The Daily Beast Podcast - Mary Trump: What Really Shocked Me About My Family & the KKK

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

Mary Trump joins The New Abnormal with a giant barrel of tea to spill about her family. Her uncle Donald? “He was protected at every turn from his incompetence, from his total inability to handle money. The media, the banks kept propping him up and protecting him and letting him fail up consistently and constantly—until the Republican party started doing the same thing.” Her grandfather Fred, the family patriarch who got arrested by a Ku Klux Klan rally? “Honestly, that story surprised me. Not because my grandfather wasn’t antisemitic, he was, but because he would spend time doing something other than making money. I'm totally serious. Like he went to a Klan rally with what free time? He's perfectly happy being racist and anti-semitic in his own house and his place of work.” And on the pathologies that drove them all, Mary dives deep. “Just like being kind was weak, or being wrong was weak, so is needing to sleep like a normal human being. I think that's why Donald doesn't sleep, because daddy wouldn't approve. So that's maybe why he drinks 12 diet Cokes a day and is up until three in the morning tweeting,” the Too Much and Never Enough author tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson. Then! The Nation’s Elie Mystal joins Rick and Molly to discuss the passing of John Lewis—and the rise of a new generation of activists. Plus! Can Allen West turn Texas blue? Is Rick part of Antifa? And is there anything—anything—Bill Barr hates more than graffiti? Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit and editor-at-large at the Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So, Rick, I have a question for you. Are you part of Antifa?

I'm clearly part of Antifa because I don't like extra legal, extrajudicial people snatching folks off the streets of any city and not having a warrant or probable cause or actually the power to actually arrest them understate and local laws. You know, call me crazy, but Bill Barr, Interior Minister Bill Barr's shock troops. We're told now that DHS acting temporary provisional short term maybe came from a temp agency secretary Chad Wolf. They'll be spreading across the country now. Oh, really? That's kind of terrifying.

Well, it is kind of terrifying. And I'm fascinated by the fact that Trump conservatism has decided that the hell they want to die on is defending secret police. It's truly amazing. So, yeah, the message of the day for the Trump campaign, and I kid you not when I tell you, it came from the Trump campaign. campaign, all the little fox, the Sturmbart crew, O.A.N. and all the rest of them, that Lincoln Project is Antifa. Rick Wilson is Antifa. Well, you know what? I admit it. I like fascists to end up the old-fashioned way. Oh, Jesus. Yeah, I don't think that's going in there. Since the censorship at Big Beast won't let me say what I really mean about fascists, I will simply

say they need to end up in a variety of severe legally constituted proceedings that end with appropriate punishment for their horrible actions against humanity. But no, it's got really ugly there this weekend. So basically, what's happened is that Bill Barr has dispatched this police force. Nobody knows what it is. It's basically what they did in D.C. during the protests. Right. And essentially, as of the interior minister, what he has done is said, I don't like graffiti and fireworks.

They're very upset about the graffiti. The graffiti really upsets them. graffiti and fireworks. And so we're going to dispatch people who do not have badges on, who do not have name tags on, who do not have unit identifying patches on their, on their tactical Tommy uniforms. And they're going to go out and they're going to engage in riot control, which this weekend also ended up with them beating and breaking the hand of a Naval Academy, former U.S. Navy veteran who walked out and asked them to please remember their constitutional oath. And so they beat the shit out of the guy, broke his hand, sprayed him with pepper spray in the face at point

blank. And this morning, this became a part of the Trump campaign world's, you know, masturbatory police state fantasy that they really, really, really can't wait for the libtarred fascist Antifa to be rounded up by Bill Barr's troops. It's... I'm always interested in the idea that they've decided that the pandemic, which is killing thousands of Americans every day, is not their jurisdiction, but jailing people. for graffiti is. This is a sign of the Trump campaign being out of airspeed, altitude, and ideas, as we say in aviation. But their campaign is struggling right now to make this election about something other than 145,000

dead Americans and something other than the fact that Donald Trump's, you know, economic leadership. You know, last month, 32% of Americans could not pay their rent or mortgage. Yeah, we have 11% unemployment. Right. And right now, Mitch McConnell is saying, my God, if you. If we give them another $600 a month, they might lay on their couches and watch Netflix all day, where the country is about to go down the goddamn economic tilt-a-whirl of doom. Yeah.

It's just fascinating. There's no testing. There's no tracing. There's no federal government for any of that. But there is federal government to go to Portland who does not want them, right? But the Trump administration has decided that this is the only way to control the 11 people there who are graffiti. You go back through history and you find these people who were the last, who were the deadenders, you know, who were the last guys to protect, you know, Marcos in the Philippines, or Mussolini.

Well, or Musilini or the Chochescu's. Pinochet. But these guys that are out in the streets, the people that sent them there, they will be before Congress. And it won't be President Trump protecting them. These guys that are in the streets who are engaging in this behavior that they know violates the law and their oath of office and their oath to the Constitution because a lot of them are federal employees, they're not going to get away with this, without accountability at the end of the day. They will be revealed who they are, the people ordering this and running this,

it will come forward. And while Attorney General and Interior Minister Bill Barr may be at the head of this particularly shitty operation, the people down the chain are going to be held accountable too. They will face legal scrutiny when this is done. Well, I don't hate that. Big exciting news as people continue to die. Yes.

The President of the United States has decided... What is he decided on? Drum roll. He's going to bring back the crowd freezer to end all crowd pleaser. Sarah Huckabee Sanders? The delt killer, the melodious voice of young Sarah Huckabee serenating us. The daily briefings are coming back.

What, what? That's amazing. Because the summer was feeling a little bit slow. So, so let's remember President Dahlhan's when he started the daily briefings, his approval number on COVID was a net positive. Right. Now, it is a. gigantic 27 or 29 point deficit in the ABC poll of handling of COVID.

And this is what a fucking junkie this guy is. Well, he knows he can't do rallies. He can't do the rallies. He can't go out and he can't go out and do the rallies. Eventually golfing with Lindsey Graham gets dull. Ball goes into the raft of Trump points. Fetch. And Lindsay never even resists it.

Okay. But that's amazing. I can't wait. You know why? Because I think the president. conferences, the reason he stopped doing them was it eventually reached the point where even his own people, even the, even the dead enders was like, okay, listen, sir, we love you, sir, and we have tears in our eyes, sir, but the libtard shill, rhino, cuck media, they're distorting your

beautiful message every day. We have to stop. And eventually he got the message that they weren't working for him, but this is how much of a junkie he is for the camera. Right. I mean, the most dangerous place in the universe is between a live TV camera and Donald Trump, and that's why he is going to come back and start him up again. That's amazing. I love it. We get to mock him so much. It's so much more mockery material. You may have heard of Mary Trump. She's the niece of the President of the United States. She's the author of the record-breaking bestselling book Too Much and Never Enough. And we're delighted to have her here today to talk with us. Also joining us will be

Lachlan Cartwright of The Daily Beast. All right, so how do you grow up in a family like that and end up a liberal, smart, normal person. It's pretty simple, actually. The fact that I grew up in Jamaica, Queens, is one of the two best things that ever happened to me. The second best thing has nothing to do with your question. But growing up in Jamaica, where, you know, I think when I was a kid, it was like 70% black and the rest of the white,

and it was segregated by Highland Avenue, but I took the subway to school. So all the shop, or not all of them, but most of their shops were by black people and most of the people working and them were black. And it was just normal. And then I'd go to the house and I'd hear what they were saying. And I went to school in Forest Hills and I'd hear what my friends' parents were saying.

Like my friends were barely allowed to come to Jamaica because of the blacks but said in a whisper. So it was that simple. It was experience. Like all the people in my life who've hurt me are white. I've never understood the generalization. I never understood the demonization. I'm so happy and grateful that I grew up in Jamaica because it's what grounded me. This entire series of events, can you just briefly give us the 30,000 foot view of the gigantic fucking fraud that is the Trump actions that they took toward you and the way that the reason this whole challenge to them has emerged because of the way they treated you?

Can you just give us like the 30,000 foot view of the fraud they tried to commit on you? It started actually when my dad died. Well, it probably started before that. But because my grandfather and Donald were my dad's executors, apparently, certain things got undervalued then so they could save in taxes. And there's no way for me to know if I benefited from that or not, although I have my suspicions. In the 90s, probably the engine driving the fraud was the Shell Corporation of all county.

And it was just this absolutely breathtaking piece of, I'm sorry, I lost my word, in its simplicity in some ways and in its brazenness. They create this fake company. They start pretending that it's a management company and they use it to buy supplies that they then sell to my grandfather's company at a huge markup and then keep the cash. So this middleman thing and it was, I don't think we can underestimate just how much money was involved in that. So by siphoning off the value of all of my grandfather's properties, some of which I had to share it, they devalued everything my brother and I owned, which is exactly what you want your aunts and uncles to do after your dad dies.

I mean, obviously. So I guess that's what being a trustee in the Trump family means. When I read the book, I noticed the arc of Fred throughout your whole family. This sort of supervillain origin story of Donald Trump obviously runs through Fred. It's clear to me at least that he's emulating Fred in the whole PR trickery thing and all of his like showmanship and all this bullshit. But how much of Fred do you see in his incompetence of handling things like Corona and the delusions he has about the world and everything else? Yeah, well, honestly, that's one of our problems is that Donald actually isn't anything, Fred, in some ways.

My grandfather was quite competent. He ran a very successful business. I mean, granted, he was shady and unethical. But, you know, I mean, he was much better at those things that Donald is. So I think that my grandfather wouldn't have cared about. the people, but he would have probably handled the connecting the dots and making sure things were in place that would help solve the problem. So where Donald is like my grandfather and actually exceeded my grandfather was in the manipulation of the media and the hyperbolic self-regard. So, and then, you know, that's why my grandfather found him useful. Your phrase, you just used the hyperbolic self-regard. It's just so beautiful because, again,

in reading through it, it's like obvious that Fred had a purpose. perfectly high sense of his own self-worth, but may have been immoral, but he was successful. I wonder, when you described how Fred was in decline and Donald's contempt for him rose, was there like an inflection point Donald could have shaken it all off at that point, or was it too late by that? I think it's been too late for a very, very long time. I would say that the point of no return was, I mean, if not earlier, but certainly when he met Roy Cohn. Touch Roy Cohn, and it's an evil will follow you for all of your days. That's the second volume of your book. Everything Roy Cohn dies.

Yeah, right. So one of the big things that made a lot of news about the book was you said that you had heard him say, and you said this in other interviews, that you heard very direct and racist and anti-Semitic talk from the family, Donald included. Would it shock people, the degree to which that he has done that? If it's shocking people, they're really not paying attention. I'm beginning to understand, like, how these things work. It starts with the sensational stuff. And if we can get past that, then people are going to dive in.

deeper, which is what you guys are doing. But between the SAT thing and the racist thing, that seems so clear to me. And I said this the other day, you know, what really, what should concern us is that he's acting racist, not what he said, what he says in private conversation. It's the actual racism that's up front and center right now that we should be really paying attention to. Exactly. In the acknowledgments of the book, Mary, you thank your aunt, Marianne, to quote all your enlightening information. You think her even though you and your brother sued her and Donald and Robert in 2000, after being stiffed over your inheritance.

What's your view of your art now? Family is, as you all know, a very complicated thing. And when Marianne sort of offered an olive branch after my cousin of Bonca's wedding, I don't even know why I was invited to that wedding. I hadn't spoken to any of them since, I think the last time I'd seen them was during their depositions. Absolutely no idea why I was invited.

It amounted to absolutely nothing with Donald Rock. Robert and Elizabeth, but Marianne felt it was very important that we talk about the elephant in the room, and I assume she meant the lawsuit. So we met and we started the slow process of talking it out, and I realized very early on that she meant make it clear to us that we were horrible for doing what we did and causing the debacle, which was her term of art. And it was really interesting because she acted as if the lawsuit had preceded the disinherence. That's very Trumpy, though, isn't it?

So them, yeah. We can't say Trumpy, though, because that was my cat. I'm sorry. Well, and also, you are a Trump. I mean, I keep forgetting it's like, I think of you as like, there must be other normal. She's smart, though, that aunt. Yeah, yeah. And I'm also not suggesting I'm normal either, but definitely wired differently.

Marion's smart. She's actually quite funny. But she's like in certain regards, a pale imitation of Donald. Like she tries mightily to do the self-aggrandizement thing, but it's always with a tinge of self-consciousness and insecurity. See, that's totally off-brand for nine. Right. There's never any self-consciousness. Exactly, which is what makes it so uncomfortable.

Did she explain to you why she retired as a federal court judge last year? It was quite curious timing because that retirement ended a court inquiry into her role in the family tax judges. That's why she retired because if she did retire, the inquiry would stop because it only an inquiry into an active judge, and she would retain her pension, which she really needed. That was sarcasm. I was going to say, I was about to follow up on that and be like, wait, Ivanka and Jr., they can't possibly be the future of the Republican Party. Well, this Republican Party.

Molly, Molly, Molly and Mary. Let me step in as the Republican whisperer here. Not only can they be, but I believe that the ticket of Tucker Carlson as VP and Don Jr. as president will almost certainly appear on the horizon in 2024. Don't say stuff like that. At that point, we should enjoy it because it's going to be more comical than terrifying. How much interaction did you ever have with Jared?

The boy wonder. None. I didn't even see them at their wedding because there were like a million people there. And it was their wedding. It's not really the time to say, hi, I haven't seen you in eight years because I was this inherited

and we sued everybody. It didn't feel comfortable. And at the White House, neither one of them approached me. And I felt like I was the guest in a very awkward situation. So I wasn't approaching anybody. So, yeah, that never happened. So it's... You know, as a professional in the mental health field,

you really missed the opportunity to interview America's first vice presidential Android American. I thought that was Mark Zuckerberg. Look, I think they both came off the same flaw in assembly line. You talk about the idea of, like, Trump being actually institutionalized. in the White House, which I think is so interesting. Can you just talk a little bit more about that? Because a lot of the book is this insights into his psychological life and the world that

created him. It just makes sense to me because, you know, it starts in the house. And when Donald finally was chosen to be the era parent when he was probably still in high school, he was protected at every turn by my grandfather from his incompetent, from his total inability to handle money. And he never had to fend for himself. He never had to admit when he was wrong. And then he was in my grandfather's company.

And then the Trump organization was set up, which I think it was like a cynicure, honestly. And then it wasn't just my grandfather was all these other entities coming forward, the media, the banks, to keep propping him up and protecting him and letting him fail up consistently and constantly until the Republican Party started doing the same

thing. And I imagine the White House to be the kind of place where, you know, the person in his position has every need attended to, everyone attended to, 24 hours a day, and is never told no. I mean, good presidents, well, I don't consider him the president, but like, you know, I'm sure Barack Obama or even George W. Bush would maybe seek it out sometimes, you know, give me an honest critique of this. Donald would never do that. And if somebody did question him, that person would be fired and humiliated. So he doesn't have to do anything. I can't think of any way to be more institutionalized except to be on a psych ward. It's not out of the question. No, it's not. And in fact, honestly, it would be better for him and it would be better for us. Knowing the way the White House works,

I think your analysis is very on point because it is a controlled environment. It is a place where the ease of traveling and moving around is, there's a lot of friction to him causing more trouble than he would probably be inclined to cause otherwise. And even though the staff at the White House as of now are the bunch of most obsequious lick spittles to ever hold office there, even they can't let the monster run around all the time. Right. I didn't know there was a list below the Z list, but here we are. When I was writing the book, I was in thinking about this issue, I was trying to imagine Donald, okay, in Astoria Queens, living in a studio apartment, having to go out and get a job and support. I'm serious. Like, how?

would that work? No other company would not have fired him. Was that like a triple negative that I just pulled there? Any company would have fired him for his behavior, except apparently the United States of America. It's not that it's not important. Mary, how I caught up with the fact you were working on a book project was through my reporting a year ago on David Basto

and how he imploded the New York Times tax team in his relentless pursuit of you wanting to ghost write your book, obviously seeing there be a massive payday. And you were a key confidential source of the times at the time, But yet he showed up at your house and announced, he bombarded you with calls and texts. What was that experience? Like, I noticed that he wasn't given a shout out in the credits where Susan Craig and Ross Gutner the other Times reporters were.

No, and I refused to mention his name in conjunction with that article because his behavior afterwards was so unethical and unprofessional. It's kind of mind-blowing. Yeah, Loughlin and I go way back. Although you didn't know who I was until recently, right? That's correct. Yeah, I thought it was either Marianne or Elizabeth up until around Christmas time. Right.

So yeah, I was starting to feel like, you know, my role in life was just to be a confidential anonymous person. It was really just heartening that you were so on that story because nobody else cared. And it was awful because I really had liked David and I thought he was a good guy. And it just felt like when I finally figured out what was going on, I had been set up from day one. I felt like such a rude, you know. It took, it took a while for me to let that go. because he was so persistent and so indifferent to the effect on me, but also completely incapable of seeing what he was doing.

Or maybe he saw it but just didn't care. You know, just completely using me to his own ends and using his agent and stuff like that. It's a very long story for another time, Lachlan. You'll get the exclusive on that one. You know, I like a good exclusive, but David obviously knew that this book was going to sell like hotcakes and it has.

It's set, you know, records and you're on your 14th print run now. which makes you wonder, are you interested in writing more books? I mean, are there other Trump family secrets still to be aired? Oh, yeah. Yeah, because I initially wanted this book to be more about my dad, and it turned out not to be for a lot of reasons. So, yeah, absolutely, and not just about the family. I have a lot of other things.

I actually started out in life wanting to be a novelist, so that would be. I'm sorry. I say this as a recovering novelist, but you certainly could be. I mean, you're really good writer. It really are. So, Mary, let me ask you this question. Where does all the various Trump litigation stand? Is it all, are we done now in terms of them trying to litigate against you? Obviously, their prior restraint didn't work out too well. But are they litigating with you on any other fronts? I don't know. I think perhaps after he tweeted about me, they hired a team of people to sit on him because that was probably ill-advised. I don't think it makes me look bad to say my grandparents couldn't stand me. or that I was a, what was it, seldom seen. Like, you're my uncle.

Anyway, yes, I mean, it's ridiculous. She's my uncle. I grew up with it. Ridiculous. So in terms of forthcoming litigation, I don't know. I mean, there is, I suppose, a possibility that they could sue me for damages. Because I'm not entirely sure if that issue was resolved in the last ruling. But because all I'm really concerned about right now is what's happening right now.

And if they want to sue me, you know, it would, it hopefully won't happen. if they did, I think the chances that they would get damages are exceedingly unlikely. But he engages in a lot of legal terrorism with people over the years. So when you were writing this, did you think about how litigious from that Roy Cone DNA that this guy could have been? Oh, yeah. I knew they were going to sue me. I didn't know what form it would take. Of course, I knew about the settlement agreement. I also knew that it wasn't going to hold up because it's poorly executed. But yeah, this is really important. Until January 20, 20th, 2017, he had never been held accountable or had to compromise or negotiate. And until now,

he'd always had more money, more lawyers, more time to wait out the other person. And then he finds out probably much to his horror, or at least to Charles Harder's horror, that I've got Ted Boutros and Annie Champion and basically... Hello. First of all, yeah, they're extraordinary lawyers, but they're amazing people. It's just been incredible. And, you know, this has been going on for two years, and they've been with me every step of the way. And they're not going anywhere. Well, that's a good squad to have on your side in this thing. I keep going back to Fred because, like I said, I keep thinking Fred is like the super villain origin story of Donald in a lot of ways. One of those persistent things from that one article from the New York, I guess it's the Daily News back of

the 30s, was that Fred had gone to a clan rally and that he had been either a participant in or had been arrested at the clan rally. Somehow I'm going to guess Fred wasn't there fighting for social justice in Black Lives Matter. Are you sure? Did you ever hear anything about the famous incident where your grandfather was arrested at a clan rally? Did you ever hear anything about that in the family? Right. Honestly, that story surprised me.

Not because my grandfather was an anti-Semitic, he was, but because he would spend time doing something other than making money. I'm totally serious. Like, he went to a clan rally? In what free time? Like, he's really perfectly happy being racist and anti-Semitic in his own house and his place at work. I mean, he's really. In some ways, that's just so much worse.

It is, actually. Exactly. Which is, you know, what does that say about us? Right. It's like our capacity for horror has been diminished. But it is so brave. I mean, being the source for that New York Times piece, Were you, like, freaked out by it at all?

No. And so many people have asked me some version of that question. I'd be getting to feel like I should be. No, I mean, I mean, I guess if I, if Trump were my uncle, I would do it. It makes sense with the book. Sometimes, like, these far-right people would be like, well, why did she do it now? And I'm like, because she doesn't want him to get re-elected because he's ruining the world. It's so clear to me the motivation, but I'm just curious, like, you weren't at all.

No. One of the hardest things about 2016 was knowing there was nothing. I could do. You know, I wanted to do something. I didn't have proof of anything. I didn't even remember about the documents. I just would have been just this disinherited, bitter, wanting her 15 minutes, whatever. He said, she said, and that was very hard to take. So when I was finally given an opportunity to do something, and actually, initially it was really amorphous. It was like, okay, earlier 40, 40,000 pages of documents, I don't know what's in them. You don't know what's in them. Hopefully it helps. And then it ends up being this just,

extraordinary piece of investigative journalism, I finally felt like, okay, I've done something, and it became apparent quite quickly it wasn't enough. So that's when the book started shaping up. Right. You've encountered some pretty insane legal threats, Mary. Has it gone any more extreme than that? Have you experienced death threats? No, but not yet. It seems like everybody gets death threats these days and are going to feel left out. Rick gets really bad ones. Yeah, I'm sure. A couple of days ago, I got a text on my personal phone from somebody just saying, how dare I, I own 16 properties. I'm like, really, where are they? And it wasn't any, it was just like something I would see on Twitter, but it was on my phone, which is a drag.

And then somebody actually nail mailed me a card that it was like a hallmark card that on the front of it just said, oh shit, shit, shit. And you open up and it says, you're a piece of shit. Oh, God. And, you know, your dad is. Eric is going to say, Daddy, do you love me now? Was that signed Donald Trump? What if it's from Eric? It was actually from Santa Clara, California or something.

So, and it was, you know, your dad's a loser. You should have been a billionaire. I mean, again, it wasn't a threat, but it came to my house. So that was a little weird. But I have security. I'm glad you have security because there are people in this world in 30 years of politics. I never had a serious death threat from a Democrat. I get them all the time now from people who are like,

I will cut off your head. shit on your grave and blah, blah, blah, and put a monga hat on it. You know, ooh, okay, thanks. Don't, don't ever take that stuff too lightly, though. No, no, I don't. I have a kid. So I'm not in New York right now. So the security's staying with her, wherever she is.

Because, no, these people are insane. So my question for you, and I come from a family with a lot of alcoholism, and I'm sober a long time. So there's been a lot of talk of Trump as, like, a dry drunk, and that there's alcoholism. How do you think alcoholism plays into this? Well, yeah, in my family, there's a strong, genetic component. I think one of my grandmother's brothers died from alcoholism. One of my dad's

first cousins, Malcolm, who was a very, very sweet man, died in his 50s from drinking. So it's very present. But with Donald, I don't know. I mean, I don't think he's a dried drunk necessarily. I think his issue, and this might sound ridiculous. And again, I don't know anything about the drugs in the 80s. Other people can speculate about that. One of Donald's problems is that my grandfather was one of those very rare people who needed like four hours of sleep and had tons of energy to burn for the rest of the 20 hours. So in my family, just like being kind was weak or being wrong was weak. So is needing to sleep like a normal human being? So I'm not kidding. I think that's why Donald doesn't sleep because daddy wouldn't approve. So that's maybe why he drinks 12 Diet Coke

a day and is up until three in the morning tweeting and then up at six o'clock in the morning tweeting, it's so unhealthy, both physically and psychologically, not to get enough sleep. And I don't think he ever has in his life. Your description of his various pathologies in the book, there's so much observable data. You could break apart any of the things you mention about him, learning disability. The guy can barely stand there in front of the teleprompter and grunt out words. There's so many things in that, from your professional perspective, that I think give this book a layer of granularity in context that, I mean, I'm really glad that you put your professional skills to work on some of that analytical assessment of him. Because if they rolled him into a psych ward, I think you would

probably immediately pack him off. Yeah. Well, it's too late for him, unfortunately. And the people who are closest to him clearly don't care. But I was really, I appreciate that because I've been out of the field for a really long time. Obviously, I have the training, and I talk grad school, and I've seen lots of patience, but it's been a while. So, To hear people see value in my analyses and to hear other psychologists and psychoanalyst sort of nodding and saying, yeah, that's spot on. That's pretty cool, I have to say. I feel like in some ways that that's the most important point.

Validation. Yeah. Well, but also it's, to me, it was one of the most important aspects of the book. And if I had gotten that wrong, it would have been a disaster. Right. That's true. I just think that the success of this is just being phenomenal. It really is like a cultural moment, I think, out of all of these books.

And, you know, I think people want you to keep writing them. So get bit... What are we going to do when this is all to calm down, Lachlan? What are we going to have several babies? We'll be rested, tan, ready to get going. Drinking a lot. Exactly. Mary, well, we've got... Just lastly, can I just jump in and just say, in Trump's tweet on Friday about you,

he did highlight your NDA and saying that you violated it. And there is a pattern here where Trump puts people that work for him under NDA. And, you know, it happened to Trump organization. It happens down the White House. Do you think these NDAs should be ruled invalid and non-binding? Because we keep seeing them being used to cover it for fraud in your case. And in fact, in other cases like Karen McDougal and Michael Cohen for criminal activity. Oh my gosh, absolutely.

In fact, I think it should be a requirement if you want to run for president. All of your NDAs get invalidated. I mean, with the judge, when he lifted your gag order, actually ruled con law Trump's contracts. Yep. Yeah. Right. Oh, Mary, thank you so much for today. Thank you so much, Mary.

This is great. Support troublemakers like us who speak truth to power. Believe it or not, your actions speak louder than our words, and our super-egos can get very loud. Visit newabnormal.com to sign up and become a beast inside member. And we're so excited today to have Ellie Mistal. He's the justice correspondent at the nation and one of our favorite Twitter personalities.

Ellie, you just wrote a piece about John Lewis for the nation. Can you talk to us about what John Lewis, meant to you as a journalist. You know, one of the things that really hit me when he passed away, he hasn't sick for a while, so it wasn't a complete shock. But one of the things that really hit me when he passed away was just the dripping

imposter syndrome that I have, and I think a lot of people in my generation have. What we're losing when people like Lewis passed away and C.T. Vivian on the same day and Elijah Cummings not too long ago, we're losing that

greatest black generation that generation that has kind of direct living memory of the fight for civil rights. My mom is almost 70. She was born in 1950 and segregated Mississippi. She met Dr. Martha Luther King at her house when she was a kid because he was around people's houses back then, right? Like, he was, you know, my grandmother was a schoolteacher and he was, you know, making the rounds in Mississippi and checking out the schools, right? So, like, that living connection to the struggle is passing away. And as those elders pass away, it then becomes my generation.

I'm using generation kind of expansively, but like it becomes fundamentally people my age. I'm 42. People in their 50s and 40s are now to be the next elders, to be the next kind of leaders, or at least the keepers of memory. And I have an imposter syndrome feeling of I'm not personally, you know, I don't know that I have the bona fides to be an elder. I certainly don't have the experience to be an elder. I didn't march across no bridge.

I went to Harvard, right? People like my mom, like John Lewis, like Elijah Conno, their sacrifices were so I didn't have to worry about. So I could just, you know, go to Harvard and read Plato. And instead of having to go out there and fight in the streets for my basic dignity, right? So losing that kind of direct connection, that living memory of what it was like and what it takes to fight white supremacy is a whole. It's a whole.

It's a whole in our community, a whole in the black community, whole in our national community that we now have to fill. I mean, generationally speaking, I think what you said was very compelling, because at the same time, we're losing that understanding of what the civil rights movement in the 1960s, 50s and 60s, actually entailed. I think we're losing them at an incredibly inopportune moment where the Trump side of this equation and his followers have very much weaponized the idea that brown people are coming to kill you. They're not like you. They're going to take your suburb away. They're going to take your job, your safety. It's this recapitulation of stuff that was dead and gone in some ways as part of our.

political discourse and he has like opened this fucking time machine on it and it's terrifying. The saddest thing for me with the Trump administration, like my mom lives with me, she has a mother-in-law suite. The saddest thing has been watching the news on Sunday with her and hearing her say things, I thought we defeated these people. I thought things were better. I thought that not only that you wouldn't have to fight, I thought that you might have to fight some of these battles, but I thought that my grandkids would never have to fight these battles. And watching her kind of had to wait outside the library for some white man to go check out a book for her. That's where she started, and for her to be here now with all of that success and victory,

and yet to have to see the retrenchment and the counterattack of white supremacy, and she looks at me, and again, you know, we're watching Joy Reid, we're watching, you know, the news, she knows that, you know, sees me on TV, and she's like, can't you do something? That's easily been the most painful part of this era, but I will say to try to kind of upswing it a bit, my generation has its own problem. We're a smaller generation than the ones that preceded us and the ones that are succeeding us. And the thing that Trump is doing that the Republicans are doing that I don't think they've fully priced in is that they are now forging an entirely new generation of fighters and heroes who are on the come up. And what they have done to these kids, the,

what they have exposed these kids to and what these kids are going to be willing to do to fight them going forward. I don't think people in the Trump administration have fully internalized what they are setting themselves up for in the future. They've activated a generation of people under 30 who look at Trump and Trumpism and Republicanism now. They see the two sides in Portland. They see the two sides in Minneapolis. And they're not going to stand with those people. It is a generational neutron bomb for the Republican Party. And by the way, good. That's good. There's a huge discrepancy in health care for African Americans, life expectancy, infant mortality. African Americans are not getting the same kind of medical care that white people are. And even John Lewis and Elijah Cummings, Elijah Cummings was like 68 or something. So can you talk a little bit about that struggle?

Well, part of it is just that it's hard to live around all these white people, right? Like racism does have a cost to one's health, right? Even beyond the disparage. and medical care that you're bringing up, Molly. There are studies after stories that show that black people are more prone to hypertension, heart disease, issues involving stress. And what is that stress? That stress is trying to live and breathe and work in a predominantly white society. I like to point out that, like, my experience as an African-American, trying to drive my car to the store, is completely different than your experience as a white

American trying to do the same, right? That is a stressful endeavor for me. at times. You know, I like to joke about, you know, you see, when you see these videos of these thrill seekers, you know, white people are just climbing mountains or like driving their bikes off a cliff with a GoPro on there. Man, you never see black people doing that. If we want to thrill, we just have to go out in the street and try to defend our rights in front of a cop. That's a thrill. We're an African-American, right? Sure. I guess one thing also about this generation passing, the confidence you have in a new generation of leaders rising up, I think,

is very well put. I think there is a generation that's going to be sensitized to the fact that the civil rights struggle when it comes down to justice reform, I think, may not be the whole thing, but I think it's kind of the central inflection point right now because people are seeing it every day play on on the streets. And they're just seeing it every damn day. Can you talk to us a little bit about RBJ? Do I have to? Because that's just the fear that I have. The fate of the Republic should not rest on the shoulders of an 87-year-old umpteen time cancer survivor, right? Like, That is not what the framers intended, I believe. So one of the things that we have to learn from the RGB experience is that having so much of our policy

depend on the beggaries of death of very, very old people on the Supreme Court is ludicrous. There's got to be a way to stop that. I have a few ideas that we can talk about. But like that's the number one takeaway has to be this can never happen again. I think we all know that the number one thing Donald Trump's campaign wakes up every morning. and wants is for her to pass. This would turn this election and with their base into a single subject election, it would turn into a Washington, D.C. shit show. They would nominate some Federal Society guy in a hot second. No, the woman, that's scary Amy Barrett. Amy Coney Barrett is... They look at this as,

and I cannot express to you enough how much that my former Republican colleagues are, every time they see her pop up on a Google alert, they rub their hands together like crazy people, like movie villains. They're so desperate to have an open seat to campaign on. They're trying to put, push Clarence Thomas out. Right? Who doesn't want to go. Clarence Thomas loves his job and he's in the majority now. He doesn't want to go anywhere.

But they're trying to push him out to get a seat. But Rick, let's talk about this. Why is that? And when you look at it, what you see is that Republicans have done an excellent job over the past 30 or 40 years of explaining to their voters how important the Supreme Court is. Look, I do not believe. Yeah, why haven't Democrats done that? I do not believe that the average kind of baseline Republican voter is any smarter than your

average baseline Democratic vote, right? But Republicans have made the one-to-one connection to these voters, right? You want your guns? It's about the Supreme Court. You want to stop them queers from kissing? It's about the Supreme Court. You want to stop these women from having rights? It's about the Supreme Court. They don't know what the Supreme Court. The Republican voters don't know what the Supreme Court does or any of these kind of like complicated legal theories of interpretation. They just know that if they want their culture war victories, they have to win at the Supreme Court. Democratic voters don't know that. That is a failure of the Democratic Party. That is a big,

hawking, dripping failure of the Democratic Party for the past 40 years. You sound a lot like Rick Wilson. The thing about Republicans' understanding of the Supreme Court message is very simple. When Republicans have the control, when the fellow society is in charge of appointments, the kinds of judges they appoint are these kind of radical standard bearers for the right-wing movement. When liberals have control, the kind of judges they appoint tend to be fundamentally centrist. We don't come out of the gate with our heroes, with our liberal, kind of liberal crazy people to combat the conservative crazy people. We try to play the center.

One of the analogies that I've made is that if you've got a seesaw and on one side there's an elephant, the way to balance that seesaw is not to put a donkey in the middle of the seesaw. It's just going to slide towards the elephant, right? You need to put your own elephant on the other side of the seesaw. That's how you get balanced. And Democrats don't understand that when it comes to nominating Supreme Court justices, so that if you look at Obama's appointments, three attempted appointments, Kagan is fundamentally a centrist. Merrick Garland fundamentally would have been a centrist. Sonia Sotomayor, who has turned out to be quite liberal, did not play that way when she was trying to get the job. I don't want to say Obama got fooled, but Surya Sotomayor has been way more liberal

on the court than her Second Circuit opinions would have suggested she was going to be. One of the secrets, though, at the Federalist Society, this long march that Leonard Leo is engineered, was not just that they picked out guys that were going to checkbox all the ideological things. They also looked for people who could be influential inside bodies like circuit courts and the Supreme Court. They looked for people who could be operators as well as jurists. And that, you know, whether you love them or hate them, that is brilliant strategic thinking, where the Democrats have never had anything even vaguely comparable to that. Going to Harvard Law School, you know, one of the things that I learned is that how brilliant the fellow society is

at identifying people when they're young. Trust me, if I had given any, I went to a law school from 2000, 2003. If I had given any indication that I was conservative, right, that I was going to be a black conservative jurist, they would have plucked me out as a one-out, marshaled me through my entire career, so that I would have been in position to be a federal judge when Trump won and would now be on some kind of fast track, short track for Clarence Thomas's seat. They would have done that. They would have identified me as a 22-year-old, right? Democrats have not. nothing comparative, nothing on the scale of operation of even identifying their young stars and helping them throughout their career. Democrats are 40 years behind on this project. I've counseled Democrats a lot who bitch about the Federal Society. I'm like, okay,

you can complain about it all day long. It's not going to change the fact that it exists and it's done what it's done. Why don't you do something similar? And it's always like, well, because we're, well, but that's, uh, right? Are you not in politics? It's not even that expensive. Federal society's got a dominole of what, like $25, $30,000. So we're screwed. So my solution is court-packing, right? And I come to the conclusion, the only real way of fixing it is

court packing. The number of Supreme Court justices is not set by the Constitution. When we started, it was six. Then at pre-Civil war, we were up to 10. It was only with the Judiciary Act 1868 that we got to this number of nine. Nine holds no special numerical significance. I

have an argument that the court would function better if it had more justices like 19 justices as opposed to nine or even like 11 or 12. And the reason why, look at how all the circuit courts operate, right? They operate with many more justices in the Supreme Court. California, the Ninth Circuit has, I think, 21 justices. They operate on three judge panels, which are chosen at random. The randomness gives it more of a sense of impartiality, by the way.

Only really important cases are bumped up to on bank, which is the full circuit. If you had 19 justices, the death or retirement of any one, One justice would not matter as much. It just wouldn't. It wouldn't change the power of the Supreme Court, but it would change the power of any individual justice. One of 19 is a completely different kind of political football than one of nine. There are, quite honestly, very few opinions, I believe, at the Supreme Court level,

that would break down 10-9 on partisan issues so cleanly, right? Because cases are complicated. We saw even with this term, you had that one case where Gorsuch kind of flipped and went with liberals on Bostock, right? You had Roberts kind of playing both sides. That's not because Gorsuch or Roberts are rhinos in any sense, right? It's because the law is complicated. It's because even an ideologue will have certain pet issues that they like or they care about or they don't like or they don't care about, right? If you have 19, even complete ideologues kind of fighting over these very difficult and complicated legal issues, the chances of them kind of all kind of circling

the wagons and party lining on a 10-9 situation, I'm not saying it would never happen. It would just be way more rare than the five, four kind of decisions we see regularly out of the Supreme Court. We would have a better Supreme Court if we had more justices. And then you deal with the, you know, Merrick Garland-Camp. It also gives the Democrats something to shoot for. And by the way, the way you sell this to Trump is, you tell him it's the greatest reality show of all time. A 19-1 Supreme Court. Leave it to Rick to take an elevated discussion to something completely shallow and media related. I liked it.

Let us go now to our one segment. The one segment you all have been waiting for. The segment you know and love. The only segment we have. We need like a trumpet flourish before this or something. That's right. Some music. All right. Rick Wilson, who's your fuck that guy?

My fuck that guy is acting temporary provisional sort of kind of pseudo-Secretary of Homeland Security. Chad Wolf, who was out this weekend in Portland, Oregon. declaring his billion-gillian-dollar federal agency would be bringing the full might and force and power of the federal government down on a bunch of fucking teenagers with spray paint and fireworks as he seeks to stomp out the...

He's decided to marshal the full resources of his multi-billion-gajillion-dollar agency to defeat the armed communist insurrection of Antifa. General, you're on our list for this week's fuck that guy. You don't get a lovely parting gift. Hey, Mary. Thanks for being our special guest. The first time anyone else has done fuck that guy,

who is your fuck that guy for today? There's so many choices. And I would say because of the lawsuit to make it illegal for people not to die in Georgia, I might have said Kemp, but I think more currently because that's been ongoing and it's not going to stop. You know, Betsy DeVos, you apparently know wants to kill our children. What a monster. She really is. She really is.

Can I do Ken Coochinelli? The Cooch! Acting provisional temporary secretary of internet shopping, Ken Cuccinelli, who is the Homeland Security Director sort of and spends much of his time trying to stop. I don't know what he does, but he does a lot of racism. Brown people. Got a lot of racism. He's looking for a caravan.

He's my fuck that guy the week. Though I will say Greg Abbott, Texas governor, right, letting border towns get overrun with COVID. he could qualify. Speaking of Texas, did you hear that former congressional candidate, former Florida resident and full-time lunatic, Alan West has now been named the head of the Republican Party of Texas. I'm going to need a little deep background here, Rick Wilson. Alan West is so crazy that the craziest Trump people sometimes say, Alan, dial it back like to six or four maybe. Okay, who is Alan West? We need the full. Alan West is a former lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. He moved to Florida. He ran for Congress.

he won a congressional seat. He was so hated by every Republican in Florida that they redistricted him out of his own seat. And then he moved to Texas. Tea Party, like, superstar for a while. Then he moved to Texas a few years ago. And now he's at the Republican Party of Texas. So Beto O'Rourke couldn't turn Texas blue,

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

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