The Daily Beast Podcast - Orange Is the New Orange: Trump Just Might Go to Jail

Episode Date: February 23, 2021

For years, he’s gotten away with it. He lied. He cheated. He treated the government like a get-rich-quick-scheme and his most ardent followers like marks.  But now, Donald Trump could be facing serious criminal charges. The kind of charges that might lead to the former president going to jail.  The Supreme Court turned down Trump’s final appeal, and that means his accounting firm has to turn over his tax records and business documents to Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance ASAP. “Trump's lawyers will always come up with something, but there should be no reason why the grand jury won't get these financial records tomorrow,” Daily Beast legal analyst Jay Michaelson tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest edition of The New Abnormal.  “Basically, what we all know happened was: Trump inflated the value of his business when it suited him, which is in order to get on the Forbes list [of richest people] and also to get loans from Deutsche Bank. And then he deflated his worth in order to save on taxes. So that's illegal... Not only is that insurance fraud and bank fraud, but that could affect those loans,” Michaelson adds. “Will he go to jail for, like, the rest of his life? Probably no. Is it possible that this would lead to criminal charges that would carry jail time? I would say that's pretty likely, and we could have a grand jury indictment fairly soon,” Michaelson continues. “A lot of these kinds of white collar crimes are settled, and they're settled out for large financial settlements. In this case, I'm not sure that Cy Vance is interested in settling with Donald Trump—even if Donald Trump could afford the fines that he would have to pay, which I don't think he can.”   To which Jong-Fast asks, “Can he borrow it from Jared?” “Unfortunately, he's not the financial wizard that he makes himself out to be.” “Wait. But Jared made $200 trillion.” “Don't fall for it. I mean, he's cute, but he's not really that smart.” Also on a packed episode of The New Abnormal: Tommy ‘Quentin Quarantino’ Marcus talks about all the cash he raised for Planned Parenthood—in Rush Limbaugh’s name. ‘How to Be a Liberal’ author Ian Dunt tells us how post-Trump Americans should see still-Boris Brits like him: “So what you should do is look at us like we were like someone you used to date that is still taking heroin. ‘I'm so glad I left that behind,’ because that's where we are.”  Finally, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Sen. Mark Warner about how the fight against the far-right needs to be taken international. “We're going to do a deep dive on this anti-government extremism—and particularly some of these groups, their ties to right-wing groups in Europe, oftentimes amplified by Russia,” he says. “I know the threat is real. I know it's not just in this country.” If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes it's just Rick & Molly discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor at large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned upside down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how we get our out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, and I'm here to make sure everything doesn't go too far off the rails while we have fun discussions about our world gone mad. And while I take

that duty seriously, ourselves, not so much. Say we have a jam-packed episode with interviews with Senator Mark Warner, Tommy Marcus, aka the meme maker Quintin Quentin Quintinantino, and UK podcaster, Ian Dunn. First up, we're going to have the Daily Beast Jay Michelson on to talk about Merrick Garland, along with all the stuff that's happening in the Supreme Court today. Hi, Jay Mendelssohn. Michael's Jesus Christ. Are you overjuing me? Chew Michelson.

Do you know how my ancestors paid for this name? We have two Hebrews hosting the new abnormal today. That's what we're going for a lot of extra diversity. Diversity. We need more Jews in media. That's right. Are you from a reformed Jewish family, perhaps? I grew up conservative.

I was a nice Jewish boy. See, I was a nice Jewish boy. See, I grew up Unitarian. We're good. My partner's Unitarian. We actually had a Unitarian wedding. It's the best because it's not anything. It's whatever.

You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? What? Someone who knocks on your door for no reason at all. So let's talk about someone who's not feeling very unified. Today, the Supreme Court decided that Trump has to give his taxes to Sy Vance. That's right. This was like the final. Nina, Nina, Nina to Donald Trump's years-long effort to conceal his tax returns.

This was kind of, it was a Hail Mary to begin with, because the court decided last summer that he enjoys, Trump enjoys no special protection. So this was just like if you or I, you know, had our tax return subpoenaed and we went to the whole way to the Supreme Court. And they would also dismiss us with an unsigned one-sentence order. Can you explain why, what the timing of this was? Yeah, I mean, the mystery and, you know, it's kind of reading the tea leaves, we'll never really know, but the mystery is why it took them several months to reach this decision. It was pretty clear that Trump was going to lose. He had not a leg really to stand on. You know, the word on the street is they might have been waiting for the impeachment drama to play itself out. This has nothing to do with that, but it's possible that the court just felt like, you know, it could somehow affect the integrity of that process if it had any integrity in the first place. So, but the timing now should be immediate. I mean, this was the final appeal. And, you know, Trump's lawyers will always come up with something. But there should. should be no reason why the grand jury won't get these financial records tomorrow. But they should be able to just get them from the IRS. It's not like they have to wait and try

to get them from Jay Seccullo or someone, right? No, that's right. He's out of the picture, thankfully. Actually, these are for financial documents that are at Mazars, his accounting firm, including tax returns, but also, and maybe even more importantly, a host of business documents. Basically, what we all know happened was, you know, Trump inflated the value of his business when it suited him, which is in order to get on the Forbes list, and also to get loans from Deutsche Bank, which is maybe even more important. And then he, you know, deflated that his worth in order to save on taxes. So that's illegal, and the sets of documents won't match. So what he told Deutsche Bank is clearly a lie. And they gave him, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars of credit on the basis of that lie. So not only is that insurance fraud and bank fraud, but that could affect those loans. And how? I just filed my Daily Beast piece on this. You know, this is like the new episode of the Trump reality show, really the new season.

Sorry, this is like the season premiere. It's like now comes all of these petty humiliations, right? So Richie Bank has already kind of called in the credit, basically. Trump doesn't have the money. It's not really clear where this amount of money is going to come from. Can he borrow it from Jared? Unfortunately, you know, he's also not the financial wizard that he makes himself out to be. Wait, Jared, but Jared made $200 trillion last year.

Don't fall for the . I mean, he's cute, but he's not really that smart. There's no way. There is no world in which no is going to let you say, my whole pitch for this gig is that I'm the sassy gay friend. Like, that's what I have to offer in this interaction. Okay. I have a feeling just like the last time when you were our first guest that we had to beep, that there's some coming here. Wait, so tell me why Jared isn't as rich as he tells us he is. So he does hold a lot of property.

But the key with all of these kind of real estate companies and Kushner is just one of these is basically leverage. I mean, you never really, you never want to own more, you know, just cut property outright because you could be using that property to borrow money for more property. So all of the major real estate companies, you know, Durs related. all of them are leveraged out, which means they've already basically used all of these buildings as collateral. So Cushner's no different. I don't know where, you know, Jared Cushner could come up with $600 million dollars just from his back pocket, maybe by selling some of those assets. But again, they're not really meant to be sold because imagine if you had, you know, a million dollar mortgage on your million dollar house, you wouldn't come out with a lot of cash. Right. That makes sense. So now

they get the taxes. Sy Vance gets them and then he can put Donald Trump in jail forever and ever. Dream on. No? Not quite. First of all, just to like, you know, temper expectations even more, we may, will probably never see these documents. Wait. Really?

You don't think they're going to leak? Well, they might leak. But grand jury is, you know, it's not like the Trump White House. It's not just like constantly leaking all the time to Swin. And whoever, you know, Swin is working with. Maybe Swin can get the documents. Yeah, we've got to get to. I mean, grand jury, you know, documents are meant to be sealed.

They're meant to be totally secret. You know, there are some cases where they do leak out at some point. Sy Vance is not. like the kind of lawyer who just like leaks stuff through someone, I'd be surprised if we actually do see most of this. And remember from the tax returns point of view, we already got what the Times had last fall. So, you know, it is possible that some of this may leak out, but we shouldn't think like it's not going to be another, you know, Times special section with all of these documents in it. Will he go to jail for like the rest of his life, probably no? Is it possible that this would

lead to criminal charges that would carry jail time? I would say that's pretty likely. we could have a grand jury indictment fairly soon. Wait, so he could go to jail? Yeah, no, you know, you can't cheat this badly all the time and avoid jail time. I mean, some of it, you know, a lot of these kind of white-collar crimes are basically settled and they're settled out for large financial settlements. You know, in this case, I'm not sure that Cy Vance is, like, interested in settling with Donald Trump, even if Donald Trump could afford the fines that he would have to pay,

which I don't think he can. Wait. So Trump really could, because, you know, my husband, is a big fan of Trump is going to die in jail. And I always tell him that we in America don't jail our presidents, no matter how sleazy they are. But you really think this is a possibility. Well, I think it's useful to think that to notice that we were not jailing the president. We're jailing a crook who lied on his taxes and his business forms and his insurance forms. Like, we're jailing a criminal. So this is not connected, let's say, to the impeachment.

It's not connected to any official. It's not connected to Russia. It's not connected to anything connected to his job as president. This is old stuff from the Trump organization lying all the time. Can we talk about Pennsylvania, the great state, the Keystone state? I think maybe one reason, maybe I surprised you a little bit by having a little optimism around the legal process is I actually feel like the courts have done a pretty good job enduring this assault on our democracy for the last four years. And this is an example of it. So, you know, Trump lost 70, some odd election challenges. And all of these were basically the same con, right?

I mean, what's he doing with his taxes and his net worth? He's just lying about reality. He's saying reality is A when it's actually B. He's going to go to CPAC, the CPAC conference on Sunday, and say, I'm the presumptive nominee for 2024. I'm in charge of the Republican Party. These things may or may not be true, but certainly him saying it as a reality TV star doesn't make it so.

But there is this thing called actual reality. And that's why I have a little bit of optimism both around, whether there is the Supreme Court or now this grand jury process. So the same day that the Supreme Court said that Trump does have to turn over these financial records, they finally put like the 20th nail in the coffin of the challenges to the election lawsuits. Yeah, it was 6'3. These challenges were moot. Again, was Justice Thomas. Didn't say that Trump should actually prevail in these challenges, just that there's actually still a live issue around how the judges in Pennsylvania kind of changed the election law. I'm surprised Gorsuch.

Yeah, I am also surprised. I'm not at all surprised about Thomas. Right. Thomas seems like he always takes the worst opinion. You know, I am actually slightly sympathetic to the dissent in this particular case. So I'm not sympathetic because this case is clearly moot. The election is over. But it is true that we just left this major issue kind of dangling on the table, which the question was how these courts are interpreting the Pennsylvania Constitution and whether the way that they changed the law to account for the COVID pandemic was the right way or not. I think it was, but I also think it was kind of a live question. But the thing with it, the thing is with the

courts, it has to be a live case or controversy, and it's not. The election is over. And this one, you know, I think, I don't think anyone thought that Trump was going to win, and he didn't. He lost seven to two. But it's still, again, yet another nail in the coffin of reality kind of winning out over reality television. Jay, we're lucky to be joined by you. today because it's in the middle of Merrick Garland's confirmation, and you used to clerk for Merrick Garland. What have you been seeing today? We expected this hearing to be mostly boring, and it mostly was. And I think that is mooring it a good way, especially after the shenanigans at the Senate,

you know, over the impeachment period. There was a remarkable moment right at the very end responding to Senator Booker. Corey Booker kind of pushed Judge Garland a little bit on racial justice and criminal justice. And Judge Garland used to work at Department of Justice. He's kind of come through the criminal justice system. And I think there are some on the left who have a concern about that, that this is someone who's maybe too invested in modern policing or mass incarceration, for example. So Senator Booker was kind of pushing him on that to really take more of a stand. And Judge Garland actually visibly, his voice was shaking, and he told his own personal story about how his grandparents fleeing Nazi persecution came here and found a home here and this country welcomed them in.

And it was, Judge Garland said, his own personal sense. of responsibility, hoping to do the best job he could to honor that and to pay that back. And I think, you know, as speaking as a rabbi here for a moment, which is one of the other hats that I wear, you know, we've seen so much bad American Judaism lately where it's just turned into like waving the flag, whether it's the Israeli flag or whatever and taking these kind of very hardcore, nationalisticy, Trumpy kind of points of view, it was so refreshing to kind of see a public figure articulate the American Judaism that I actually love, which is that understanding the Jewish experience of marginalization, making us hopefully more sensitive toward other forms

of oppression, including around racial justice. And it was just one of these really, you know, for me, a moving moment. And I did, I had worked for Judge Garland. He definitely showed more emotion in that two minutes than during the year that I clerked for him in D.C. You know, he's a very, very smart guy. And it was hard to clerk for in a good way because, you know, judges kind of just rubber stamp what you write as a clerk, but Judge Garland was never that way. He always read up at least as much on the cases as the clerks did. And so he was known for being kind of meticulous and tough and in a good way, not mean or anything, but just you really needed to know your stuff.

So to see him show that other side, that kind of human side, I think made the confirmation hearing a little bit more real. So a lot of people are concerned, though, how hard he will go on prosecuting the capital insurrectionists. As somebody who worked under him, how do you feel about which way that wind might blow? Yeah, I think one of the notable things about Judge Garland's resume is that he's the guy who put away Timothy McVeigh. He led that investigation. So this is familiar territory for him. I did watch the hearing this morning. He was asked about that. There's the first question he was asked about, and many senators asked him about that. There were some Republican opportunists to say, well,

what about Antifa and don't forget them too? And yeah, it was six three. And what about Chuck Grassley? Do you want to go to that now or talk about it? I mean, from the sublime to the ridiculous, I mean, he literally said, in case people are not aware of this little trivial moment, he literally said with Judge Garland sitting right there, yes, it's true. I never gave you a hearing, but at least I didn't go through your high school yearbook and make your wife leave your committee hearing in tears. Right. Referring to Democrats investigating a rape application from Breit Kavana. It's like they were just doing going through the yearbook just for the of it. Like there wasn't a rape

allocation that they were, it was this moment of supreme ridiculousness. And I, at first I was kind of impressed that Grassley even owned up to like, it's true that I ruined your entire career and took away your dream job that you completely deserved and did so on a hypocrite. Like, that's

true. But then to turn it around and like say that what Democrats did with Kavanaugh was worse was just appallingly hilarious. He's kind of amazing. I don't know what's happened with Grassley, but My favorite Grassley is Grassley fighting with the history channel on Twitter. That's when he's at his best.

I want more of that. Wait, I haven't followed that at all. See, my personal favorite is when he hits animals with his car and tweets about it. Yeah, that too. Yes, well, there's also that. Well, he just, I feel like a lot of these guys are the Republican, the sort of white old men Republican senators are like trying out various ways of being odious. Yes.

So like you could do the Lindsay Graham one where you just kind of. slide it in there and say something so offensive and absurd that everyone's scratching their head. Yes, I liked it when he was like, why haven't you been to the border, Merritt Garland? I think you should go to the border and you'll see drug cartels. I mean, I don't know. I guess he has decided that the caravans are like a big Fox News messaging point, and so he was going to bring them up in the hearing, but that was amazing. I just love how the last four years haven't happened from that perspective. It's like we've just picked up exactly where we left off, right?

Like migrant caravans, drug cartels, whoa, now it's 2021. And we're saying the same thing that we said in 2016, even though there's a pandemic and a coup that also just happened. Like, it's this amazing. Like, they haven't skipped a beat, basically. I mean, I've been actually really surprised at how well Biden's nominees have, like, sailed through a lot with, like, pretty large, you know, a lot of Republican support. But it seems like the person who's just going to get the knife is going to be near a tandon. Near a tandon. Yeah, mean tweets. Better watch out for your confirmation hearing, Molly.

Yeah, Molly, your chances are, I'm sorry, but. God damn it. You've sent a bunch of mean tweets. Can you imagine? What would you even, like, what would you even want me for? Like, what could I even do? I guess I could be, like, ambassador to somewhere. I was going to say you'd make a lovely ambassador to the Vatican

to replace the Giggriches. So it seems we're going to have another impeachment trial, but this time in New York State over Governor Cuomo being a bully. Is that possible? Can they impeach him over just sheer awfulness and also fudging the nursing home numbers? Yeah, not the awfulness, but I mean, over the fudging the nursing home number, yeah. I mean, I don't know if that's going to happen,

but it's certainly it is a legal possibility. I love it when conservatives are like, do you think DeSantis is bad, but you love Andrew Cuombo? It's like, mm, that's right. The Loma's progressives don't really. It's like, and also you could take de Blasio too. It was probably a mistake for Cuomo to call up, you know, a state assembly person's wife and

threaten her on the phone and yell. I mean, that's probably not a good call. But, you know, that's what he does what he did. And it is kind of the style. Yeah, it's a weird, it'll be an interesting moment if the sort of COVID denial wing of the Republican Party, you know, makes common cause with the progressive wing of the Democrat Party to get rid of the person who they dislike for very different reasons. It could happen. Wow, who do Andrew Cuomo would be what makes Horseshoe Theory a real thing?

It is. It is clear of that. Even so, they surely don't agree. I mean, horseshoe, the idea is that they sort of agree on something, like, you know, QAnon agrees with, like, left-wing hippies because they both think the government is bad or something. Here, they don't even really agree, right, of why they hate questions. But everybody, you know, wants to hate Cuomo. So for different reasons. As, you know, for me, I am a bit of a Cuomo contrarian. As a New York resident, I kind of like the, I don't know if it's, like, racist to analogize him to Mussolini because they wrote the Italian. Let's just say he has a certain authoritarian streak. I feel like Mussolini is not, should not be held up as good government. I'm going to go out and a living here. But I'm getting the vaccine on time. So like I feel the trains are running on time. No, I think, I think a lot of what's happening. is sort of, there's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking.

But now this is a real thing. I mean, this, you know, if they lied about the nursing home deaths and concealed that they lied about the nursing home deaths, right? So it's like a cover up of a cover up. You know, that's not pretty. Ian Dunn is a British author, political journalist, as well as the host of the Romaniacs podcast. Hi, Ian. Well, hello, hello.

What the fuck is wrong with your country? Well, that is a question that would take me a very, very long time to answer. You know what? I mean, the truth is, it's basically. sort of the same thing that's wrong with yours, which is that we got lost in a dream of borders, of like a politics that's basically about borders. And you can factor in trade in that. You can factor in immigration. But ultimately it came down to a hijacking by a nativist reactionary political force that says everything's going to be all right. If you just close all your fucking borders and pretend that the world's

simple. Now, you guys have the rather considerable advantage right now of having turned away from that part. So what you should do is look at us. We were like someone you used to date that is still taking heroin. Like, you know, I'm so fucking glad I left that shit behind because that's where we are right now. I keep reading all of these reports about your coronavirus stuff. What is going on? Like, why can't you get it under control? Like we did in Florida.

Just kidding. Yeah, because it's a wonderful example, you guys would say. We've only killed half a million people. Whereas you people. Okay, I think that this comes down to a couple of things. I mean, the most important one is we have spent the last five years, basically since the Brexit vote, denigrating expertise. They're basically saying experts don't matter.

They have nothing to contribute. What really matters is this thing, the will of the people, which is basically whatever the person in charge happens to think it, or whatever is useful for them to say on that particular day. Now, once you do that, you create a political culture where, when you have scientific advisors saying you need to lock down right now or else because of exponential growth, we are going to see more deaths, you have political leaders that ignore them. Now, Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, has not been as ignorant on COVID as he was on Brexit. But what

he has done is allow himself to get kind of triangulated between public health guys on the one hand and the ones that want to ignore all the evidence on the other. And what that means is for each moment, each of the three lockdowns, every other piece of public health policy, he implements it between two to six weeks too late. And those weeks are the crucial fucking weeks where the virus just explodes in the population. And that's why we are where we are right now. Yeah, that was what I was

wondering, because you see a lot of reporting that you guys have a lockdown going. Oh, yeah, man, we've been locked down. I mean, I haven't seen another human being about from the woman that serves me in the supermarket for months now. And the misses, obviously, but the misses and I can barely even see each other at this stage.

We're like rules to one of them. Yeah, it is, is amazing being married to someone during lockdown. It is. Now, where are you guys with it? They started vaccinating everyone in England, right? But they're not, they don't have enough for two shots. Well, yeah, they made a punt on that, which the moment seems like the right punt,

which is that you'd be better off giving the first shot to more people than giving two shots to a smaller group of people. Now, when they made that cool, the scientists that I was speaking to were pretty divided on which way they would go on that. And it looks at the moment like they probably made the right court. Now, of all the things that there are to criticize the government for, the vaccine rollout so far isn't one of them. I think a lot of that comes down to the NHS as a highly centralized health system is actually very good at exactly this kind of thing. So the rollout of the vaccines at the moment is working very, very well.

That is the only, and I mean it literally, it is the only area of policy that these guys have not fucked up. But thank God. Thank God they have. But you have this more contagious variant. Yeah, well, we do. I mean, we're also getting sort of others coming, you know, a South African variant, which is potentially really quite concerning because it may not respond, and the vaccines may not respond to it in the same way. I mean, I think I caught, I mean, I got COVID, me and the misses both got COVID last month. And we presume because most of the country at that stage was getting the more contagious variant. Jesus.

But it was that, much more contagious. It has the massive plus point of it very rarely takes away people's sense of taste or smell. Oh. Like, you know what? I didn't even care about, you know, it was one of those things you heard about that I didn't really think about very much until I got COVID. And then when you do get COVID, you think, well, I can't go out. I can't see my friends or my family. I can't go to a pub or restaurant. The one thing I have is evening meals with wine. And the idea of losing even that pleasure

just felt like God was being particularly vindicted. So I was very glad to keep it. When the COVID started and then we'll talk about Brexit, but I just, you know, I'm like a very neurotic too. So I'm obsessed. I mean, I am. I'm not. like, I'm a very neurotic Jew. Jesse knows this about me. And so I'm obsessed with this idea. I have a friend who's very, who lives in the UK, and she was telling me that her mother is very fancy and has this doctor. And the doctor sent them a letter that said, if you're over a certain age, no one will treat you in the hospital. You shouldn't even bother going. And if you're, you know, it was like over 65 and you have a preexisting condition, you're not going to get treatment.

And, you know, there was a whole sort of a menu of like how you could get not get treatment in the hospital. Is that still true there? No, that's not true. And one of the things that they really found was we're getting a proper backlog right now of non-COVID related health problems that haven't been dealt with. So you don't know, I mean, the real death toll of this thing, we're not going to know for years, right? It's about how many people that didn't go get, you know, they felt something in their lungs and haven't gone to get it checked. How many people aren't getting treated for diabetes or for heart conditions right now? That's the real long-tail death toll of this thing. And they, from the first lockdown to the second, that was much, much improved. Lots of messages from the NHS

saying, if you've got symptoms of something non-COVID related, do go into hospital, don't be put off, blah, blah, blah. So no, they've been much better on that the second time around. Okay, so now let's talk about Brexit. I was talking to my husband this morning who could be quite annoying, but it's very smart. And he was saying that he thought that it's almost like Britain had put sanctions on itself. Yeah, that's a very good. I might steal that. It's yours, baby. Thank you. I'm taking that. I'm taking that.

That's basically true. Can I like, let me explain how it's true, but just by talking like really briefly about how the EU started or what it is, right? So you get to the end of the Second World War and basically Europeans are just looking at each other like, I mean, we've done this twice now and we keep on like nearly destroying the world. So we need to come up with a system for not doing this again. And the system that they came up with was like exactly the opposite of what they did after the First World War. First World War, end of it.

France, other countries just basically stripped Germany for parts. including its coal industry, it's steel industry. When you get to the end of the Second World War, what they say is, we're not going to strip of parts. What we're going to do is we're going to meld coal and steel industries together across the continent. And that's like an old liberal ideal that you see, for instance, in Paines writing during the American Revolution, that trade is the defense against war. If you can get countries to trade with one another, they're much less likely you go to war, and that goes doubly the case if you can just

meld your economies together. The way the Europeans have done this is, by two things. One of them is the Customs Union, which takes tariffs, sort of taxes on goods when they go over borders and harmonizes them on the outside and eradicates them on the inside. So if you're the US, you send a banana to Italy, it's 10%. You send it to France, it's 10%. It's 10% wherever you go. But between

France and Italy, they pay 0% on anything. There's no checks on any of those goods. Everything moves as if it was one country. The second part is the single market. The single market is basically the most sophisticated act of cooperation between nation states and the history of man. It is regulating in a way

for each country so that it doesn't have to keep on checking goods coming into its territories. It's essentially saying if we do this kind of safety check for electrical equipment and cars in Germany, we'll have the same rule in France. And that allows goods to just move around as they like. It also means that Europe could introduce the idea of free movement, which is that you can go and live and stay and work wherever you want on this continent as long as you're a citizen of the continent, which is, I think, a degree of liberal accomplishment that stands up there with human rights law for the post sort of second world war period. Now, Britain's decision was, fuck that,

don't want anything else to do with this thing, so we're just going to pull out, basically because it got upset that there were so many Polish plumbers coming over. I mean, really, at the heart of it, it was just like, it turns out we don't like Polish plumbers. Fuck knows what Polish plumbers have ever done to the Brits, but they've decided to detonate their own economy to keep them out.

And they pull out, and what that means is, you now do get checks at the border, going into Europe for your tariffs. You do get it for the regulatory quality of the goods. And Britain's economy for the last 40 years was based on the fact that that would not happen, that goods could move very, very freely for just-in-time production processes, wherever they liked on the continent. So sanctions on itself is precisely what Britain has chosen to do,

once again, because that apparently was the only way that it could stop Polish plumbers coming over. There's no way out of this now, right? I'm the belief that in about 15 years, if we're smart, about it. If liberals and internationalists remain as smart about what they do, we can get back in. You will never talk to anyone sensible who's going to give you a shorter time scale than 15 years.

That's where we are right. This is it right. I used to sit with, you in the last five years, with like American journalists and they're in London, and you'd sit and you basically drown your sorrows together. You know, they'd talk about Trump and I'd talk about Brexit and we're like, look, how have we fucked ourselves? I was like, there's a blah, blah, blah. But each time in those conversations, I was like, look, the thing is

I know that Trump is worse than Brexit. And I I mean that. Like, he was worse than any single politician I can think of in Britain, including Nigel Farage, who was basically like an asphrey in human form. Wait, he's worse than Nigel? He is, I think he is more pernicious. I think he's more explicitly racist. Right. Yeah, he's more dangerous and also more megal and Michael. He really, he was a worse human being in Nigel Farage. I mean, believe me, what I've just said is the nicest thing I've ever said about Nigel Farage, which is that he's not literally the worst human being on earth. But he was terrible. But what I would say was, look, no matter how

bad it looks for you right now, at least you can change this in relatively quick order. I know there's, you know, level of political toxicity that remains, but you can change it on what Brexit is, is Trumpism, but you're fucking with the engine room of a country, with the structural integrity of the company with its diplomatic status, with its political status, with its trading networks, with its economic framework. You are really mucking around with the spine of the place, the spine of the state. So this stuff, it will get much. much, much worse before it gets better, and it's going to take a long time before we can put it right. Yeah, sorry, I can't do that.

I hope you can bring me on here to make people better about things. Except by thinking, at least we're not going through it. That's the most like... I mean, what does the UK think of us? It's a really complicated question. I feel like I spent a lot of time in the UK when I was young, and they always thought we were just sort of dumb. No, no, no, no, no.

No, that's just half of it. Right. Remember, this is Britain's attitude towards everyone, is a mixture of arrogance and insecurity. You know, we're like that guy, you know, in high school. You know what I mean? Like, he was just, he acted really arrogant, but in fact, he was just deeply, tragically insecure

and didn't know how to it was women. It's like, that's basically, Britain's national personality. Fuck me, I hope no one in this country hears the shit I'm saying right now. Objectively, this is true. And this is mostly how we look at all other countries, apart from Sweden, for some reason,

who we think are fucking perfect. God knows why. And so that is the attitude towards, the Americans, and we are simultaneously kind of repulsed and tremendously aroused by America, right? So in terms of the repulsion, the classic sort of stuff, like, you know, for anyone, even in the center, let them the sort of left of British politics, you know, around capital punishment or school shootings or the abortion debate. We're boring.

I mean, we're just awful. I don't know how you like us, but go on, go on. That stuff is shocking to it. And you're constantly reminded, right, of like, you think the Americans are like us. And then you just, you get a, usually around religion or abortion, and you're like, oh, fuck me. No, you know, that is fucking mad. I don't know how anything is that. Or ER 15s.

Yeah. It comes almost every day. And you know, you feel it as a Brit when you're in America, right? Because you feel, you feel similar, but then you just, you know, even to us, like, the first thing you see when you go to the U.S. is the guy at immigration. But they have a gun. And that to us is this first moment of like, what the fuck? Why the fuck? What's this guy going to say if my papers are wrong?

You know, it's going to bought a gun? Why would he have a gun? It's just this insane thing to us. The flip side is, you know, we're fucking fascinated even now. Well, at fact, people were arguably more fascinated than ever by Trump, but they were as well by Obama. And they have mostly watched the West Wing, you know, so they still have within them that kind of idealism that America has about itself is also part and parcel of how other

countries think about America. So all of that stuff is wrapped up inside of itself. It's definitely not just that the Brits. think the Americans are done. They do often think that, but then also they kind of want to be them. It's baffling. It's baffling. Do you know what the schedule is for vaccinations in the UK? Oh, yeah, we're cracking on, man. I mean, no, really. I mean, I've just got a message from a friend of mine who's 45, and she just got a message to say that she's lined up for it. You know, they are really cracking on with this now. So on the vaccine front, we're looking pretty good.

I mean, the concern is the nutters in Parliament. So there's a group called the COVID research group, group of Tory MPs who model themselves after the European research group, which is a group of Brexit MPs. Basically what this means is whatever they say, whatever word they put before the word research is the subject they're not doing any fucking research. They're basically, these are the anti-lockdown guys.

And in fact, it's stray into a kind of COVID denialism. And it's like anti, it's lockdown skepticism on the shop window. But when you go into the shop, that, you know, behind the counter, there's a bit of COVID denialism being churned out as well.

This is like Toby Young. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm so sorry that you know who that is. I really am. Can you explain to our listeners who that is? Yeah. In fact, there was a film made of him,

how to lose friends and alienate people. We used to be this quite pretty... Yes. Yes. He was sort of a socialite. He lived in New York in the 90s. That's how I knew him. Right. And he wrote a pretty...

He wrote a good book. I like the book, actually, of, you know, going over to New York and basically not making any friends. It's true. And alienating lots of people. Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah, yeah, which is probably the experience of more people than they care to admit.

You know, he's been pro-Brex. I mean, I haven't agreed with him for a very long time. What I wasn't expecting was the degree of deterioration that we saw the COVID, of, you know, trying to harness this constant attempt to undermine any kind of public health strategy, which is just, I mean, as a journalist, first and foremost, it is objectively false. Like, the information that you're putting out is objectively false. But also, it is, frankly, catastrophically fucking immoral. And yet there is a really, there's a really, there's a.

the fucking industry of this stuff, and it's not just columnists. Today, the Daily Mail, very widely read, very well-read in government, right-wing tabloid, was putting out this thing and saying, look, you've got to open up now. You know, we've got a vaccine, so why don't we open up? And this is punishing you fucking stupid, because the truth is, Britain does another two months of lockdown. Probably, but, you know, you could open up the schools, but keep the rest of the lockdown in place. We can have the rest of the year and we'll be largely free. But if we end this thing now, when the cases are going down, but the R rate is still not below one, we can. that is not what is going to happen.

So you just look at it and you're like, it's almost like the COVID research group basically saying, you know what, if we're really quick about it, we can fit in just a fourth wave of COVID before the whole pandemic is over. This is so horrible. It is interesting that you guys are worse off than we are. Because I always thought we'd ultimately be worse off than you were.

So congratulations. Thank you very much. That's a very cheering thought for me to. I do. You know, I always think, like, the people I know who are British are very, very smart, and they're very educated and they're, they're very cultured, but man, you guys really shut the push. Well, remember, we decided we didn't want to be there. So, you know, expertise and doing things properly and all of that, that all went out the window. Like, you can't, you know, the weird thing is talking about the COVID response

without talking about the Brexit response is really fucking difficult because it's all part of the same cultural shift in Britain. It's this kind of populist idea. I mean, this was, you know, I remember a few years ago, I would laugh at the notion that someone like Boris Johnson would ever become prime minister. It's like, come on, man, this is a serious country. You know, we're not a fucking clown car. We're not going to put like a guy like this.

He can't even dress himself. Literally doesn't know how many children he has. We're not going to fucking put him in charge. Doesn't he know but won't say? Well, yeah, but there's two theories, right? One of them is he knows and won't say. And the other one, he just doesn't even fucking know. I mean, that is an amazing thing that you have a prime minister that cannot answer the question

or will not answer the question, how many children do you have? Yeah, you know what? But the only good thing that might come out of Boris Johnson's administration is that, because the right love him, right? So the right would just stick up with whatever the fuck he does. And because of that, what we've got is the sort of Philandro, but he's someone with a girlfriend. He's not married to the woman that is with.

They've had a child now. So actually, hopefully, if one good thing can come out of this, is that that kind of tedious, old-fashioned, moralistic bullshit about you expect them to be married, you know, you expect this 2.4 conservative sort of family nuclear unit, actually might have dissipated and we've become a little bit more French, hopefully not to the full extent of, you know, everyone has to fuck everyone all the time.

But, you know, at least some of the time, there's just a more relaxed attitude towards it. This is like how I always said I wanted an atheist president of America that I got Donald Trump. Oh, God, yeah. The Bible is his second favorite book? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't think it's true that he wanted to be sworn in

on Art of the Deal, but... Hey, folks, if you haven't heard, every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadobrian. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening

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Sarah Mark Warner is the senior senator from Virginia. And joining us today for the interview as well is the Daily Beast Spencer Ackerman. Hi, Senator Warner. Hey, Molly. How are you? I'm good. Thank you for joining us today. My pleasure.

Very exciting. So I want to talk to you about 230. What is going on with 230 and one? Remember section 230 was passed way back in the late 90s when there really wasn't any kind of social media. It was at the very beginnings of the internet. And I was an old telecom guys. In many ways, we kind of took the ideas around protecting telecom networks from being responsible for their content and put that kind of protection in place for these new message boards and these new companies.

that we're beginning to pop up like YouTube and AOL and Twitter. And I think for a while it made a great deal with sense. But now we're 22 years, 23 years later, and 65% of Americans get summer all their news off of just Facebook and Google. And the idea that they bear no responsibility at all for anything that happens on their websites, particularly since they manipulate through the use of algorithms, a whole lot of this content. They are clearly curated, but curated to, you know, if you're on to the left, push you further left, if you're on the right, push you further right. And they ended up being used Section 230 not only to protect things like political content,

but there was this wild case around the platform grinder where some guy met a guy on Grindr, they went out, they broke up, and then the spurned lover basically took on a false identity and said he was the other person and invited all kinds of. to people to come and harass his spurned lover. And the poor guy, life turned to living hell as he got harassed at his apartment, harassed at work. And he tried to get Grindr to take down the other, take down this content. And Grindr used Section 230 to protect itself. So it was just Section 230 has evolved into this thing that I don't think any of us anticipated.

And so there's a bunch of different ideas, including an idea I have about how we might put some guardrails around it. But isn't there a danger there that, like, I mean, it just feels like there's no, nobody totally understands. Like, are you for the idea of it being a publishing platform or? No, I'm not as far as saying we ought to call Facebook or YouTube or Twitter the New York Times or Fox News. I don't think we should get rid of all the protections. And I also think sometimes people get confused. There are First Amendment rights, and I want to protect those First Amendment rights. You've got a right to say stupid stuff, but does that right mean you can also have a right to have your stupid comments amplified five billion times?

I think that's more of an open question. So what I did working with Maisie Hirono and Amy Klobuchar was we really spent a lot of time saying, let's protect First Amendment rights, but let's clarify that Section 230 doesn't give you protections from some other basic laws that are. already on the books. And we've already made some exceptions to Section 230. You can't do child pornography. You can't do sex trafficking. You can't do bomb making. So we said on our Section 230 reform, let's still grant individual users First Amendment rights, but Facebook and YouTube and Twitter shouldn't have their Section 230 First Amendment protections go to advertising. If the advertising is inherently lying and misrepresenting, you shouldn't be able to hide behind Section 230, number one.

We said Section 230 protections shouldn't take away the ability to enforce civil rights laws. So if you're promoting discriminatory behavior, that ought to be able to still be enforced through existing civil rights laws. You should be able to get injunctive relief. if you can prove to such a higher standard that going back, for example, of the Grindr case, that somebody is personally harassing you on these platforms, and you can get a court order to prohibit that harassment, that shouldn't be protected by Section 230. And we've also said if you are, and this goes more to kind of the tort act,

if you are can prove in a court again that you're causing bodily harm to an individual the way in Burma, the government was using Facebook to incite violence against the Rohingya, you ought to be able to have that law enforced. So I think we've got a more moderate, nuanced position, but I know that some of the defenders of the status quo have been pretty upset with our proposal, but I think that's a healthy debate. I wanted to ask about the fallout to January 6th. There's a big debate underway about whether the FBI and the Department of Public

Homeland Security require new domestic terrorism powers, in particular, something on the akin of the Patriot Act aimed domestically to both list domestic terrorist groups and therefore create prohibitions against material that is financial and other support of them. Where do you stand on that? Well, first of all, I think the rise of anti-government extremists has been going on in this country for the last couple of years. And I think the FBI and others have read. recognize that, but the previous White House basically didn't want that emphasis to be made that public. And I think that's a real, a real problem. I'm not sure what new tools need to be used. I want to make sure people have got a right to protest, have got a right to, again, not have

their basic freedoms impinged upon. And I don't, I'm not sure what new tools ought to be used yet. That's why I'm taking the Intelligence Committee, and we're going to do a deep dive on this anti-government extremism. And particularly some of these, their ties to right-wing groups in Europe, oftentimes amplified by Russia. So Spencer, I got to sort through this and figure this out as well. I know the threat is real. I know it's not just in this country. If you look at countries like Hungary and Poland, you've seen the anti-government extremists

become the government and become very anti-democratic. Part of the problem may be just solved within our existing tools if the FBI and other government agencies can actually continue to help educate. the public and elected leaders are willing to acknowledge that this threat exists. The previous administration just didn't want to hear this stuff. Sure. Are the FBI or any of your other security sector interlocutors actually asking Congress for new authorities? Because I haven't seen that happen. Yeah, I don't think they've asked yet. I think we're so much at just the early stages. How did this happen? How extensive are these

networks? What else are they working on? And there is some interconnection, obviously, between especially what you're talking about here and what Molly talked about in terms of the social media platforms because a lot of this organizing is obviously going on on the web and on these platforms. And I'm glad you mentioned the Senate Intelligence Committee investigation on this. I imagine it's been sort of too short a time period for you guys to have come to any, you know, initial investigative findings. Is that the case or are you starting to see something? Do you have cooperation from anyone you might have interviewed already, or is this all premature at this point? Yeah, it's way premature.

Got it. We, you know, one of the things I want to try to do is, again, I'm really proud of our Senate and Tell Committee. You know, we've been bipartisan. We stayed bipartisan through the whole Russia investigation. And part of the first step here is to kind of sit down with members on both sides and really scope the problem. And scope the problem in a way that this is not just an attempt to kind of go after. the MAGA universe, you know, or this is not an attempt to simply take on the Donald Trump crowd. This is a much bigger, graver threat. And if we can all get on there, most of us get on the

same page about the nature of the threat, and then I think we can ask those kind of questions that you're asking Spencer, but we're not there yet. Do you think you can get there? You did mention how bipartisan the committee was able to operate during the Russian investigation, which must have in a really Herculean effort. But this seems something, you know, more incendiary, given that this was, you know, an insurrection by the president's supporters cheered on by some of your colleagues. Do you think you can actually keep this as a bipartisan investigation? And are you worried that in keeping it as a bipartisan investigation, you jeopardize the scope of what you're trying to find out? Well, I'm going to do my damnedest because I really think the seal of approval we can put on something

that it's bipartisan. I think, you know, we claimed at times that we're the last functioning bipartisan committee on the Hill, and that's a low bar to get over. So it's, you know, I don't want to lose that moniker. And I think there is some value that we bring to this, because some of the sessions that we'll have will be behind closed doors. You know, there will be our intelligence community coming in and briefing us. And that decreases the amount of political posturing. And if we can kind of come to some common agreement. Hey, this is a real problem. It's not just a real problem in this country. It's a real problem happening around Western democracies everywhere. How do we get our hands around it? I think we got a much better shot of coming to, you know, coming to those bipartisan

conclusions. But I got no idea how long this is going to take. And we're still at the stages of trying to get oftentimes academic expertise because there's, there has been some expertise, obviously within the FBI. But I do think under the Trump administration, these efforts were a little bit undermined. I mean, there just was not, you know, Chris Ray has said a couple of times when we used to still have the intelligence threat assessments. He raised this point about anti-government extremists, but that last White House didn't want to hear those stories. Have you seen stuff that we, the public, haven't seen, that you feel should be released? Molly, not yet. I expect that I will because I am still at just the starting stages.

But even with the Russia stuff, have you seen? Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Of course, with the Russia stuff, we have seen things that haven't been fully declassified yet that I'd love to still see declassified. But we didn't get as much attention on some of the volumes that we released. But when we showed with great detail of the manipulation on social media, we showed with great detail. detail all the different ways that Russia took selected information that they'd hacked into and released during the midst of the 2016 campaign. You know, we were obviously, this was the hottest topic, the first couple of years of the Trump administration.

I think the public had kind of moved on by the time we got our final reports out. But I think history will treat our five volumes as the most, far more than Mueller, the most definitive statements on what Russia's goals were and how they, basically screwed with us in major ways back in 2016 and beyond. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Sorry I was late. Let's do it again sometime. We can go longer.

Tommy Marcus, aka Quentin Quentin Quentin, is a meme maker who just raised $1.1 million for Planned Parenthood as a reaction to Rush Limbaugh's death. And today he's going to tell us the story around that. So I don't often have relatives on the show, but I'm pretty excited to have you on the show, Tommy. Can you explain who you are, who you're? your other personality is? Would my other personality be Quentin Quarantino or Tommy Marcus? Yes. Tell us about your Instagram personality. Okay. So I started this Instagram page, Quentin Quentin Quentin Quentin, the first day that everything shut down in New York, which I believe

was March 13th, 2020. Can't believe we're coming up on a year on that now. But it started off as as kind of a humorous account of just staying at home while we all thought that, you know, the pandemic was going to last a month. And it was just really kind of a lighthearted, uh, jokes page about, you know, how I was feeding myself off of canned chef boyardee and not leaving my apartment and wearing sweatpants and stuff. And then, you know, as, as time went on, things got a lot more political as it, as it related to the pandemic. And, And slowly I morphed the account into a political account where, yeah, it's been this crazy journey where I really didn't know what I was getting into when I started the page. I've always been an incredibly political person.

I almost said religious. But it's been really incredible to kind of use my platform to really confront misinformation and. turn negativity into humor and I guess with my latest stunt kind of, I've been kind of calling it trolling for good. I think that I really have hit a sweet spot in which I'm not, you know, spewing the same polarizing hate as the other side. I'm really trying to bring people together who follow me and kind of combine on a mission to really just first make people, who might not be aware of things, aware of it, but then also make them laugh and make their days better.

And I think I've found a really good blend of that over time. So let's talk about what you've done, which is pretty exciting. You started a fundraiser in the name of Rush Limbaugh, and the money went to Planned Parenthood, and you raised a million dollars. Yeah, as of the time that we're speaking, It's at, I believe, $1.17 million from 45,000 donors. And I'm still trying to process everything that's happened because I set off with a $10,000 goal.

And the whole fundraising aspect on Instagram is a brand new feature that I had just noticed. The original joke was just that I had donated $100 to Planned Parenthood on their website. And when I was going to post it on Instagram, I saw this brand new feature called, fundraising on posts. And I was like, all right, why not? Let's, let's add a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, set a $10,000 goal. It would be so funny if I was able to somehow raise $10,000 for Planned parenthood in spite of Rush Limbaugh. And, you know, 10 minutes in, it was at $1,500. And I was starting to realize, like, whoa, this might have potential for a lot more than $10,000. And now we're sitting here talking and it's over $1.1 million.

and still going. It's really been crazy. The amount of money and I guess the actual impact that this money is going to have is still something that I'm, I guess, trying to wrap my brain around because it's just such an insane thing to think about that what started off as kind of a joke has turned into such a positive and almost unifying thing based on the messages that I've received from followers, really heartfelt. messages about how this fundraiser has really kind of boosted their past week and that it's been what they've been looking forward to and constantly checking the numbers and all of this stuff. And it's just, it's, it's really just unbelievable to me. Everything has happened so fast. We hit a million dollars in three days. And yeah, I'm just, I'm still kind of in shock. And it's just been, it's been a really beautiful thing to be a part of. There's four. 35,000 people as of right now who have donated to this. And that's, that's just an unbelievable amount of people. The average donation is somewhere around $24. And we have been able to raise over a

million dollars for Planned Parenthood, which, which I would say is probably one of the most necessary and specifically most unfairly politicized and unfairly demonized organizations in this country. So yeah, it's just been absolutely crazy. Is it okay to speak ill of the dead? That is a great question, Molly. I don't know. I mean, that's really just a question. You know, I'm not sure where I come down on it.

When I first got the notification that Rush died, you know, Rush Limbo has always been a person that I've kind of had in my mind as one of, I guess, the worst people in America. He's just spent three decades, really. in my mind. I think he's really in my mind kind of brainwashed an entire generation and really spent decades spewing hatred out onto the airwaves, whether it be anti-feminist, where he refers to feminists as feminazis or is making fun of deceased AIDS victims and then is and people of color. And there's really just no marginalized community that you could pick that Rush Limbaugh.

didn't spend a significant amount of his time insulting, degrading, and brainwashing people about... Against, yeah. No, I agree. So to answer your question, you know, it kind of started off as me joking about a dead man, absolutely. Yeah. You know, some people were saying, like, I usually love your stuff, but this is a little

far. He just died. Think of his family, et cetera. But, you know, when you have such a public figure who, in my mind, really kind of, is one of the main catalysts for Trump's America. I really, I really think that he has had such a major role in, in building up America into what it became in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected. That I didn't feel bad at all kind of making fun of the fact that he had died. And with the fundraiser, I was kind of able to turn the hatred and the, you know, the kind of objectively.

negative thing of laughing at someone who just died into something that was actually productive and something, I guess I would say, intensely good, you know? Yeah, no, I agree. I mean, you know, it is the question that we all must ask all the time. You know, I don't have an opinion of it, but I definitely think that there are few people have really been as horrible and bad for the world as Rush Limbaugh, which of course is why Trump celebrates him. Yeah, exactly.

Hi, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly. So today we have a extra special themed edition of Fuck That Guy. Woof. Yes, exactly. So if people do not follow you on Instagram, they may still know that you have the most adorable rescue pipe, Leonidas. And they definitely do not know that I have a rescue pup violet that I'm an uncle to that is the light of my life.

Yes. Jesse and I are committed dog owners, and I actually have three dogs, Spartacus, Serbrus, and rescue puppy Leonidas. But, you know, the most disgusting thing always with these Trump people is that nothing is out of bounds of the culture war. And somehow, Newsmax's Greg Kelly found a way to insult Joe Biden's totally cute rescue pup. Right. That's right. Joe Biden has one rescue dog, one breeder dog, and they're both German shepherds.

And Greg Kelly, you may know him as sort of he's like a kind of Sean Hannity wannabe. On Newsmax, he's Sean Hannity without the hair. He had deemed this rescue dog not rescue enough because he was from a non-kill shelter. And you know only dogs from kill shelters count as rescue dogs. That's not true. That's completely nuts. And then he was also not that cute. And he had a lot of complaints about that dog. Not to the standards of the White House.

Apparently. I mean, I would note that the last president did not have a dog. Yes. And what I would also note is that dog is adorable. Every time I see it, it puts a smile on my face. Yes. It's a very adorable dog. And also, it's a fucking dog.

Yes. That is the real thing is that. that, you know, it'd be really nice to have there be some boundaries. But we also want to take this to another place, which is, fuck you, Ted Cruz, for leaving Snowflake all load while you went to Cancun. Well, we don't know what happened with Ted Cruz because we don't know because that security guard said he was taking care of Snowflake, the tiny white poodle who was photographed standing in front of the open door in the cruise house.

Not open, but in front of a sort of glass-paned door in the clues hassle. In that case, can I just, then maybe I'll rephrase my fuck that guy for Ted Cruz, right? What I'll say is fuck you for naming it Snowflake because you know all day he's asking Snowflake if it's triggered that he's not giving it treats and things like that. So just fuck him for that. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. 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.

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