The Daily Beast Podcast - No One Is Shedding a Tear for Kevin McCarthy

Episode Date: December 8, 2023

This week on The New Abnormal, hosts Danielle Moodie and Andy Levy reflect on the downward spiral of Kevin McCarthy as Speaker of the House. Plus! The Nation’s Elie Mystal stops by for a scary prediction if Trump returns to the White House in 2024. Then we talk to The Intercept’s Ryan Grim about his new book. 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.

The nation's Ellie Mistal stops by to shine a light on a Trump-appointed judge in the Eighth Circuit courts plans to gut the Voting Rights Act. Then we'll talk to the intercepts Ryan Grimm about his new book, The Squad, AOC, and the hope of a political revolution. But first, let's have some fun. McCarthy, we hardly knew ye. Kevin, poor Kevin, he of the limp gavel, his whole life just wanted to be speaker of the house, and then finally got a hold of that monkey's paw and got what he wanted being elected speaker or chosen speaker after, I think it was 934 times that he didn't get it. He was then ousted, as we all know.

know, and he now says that he will be resigning from Congress at the end of this year. So he's not even going to finish out his term. And I guess this falls under the Be Careful What You Wish for, Header. Also, I wonder, Danielle, if he, even right now, if he thinks it was worth it. For me, this doesn't fall on the Be Careful What You Wish for, because I've been wishing for this for quite some time. So I just want to, I want to let, I want to let people out there that feel hopeless. I meant for him. To know indeed that wishes do come true. This is Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa come early. I don't think that looking back right now that Kevin McCarthy says to himself

that debasing himself for Donald Trump, kissing the ring, showing himself to be spineless, devoid of values and embarrassed himself with the 15 votes to become speaker that he didn't even hold on to for a calendar year, that he looks back and says to himself, oh, that was a valiant fight. I think that he should be embarrassed because what he is going to be remembered as is a limp gavel Fisher Price Speaker of the House who did not have the ability to get his caucus together that presided over for even a short period of time, the most, what is it? The most dysfunctional house with the least, the least bills that have come out since the Depression. I don't know what he's going to do.

Maybe he's going to go write a memoir that probably will get as many sales as Chris Christie's book did. You know, maybe he's going to find himself on Fox News, but probably not. So who knows what he's going to do, but I can't think that he's. He looks at himself in the mirror and says, you know, job well done. I think that's probably right. But I also, as someone who recently, you know, in the past several years, sort of stopped believing in karma, I think he'll be fine.

And I think he'll get himself a nice cushy lobbyist job or think tank job and, you know, make way too much money. I think he will materially be fine. And I think that given that he has no soul, I think that's all that really matters to him. I don't think anyone's shedding a team. year for Kevin regardless, but I really do think that unfortunately he will be fine. There was a great line in the CNN story about this. It said, McCarthy had been attending meetings sporadically, but some members had made it known his presence was not welcome. And I was like, damn, man,

this is the guy who like, again, his whole life, all he wanted to be was Speaker of the House. And like you said, within a calendar year of achieving his greatest goal, he became like persona non grata among the people that he thought he was going to lead to the promised land, I guess. You know, the person that we're all waiting to have everyone's backs turned on them to be shunned and to leave the Republican Party, frankly, to just leave America altogether, is not going anywhere, which is Donald Trump. And not only is he not going anywhere, Donald Trump is saying all of the things that we

We know to be true that we talk about on this show all the time. When we talk about authoritarianism, when we talk about fascism, when asked in a pre-taped interview with Sean Hannity on Fox, he said, oh, Sean said, oh, something to the fact, you're not going to weaponize your position if you were to be reelected. You're not going to go on a campaign of retribution against people, will you? Donald Trump's response, I'll just be a dictator for one day. just one good day. Sean Hannity tries to get him to, oh, I don't know, maybe clean that up.

But you know what got me was not that Donald Trump is once again giving us the I ordered the Code Red moment out loud. I am going to be a dictator. I'm telling you what I'm going to do so. I don't know why you motherfuckers are going to be shocked if it happens. He did it to rousing applause, Andy. The applause and the cheering. that came after he said that is what shook me.

Not so much what Donald Trump said, because he's been saying it, I alone can fix this, I am your redemption, I am your retribution, now I will be a dictator, but just, just for one day.

Like I'm sure he just orders one thing at McDonald's. No. So here we are. And Sean Hannity tried to offer him an out. Donald Trump did not take it. Okay, I'm going to be a little contrarian here, I guess,

obviously this comment has gotten a lot of attention. First of all, I think the important point here is that he's lying. Is he? Well, yes. He said after day one, I'm not a dictator, okay? Oh, yeah. And he would not go into, because Hannity brought up, you know, the coverage that has been out there of the fact that he will seek retribution against his political enemies. And Trump refused to even talk about that. The fact is all that stuff is true. And he will be as much of a dictator as he can get away with on day two through whatever. So first of all, he's lying, and I think that's the more important part here. The other thing is the things he said about day one, he basically said, I'm going to close the border and get to drilling. I do sort of think that in this case,

what he was saying is I'm going to throw out some executive orders on day one, which a lot of presidents do. So I am less troubled by his answer to this than I am the fact that, again, that he's lying and that he, again, fully intends to be as much of a dictator as he can get away with on every day of his presidency. So, I don't know, I've seen quotes saying, you know, look, he's, he's saying it out loud. Look, he has always made it clear the kind of presidency he will have in his second term. We're starting to see more and more the mainstream media is going woke, I guess, or is just being awakened to the fact that, oh, shit, we have to start covering this guy differently. And we can't keep doing the, you know, some say X, but others say Y, which is like

the beating heart of objective journalism in a lot of people's eyes. So I think they're starting to wake up to the fact that this is different and this has to be covered differently and it has to be explained differently. For him to say, oh, no, on day one, I'm basically going to pass a couple of executive orders and close the board. I always hesitate to say, I don't think he can do that because who the fuck knows with him and with the people he'll put around him. I guess my contrarianism here is simply that part of me is like, out of all the things that he has said and that the people who are in his orbit have said and that the people who will more than likely, if he gets reelected, be the people surrounding him in powerful positions, I've said. This one doesn't stand out to me,

particularly, I guess is what I'm saying. I will disagree only to say that, I know, only to say that I feel like people continue to shrug off his comments. Agreed. And by people, I mean corporate media, mainstream media, I feel like people literally have learned nothing and continue to just make the headlines about what he's saying as if they're offering it up as entertainment as opposed to a cautionary tale as to how dark and dangerous this country and the world will be. And I say this and I want to bring up a piece that was written in The Guardian by former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown entitled, Here's What Trump 2.0 will bring ignorance and vengeance in the U.S. Chaos for the World. And it want to read this tidbit. He writes, at a moment that urgently needs a firefighter to stamp out the

embers of conflict, Americans and the rest of the world may find an arsonist in the White House. It is not just the survival of American democracy that will be on the ballot in 2024, but stability and progress everywhere. This is the thing that I do not believe that people are getting right. now, particularly as I see hashtags grow and commentary grow from rightfully angry citizens of this country that are frustrated with seeing what their tax dollars are being used for versus what it is that they actually need, where their values and their ideals are being questioned consistently on the world stage. I get that. But when you are looking at the potential of a Trump 2.0, which folks does not provide you the opportunity for a redo come 2028. Trump is reelected. That is it.

We are done because everyone that is going to be installed around him will not have pledged an oath to the Constitution, but to their orange Jesus, Donald Trump. Okay, so look, I agree with everything you just said. I thought Gordon Brown's piece in The Guardian was very good and basically laid it out, as other people have done too. Robert Kagan in the Washington Post laid it out a little bit ago. That's what I meant when I said. It does feel like at least some in the media are waking up to the fact that this shit is different and this shit is dangerous. And this is not Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama. Again, obviously Barack Obama a far better choice. But the quote-unquote future of the republic was maybe not at stake. Whereas now, it kind of is. I sort of have

gone through life being not alarmist. And basically, Daniel, as you know, using my, my famous Gen X chill to just sort of be like, yeah, everything will be all right. I'm not there anymore, you know, this shit is, this is an important election. That's an understatement. I'm going to say this carefully. Donald Trump and the Republican Party in 2023, 2024 are not a unique threat to the republic because we've been through threats before with a civil war, et cetera. But they are a once in a century threat to the republic. And it needs to be countered and the media needs to wake up to that fact. I'm glad to see that at least a little bit they are. I think it needs to go much further. I don't mind when people jump all over what Trump said to Hannity. My only point is he has

said worse shit in my opinion. And as you said, people just kind of shrugged it off. I just want to lift up a couple of the things that he has actually said, too, to your point, that I will be a dictator just for one day. Or I like to say, I will be a dictator on day one is what the fuck he meant. But just a couple of the things that Gordon Brown lifts up in this piece that Trump has said, right? One, deporting homeless people from urban areas, imposing death sentences on drug traffickers, legitimizing shoot and kill even for shoplifters, repatriating the children of undocumented immigrants whom he accuses of, quote, poisoning the blood of our country. purging free thinking from institutions because he's all about those book bans and curriculum

bans and purging out professors and teachers. These are just some of the things as well as calling his dissenters vermin and traitors. So all of this amounts to, just to reiterate again, you are not voting for a person in 2024. You are voting to hold on to democracy and not just for us in the United States. And now we come to the reason why I was very careful to say Donald Trump and the Republican Party are a big problem in 2023 and 24. And that is the debate that the people who are running for second place in the Republican presidential primary had Wednesday night. Chief among them, Vivek Ramoswamy, who in addition to just continuing to be in the top 1% of unlikable people in America. But in addition to that, he decided that this debate was a good time to say that January 6th looks like an inside job, that the Great Replacement Theory, which is the racist and anti-Semitic right-wing theory that white people are going to be replaced by people of color, all of which is part of a Jewish plot. He said that this great

replacement theory is a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform. I mean, he went full unhinged at this debate. You see where he is in the polls. And he's, he's a He had that brief shining moment for him when people were actually talking about him. And then, you know, he has that classic problem that a lot of people have where the more they talk, the less likable they become. It's sort of a different strain of DeSantis syndrome, I guess. But this debate was insane. You had Chris Christie at least sort of, again, not one of my favorite people in the world, but he was up there talking about Donald Trump. being a criminal and being mentally unfit to be president. And so I got to give him credit for that.

But just another insane debate and another pointless debate that God, I hope nobody listening to this actually watched. This is the bench for the Republican Party. It's so disturbing, disgusting, and disheartening to see. Right? Like, yeah, I guess I'll give, you know, Chris Christie like a little bit of applause because he's the only one on that stage who doesn't have a shot in hell at becoming the nominee. None of them do, but he definitely doesn't. That has enough of a backbone to take on Donald Trump. But I think he's taking on Donald Trump because he doesn't have a chance at hell of courting that base. You know, but at the same time, I just want to remind folks that as you're seeing, you know, Republican donors want to put all of their money now behind Nikki Haley,

that woman got up on a stage talking about Ron DeSantis did not go far enough. with his don't say gay bill, that she's jumping on the anti-LGBQ wagon. You know, she's been calling out and attacking trans youth. And this is supposed to be the person that they're offering up that is more sane and better than Donald Trump. Are you fucking kidding me? So like when people are trying to part and parcel and say, oh, well, we need somebody other than Trump, he has infected the entire party.

And the people who either are not liked, like a Kevin McCarthy, are booted, or leave on their because ain't nobody want them to sit at their table. And Mitt Romney, who also leaves because your type of Republican is no longer welcome. So there is no one that is better than Donald Trump. There are just other people who are not facing 91 counts. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. And look, Nikki Halley is the clear leader of the non-Trunk candidates, which maybe sounds impressive until you realize that Trump has still well over 50% of the Republican voters want him. And he hasn't even appeared at these debates. So it's not like Trump supporters are listening to her and thinking, oh, I really like her. It's just she has the largest sliver of the few

remaining Republicans who are not enthrall to Trump. And that just ain't enough. So, you know, these debates, these debates have been a sham since day one. But they're really a sham now. And I mean, I think there's two more that I just read that CNN is going to host. It's like, why are you doing this? I don't even see the point anymore. No, because there isn't a point anymore. And also, like, I don't know why CNN is doing this. I mean, have the ratings been so great? Like, have people just been glued to the screens to see what stupid, unfounded thing the Beck is going to say? And by the way, let me just say this on that trash. He did get one thing right. not in the way that he wanted it to come across.

January 6 was an inside job. It was an inside job where the conductor was Donald Trump, who was inside of the White House. So he was 100% fucking right. Folks, I am so excited to welcome back to the new abnormal. Ellie Mistole, who is the author of Allow Me to Retort, a black guy's Guide to the Constitution. He is also the Justice Correspondent at the Nation. if you are fortunate enough, you get to catch him on MSNBC, just rock in and drop in truth like nobody's business.

Ellie, I feel like America should just have underneath maybe the Statue of Liberty that says, instead of the poem, welcome to the shit show. Do you know what I'm saying? Because everywhere that we look, particularly in your field, when we're looking about law, which is the kind of foundation of our democracy, how those laws are being applied to some people versus others, how they are being objected to cases being brought in the vein of saying that things are unconstitutional.

All of that is up for grabs in this country right now. I want to start first with a case that you've been following that I think will lead us in the direction that I want to go today, which is about ultimately our freedom, our democracy, our ability to progress as a country, has everything to do with our ability to vote, has everything to do with our ability to give voice and vote in representatives that are going to represent our best interests, but also, oddly enough, follow the rule of law. Talk to us about what is happening at the Eighth Circuit Court right now that has not found its way up to the Supreme Court, but will. Yeah, first of all, thank you so much for having me, Danielle. It's been too long. We are living through a rolling, shit show. And that is primarily because Donald Trump, while he was president, left behind some 200 federal judges with lifetime appointments. We all talk about the once he put to the Supreme

Court, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney-Barrad, he Trump controls a third of the Supreme Court right now. But it's his impact on the lower federal circuits that has thrown much of what we would consider settled law into question. particularly last month, at the end of right before Thanksgiving, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals headed by a Trump judge that was on Trump's shortlist for a Supreme Court appointment, didn't make the final cut, but did get to the Eighth Circuit, basically try to bury the Voting Rights Act once and for all. Now, it's a little bit of a complicated story of how he got there, right?

But you have to understand how our constitutional rights are protected in the first place, right? Like, all right, so you have a right to free speech, you have a right to guns or whatever. The government violates that right in some way. What do you do? What do you do when the government violates your right against illegal search and seizure or violates your protection against cruel and unusual punishment? Well, you sue the government. Like, that's what makes those rights real, right?

The ability to sue the government for a protection of your government. constitutional rights and have that case have its day in court. So what the Eighth Circuit did, what this Trump judge did, is to say that under the Voting Rights Act, which is the act that enforces the 15th Amendment of the Constitution, which guarantees the right to vote regardless of race, color, or creed, he said that private lawsuits cannot proceed under the voting rights act. That means that if states in the states of the Eighth Circuit controls, which is like, Minnesota, Missouri, Arkansas, you know, that kind of thin band of Midwestern states.

If Missouri violates my right to vote under the 15th Amendment, I can't sue them, according to this judge. You know who else can't sue them? The NAACP, right? Which would be a normal thing, right? Your rights are violated. You go, hey, Cheryl and Eiffel. Hey, Jenae Nelson, some bad things have happened to me. Perhaps we have a lawsuit here.

No, no, no. The Eighth Circuit says that the NACP can't sue. to protect voting rights under the Voting Rights Act or the 15th Amendment. In contrast, if, for instance, New York State takes a lot, let's say I'm a hunter, I like to, I look for Bambi, I look for Bambi's mom, I like to shoot them and put them on my table. The state of New York takes away my guns. Oh, then I can sue. Then I can sue the government.

Then I can go to the NRA and Wayne LaPierre and be like, oh, somebody took my guns. And they're going to sue them. And we can still do that, right? If you're a bigot and you have a bakery and you don't want to serve LGBTQ customers and the government forces you to, you can sue the government. You can go to the alliance defending freedom or any number of religious, kooky organizations and sue the government for your First Amendment right to be a bigoted asshole. But if you violate black people's voting rights, that's and only that is something that you can't sue about, according to this judge, only the attorney general. of the United States is allowed to sue the states, according to this judge. So, you know, if you have a voting rights problem, yeah, go call Merrick Garland and wait for him to get out from

under his desk and do some. How are we even discussing the rationale behind a decision like that? That in a country that is supposed to be ruled by a system of laws, citizens are allowed, right, to sue if their rights, how? have been violated that in this one area that is largely about marginalizing one particular group of people that a judge would say, oh, no, no, this isn't racist. It would have to be up to Merrick Garland or whoever is leading the Department of Justice to tell you that this is right. I mean, that's basically what this is saying. Am I wrong? No, that's what this judge is all about. But this judge, I mean, this is a judge who, before he was

appointed by Donald Trump, like, wrote negative. about desegregation, all right? Like, that's the kind of person we're doing it. And those are the kinds of people Trump has left behind, right? Like, Trump left a series of landmines in his wake. And those landmines are these Trump judges seated throughout our federal system. And every now and again, you step on one and it blows up in your face. You know, women have already had to deal with this in Texas, where Trump judges have outlawed, you know,

besides all their attempts to outlaw successful attempts to outlaw abortion rights. They've tried to outlaw Mifristone, the abortion pill. They're coming for contraceptions next. That's Matthew Casmeric in Texas doing that kind of stuff. Reid O'Connor, who basically doesn't allow the Biden administration to have any kind of immigration policy. He's unsalpable in his lifetime appointment. And of course, Trump's favorite judge, Eileen Cannon, who seems to exist only to try

is spring chump from jail. There are people like this throughout the federal system. And because they have lifetime appointments, the only way to get rid of them is through the constitutional power of impeachment. I mean, you can see how likely that is to go. Or some kind of Democratic-led progressive plan to expand the courts, not just the Supreme Court, but also the lower courts, which doesn't get rid of these judges, but significantly lessens their power if they are sublimated amongst a whole new set of more liberal,

fair-minded, and not racist judges that Biden could appoint. It's like every time that you try and get a hold over the damage that Donald Trump has done, we can't even get a hold of it, Ellie, because obviously Donald Trump is running for president again. And as I continue to argue with people on social media who are telling me that they're not going to vote, that they're going to vote their values, that they're going to sit this one out. This is the type of shit that I want people to be reminded of on a consistent basis. Did you see Danielle, the story today about Trump's potential loyalty cabinet, they're calling it, like the people that he would actually put in charge of the country if he was reelected?

It's names like Stephen Miller for Attorney General, Steve Bannon, J.D. Vance, Tucker Carlson as either a VP or Spengali type figure. Mike Davis, oh my God. If Mike Davis ends up being Attorney General, I will end up in jail because he is the kind of person who will fabricate a lawsuit against me using the powers of the Department of Fucking Justice. Like, Mike Davis is the kind of thing where like, if he gets in, I literally probably need to move to Canada to get away from him. The idea that I don't think people fully appreciate is that if Trump gets in power again, he's never leaving.

Thank you. There's no 2028 election, right? Like we're talking about a person who, if he gets into power, will make himself Julius Caesar-like dictator for life. He had basically a test run at doing this from 2016 to 2020, and he's learned some things. And one of the things he's learned is that he has to surround himself with people who are just as committed to his authoritarian, strong man control. ideology as he is, right? So the fact that they're calling it the loyalty cabinet, that is not a mistake. That is Trump learning, if you will, on the job, as most dictators do, the kinds of people he needs around him in order to execute his dictatorial plans. I don't know how to make the stakes

any higher than that. And I don't know how to fully explain to people just what that looks like and what that means. Because here's the thing, and I thank you so much for drawing the attention to the loyalty cabinet, because basically what we have been blowing the whistle on and ringing the alarm on and banging pots and pans about on this show, Andy and I, is about the Heritage Foundation. And their 2025 first 100-day plan that is sitting front and center on their website, that is backed by right-wing billionaires, that is about installing, not just in the fucking cabinet,

but installing throughout all of the government agencies, these absolute loyalists that are not taking an oath to the Constitution, they're not taking a oath to uphold our democracy, they are taking an oath to one person only, and that is to Donald Trump.

That is not a democracy. Part of the problem is that Americans are too American, right? And by that I mean, like, Americans have such a poor understanding of how things work in the rest of the world, right? Like, my family's from Haiti. I know from dictatorships, right? Like, I know how they run these things, right?

And if you have any kind of understanding, my uncle, who's professor of Africana's studies at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte, he likes to say, Americans are dumb because they have never lost their democracy before. Other countries have gone through the horrible process of having a democracy and losing it for a few decades here and there. If those democracies ever come back as they eventually came back in Germany, as they eventually came back in Spain, they understand much differently how to protect those democracies having gone through the experience of losing them, right? The French, they understand what Napoleon is all about.

And so they protect themselves, whatever Republic they're on, the 8th or 25th or whatever Republic, the French are gone. You know, they have an understanding of what they need to do to prevent Napoleon's. two, right? The English have an understanding of what they need to do to prevent the restoration of, you know, to make sure that King Charles is a funny guy in a hat as opposed to the actual leader of the country. We have no experience in losing the democracy, which means that we have almost no experience in protecting it. Ellie, thank you so much for laying that out because it is this idea that we think that our worst nightmares won't come true. That somehow we believe that 2017, until 2021 when Donald Trump left the White House after causing an insurrection, that somehow that wasn't a test run, that somehow his entire four years weren't just a remake of Jurassic Park with those motherfuckers just testing the fences.

Right? When you say it, it is because of this 200 and almost 50-year experiment that we haven't had to deal with the possibility of internally losing our democracy by domestic terrorists, because we've been so focused on everyone else. There's a reason why black people are a little bit more kind of clued into this than I think a lot of our white brothers and sisters is because we didn't have no democracy until like, what, like 1964?

And I'm being generous if I say in 1964. I mean, I can really start the clock in 1980 and still be okay. But we understand what it's like to live in an oppressive. state because that's the state that we've been in for most of American history. So again, I think black people have a little bit of a different understanding of that. But what worries me is that that's a somewhat older and wiser black people understanding of it that doesn't always translate or have impact with the youth. When you go into the community, when you go into the apocryphal barbershop, and, you know,

obviously my hair, I don't go, I don't get to the barbershop on a lot. When you go into the community, I am disheartened by the idea that percolates kind of on the ground, you know, that Trump is, you know, a crazy, bad, racist guy, but like he's not all that different than other crazy bad racist guys that we've had before. The media's ability to normalize Trump has had a real deleterious effect on the ground, I think, where especially young people, young people who have already lived. through one Trump administration, and, you know, technically, like, the sky didn't fall. We didn't end up in a nuclear war or whatever. And therefore, think that a second Trump administration will be, you know, survivable. That's the word I'm looking for. They think that it might be bad, but that it will be survivable.

And telling young people, like, it won't, it's a really difficult argument. And let me just express this to you. And then I'll give you the last word, which is that our ancestors survived, It left extraordinary, physical, emotional, spiritual scars that have continued on generationally. There are people that study epigenetics to talk about the ways that that trauma, that terrorism, has continued, you know, with the effects in our bodies. So the idea that you would just roll the dice talking about we could survive this is crazy to me. But last thoughts to you, again, for those people that are just like, I'll sit this one out. My counter to the people who seem to not fully appreciate how bad Trump can be,

and this is going to sound like a non-sequit, Danielle, but it really isn't. My counter to that is abortion, abortion, abortion, abortion, and also do you think you should be able to have an abortion? Because the one thing that does seem to be to kind of shake people out of their survivability, complacency, if you will, is the very clear understanding that women's reproductive freedom is gone. It just ends if Trump is reelected and his cadre of loyalist cabinet officials are reelected. And, you know, I am even seeing young men understand too, because you can tell, like, you can say to a young man, okay, you might not have a strong view about abortion,

but you like them Trojans, don't you? You don't want to have to pay child support? do you? When you understand that the abortion fight is not just about abortion, but also a fight against contraception for these people, that wakes people up. And when you look on the politics on the ground, Kentucky, electing a Democratic governor of Virginia, rejecting Glenn Youngst, Slate wins in Kansas, wins in Ohio. The abortion issue, if Trump is defeated, honestly, it might be on the strength of abortion and abortion alone. So that's my, that's my last word, where like if you are, if you are running into a wall with people who do not appreciate how dangerous Trump is, don't just tell them to vote against something, tell them to vote for something. And the thing that they're voting for is for women

to have reproductive rights, because that is salient. And I use, and don't soft sell it. You know, the word abortion is not a dirty word. And use that word, explain that issue because that does seem to be motivating people to get to the polls in a way that nebulous anti-Trumpism is not. Ellie, Missal, my friend, thank you so much. Thank you for all of your work. Thank you for all of your passion. Thank you for laying it out as it is.

And I hope that we have more conversations in the new year. Always appreciate you. I hope you get to have these conversations from America and not Montreal where we're going to end up having to go. Fair point. Ryan Grimm is the Washington Bureau Chief of the Intercept and co-host of Counterpoints and the author of a fascinating new book called The Squad, AOC and the Hope of a Political Revolution. He joins me now to talk about it. Ryan, thanks so much for being here. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

As you write at the beginning of the book, the seeds for the squad are planted in the 2016 presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders, and it feels like it's not an accident that the squad is composed of people who are not white males. In other words, people who can't really be called Bernie bros. Yes, like that left such a mark on Bernie Sanders and his supporters. Like, I don't think they even realized, you know, how much of a scar that was going to leave at the time. But I kind of go back through the creation of the Bernie bro attack against Bernie and his supporters, like very rovian in the sense of like Bernie Sanders, you know, the thing he really has going for him is he has a huge amount of young people who are super enthusiastic about him and he's, you know, filling up these stadiums.

And so how do we turn in this Rovian sense, like his biggest strength against him? And the way that you do that is you pick out, you know, some of the rudest ones. And it's not going to be hard. You know, like if you've got millions of people out there fighting online, it's, you know, just a couple of keywords and boom, you've found some Bernie bros. And so the Justice Democrats, which kind of flows out of the Bernie campaign and is mostly founded by former Bernie Sanders staffers, assessed the Bernie bro damage and came to the conclusion that actually, except for Michigan, if you looked at states and your variable was

kind of population of people of color, Bernie did worse in those states. And so they were like, look, we need be clear-eyed about this. We did actually underperform. That doesn't mean that the Bernie-brough myth was real or that Bernie bro is a racist and sexes. But it does mean that the left has some room that they need to grow here. And one of the solutions there was when recruiting candidates in 2018, you know, try to prioritize women and people of color that can't be smeared in the same way. And so, you know, you're right. It's not a total accident that a lot of the energy wound up behind people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And you could feel almost a palpable delight on behalf of some kind of Bernie supporters who were just so tired of being, you know, called racist

and sexist for so long for being against Hillary Clinton and being able to say, look, see, told you. I love AOC. Yeah, absolutely. And also, I, don't want to minimize the personal strengths of people like AOC and Ilan Omar and Roshita Tulliv and Ayanna Presley. And also the fact that, as you point out in the book, that one of the important things here is that the members of the squad look like the people they're representing. So, yeah, I don't want to minimize any of that. Right. And Ocasio-Cortez exactly talked about that during her own campaign as well. That by no means is it everything that too often it is used, And this was her argument. Too often it is used to allied the real issues or to hide the influence

of corporate power. But it also does matter because it is representative of a real lived experience that allows her to like talk about the needs of her community in a way that say Joe Crowley, for instance, couldn't. Not just because, you know, he's a white dude, but also he literally wasn't living in the community. He was living in Northern Virginia and using his mom's address in Queens as his like home. As I was reading the book, it boggled my mind to, I guess, I don't know re-realize as a word. But when I re-realized that it's only been five years since the OG squad members, AOC, Taleb, Omar, and Presley were elected. I guess maybe it's just from the amount of attacks on them. It feels like they've been in Congress forever. It does. Like, so my last book covered like 40 years,

and this book covers like five or six. And I feel like almost more happens in that five or six. And more changed, importantly, it seems like in that five or six. One of the things that struck me that I kind of re-realized. I kind of like that word was that Donald Trump announced for president within like a week of the Supreme Court legalizing marriage equality, which I can't even tell you which part of that just doesn't scan for me and doesn't compute. It just does that doesn't feel right. One part of that or another doesn't feel right. Yet there it is. That's unreal. All right. So to get back to the book, though, as you're going through this story, this was something that I remembered it, but I didn't remember the timing.

It was one week after being elected, in other words, she was not even sworn in yet. AOC was making news by tweeting opposition to Amazon locating its new headquarters in New York City. And then like the very next day, joining a group protesting in Speaker Pelosi's office for a Green New Deal. That was a wild kind of 12 hours. And as I was kind of re-reporting it, I hadn't maybe even in real time realized what was going on. Like she was on Twitter beating up the Amazon HQ2, you know, well after midnight. And her chief of staff told me that, as he described, he's like, she didn't quite realize the AOC effect yet. Right.

Because literally just months earlier, she was still bartending. And now one message from her can impact the most powerful corporation in the like history of the world. And so in her thread, she sorts to start to clarify what she's saying. She's saying, look, I'm not trying to say we should nuke deal. All I'm saying is that community members didn't appreciate that they didn't get input. And here are the concerns. And if Amazon wants to come, great, but I don't see why we have to give them X insane amount of millions of dollars. Like, probably just normal, rational stuff that 90% of people would agree with.

And it does actually appear like Amazon was probably not that serious anyway and was always going to just have DC as their main HQ 2, if that's even going to happen at this point. Right. Right. So then the very next morning she had committed that she was going to occupy Nancy Pelosi's office with the, you know, these climate activists, the sunrise movement and the organization. Justice Democrats, and she wakes up and she's talked about this since, like she wakes up that morning, she's like, oh my God, I want to vomit. What if I'm doing the wrong thing? Because now she's thrust into this position of representing this gigantic movement. And the progressive left has always had this problem where they represent, you know, tens of millions of the hopes and dreams of tens of

millions of people around the country, but they're often channeled through just a few people. Like for so many years, it was basically just like you had one Democratic socialist representing Vermont. And that was it. So that's a lot of weight to have on your shoulder because you're like, if you screw up, you're not just screwing up your own career. Right. You're screwing up the aspirations of millions of people. So she's like, what if I'm doing the wrong thing? What if this is a mistake to occupy her office? And that weekend, kind of knowing that she was going to be facing those pressures, her staff took her to this church to meet a lot of the climate activists. And these are young people compared to her even. You know, she's like 28 at the time. These are 18, 20, 21-year-olds who were at this

church, you know, preparing and strategizing for the occupation and meeting them, you know, really helped buck her up to remind her like, you know, we're in this fight together. So she went for it. And yeah, and like I was with, as you saw in the book, with her staff down at the Capitol waiting for her. And so she shows up and we kind of walked to Pelosi's office together. And it felt like a scene out of a movie when we pushed through these swinging double doors that they have in the Capitol. And you know how in a movie like all the cameras and the balls just start exploding in like somebody's face. It was literally that. I don't think it was the poof from like the 1950s. Right. But it felt like in my mind, I still hear a poof. Yeah, from the flashes. Yeah, sure.

It was just insane. And like instantly, you know, she's gone from kind of obscurity to just 30 reporters because like she was trying to get there secretly. You know, shouldn't want word to leak out that she was going to occupy Pelosi's office. Obviously word leaked out. And that's why there's like dozens of reporters waiting for her. You said, while somebody like Obama wants to be seen is being all things to all people. Ocasio-Cortez actually thinks she can be all things to all people, even while leading a political revolution. She believed she could occupy the Speaker's office and have Pelosi appreciated, if not immediately, that at least down the road. So I found that interesting just in and of itself. And then I was curious if you think she still believes that.

That's a good question. And I think she has probably been disabused of some of that, for sure. Because when she came in, she had a real belief that everybody was kind of in this for the same reasons. The reason that she got into it, you know, she got into it because there was, you know, 12 years to turn the climate around because her generation was, you know, facing the first kind of downwardly mobile collapse since maybe the Great Depression or even even before that, like the collapse of the American dream. She wants to like join with other people and collectively turn this around. And she, you know, had the sense that there may be generational problems here. Somebody like Nancy Pelosi, you know, wants all those things, but just has been in

Washington for so long that they've kind of lost perspective. And so she's going to help them find that perspective. And so she's genuinely seeing herself as persuading people toward the political revolution. But I think, I think you're right that over the years, she's started to see that, oh, not everybody is here for the same reasons. Yeah. There are people who have some other motives that are at play here. And so you can't necessarily talk them in. You can't persuade them from that great Upton Sinclair line or whoever it was. You know, you can't persuade somebody of something if their income is based on not understanding. Right. Yeah.

Something I thought it felt to me at least like a through line through the book or a through line of the book, rather, is the battle between activism and results, or maybe to put it another way, I guess, the battle between purity and compromise, which is, you know, always what we talk about in politics. Is that a fair assessment in what she and the other squad members sort of have gone through? Yeah. And you see it playing out in layers in interesting. ways. Like, you've got, everybody disagrees on where the line is. Like, almost everybody agrees

that there is, you know, except for the most fringe figures out there. Everybody agrees that there's some line between activism, pragmatism, that people play different roles. But you'd have, say, Josh Gottheimer, who, you know, their antagonist, who's like a big character in this book. Yeah. Where he would draw that line is to the right of Nancy Pelosi. Nancy Pelosi would be constantly warring with them saying, like, you're, you're members of Congress now, like act like it. Like, you know, you're not activists anymore. But then the same dynamic would play out between the members of the squad and their supporters who were like, yes, you're members of Congress, but you promised us a political revolution.

So go bring us a revolution. So they're really getting hit from all sides. Yeah. And we see that a lot now. I mean, you know, I just see it online. I see it from lefties who have become disenchanted with AOC, et cetera, for not maintaining, I guess, that purity. Which it just feels to me, I don't think you can be 100%. sent pure activist and be in Congress? Certainly not. You could if your only goal was kind of what I guess

they call now narrative change. Like if your only goal was to like use your position to be on CNN and MSNBC and wherever else to like, you know, throw bombs like Ron Paul, for instance, back when he was in the house, like he was trying to do narrative change from the libertarian direction and just had basically kind of given up on getting anything legislatively done. So, you know, that model exists, but that just was not the model that they were going to take. Anybody who expected that was going to be disappointed. And it's not even the model that Bernie Sanders took. He's the amendment king back in the house. You don't become the amendment king like without that. No, absolutely. I realize this may be a weird question to ask the guy who just wrote a book called The Squad. Do we make too much of, quote,

unquote the squad. As you write in the book, Ilan Omer once said to you of the squad, we're not an entity. It's a media creation. And Iana Presley says to her squad mates, at the end of the day, you vote alone and you're voting for your district. We almost sort of think of the squad as like the Democratic version of the House Freedom Caucus sometimes. And that feels inaccurate to me. I think it is inaccurate. It's also inaccurate in the sense that the Freedom Caucus has a gigantic kind of media operation behind it, which organizes a kind of army of regular people who are just kind of marching to their orders, like, you know, the Steve Bannon's and those type, you know, if you follow Steve Bannon's podcast, like he's constantly got Freedom Caucus members on and they're

giving marching orders to the audience and the audience is then, you know, calling Congress and like they're working in this kind of coordinated fashion to really go after the rest of the Republican conference in a way that there isn't an organized operation on the left doing. that at all. You know, there's Twitter. And now there's basically not even Twitter because so many kind of lefties have abandoned Twitter. But for the period of time describing this book, there was Twitter. And Twitter is just reactive. And AOC talks about this that like, oftentimes they would be looking for kind of guidance from their kind of grassroots base about where their energy is and what they ought to be pursuing or how they ought to be handling one particular vote or issue. But that just

wasn't there because there's no mechanism to produce that reaction. The only thing they can do is react. So a vote would be cast or a speech would be given and people would flip out on it or praise it. But they wouldn't always guess ahead of time which direction that was going to go. And so that's just a recipe for kind of a vicious cycle of acrimony. When I sort of, I guess, maybe a little glibly throughout the Freedom Caucus thing. But I guess what I really meant by that is, you know, the Freedom Caucus has meetings. They have a whatever. I did not get the sense from reading the book that the squad mates or whatever you want to call them have like regular time together where they sit down and strategize. That was one of the points that Omar was making with that comment that like

there isn't a weekly check in. You know, there's text message chains and informal things. And, you know, certainly in 2019 as they're kind of thrust into this role, their staffs were coordinating a lot because that's who they knew. And they didn't know each other that well, which is also a key thing to understand. Like people, when you say squad, These are like your besties. But actually, you know, they're just had all come to Congress at the same time. AOC and Iona had met each other. Iona had campaigned for AOC and vice versa.

But it's not as if they'd known each other for more than a couple months at that point. And the staffs, you know, had also just met each other. But they're kind of thrown in the fire together. So when votes are coming up and talk about some of these votes like the whether they're going to fund DHS, which then funds ICE, the staffs would talk to each other. And the squad themselves would meet. So in the very beginning, that was happening because that's all they had, really. Right.

But as time goes on, they have their own overlapping interests, but they also have their own priorities. Yeah, it really just does seem like they're more of an amorphous entity than anything else. But look, it's also obvious why they are lumped together and spoken up together. Towards the end of the book, you highlight a University of New Hampshire poll that was taken in January of this year. And it showed that AOC was the most popular Democrat in that state with like a 66% approval rating and only a 9% unfavorable rating. And that is so unreal that AOC herself told you she didn't believe it. Right. She's not unskewing the poll exactly, but it's shocking because if you think of how

she came in as this kind of lightning rod, and if you think about how there was so much kind of hostility among a subsection of Democrats towards Bernie Sanders, who she was associated with, you would not think that four years later, if polling the first in the nation state, Democratic voters there would tell you that AOC was their top Democrat because that means she's not just winning kind of with the left-wing Democrats that a ton of the Normie voters who would have voted for, say, Hillary Clinton, even in the New Hampshire primary right next door to Vermont. That number shows you, like a lot of them are quite supportive of AOC, which, you know, opens up a lot of interesting questions and also interesting possibilities. Yeah, absolutely. It does seem a little unreal,

but, I mean, who knows, the country is so fractured right now that maybe people are looking for someone like an AOC to step forward on a national skill. There's an authenticity there that I think people probably appreciate. Exactly. Ryan, there's so much more in the book that I wish I had the time to talk to you about, but unfortunately I don't. But the book is the squad, AOC, and the hope of a political revolution. And it's a fantastic read. It's a fun read even when it's serious and sometimes depressing. So I hope everyone goes out and buys it. Ryan, thanks so much for being here, man. Thanks so much. Andy Levy. Daniel Moody.

Who is your fuck-that-guy to close out this fucking week? My fuck-that-guy is J.D. Vance, the senator from Yale. I'm sorry, from Ohio. So, okay, a little quick back. Last week, there was a piece I mentioned it earlier that Robert Kagan wrote in the Washington Post, talking about the sort of dictatorial dangers of a Trump second term, and talking about how... if he does get reelected that there could be resistance from governors in states like California and New York, and that Democratic governors, et cetera, could refuse to recognize the authority of a tyrannical federal government.

J.D. Vance doesn't like this. And he has sent a letter now to Attorney General Garland and Secretary of State Blinken. I'm not really sure why that comes into account. But he is claiming that this op. may have violated federal law because it is calling for open rebellion against the United States and will lead to political violence. He also brought Kagan's wife into this because Kagan's wife, as a woman named Victoria Newland, and she is an Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs. That's why he wrote it to Blinken. And he asked whether her close relationship with her husband might compromise her judgment about the best interests of the United States. We now have, a senator, a U.S. senator, calling for a Justice Department investigation against an op-ed writer.

Keep in mind, this is a how dare you to someone suggesting that Donald Trump and the Republican Party may have dictatorial aims in 2024. And really, what better way to show your outrage at being portrayed as tyrannical and dictatorial than to call for an investigation of the person who calls to tyrannical and dictatorial. It's unbelievable. Irony is dead. Hypocrisy is dead. Everything is dead. It's absolutely unreal. And I mean, J.D. Vance is just, he is among the worst that America has. And trying to figure out what role he might have in a Trump 2.0 administration will make you want to bash your head against the wall. And for that, and for so many other reasons for J.D. Vance, he is my fuck that guy for today.

I mean, imagine J.D. Vance in a cabinet. Imagine J.D. Vance with the authority to just say, no, we're not going to abide by free press and freedom to assembly and no, none of that exists here. But we're not dictators. So that makes a ton of sense. I hate these people. Fuck that guy. Danielle, who is your fuck that guy for today?

One of our old-time faves, Alabama Republican Senator Tommy Tubbs, Tuberville, Tuberville, I don't give a damn. But for the last 10 months, 10 months, he has denied the promotions and appointments of, I believe it is over 400 people inside of our military. I believe actually it says 430 military promotions have been on hold because of his stance. on the fact that he does not like the Pentagon's abortion access policies, which, quote, have allowed for uncharged leave and travel stipends for troops forced to travel across state lines for abortion services because of local laws. He says that he is going to abandon this now that his point was made. It wasn't. The point that continued to be made was that he's a fucking idiot. He finally bowed to the pressure of both Democrats and Republicans who were working.

working on a workaround, which could have longer term implications for the Senate moving forward. But this is how serious his holdup has become, particularly at a time when, I don't know, the world is at war in multiple places. And this is what he sees fit to be doing. He says, however, that he's not dropping all of the holds and intends to delay 11, four-star post still pending in the Senate. This man, these people and their faux like patriotism, their faux stances, they're just full of shit. They don't do anything. They don't mean anything. And all they end up doing is causing harm and making America less safe, which so many people have testified to that fact to try and get this idiot to change course. I'm glad that he did. But the idea that he has the ability to hold up post for four

or star, it's just like it's beyond and shows you again that the limits of our agencies of our systems have been pushed to their breaking point by the Republican Party. And there is so much that needs to be fixed and can't be because of these people. So for that reason and so many more reasons, Tubbs is my fuck that guy for this week. Yeah, I loved his little quote, according to the military times. He said, quote, we saw some success, but we didn't get as much out of this as we wanted. You saw no success and you got nothing out of it other than pissing off a lot of your fellow members of Congress, including a lot of people in your own party. So I don't know what more you wanted at it. Did you want to be hated by everyone in the Senate? Because yeah, in that case, maybe there's

one or two holdouts and maybe you didn't get as much out of this as you wanted, if that's what you wanted. But that's all you got out of this was a whole bunch of people hating your ass. And a whole bunch of people realizing that you are dumb. Like, you are just not bright. So yeah, fuck that guy. 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 Kemp. and Seamus Calder.

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