The Daily Beast Podcast - Schumer: Manchin Didn’t Want to Be Reason the Globe Burns

Episode Date: August 9, 2022

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer got fellow Senator Joe Manchin to do something few have done before: convinced him to vote along Democratic party lines. Some are calling it The Manchin-Schumer bill, and even Schumer wasn’t sure it would happen until the end. Chuck tells Molly how he made it happen on the latest episode of The New Abnormal as well as why his flip phone is his secret weapon, how he is the opposite of Sen. Mitch McConnell, and his plans to bring back an insulin cap bill in September. Plus! Daily Beast Politics Editor Matt Fuller also breaks down the new “Dark Brandon” meme about Joe Biden that the White House has even embraced. Plus! Molly and co-host Andy Levy go after Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene for crying about Alex Jones being a victim and why the current behavior of former President Donald Trump is actually pretty scary. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, 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 the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. What a great show we have today. First, we're going to be joined by Majority Leader in the Senate, Charles Schumer, and he's going to talk to us all about the huge bill and all the progress the Democrats just made in the last session. Then we're going to talk to the Daily Beast senior politics editor, Matt Fuller, and he's going to talk to us about all the stuff that's been going on in Congress, along with a little analysis on our friend, Dark Brandon.

But first, let's have some fun. Andy Levy. Molly Jongfest. Do you know what happens every day? I know a lot of things that happen every day, but do you have one thing in particular in mind? Yes, every day is CPAC. Every fucking day is CPAC. And I used to be a regular attendee to CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference.

It used to be in March. Now it's every day. And that's good because those people don't have any other place to go. And so March, they were in Florida. Now it is the month of August, we think. And they are in the other conservative favorite state, Texas, where the grid is a little shaky, but the guns are readily available. The great state of Texas. It was the usual of what we see in CPAC, a lot of pageantry, a lot of right-wing talking points, and not a lot of substance, but a lot of Victor Orban.

Well, that's the thing. And the one thing you left out is there was a CPAC in between the two that you mentioned. There was the one in Budapest. Ooh, that's right. I forgot. Yeah. The home city of Victor Orban. Orban, who they then loved so much his little brand of fascism that they invited him to come speak at one of the 27 American CPACs. And they cannot get enough of Victor Orban. And it is amazing. It's so interesting to me because I don't like Victor Orban because he sucks.

But, and he's a fascist and he's super sketchy, but a super interesting thing, two interesting things. about Hungary. One is that it has this incredibly high inflation. So, you know, the right loves to blame Biden for inflation, which a lot of people would say you can't necessarily blame the president for inflation that comes after a pandemic. But whatever, okay, I could see, you know, if you want to do that, that's on you. But here we go. In Hungary, inflation hits a 24-year high and shows no sign of slowing. So he's a... actually a worse leader than the American president, but again, where we never let facts get involved in any of this. I do think it's also interesting. Hungary does an incredible job of funding

people and paying for them because Hungary wants people to have more children because they have the same thing that we all have, which are these declining birth rates, because no one wants to bring children into this mess. And Hungary is actually paying people and paying for their houses to have children. Two very not Republican ideas. Well, first of all, what you're failing to understand is that the high inflation in Hungary is Joe Biden's fault. Right. Exactly. So first of all, get that straight. I don't know. I waffle between thinking it's amazing and between thinking, well, of course, this is where they're, they ended up. But the thing I'm talking about is just this, the outright embrace of fascism, because I honestly don't know what else to call it, of fascism.

by the one-time purported party of small government. And there's sort of no fascist trope that these modern-day conservative slash populists haven't taken in. Straight up to the, I mean, you've got Orban, who's a borderline Holocaust denier. Oh, yeah. You know, whose entire thing is basically it's the white race and it's not mixing. the races and it's just, I don't know how much more you can be hit over the head with what exactly the Republican Party as currently constituted stands for. It is a straight up fascist party and whether

it's fascism light or full on fascism, whatever, it doesn't really matter because that's, that's where it is right now. And there's no tenet of fascism that these people won't go for. It's just, it really is amazing. I think it's super interesting that at this CPAC, there was so down sort of there's an exhibition space where they have all of this pretty sleazy sponsors. Companies like Patriot Mobile, that's in case T-Mobile is too woke for you. That's special cell phones for racist. But they also had a little bit of performance art, which is, I think, kind of ironic because a lot of. these candidates and members of this far-right fringe are actually aspiring actors. So maybe all of

this is the fault of like the death of theater. And if we had had more theater, we would have had less fascism. But either way, there was Brandon Strachan. He used to have long hair. He is the founder. You used to have really, really long hair. I was like obsessed with how long his hair was. It just baffled me. It was the founder of the walkaway movement. He comes from, of course, Hollywood, California. His schick was that he would clean up parks and also, do racist stuff. He was charged for his, you know, his help, I think is a fair way of framing this. During the January 6 riots, he then participated quite a bit with the prosecution so that he ended up not serving any time in jail. So, so in a previous, in a sort of more mafia or

Trumpy way of looking at this, we would call him a snitch, right? Yeah, or a rat. Or a rat. So he then sat in a jail cell at CPAC weeping and checking off the days on a chalkboard. Now, not to be upstaged, Marjorie Taylor Green came into that jail cell. Also a person who has yet to serve any time, but probably has some involvement in the January 6th planning. I'm not sure what that looks like. Marjorie Taylor Green got in the jail cell and then people wept.

and sung and said prayers. Andy Levy, are you still there? I'm still here. No, but I'm just saying, did you die from shock and horror? Oh, yeah. I mean, in a weekend that was all about the theater, as you said, that was as over-the-top camp as you could possibly have. And the picture, for people listening,

if you haven't seen the picture of Marjorie Taylor Green kneeling in front of him praying, I guess, It's phenomenal. It is an unbelievable picture. And it is just, nothing sums up these people better than Marjorie Taylor Green. On the one hand, blaming, you know, she's a big proponent of the January 6th was actually Antifa theory. On the other hand, she's in there complaining, you know, kneeling before Brandon Stracher, who basically told, you know, investigators that it wasn't Antifa. And he named names. and said exactly who it was on January 6th. But, you know, you're not expecting any kind of intellectual cohesion. So very performative performances at CPAC, as we have grown to expect, just to get back to Marjorie Taylor Green for a minute. Marjorie Taylor Green during CPAC, during one of her panels,

she said that she felt really bad for Alex Jones and that it was extremely unfair that he was. being targeted. So, I mean, these people can find victimhood in anything, right? I mean, I think the lesson here is that they are always victims. They absolutely live for it. And the funny thing about that, or ironic, or maybe it's just not funny, it's hard to tell what's funny anymore, but there used to be this big thing on the right where they yelled at the left for constantly claiming victimhood. And now it's just, like, they could not be bigger victims. Everything happens to them. Nothing happens because of them. It's, you know, it's just that, that's their mindset right now.

And everything is unfair. And, you know, that all stems from Trump. You know, how many times do we hear Trump say, they treated me very unfairly and stuff like that? I mean, that's, you know, that's straight from the top. That is the pure victimhood of the bully. And it's just amazing to see the shift from the, you know, pull yourself up by your bootstrap. the rugged individualism of the right that used to yell at the left for blaming everything on society and saying that, you know, everything was someone else's fault. And now this is what they are. And this is what they are through and through. And what we see at CPAC is what they are through and through.

And I think that's the actual important thing is like, you know, this is not an outlier. This is not, oh, look at the freaks who gathered at this conference, but they're not representative of anything. This is Donald Trump. This is Ted Cruz. This is Rick fucking Scott, who is supposedly, you know, a quote unquote moderate Republican or, you know, not supposed to be as insane as the MAGA heads. Those are the people sharing the stage with Jack Pesobiac and Marjorie Taylor Green and Brandon Straca and all these people. No, all the, all the stalwarts of the Republican Party are now basically members of CPAC. and I think that's a really good point.

Yeah. Now, I do think that's important because it's just, you know, I think I've talked about this on the pod before. I have a friend who would always say, oh, why do you guys, you know, you talk about Marjorie Taylor Green too much. She's just, you know, she's just, and she didn't mean us. She meant the media in general. Right. And he was like, you know, she's just this one congresswoman. And I just kept saying, no, she is the party.

Like, that is where the party is headed. And nothing proves that more than what CPAC has become. It has just become, it's all these people, but it's also, it's again, It's the former president of the United States who's probably going to be running again and will probably be the frontrunner for the Republican nomination. It's Ted Cruz. It's all of them. I do want to point something out, which I think is really interesting, which is Trump gave a very long CPAC speech. I have sat through those myself. They're quite boring.

They start out a little bit interesting, but by hour or two, you're just like, I really have to pee. And you know, you can't leave because they have the bodyguards everywhere because it's the president. or at least when I went, he was the president. What I thought was striking about this speech and I have this theory, which is that people are kind of bored with Trump because his racism was so shocking when it came on the scene. Right. But now he only has like three schicks and they're kind of boring.

And like the worst one, the one that is bad for democracy but is also quite bad for the Republican Party is the I won in 2020. Right. And I think that a lot of these schicks, they don't hit the way they did before. And like what was very shocking in 2015 is now quite boring in 2022. And so I do think that one of the sort of factors that is not factored into Trump's return, and I do think he will ultimately decide to run. But I do think he is not shocking the way he was before.

And I think that's an important data point. Agreed. But I do think that, you know, what usually happens when the same old routine doesn't shock anymore, you go further. Right. And certainly possible. Yeah. No, I think we're starting to see that. I think some of the things that Trump said at CPAC were that he thinks the president should be able to fire any person in government he wants at any time. And, you know, it's stuff like that where basically he thinks that every government employee has to do the president's bidding, whether the president's. whether the president's bidding is legal or not. And it's stuff like that that is going to be, you know, it's, again, it's pushing the envelope

of fascism and sort of, you know, I hate the whole Overton window phrase. But I guess it does sort of apply here is that, as you said, all the stuff he said that was shocking and that sort of moved the Overton window back in 2016 and for the last, you know, six years or whatever is now mainstream. Republicanism. So what do you have to do? You have to push it even more. And that's the really scary part is that once he does figure out that, you know, like a shock jock or like a quote-unquote edgy comedian, you know, once he does figure out that, oh, they're getting bored with the same old stuff, you start rolling out stuff that's even more extreme. Absolutely think that's where Trump is headed.

and, you know, we'll have to see if the DeSantis is and the people like that follow his lead. And, I mean, they, you know, they already sort of are, like, everything that's going on right now with the, you know, with the gay and trans people is, you know, it's pushing that window as far as they can in terms of just being cruel and mean. So it's just, it's not going to get better. And the fact that it's become boring is actually a little scary. Yeah. The one thing I would say is Trump is not a disciplined speaker. He's not a dissentist. So I think it's very unlikely you get him to stop talking about the 2020 election.

Agreed. It's like they said on the Kiron at the top of the stage at CPAC, we are all domestic terrorists and also before. Right. Charles Schumer is the senior senator from New York and the majority leader in the Senate. Welcome to New abnormal leader Chuck Schumer. Right. Well, thank you, Molly. And the new abnormal is that we got something very significant done, the most significant thing in decades. And people had been waiting for a long time that we get something done real on climate with the perils to the globe, that we go after the drug companies so that the prices of things like insulin and other things are lower, that we close the loopholes that wealthy people and big corporations you'd use to pay no taxes, and that we lower their costs. And all of this. This is in one bill. So I'm pretty proud of it. Molly, it took a long time to get there. We had a lot of dead ends. But I'll tell you a brief minute about my dad. Yes, tell me. So my dad was raised in Utica.

My grandpa was a union organizer in the paper mills. He's drafted right when World War II starts. They give him a test. He scores real high. They teach him radar and he flies these very perilous missions over the mountains in Asia. Comes back. My grandpa's lost his job as a union organizer, or bought a little exterminating business, but grandpa was an idealist, not a businessman. So my dad had to go into this junkie business. He spent 40 years in the business, 45, he hated it. He never complained and he never resented people.

You know, he could have gone to college and done some good stuff, but he got bad breaks. Never complained or resented other people, but he's still here. And he taught me two things. Help people who need help. That's the noblest thing you can do. And second, if you're doing the right thing and persist, will reward you, you'll succeed, don't give up. So here we are. That's what we did in this bill.

I have to say when you got Mansion on board, that day that had happened, I think everyone was just blown away. I mean, did you know you would get him on board eventually? No, he's very, you know, he has different views on a lot of things. And when he backed out the week before, well, as he said it, we let the dogs loose, you know, and people were saying, Joe Manchin, you could be the one person who's standing in the way of dealing with global warming. And if you don't, you could be the person who destroyed the globe. And he felt that. He felt that. And he came back the following Monday and said, let's negotiate. And we did. And here we are. But it was a surprise. Molly, the one thing that he made me pledge, and he was right about this, we're not going to tell anyone, not the president or the

White House, not our colleagues, because then everyone comes in and disrupts everything maybe. So it kept it a total secret till Wednesday and then boom. As one of my colleagues, Tina Smith, a very nice, soft-spoken but great senator from Minnesota. When she heard it, she said on the air, holy shit. Yeah, that was my, I mean, I think a lot of us were like, I actually saw Angelo that day at a party. And I was like, wow, your boss did it, man. That was amazing. Well, we kept persisting.

And, you know, I can't show you. this is a podcast, but I'm holding up my secret web. It's a flip phone. Every senator has my phone number, every Democratic senator, and I have theirs, and I talk to all of them. They don't go through staff. They don't do email. It's the secret to success. When you have a caucus of 50, with no margin for error running from Sanders to mansion, intransigent Republicans who won't do anything because they're in the pockets of the big special interests all the time, you need to bring people together and talking to them is the way to do it. And I do it all the time. I just going to say, I tell people, Molly, this was the hardest job I've ever had. Hardest. But I woke up every morning

with more energy and more enthusiasm because it was so fucking important. Can we talk about insulin for a minute? Because I was shocked that seven Republicans voted for insulin. And do you think there's a way to get a little standalone insulin, Bill? First people forget, they did not knock out the insulin, 35. dollar cap, which I had worked on with Gene Shaheen and other senators, they didn't knock it out for Medicare. So anyone on Medicare has the cap. Right. We had to get a vote

on the non-Medicare when you had a insurance. And we needed 10 Republicans. We only got seven. I'm going to bring that back in September. They're going to feel the heat and I'm hopeful we can get it done then. Do you think Burn Pitts was a good example of a bill where

Republicans voted against it, even though it was really a very popular bill. Molly, they were so mad that I had brought mansion on board and it looked like we do reconciliation. They were mad. Okay, so they're mad. They took it out on our poor veterans who were having cancer and heart disease and everything else because of their exposure to burn pits. They looked like total jerks and they had to back off. And I, you know, they thought I'd back off, NFW. We put it, I said it's coming right back up and you guys are going to have to vote it down again. Well, they didn't, praise God. And we got the bill done.

Amazing stuff. One of the things we say is Democrats don't brag enough about their accomplishments. Brag for us just a little bit. This is the most important thing we're doing in a generation. You know, the Republican Party has moved to the right, far to the right. They're MAGA Republicans. They are many of them. We don't believe in democracy and elections and anything that you and I would believe. But the people said, you know, okay, we don't like them, but the Democrats can't get anything done. Well, the last six weeks with burn pips, with the chips bill, with the gun bill, with the treaties, you know, for NATO, and now this, the biggest of the mall, people are saying, hey, they can get something done. That is going to help us big time in the elections. We're going to pick up a couple of seats.

And when we pick up a couple of seats, Molly, we're going to go much beyond. This bill was great, but we got more to do on climate and everything else. And we're going to go further, much further. One last question, and then I'll let you go. the gun legislation is the first legislation 35 years. Right. Were you shocked that you got Republicans on board at all? Well, they're feeling the heat.

They're so out of touch. You know, I care about this. You said 35 years. I was the author of the Brady Law and the assault weapons ban. I was a congressman there. So I believe in this. I'm very proud that the NRA often says I'm public enemy number one. That makes me proud.

But, you know, they're feeling the heat on all these issues. They've moved so far to the right. They're so far out of the mainstream. on issues like guns, on issues like choice, on issues like environment, on issues like going, making wealthy people pay their fair share, that they're losing it. And they felt the heat here. And so it's not as much as we'd want. But again, it's something. Getting something done makes a big deal of difference. You know, McConnell, he brags that he created the legislative graveyard, you know, that he killed everything. Right. That's not what I want to do. I want to brag that I got

things done that help people make their lives better. That's amazing. Do you think Roe is going to help Democrats going into the midterms? Huge, huge. Every one of our eight battleground states were ahead in. Four challengers and four incumbents we got to keep. And after row, the numbers really started changing dramatically. A, because America's pro-choice. B, because they realize now it's in danger. Before this, they said, all right, the guys, the Republicans are bad on this, but they can't do anything. Well, they packed the Supreme Court, and you see, they did. And third, because it shows it reflects the overall extremist. of the Republican Party these days. Yeah. Thank you so much, Chuck Schumer.

Bye, Molly. Keep up the good work. Have a nice week. Bye. Thank you. Matt Fuller is Senior Politics Editor at The Daily Beast. Welcome back to the new abnormal Matt Fuller. Thanks for having me. Always a pleasure. So tell us a weekend of Blockbuster legislating in August.

It's like never happened, right? Has that ever happened? We've certainly had weekend sessions. we've certainly had sessions in August. I don't, yeah, I mean, I think I'm trying to think in 2011 conservatives had their deal. It's not usual. I don't think it's happened in the last decade quite like this, yes. So talk to us about it, largest federal investment in climate change ever.

You have $370 billion addressing climate change, like you said, the largest amount of money for that particular issue ever. Specifically, it's aiming to reduce greenhouse gases to, 40% below their 2005 levels. You do that through a number of tax credits, wind, solar, other renewable energies. Because this is a Joe Mansion bill, or a bill largely written by Joe Mansion, there's also some money for fossil fuel, the fossil fuel industry. And pipelines, right? Pipelines. Got to get pipelines in there. Exactly. This bill addresses climate. There's a good amount of tax. It pays more than pays for itself that would project it to reduce the deficit by 300 billion over the next 10 years, largely by instituting this minimum tax on corporations making

over a billion dollars. People, I think, are generally surprised to learn that these large businesses worth a billion dollars sometimes aren't paying any taxes. Yeah, I'm shocked. Yeah, shocking, shocking if I'm gambling going on here. It would have a 1% tax on companies that buy back their stocks. You might remember this with the Republican tax cut bill. And in, in, end of 2017, there was a lot of big round of stock buybacks. And yeah, there's also these health care provisions, 64 billion to shore up Obamacare, support health insurance premiums for people on that program. A big thing is a caps expenses to $2,000 a year for people who are on Medicare, allows the U.S. to negotiate drug prices for at least 10 medicines starting in

2026. It's, frankly, it's just a bill full of things that are pretty popular when you pull them individually. Right. I mean, it's super interesting that it felt like there was like this pause and now we have this flurry of legislation because even before this passed, we had the burn pits and chips, which I think didn't get so much play, but it's a pretty interesting little piece of legislation. Yeah. In retrospect, certainly a lot of Republicans believe that Schumer and Mansion basically had this agreement in hand, and they waited until the chips bill. This is a bill helping high-tech manufacturers and certainly compete with China on actual microchips. They waited until the Senate actually passed that, and they announced the deal, I think only like an hour

after the Senate actually passed the bill, partly because Mitch McConnell said in June that, you know, they weren't going to pass the chips bill until they had assurances that reconciliation was dead. And this is the process they used to pass this bill with just 50 votes. in some ways really 51 because Kamala Harris actually had to break the tie. Right. This has been more than a year, a year and a half coming together here, a large piece of legislation that obviously Democrats wanted a much larger bill. There's quite a bit that's left on the cutting room floor here.

There's no pre-K, no family leave, tons of housing policies that they wanted initially. You know, this is still a good bill for Democrats. It'll poll very well for them. Let's talk a little bit about what is happening with what's happening. what's happening with this going into the midterms because that is we have three months the midterms today. Oh, dear God. Well, yeah. I mean, so a few things here. Obviously, Biden is coming off of a very strong week for himself gas at its lowest prices in the summer. They killed an Al-Qaeda leader. They passed this bill. Right. They killed an Al-Qaeda leader. That sort of got lost in the newsstrom.

Totally lost in the shuffle. And then they had a very encouraging jobs report that said, Didn't they beat estimates by about double? Yeah, I mean, they're a little less than double. I think people were probably thinking, maybe adding 100,000 jobs, they added 500,000. It certainly seems like we are not in recession right now. All really good news for Biden. And I think in a lot of ways the tide is turning. And then this, this bill, you know, Democrats have been sort of banging their head against the wall,

feeling like they couldn't get anything accomplished in the 50-50 Senate. And suddenly they come up with a bill, again, that's just sort of chalk full of sort of election year priorities. And I think there's real wins here for them. And more than that, though, this is this is a political win. There's political wins in the sense that they subjected the Senate to a vote on these $35 insulin caps, which are extraordinarily popular. I think like it pulled at like 61% of voters, likely voters strongly support these insulin caps that was shorn from the bill under the reconciliation rules. But they did have the $35 insulin cap for Medicare. So that's still very popular. So you preserve the political issue in some ways. You still have the actual substantive win for Medicare. All these things are pointing to good developments for Democrats. And certainly also, as we saw last week, abortion in Kansas, right? Kansas is not particularly known for its liberal pro-choice values.

And people overwhelmingly came out and said, yeah, we would like to uphold Roewe-Way. We want to have abortion protections in the state. So all those things very suddenly coming together for Democrats, Democrats. And it just feels like the tide might have changed a little bit where everything was looking horrible for them for the longest time. And I think there's some real wins for Democrats here and some definitely some points of progress for them. So and we're going to have a lot of consumer sentiment numbers this week too. So that's coming later on in the week. Yeah. And a big driver of consumer sentiment on inflation has always been gas prices. And if gas prices are going down,

it's usually a leading indicator for that. Which they are. Yeah. Now, You think that this may be because of circumstances, but I want to postulate that this is because of the meme wars. Democrats are in the trenches. In the meme wars with their secret weapon, Dark Brandon, let's go. Yes, Dark Brandon. So I don't know how initiated we all are here on Dark Brandon, but basically. Please, I think we got to give my father, though he might be mad at me. but I think he's listening to this, the full thing.

Okay, so the full explainer is best as best I can do. Because even, you know, as someone who is very online, I still don't feel like I completely understand this. But basically it started as this meme from, I think, the really online left. Brandon Brown, NASCAR. Well, that was the let's go. That's the genesis of Let's Go, Brandon, which obviously is all tied up in this. But basically, leftist felt like there was legitimate complaints for Joe Biden. there was obviously republicans have let's go brandon and fuck joe biden as their own sort of calling cards um and liberals

were sort of complaining about joe biden that you know he wasn't doing enough and he actually you know the idea of him is this like buddy dutty senile stumbling you know geyser is wrong and he's actually this evil centrist who's you know disbanding like for women and whatnot so that was sort of in this gestation period for the longest time as that meme. And then very suddenly, this meme sort of took off in a different direction where I think a lot of centrist and even some liberals sort of started owning this idea of dark branding because at least at least this is a brand that gets things done. Right. And particularly in the last week where you have, again, probably the most successful week the White House has had since inauguration, people really owning this idea and really

the White House owning it. They're tweeting out these memes of Joe Biden with laser eyes and whatnot. This is all kind of feeling from the right and their love of memes and whatnot. But I think there's a big feeling of the own the libs mentality, the cocaine Mitch. All those vibes are

present in this. And it's really, it's a stunning and sort of brilliant way to respond to things like Let's go, Brandon, because the White House has never figured out how to actually respond to that. Right. Anything you say is just going to sort of be used against you.

Right. This is sort of a silent protest to that and saying, actually, we're accomplishing things and we're owning up to the fact that we're really good at this. And, you know, we're not the senile, stupid Joe Biden stumbling around the White House. It's actually someone who's Machiavellian and calculated capable of doing real things here. And I think in the sense that you don't actually have to say anything, it's just like among the initiated. You see one of those memes online. It's kind of that quiet protest. and it really can't be for that.

It is interesting to me that this Let's Go Brandon, Dark Brandon meme war, that there's a sense in which I think it was almost like there was this moment where people were sort of convinced that, like, I've seen memes that are like, Trump gets COVID and has to go to the hospital, Biden gets COVID and kills an al-Qaeda terrorist. I mean, I don't like much care for, you know, celebrating the murder of people, even if they're bad guys. But I do think, like, that some of it was this idea that he had, he was sort of had superpowers. Yeah. Biden getting COVID sort of coincides with the worst, the best period of his presidency. So it's an incredible coincidence.

But I really think just more than that, it's, there's a lot of Biden supporters and people who are online. who for the longest time of just sort of ate shit and, you know, let's go Brandon and all this sort of stuff that's out there. You just sort of quietly take it. And finally, they have something where they can actually protest that and say, look, we're getting things done without actually having to say any of that. And it's really a brilliant little joke. And that's why I think you're seeing, you know, the White House at the highest level is embracing this to an extent, which is a very weird online thing. And, you know, most voters are never going to get this. But I think it's like a cue to their most engaged voters and certainly the most online ones that we are fighting back against this and we're not just letting the right, you know, say, you know, let's go brand and fly there. Let's go brand and flags and whatnot. Insulin. Let's talk about insulin right before this segment. We talked to Leader Schumer.

I had said I was sort of shocked when I saw those numbers that seven Republicans supported this $35 cap for out of Medicare insulin because that's a lot of senators. I didn't know there were seven sane Republican senators. It's funny to look at the actual seven you had, right? It's a very interesting collection. You had, you know, the most moderate Republicans, Susan Collins, Lisa Mikowski. And then you had like Josh Hawley, Cindy Hyde Smith, Dan Sullivan, John Kennedy, and Bill Cassidy. I think it's a real collection of people who, A, acknowledge that the politics of this are really bad for Republicans. Again, it's like over 60% of voters strongly support these these counties.

And then if you really get down into this issue, I think it becomes kind of indefensible for Republicans to say, oh, no, we don't want this $35 cap. Insulin really hasn't changed for 100 years. Right. If you actually look at the, there's some great polling among diabetics who actually take insulin. And 79% of them say the cost of insulin has caused them financial difficulty. Oh, yeah. And four out of five took loans, right? Right.

Have taken on credit card debt. To support their insulin habit so they don't die. Insulin have, right. And 9,000 is the average amount of debt people take on to pay for insulin. So you're talking about a life or death drug. These people have no option. They need this drug. The free market values that Republicans love to extol on health care, they don't work for a type 1 diabetic.

Right, right. You're going to have to pay whatever you have to pay. You'll have to beg borrow and steal to get insulin. And by the way, 62% of these diabetics who take insulin say they've rationed insulin. So we're actually straining the health care system as it. because that's not a good, that's not a good system either. And the people go into comas and they have kidney damage. I mean, I've seen this firsthand.

But anyway, yeah, so it's fascinating. You could see a world where a coalition, you get some more Alaska. Well, you've got the Alaskan senators, but you could get, it seems like there's more, I mean, you've got both Louisiana senators. Clearly this is like a state situation and maybe you can, you know, get more people. Yeah, people are seeing this issue. there's real politics involved. This is not going to go away for Republicans.

And frankly, I think that if you just put this issue in front of voters and say these Republicans voted against a $35 cap on insulin, people strongly support that cap. And that issue is not going to go away. And it could potentially change voters. We know that right now it stands at 5743. I would watch that closely over the next coming months to see if there's any change there. Yeah. Thank you so much.

So interesting. Thanks again for having me. Andy Levy Molly Who is your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is a guy who I you know

he served his country honorably for a long time and rose to the rank of a four star general and to the point where he was the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and his name is Mark Millie.

It has now come out that he wrote an absolutely harsh and scathing letter of resignation to President Trump that he never sent. Wait, are you saying he never sent it? I'm saying he never sent it. And it has now come out. It's part of an upcoming book that's coming out by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. And they got a hold of the letter.

and he wrote, I'll just read a couple sentences from it. He's saying he's going to resign. He says, it is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country. I believe that you have made a concerted effort over time to politicize the United States military. I thought that I could change that. I've come to the realization that I cannot and I need to step aside and let someone else try to do that. Except he didn't. He didn't do any of that.

He didn't step aside. So I am, I mean, we've talked about this, what feels like ad nauseum. him at this point, all these guys who want their image rehabbed now that Trump is out of office. And so they're releasing all these things that they, you know, should have said or, oh, I did say this. I did raise this point. Or, hey, I drafted a letter. It was really harsh. You should see the things I said about him in this letter that I never sent.

And I'm sick of it. And I don't want any of these guys getting there. images rehabilitated. They have to live with what they did. And so for all those reasons, General Mark Millie, fuck you. Yeah, that's a good one. You want to know who my fuck that guy is? Yeah. You know, you know what? I do. I do want to know. It was good. That nice long... I don't think about it. That was good. Yeah. So this is like a very interesting phenomenon, or at least it's interesting to me. I don't know if it's interesting to the rest of you, but Trump has pushed these sort of pro-insurrectionist candidates, the ones that he thinks will go in there and mess with the vote

in 2024. Right. And he's pushed them, but he's pushed them on all the swing states, which is interesting to me because those are the states where those people are going to have the hardest time getting elected, right, because they're not Ruby Red states. So it'll be interesting to see how this works for him. Some people might have thought this was a pretty dumb idea. But Michigan AG, right now, Michigan is run by a triumvirate of women, governor, Cretchen Whitmer, and then there's AG Dana Nessel and Secretary of State. So the GOP candidate for Michigan A.J. running against Dana Nessel, you will be shocked to find out that he is, according to Nessel. the course of this investigation facts that this guy was one of the prime instigators of this voting machine conspiracy.

And so he is going to need to be investigated by a special prosecutor. Totally a great look for someone running for AG. Good job, Trump. Another great one. 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. We'll 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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