The Daily Beast Podcast - Mitch Antoinette and the Goldfish Brain

Episode Date: April 24, 2020

In the second episode of The New Abnormal, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast contemplate Mitch McConnell in a bodice, Judge Jeanine Pirro in a lovely Korean pink hanbok, and George governor Brian Kemp with a modicum of gray matter. Then the duo talks to Dr. James Hamblin about how Trump's chaotic approach to COVID is turning traditional epidemiology on its head. Plus: Rick eyes an incoming tornado. "We should hurry because my lights are flickering and the wind is blowing like insanity out there."  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

from politics, media, culture, medicine, and science. I'll also try to keep ripped to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. So Molly, I know you're probably delighted by this new fight between your boyfriend, Andrew Cuomo, and our old friend Mitch McConnell. He's decided that he is going to call BS on Mitch and the whole donor state thing. How's that playing in New York right now? Well, I was actually on the Peloton watching the Cuomo press conference, 11 o'clock every morning, you know. I actually have, like, soured on Cuomo a little bit, because, and you'd see it when you see the questions. Like, people ask him about the prison population, and it's just clear he just does not care at all.

So that kind of gives me pause, but it was delightful when he just lit in to McConnell today. Yeah. That was just like a beautiful moment in television. I have to say, this has always been one of those things that sort of rankles with the Blue State guys correctly, is when somebody like Mitch McConnell says, let them go bankrupt. You know, on the one hand, it's a great, like, throwaway bullshit political. line. On the other hand, if New York gets a cold, Kentucky has Ebola and the worst case of Corona in all time and is going to be picked at by vultures by the time this is all over. I mean, I think it's interesting occasionally to call that that particular line of talking about,

oh, those blue states don't get what we believe in the rest of the country. Well, yeah, but they also shovel in the vast majority of the tax rep. Right. Well, that was what was interesting to me, because I feel like part of living in a blue state is that you sort of don't say it, even though you know it, which is your bankrolling, some of the red states, and it's sort of tacky to say it. Sure. But Cuomo just went out there and was like, yeah, well, if Kentucky, it wants to let us go bankrupt. One of the things that this is about is McConnell is starting to look very nervously at some of his

own Senate races. He is not happy. And he's looking for ways to get the base fired back up again and to get them to think that all the old magic and all the old things they used to believe still count as well as Trump. Because, you know, today he's got, he's begging, they're begging other candidates to get out of the Senate race so that Chris Kobach will have a clear field. And they're starting to think they might lose Kansas. Delightful. In Arizona, Martha McSally has been a free fall and her fundraisers are quit today. Not because of her, but because of other reasons. But we'll get to that story. But I think part of this is Mitch trying to get back to that, we're the party of fiscal responsibility, even though they've been spending money like drunken socialist sailors since the second Trump walked in the door. The Senate map for the Republicans, the delight I feel every time I see between Laughlin, the two appointed senators, Laughler, and McSally, both complete and total train racks, right? And then you have the Montana, the governor now running for the Democratic seat. And in Colorado, we have Hinkin-Lupor. Like, for the first election cycle ever, Democrats have done exactly what they were supposed to do with the exception of Beto O'Rourke. I missed McConnell having the same fiery commitment to deficit reduction when a bunch of my lobbyist friends sat in his office and wrote a tax bill for $2 trillion that benefited about 150 hedge funds, Wall Street banks, and billionaires. Wow, I sound like a damn.

I sound like a damn red here. I hate crony capitalism more than I hate socialism, because socialism is rarely very good at what it does. Crony capitalism excels at what it does. It's great at stealing money and getting the government to do the shit that it wants to do, which, you know, that is what has replaced conservatism in the McConnell universe right now. The Senate map is fascinating, and it will be really, it'll be really fun to see how that plays out, especially because there are so many unpopular red state senators up for re-election. I mean, it is just a cornucopia of... I think, you know, you've got to keep an eye on blowing up the conventional wisdom and looking at the Senate races. because right now they've become decoupled from Trump.

The Republican base, they shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue base. They are decoupled from the Republican senators. Those guys are running behind the president with voters right now. And so I think there's a part of this where you have to keep an eye on South Carolina. You have to keep an eye on even in Kentucky. I'm not saying those are states that are easy or that they're going to go blue. But Mitch McConnell's got a pool of money. He's going to spread it thinner and thinner and thinner.

Now, I feel like if you're not. you've lost Pete King and you're a Republican, you're in a lot of trouble. And today, Pete King compared Mitch McConnell to Marie Antoinette and her let them eat cake response to the plight of serving peasants. So my question is, did Mitch McConnell get over his skis here? Or is this a calculus he had seen coming? Well, look, I think he probably did not anticipate this backlash, but he wasn't. messaging to the country. He was hoping that'd be a one-night hit on Fox, and they could all go, Mitch McConnell told those libtors, and move on. But I have to say, you know, I've got a vivid imagination of the thought of Mitch McConnell, and it's like a tight bodice with a high wig and a

broad skirt. It's going to haunt my dreams in bad, bad, bad ways for a long time. No, not in a no. There's no good Mitch McConnell-More Antoinette mashup. But I always say this. Don't underestimate Mitch McConnell ever. He has control over a money machine in Washington that is very responsive. Not exaggerating when I tell you, if Mitch McConnell went out to the big list that the NRC keeps tomorrow morning and said, I need $100 million by the end of the month. He'd get it. They understand it is pay for play in this city and the swamp has been reconfigured to be something much deeper and more toxic. So he can always gin up a lot of money, but he doesn't always, and he does great internal Senate gamesmanship,

but he doesn't always get the public mood with the same degree of skill that he displays inside of his own caucus. Hey, so I think, Molly, between us, we have a total of seven dogs. I only have two. No, oh, I'm sorry. So it's a total of six dogs.

I thought you had three dogs for some of three children, two dogs. I have a rescue place that's been texting me about a possible third dog, so we'll say. Unless it's a hyena, I don't want to. want to hear about it. So long story short, between us, we have a lot of dogs, but no labradoodles. And I'm sure there are many wonderful labradoodle breeders in the country. But have you ever thought to yourself, like, you know, when I'm looking for someone to manage

the response to a terrifying infectious disease, the first person that comes to mind is a labradoodle breeder. Did you ever think that? Yeah. Yeah, I always look for a labradoodle breeder when I'm thinking about pandemic response. That's like 80% of it. And you breed a good looking dog. Oh, then you can handle a panaddle.

Of course, folks, what we're talking about here is a guy named Brian Harrison, who is like most Trump aides and appointees. Not the first person you would have chosen for the job. He is, however, a lackey of Alex Azar. A trusted aide with minimal public health experience was how it was put in the coverage, who is running the day-to-day response for the COVID pandemic. On the one hand, it's easy to dunk on a guy like this because, you know, who knows what appointees do. They're not technical people. They're not policy people all the time. But in this case, this is a job where the guy is an actual action officer, as they say in government, where he has to do things, where he has to coordinate things.

And so a guy with no public health experience, but loyalty to Trump is so perfectly exemplary of the kind of people that are in this administration. I mean, that old Steve Jobs rule of thumb, A's hire B's and B's hire C's. Well, Trump people hire Q's and Zs and X's. And these are people that could pick out random half dozen people from behind a bus station and probably have higher qualifications. And also we have this doctor who was removed. Dr. Brilliant. Who was removed. Dr. Bright.

Brilliant, Bright. One of the two. Well, Dr. Brilliant is on TV, but Dr. Bright was the one who was removed for saying that the trial should be supervised by a doctor. Well, why can't they be supervised by a friend of Jared? Or Judge Piro. The problem with Judge Piro is that. she's having to quarantine and the delivery of the Francia truck to her apartment every day, she's got a sign for it.

I'm sorry, it's alcohol. You still have to sign for it, even in these days of COVID. Judge box of wine, as we call her. I mean, I feel like she should just supervise all the clinical trials from now on. You know, I've often envisioned her in the Hanbok, the Korean outfit that the pink lady on North Korean television used to wear, just screaming at the microphone. She's this sort of, I think she's kind of the Roseanne Bar of Trump World. Yeah, she kind of is. I had this occasional moment where I think of Judge Janine and Lou Dobbs when Fox finally decides that they've had enough of that show.

Right. Of the two of them on their own YouTube channel. Oh, I would watch that. I would watch that hell out of that. Like Lou Dobbs and Judge Box of Wine every night at 8 o'clock after they've had a few drinks. Oh, yeah. Litty, lit, lit. That's right. If you guys heard that loud buzz just now on the recording,

it's because I have got a tornado watch in my neighborhood right now. That's exciting. Yeah, this could be our last podcast. You never know. You don't die, okay? I'll do my best. Joining us today is one of the smartest writers and thinkers on the subject of the coronavirus and COVID-19. His name is Dr. James Hamlin.

He's a lecturer at the Yale School of Public Health. He's the author of the upcoming book Clean. and he's a staff writer for the Atlantic where his work is clarifying and illuminating in ways that very few other writers capture on this subject. You can do yourself a big favor by following him on the Twitter machine at James Hamblin. And without further ado, James, thank you so much for coming on the new abnormal. Oh, thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here. James, you've written so many really interesting pieces about the coronavirus. I think your piece was like one of the first pieces I've read.

Can we talk a little bit about that you're likely to get the, the coronavirus? Yeah, the headline that will haunt me forever. Yeah, that was an interesting time when I felt like I was sort of hearing different messages from epidemiologists and from our officials in government. So that piece was February 25th, which was very early days. I mean, we didn't have a lockdown or anything yet. But what was your thinking and how has it evolved? What really raised the red flag for me was when I saw this data that suggested that there were asymptomatic people. So we've had these scares for really global outbreaks before, things like SARS and MERS and Ebola,

and they tend to really reliably make people very sick. And that is bad, but it also makes them easier to contain because you can identify cases pretty easily, and you can isolate people and you can trace their contacts. But as soon as we heard that there were people spreading COVID-19, without symptoms, you know, with very mild disease, that's when my calculus shifted to say, oh, how do you contain that? If you can't identify the people, this is going to get everywhere. And then I started to talk to some infectious disease modelers who confirm that suspicion,

if hesitantly. And that's where we are now, right? I mean, Cuomo did this press conference where he said they have now done a sort of small sampling testing of the antibodies, and they've found that about 20% have the antibodies. There are multiple ways that antibody tests could mislead us. The first one is that it could be showing a positive result when in fact that person actually has antibodies to another coronavirus, one of the common cold coronaviruses. And that would be a false positive, and that wouldn't really help us.

And then another way is that the person might have actually had some exposure to the new coronavirus, and they might carry a few antibodies, but not enough to protect them from illness. And then a third way is that that person might have enough antibodies to protect them from illness, but not enough to keep them from spreading it. So a person might still be able to be personally protected, but might pick this virus up and spread it for a few days before eradicating it again. So we don't know what exactly that means.

It only really just confirms how widespread it is in New York. Except that we don't quite know that. I'm hopeful that that's true, but I just talked to actually two disease modelers at Yale right before this call, and they said, well, we don't know if that's not cross-reactivity, which is to say, you know, we've all had coronaviruses before, you, me, everyone has had one. And they're different, but they're not that different. So it's actually a challenge to create a test that finds only the antibodies to this new coronavirus and not to the other coronaviruses.

It's very likely that you'd get at least some false positives just from mixing the two up. They're not that different. I've heard so much about the antibody testing whether it's effective or not effective. Like, what's your thinking on all of this? It will take time. In the same way that the vaccine question will take time, we need to watch over a period of months and see if these people who have tested positive for antibodies end up indeed being immune to the disease. And there's no way to speed up that process, because we need to know how long you're immune.

If indeed these antibodies are accurate, they are really are truly antibodies to the new coronavirus, and they're present in sufficient quantities to protect you. Right. The possibility still exists that those antibodies might go away after three months. We don't know how long they'd last. We don't know how meaningful that would be, right? If they last for eight years, that's very different from them if they last for six months. and so any prediction model needs to understand exactly what that positive test means.

So, James, I'm curious. In the public health space, I know there's always been this focus on the mechanics of social distancing and on contact tracing and all the things, nuts and bolts, block and tackle elements of this. In the modeling that people in the public health space have done over the past, did they ever anticipate that the national leadership would be so erratic and so whipsawing back and forth? or they would try to or intervene in pharmaceutical decisions like Dr. Trump's miracle elixir. Yeah, that's been really difficult. I think that most academic spheres, there were two variables that were not anticipated here.

And number one is the lack of testing. So in all the, this wasn't my specialty, but I did, had a little bit of education in outbreak modeling. And there was never any situation where you didn't have a basically good idea of who was infected and who wasn't. And that makes it impossible to have a really accurate model. There was also always the presumption that your leadership was at least trying to inform people. And when you talked about models where there was a problem with information, we usually put it on the citizenry. Like, could these people maybe not, were they not being reached by the messaging?

Did they not understand? Did they choose to disobey? But we didn't assume that the leadership might be downplaying the problem or trying to hide it. Right, or essentially serving as sort of a countervailing message to the public health guidelines. Yeah, so those are two models that are really challenging the experts right now. Anything that they might predict right now, even if we had perfect testing and we had a really good idea of exactly how many people have it and we could trace their contacts, any model that they would make could be thrown into chaos by the leadership saying something like that you don't need to listen. This is not a big deal,

that you should go out back in the world. And then everything just changes, and then the models need to be redone. Yeah. Right, right. I feel like the media has decided, or at least sort of the more rational media, has decided that Dr. Fauci is good,

the conservative media thinks he's bad, and then a lot of the sort of regular media doesn't have much, doesn't care much for Dr. Bricks. Can you explain a little bit about a little backstory on them and what you're thinking is? These are scientists who have built a lot of credibility in the medical community over decades of work in public service. And they are kind of your quintessential public servants who you could always rely on and you could trust. I think it's pretty clear that they are in odd positions right now.

Like so many people in this administration, where telling the truth, I don't assume any evil intentions on their part, but you always also have a duty to your supervisor and your job. And that's a big part of the government mindset mentality of. And so there's a lot of needle threading and winking messages about what you can say, what you really want to be saying and what you feel you're able to say. Yeah, a little bit of anxiety there on the platform. But at the same time, you have to be a savvy political person to climb the ranks and to stay in. And it's this classic story of the administration, right, where you've found people like Mattis, people throughout the cabinet and elsewhere, where you had people who were clearly conflicted by what they felt they needed to tell the public and what they felt they could actually say and still keep their job.

So, James, I'm going to lead with this because I'm a ray of sunshine, but then I'll ask the alternative version two. What's your worst case scenario for COVID and corona in the next year? And contrary, what's your best case scenario? This is only based on me speaking regularly with disease modelers who know more than I do. The worst case is that the antibody tests you're seeing are not actually very accurate. They're not picking up true coronavirus. They're picking up coronavirus antibodies that refer to other coronaviruses, and they don't confirm. Got it.

So it's noise. And we've lost, according to Johns Hopkins, which has been tracking these numbers, as best possible. As of today, we have 46,000 confirmed deaths. We may have way more. And that we might continue to have society shut down to a degree that it is, which is really devastating to people financially and emotionally and in other health ways. You know, we're canceling elective surgeries. People can't go see their doctors for things they want to go see them for. And yet we continue to lose, we continue to have this sort of steady but still tragic rate of losses of people in the tens of thousands month after month after month until we get a vaccine, which could be as much as two

years, three years before we actually have, you know, it's actually distributable and is able to be given to everyone. So that would mean losses in the millions of lives. That's the worst case I don't think that's going to happen. I'm much more hopeful that there is some degree of immunity out there. I don't know what it is, but that there are enough people out there who will have immunity for maybe in a best case scenario many years and who have had asymptomatic cases and who can move about the world without fear that they're spreading or at risk of contracting the disease. And those people can feel, you know, no concern and do their jobs. And I think that's very unlikely. But that would be a probably best case scenario that we have a lot of asymptomatic cases.

and we approach herd immunity of 60% of people getting those antibodies within a matter of months. But again, I don't think that is likely. So you think it's somewhere in between? Yes. The two big variables are that you don't know, we don't have a testing capacity to know exactly who has had it. And we don't know exactly what these antibody tests mean if a person really is immune and how long that would last and what it would, you know, whether it would really protect. Those could change things radically. If it turns out we have huge rates of asymptomatic cases

and that those people turn out to, if you had an asymptomatic case, you turn out to be completely protected. You know, that would be glorious and that would be, that would radically change projections. The new abnormal is brought to you by you. Thanks to contributions from Beast Inside members, we're able to provide coronavirus coverage,

including podcasts like this one, to everyone for free. Visit newabnormal. the Daily Beast.com to sign up to a beast inside plan today and help us keep it that way. On every show, folks, we have a segment called Fuck That Guy. Why Fuck That Guy? Because at this moment in time, there are people who are still being shit human beings to other people. There are still people every day who are exploiting the COVID crisis, who are doing the wrong thing, who were doing things that actively hurt people. And it would be easy to make Donald Trump the fuck that guy every day, but I'm not. Today's Fuck That Guy as somebody you've never heard of. He's got named Mike Gula. And he used to be

a very powerful Republican fundraiser. Well, Mike Gula, and we mentioned him earlier in the show, not by name, was Martha McSally's fundraiser, and he was doing a whole bunch of other races this year for Republican senators and congressmen and governors. Well, he sent out an email to his folks today saying, I quit, and I'm going off to do something else. Well, Mike Gula has formed a business called Blue Flame. What is Blue Flame doing? Somehow, they've got an inside track on all kinds of PPE, N95 masks, and other gear, and they're selling it. You'll be a, you'll be a maze to find out two states and local governments and the federal government. Somehow this highly connected Republican fundraiser walked away from a business that, frankly, is a very lucrative

business to take on selling PPE based in part on his connections with the White House and the Republican apparatus. So Mike Gula, fuck that guy. All right. And my fuck that guy is not a guy, but a woman. And she really made herself a star yesterday when she was interviewed by Anderson Cooper had some of the greatest expressions I have ever seen on a television anchor ever, including him like putting his face in his hands under his glasses. As Las Vegas mayor, Carolyn Goodman, she wants Las Vegas to reopen. She doesn't understand where all the virus nonsense is about. And then she wants the casino floors to reopen.

But she also said that she would like to become a testing site for what happens when you reopen the economy. and that she would like her city to get the placebo for the medicine. May the odds be ever in her favor. They're not. So my good guy of the day, and he's a damn good guy almost all the time, has done so much remarkable work in faces of natural disaster, chef Jose Andreas is running a feeding operation in Baltimore's Camden Yards where they're going to prepare meals, individually packaged meals,

from up to 20,000 people every Saturday downtown at the stadium. He's replicating this, across other cities as well. And his World Central Kitchen operation is just absolutely one of these shining lights in this crisis of people being great to other people. I could not admire this man anymore. We should try to get him on the show. Okay.

All right. Let's do it. And my good guy of the day is the Democratic Nevada governor, St. Cessliak, who shot down the bad guy of the day. Las Vegas mayor, Carolyn Goodman, and said she really, doesn't have any power to reopen anything and that it's completely the state's call. I love that because it is one of those things where authority that is exercised properly tends to win. And she was clearly trying to do what a lot of Republicans do.

Like Brian Kemp in Georgia, trying to make Trump happy. Right. And these people that try to make Trump happy get people killed and themselves in the end screwed over. The fact that Trump rolled Brian Kemp after he bent over backwards to make Trump happy on a call on Tuesday. And then by Wednesday afternoon, Trump had made him a Latin national laughing stock. Magnificent. That was pretty great. I mean, one of the great things about Trump is he's loyal to no one ever.

And he'll be mad now at Brian Kemp because there will be stories that people ask him questions about, why did you do this to Brian? He'll be angry at Kemp. He won't be angry at himself. But every one of these guys that goes out and kisses Trump's ass, he scans their cooperation and agreement and praise as weakness, not as loyalty. Right. And therefore he holds them in contempt. He probably right now thinks more highly of Mike DeWine and Charlie Baker and Larry Hogan,

all of whom have said basically, you're being a fuck up, Mr. President. He probably thinks more highly of them than he does of the people that kiss his ass. But the problem is it doesn't even matter because he has such a goldfish brain that tomorrow he'll be thinking of something else. Oh, sure, of course. And speaking of that, our next segment is one nation under a pandemic, where we talk about how to stay sane, safe, help our family's friends and neighbors and country get through this. So my one nation under a pandemic today is that even though we're all trapped in our house, my 16-year-old, who's a

sophomore, did in fact publish a piece today in the Washington Post about how... Did it call for a violent socialist revolution against the oppressive capitalist overclass? You know what? That's quite enough out of you, sir. Um, that's right. Yes, my 16-year-old hasn't killed anything yet, but he did write this piece, and it is in the Washington Post in the Outlook section about how Zoom high school classes should have past failed grades, and it's in the Washington Post, which means published piece, oh my God, Rick, are you alive? I'm alive. Was that thunder? That was lightning striking very close to my home. Jesus Christ, you have. The sky is a bright green outside. That's a good sign. Can you move? Have we talked about this?

You have mentioned it. I feel like it might be time to live in a city with an airport. We should hurry because my lights are flickering and the wind is blowing like insanity out there. On that note, we'll wrap up episode two of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond, from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening in 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 like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Jungfast, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you again on Tuesday. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider become a. a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the dailybeast.com

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