude, you know, boy, did you pick the wrong example for that. Anyway, Danielle, close us out. Who is your fuck that guy for this glorious return from vacation? Well, she's new to the list. And we always have a lot of old timers that are cemented into her fuck that guy. But Usha Vance is the wife of J.D. Vance. And what I want to say about these Republican women is that every time a new person comes on to the scene. There's always these memes that go around like, poor Melania, save Melania,

save Usha. They don't know what they're doing. They're just there. You know, they just married these guys. So Usha Vance does not need to be saved. Yeah. And if she did, it sure as hell wouldn't be coming from her husband, who all but apologized for the fact that she was not white when he did an interview with Laura Ingram. But nonetheless, she sat down for her first one-on-one interview with Ainsley Earhart from Fox and Friends. It was a pre-recorded interview. And we all now have heard J.D. Vance on multiple recordings, video, audio, talking about his obsession with childless people in such degrading, demeaning, and yes, very weird ways. And when asked about his comments, Ushavans, girl, oh, God, the embarrassment.

This is what she has said. Quote, I took a moment to look and actually see what he had said and try to understand what the context was and all that, which is something that I really wish people would do a little bit more often and spend less time focusing on, quote, the three-word phase. She goes on to say that he was really saying is that it can be really hard to be apparent in this country and sometimes our policies are designed in a way that make it even harder. She said that not being able to have children is, quote, challenging and never, ever anything anyone would want to mock or make fun of.

Yeah, that was my response. Mm-hmm. And then she went on to talk about how difficult it is for people to have children, blah, blah. When you ever have to say that you have to really listen hard. and look for the context of what someone was saying, that means that what they're saying was convoluted and full of shit. And what she was trying to do was to be the best janitor that she can behind her husband and clean up his fucking mess, which is he doesn't like women and he doesn't like childless

women. And what he has said is not like, oh, it's hard to be a parent in this country. He said, this country is being run by a bunch of childless cat women. That's what he said. And they are miserable in their own lives and they, quote, want to make everyone else miserable to. Where in that do you get the, I took a moment to understand the context? Did you need a moment to understand the context, Andy? Are we missing something?

No. I don't think so. I think that J.D. Vance is pretty much an in-cell. And I think that he would love for a world where women who don't have children are punished, right? and not just punish economically, which is what he is also called for, for people that have no children to pay more taxes, because apparently we're not invested in America in the same way. And so we should be punished for that. It is disgusting. It's despicable. And it is weird. And for her to get on a pre-record interview and tell us like, oh, but that's not what he meant, maybe you should replay the tape again. Because that is exactly what he said, and that's who you married. And by the way, he's not proud of you. Okay? He's proud that you're a mother kind of the way that you're proud somebody is a helper. But when having to explain away your brownness, that's what he spent a lot of his time doing. So why you would go out there and tap dance for him?

No idea. But I digress. So for that reason, Ushah Vance, welcome to what I'm sure will not be your last time in our lovely hall of fuck that guy. Yeah, I don't have much to add to this except that I guess as a childless cat gentleman, I do feel personally. attacked. And you should. So fuck those guys. Hope you enjoy 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. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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