The Daily Beast Podcast - Secret Corruption ‘Waivers’ and Other Tales from Trump’s Former Ethics Director

Episode Date: October 22, 2021

Walter Shaub, former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics under the Obama and Trump administration shares “the most horrifying ethical lapse” of the Trump admin that he witnessed—and why he’s annoyed at Biden. Plus, Esquire’s politics blog editor Charles P. Pierce joins to discuss the Ronald Reagan administration’s economic ignorance and how the “the conservative media octopus” made people so anti-vax that they’re actually unAmerican. 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 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 Jong-Fast 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 up to down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Kenan. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

This show is pretty thought-provoking. Charles P. Pierce, who's the editor of the politics blog at Esquire, is going to bring us all of his political wisdom. But first, Walter Shab, who is the former director of the United States Office of Government Ethics under the Obama administration and for a brief moment under the Trump administration and currently heads the project on government oversight, is going to talk to us about how the Biden administration is, blowing it. So it's very exciting to have my friend, and I think of you as like Mr. Government

Oversight. So I'm very excited to have you to the new abnormal. Welcome, Walt Chob. Well, thanks for having me. And welcome to the burn it the down episode. So you come from government oversight. I want to set this up for people so they sort of understand where you're coming from. You left the government during the beginning of the Trump administration. Yeah, I had. nearly 20 years of service, just shy of what I needed for a good retirement and wound up quitting in July, I had actually been dealing with the Trump administration for a lot longer than that, because we worked with their transition team to prepare for taking over after the election. We did that with both sides. And then the day after the election, they fired their entire transition team that we had spent five months training and plunged their administration into total. chaos two months before even starting in government. So I had dealt with them for about nine months

and then just reached a point of diminishing returns and decided I needed to quit to be able to speak out more freely than I could inside the government. Explain what part of the government you worked in before, the oversight. I was the director of the Office of Government Ethics. I had spent years as a government ethics attorney, also did some federal employment law. I had spent some time. I had spent some in the private sector and a law firm. And then after quitting, I went to nonprofit organizations to continue fighting for government oversight. But as you can imagine, being the ethics director, when the Trump administration came in, was the cause of not one eye twitch, but two. You came out and spoke very strongly about some of what was going on. Before we get to what's happening

now. Just give me sort of a quick, what was the most horrifying ethical lapse of the Trump administration go? I mean, really the worst thing was President Trump's failure to divest his conflicting financial interest, which he then made worse by promoting those financial interests aggressively using the presidency. And I spoke out about that on January 11th, 2017, the day that he announced he would not divest. I gave a 13-minute statement to the press. And it was funny because I was watching, the press just kind of sitting there, rolling their eyes, checking their cell phones, and not one eye was looking up. And then one after another, they started looking up. And then their eyes started getting wider. And then they started typing frantically. And my stomach just sank because I thought,

okay, so this is my resignation letter. And I assumed I would be fired on January 20th. But the next day, Jason Chaffetz, head of the Powerful Oversight Committee in Congress, went after me. And he botched it so badly that I think the Trump administration was afraid to fire me because Chafids had messed it up. So then that left me dealing with them for a few more months. And we had a big showdown in May when I was trying to force them to release what were rumored to be secret waivers in the White House, secret ethics waivers, letting folks do things. The ethics rules prohibited. And the showdown got pretty testy. Actually, at the time, I heard that a call had been placed over to Saudi Arabia, President Trump was at the time, presumably asking for permission to fire me for whatever reason.

Well, I know what reason. I had sent a copy of my letter to Chuck Grassley, Senator Grassley, pointing out in the letter to the Trump administration, Grassley's letter to the Obama administration demanding that waivers be released publicly. And apparently I found out later that Grassley called over to the Office of Management and Budget when he got my letter or someone on his staffed it and said, we want to see these waivers to just get a sense of what this fight is all about. And they told them to go take a hike. Well, you don't tell Chuck Grassley to go take a hike. So apparently Grassley lost it and yelled at them and told them they'd better release those waivers by the deadline I had set. The problem is the secret of the secret waivers was that there were

no secret waivers. They were just letting people break the rules. So you could pretty much tell, and I can't say for sure, but my belief has been, or at least my suspicion, has been that the ethics official sat there ginning them up on the morning of the deadline, and they wound up releasing them. Most of them were unsigned and undated. And when you looked at the metadata, not only the PDF, but the underlying MS Word document appeared to have been created that day. Jesus. Jason Chavits went from government oversight to Fox News host. Yeah, he quit mysteriously, like really suddenly one day. I don't know if he was worried about something or if just Fox had offered him enough money to sell out his government post. But he left. And then after that showdown,

the White House finally figured out how to deal with me. They just cut me off from all information. And that became a problem because I was required to review the financial disclosures of White House employees to look for conflicts of interest and see what they held. The problem is they wouldn't answer our questions. They wouldn't tell us what these people did for a living. So I couldn't, in good conscience certified that these reports were compliant and free of conflicts of interest, but I couldn't refuse to certify all of them without being accused of being partisan and looking partisan. And so they finally had me in a pinch, and I decided the better move, instead of staying and becoming window dressing for corruption, was to leave and be able to speak much more freely.

And I think one thing people don't know about jobs like the one I had is, unlike some agencies, the Office of Government Ethics was prohibited from speaking directly to Congress. So I couldn't call up Congress and alert them to my concerns or propose solutions or ask them to investigate. Leaving government freed me to be able to work fairly closely with people on the Hill, which I have ever since. So talk to us about what you're doing now and exactly why you are so furious. Which is good. Nothing wrong with being furious. We're all furious. Yeah, I am so angry today. You've caught me on a day when I am just seething. But I'm working for the project on government oversight, which is a nonpartisan good government group that for years has fought for accountability in government and transparency, ranging from everything from fighting direct corruption to fighting fraud, waste, and abuse and needless government space. on defense contractors who pad their bills. They've been around since about 1981, so they've got a long track record, and I have to say, I absolutely love the job. But we are continuing to fight for ethical reform. And at the end of the Trump administration, America was at a turning point. You know, Trump did not create the weaknesses in our government. He exploited them. One thing America

should have learned from the four years under Trump is that our system is incredibly weak, and completely dependent on the people at the top doing the right thing. And there's little, if any, way to enforce anything against any of them. And so this was a moment for reform. And Biden ran on a reform platform. And when you go back and look at his ethics platform, it all speaks about legislation. He says, I will enact this, which of course he can't do, but you can take that to mean he'll work with Congress to see that it's enacted. And I will propose this.

I will pursue this legislation. It's almost all legislative. And that's because we need new laws. Anything he does on his own, an executive order, a policy of practice, is just going to be thrown out the window by the next president. So we had this window of opportunity. And the House did its job. It passed H.R. 1 Before the People Act, from the start, the Biden administration showed absolutely no interest in that bill, made no effort to push for it. It just sort of languished and languished in the Senate for a while. And then, you know, you start seeing when good government groups like ours and others were pressing them and pushing them to help America with this reform effort, you would get the occasional little tweet saying, oh, boy, you know, we need this proposal

to pass. We support HR1. La-da-da. And that's about it. Then things started here. up on the voting rights front, another anti-corruption issue. Right now, there are over 425 voter suppression bills that have been introduced in 49 states. 33 of them have passed in 19 states. So it will be much harder for people to vote in the next election. And these voting restrictions are targeted at minority communities and other people that the Republicans pushing them. think are people who will vote against them. And so they want to, instead of winning their votes or changing their minds or adapting their positions to attract others, they want to prevent them from voting. The thing is, this is not a left versus right issue. Voting rights is not partisan. Voter suppression

is partisan. So these days, I tend to try to avoid talking about Republicans or Democrats because I care about democracy and freedom. But the truth is one party right now is acting in a partisan way, trying to suppress votes. And the media is covering it like a policy debate between the left and the right, where this is actually a fight between freedom and authoritarianism. Again, Biden showed very little interest in the For the People Act, which had voter protection provisions. And ultimately, a deal was worked out where Schumer and Mansion and others were going to come up with some compromise bill. And the compromise bill they came up with. Was yesterday. Well, they came up with the bill in September. Right. But it was voted on yesterday.

Yeah. And the bill gutted every single ethics provision of the HR1, as if, like, we were so happy with the way Trump behaved. Let's gut all those ethics provisions and let people do what Trump did again, because that was a lot of fun. So all we've got left is the voting rights provisions. They gutted everything else. And it's the Freedom to Vote Act. And I will say it's a little bit better on the voting provisions because they learn the lessons of watching this voter suppression effort, but it guts everything else. Came up for a vote yet. which took forever to do. I mean, here we are in mid-October and they're just now bringing it to the floor for a vote. You saw no campaigning for it by the president or vice president. There's the occasional tweet that kind of in milctose terms says, hey, go for this. Meanwhile, they're running around trying to use the bully pulpit to pound into America the need for this build back better plan and this infrastructure plan, which of course we need. But if you get them, and you don't get voting rights, they're going to be swept away in five minutes when Congress changes hands.

So the vote comes up and it gets filibustered. And the way a filibuster works these days is just atrocious. All you have to do is have 41 senators oppose even debating an issue. And that's it. It's all over. There's no debate. You just move on. And it used to be that with a filibuster, you had to hold the floor. You had to literally go down, and speak. Just like in that movie, Mr. Smith goes to Washington where Jimmy Stewart collapses on the floor dramatically. Well, that's literally what it was intended to be. And the filibuster was a tactic for slowing legislation to buy time to negotiate. It was never intended to block things. But in the 1970s, they changed it so that it's all now so civilized. Nobody has to stand up and speak and yell and shout and read phone books or whatever they can to hold the floor. So they did that. And the theory

has been, okay, we'll give Joe Manchin a few months, we'll compromise with him, we'll gut the ethics provisions, we'll give him a few months to round up 10 Republicans to vote for this. And then if that fails, we'll all be ready to turn to filibuster. Well, okay, it failed. And I didn't see the president take the airwaves last night to talk about filibusters. I turned on the TV and he's on there telling Amtrak stories and being charming and trying to get everybody excited about budget reconciliation. And it's like Rome is burning and he's out there playing the fiddle. And it's just disgusting. And I agree with him. I agree with Reverend Barber who I, is somebody I really admire who talks about how we need all of these things. But there has to be an order of priority.

of needs. And if you don't have voting rights, you are going to lose every last game that you get. And I have theories, but I cannot truly figure out why the White House is oblivious to the threat this country faces. And you see lots of people making excuses like, oh, well, he can't control Joe Manchin. But I guarantee you, if the infrastructure bill or this reconciliation budget bill goes through, they're going to credit President Biden for the massive, successful effort he'll have put into using the bully pulpit to push for this. So you can't have it both ways. He either gets no credit for that success or he gets credit for the failure because he's made no effort on voting rights. And it does seem to me that we find ourselves in a situation where

the voting rights is a much bigger deal. I mean, if you don't have the voting rights, you can't, I mean, we just had someone on the pod who was talking about the rise. of autocracy and talking about how we have these state parties that are now being controlled by people who don't want free and fair elections on the Republican side. This only ends one way. Yeah, I mean, there was a time not long ago where talk of authoritarianism would be the talk of aluminum foil helmet people, that it's just crazy conspiracy theory. But these guys are doing this out in the open. There's no conspiracy theory. They are out in the open and painfully clear about what they're doing because they know no one's trying to stop them. The cure doesn't even have to be to eliminate the filibuster.

Mansion and cinema have made clear that they're opposed to eliminating the filibuster. Even Joe Biden is opposed to eliminating the filibuster, but there's a simple reform you could do. You could go back to the earlier version of the filibuster that probably existed longer than the current one. I don't know the history that well, but I know it existed for a long time. The talking filibuster, and there's a second piece of it, it takes a two-thirds, vote of the Senate to vote to end a filibuster, but you could change it so that it's two-thirds of the people present in the chamber at any time. And what that means is that 41 Republican senators would have to be in the Senate as one of them is speaking around the clock. And suddenly,

this now takes a toll, because right now you can do a filibuster, which to the public sounds like a formal thing or a lot of work. It's just 41 people saying, no, we're not going to talk about this. It costs them nothing. But if you impose a requirement to not only speak, but have 40 other senators with you at all times so that your opponents don't seize on the advantage of too many of you leave the chamber to vote to shut down the filibuster, now it takes a toll because they can't do other business. They are trapped there. Nothing else move forward. They can't work. They can't They can't sleep. They can't go back to their families. And suddenly now there's a proportionate burden on the minority party trying to obstruct legislation. And voting rights would have a chance to move forward.

And at a minimum, it would create enough of a burden on the minority that the two sides could negotiate. And even if we got a watered down bill, it would be better than what we have now, which is nothing. And just the sheer indifference. And the thing I got to tell you is from my dealings with these folks, and I was on the transition team. I have had conversations with people in the White House during this administration. I have had conversations with other people in the administration. They truly do not perceive a threat to the Republic. They just can't even imagine. Like, it is so far out of their realm of experience that they can't imagine it. And I was talking to one reporter, and I only know this second hand, but he was grumbling how when somebody asks them, don't you even read news. They were like, we make the news. We don't read the news. And there's just a certain arrogance. And, you know, I think the arrogance comes from the fact that this is probably the most skillful, most talented, smartest, most capable and technically expert administration our country has ever have. I'll give them that. They are the best of the best. Yeah, but it doesn't matter if they're

not doing the rights. But it doesn't matter because they're so obsessed with the fact that they are the best of the best that they're not taking in any data. No information is. permeating their echo chamber. Yeah. No, and I think that's what's important. So what should people, we have really active and activated and fabulous listeners, tell them what they should do. Here's what I'll tell you I think needs to be done. And I don't think people are going to like it, but I think it has to be done.

I get so many people angry on social media when I do this. You're in a safe space. Well, at least I can't speak up or respond to me at this moment. The reality is the Republicans are unpersuadable. And both Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema are unpersuadable by you and me and most of your listeners. Because Joe Manchin and Kristen Cinema do what their donors want them to do and maybe what some of their constituents want them to do. So the only soft target in this equation is the White House. Only the White House can be pressured.

Weirdly enough, this White House has a fairly thin skin. They get really angry at the criticism. And right now I'm sure... I'm aware. I'm absolutely sure my face is on a dartboard somewhere in the White House right now. And the funny thing is I'm rooting for them. So it's a weird thing. Well, they can be mad at us if they do the right thing.

Who cares? You know? Yeah, they can hate me all they want. Just do the right thing. And I feel like the remedy here, the only shot we have is for the public to put extreme pressure on the White House to step up to the flight and get in this fight. And I think that the bully pulpit is very powerful. And I'll tell you an example. Right now, Joe Biden is all in money for his build back, better initiative and the money for his infrastructure initiative. And unfortunately,

I think some of the people on the left who would normally care about voting rights are also deeply invested in it. So there isn't a counter pressure from the left wing of his party right now. And so you've got people across the spectrum in his party focused on build back better and the reconciliation bill and ignoring voting rights and saying, yeah, we need that too. No, you need that instead. And so frankly, if I was Biden, I'd walk up to mansion today and say, you name your number. Name the number you want on the budget. Name the number you want and the build back better thing. I'll give it to you. You win. But I want your vote on reforming the filibuster and turning it into a speaking filibuster and two thirds of a vote of people. in the chamber. And maybe that would work. Maybe Mansion would take that deal. And yeah, it would suck to have to go back to the American people and say, I got you this really watered down lame reconciliation bill and infrastructure bill this time. But you know what I haven't done? I haven't lost democracy. I haven't failed the republic. We are not going to be taken over by fascist authoritarians. But you know what? That kind of vocabulary isn't even possible, I think,

for Biden or the White House. I don't think people in the administration believe this. They roll their eyes at this talk about terrorism. They think it's chicken little talk. They think it's crazies on the left or something. And they truly believe that. They just, they think I've lost my mind. You know, maybe I have. And I'll tell you what, I hope it's true. No, you haven't. I mean, we see these state parties consolidating power. We see Republicans. They are not even pretending to try. They have a goal. and the goal is to, you know, abandon democracy and make sure Trump, quote, unquote, wins next time, whatever that means, in any way they can. And I think they fail to understand the stakes. I think they are almost certainly going to lose both the House and on the trajectory we are on right now. I think it's almost guaranteed they're going to lose both the House in the Senate.

Joe Biden will be impeached for jaywalking or taking 14 items through the 10 item or less lane in the grocery store. He won't be convicted in the Senate, but they'll be able exact their revenge for Trump's impeachment. And then if he wins in 2024 by a narrow margin, the Senate in the House will not certify the election. And then the violence that will erupt could make January 6th look like a picnic. And I am frankly terrified of that prospect. I think, though another possibility is he'll just lose so badly, it won't come to that. and then we won't face that violence. And I think that's absolutely where it's going to go if he doesn't focus on making sure that all Americans can exercise their right to vote. And I want to emphasize,

I'm not expressing a partisan desire for Biden to win. This is about all Americans getting to cast their vote, and they can vote for whoever they want to. They decide they want Trump, then so be it. But we ought to have voting rights. It's not just politically smart for Biden, which, is what I'm emphasizing to try to get through to them. But it's a moral issue. And I truly believe that's a word we don't use enough in this context, maybe because it's too associated with religion and that makes people uncomfortable. But this is a moral issue. Preventing people from having a say in the destiny of their own country because they look a certain way or live in a certain zip code is immoral. It is evil. And this is simply a battle between good and evil. And the media

needs to stop casting it as left versus right because voting rights is not partisan, voter suppression is. Thank you so much. This was so great. Thank you. Thank you. Please come back soon. Yes.

Thanks for letting me rant. And I worked really hard to keep curse words to a minimum. 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 happening behind the scenes in media, like Jim Acosta or Soledadad O'Brien. 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 in the news. 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 fearless journalism, as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to New Abnormal.com. That's new abnormal. Charles B. Pierce writes the politics blog at Esquire. Welcome to the new abnormal, Charles Pierce. Well, I've been abnormal for a while, so I'm a little bit behind on the latest fashions. Well, we're happy to have you.

I wanted to talk to you about what you think is going on right now, because one of the many things about you that's great is you've been doing this for a while. So you have some really good reference. And I was thinking about that today when I was thinking about the way that this negotiation, with the Democrats as being covered? There have been a couple of really good stories. One of New York Times, one in the Washington Post. In the past couple of weeks that are essentially covering the debate over the reconciliation

and the infrastructure and all of that without being in Washington and without dealing with the Congress. One was the New York Times piece on the consequences to the state of West Virginia. Right. If nothing passes. And climate. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.

And the other one from. from the Washington Post about the closing of one of the FEMA emergency trailer parks in California that would put up after one of the wildfires and the effect of both of living there on the people and the effect of what's going to happen to them next because they're all essentially become homeless. And all of that is about those two bills, but it has nothing to do with up and down and who's winning and who's losing. And I think the great vacancy at the heart of the the coverage of this has been what's actually in the bills. Oh, yeah, for sure.

You covered Obamacare. What happened with Obamacare? What's not so dissimilar? No, it's a bigger thing, and the problems are bigger. Well, bigger is, I shouldn't have said that because, as Joe Biden said, it was a big effing deal when Obamacare got passed. I mean, this was something that Democrats had tried to do for 50 years, longer than that, actually. So I don't want to minimize it. This is a radical, I won't even say restructuring, it's more of a return to what an actual social safety net looks like.

And, you know, it's been so long since we had one that everybody looks at this as being kind of unprecedented. And it's not, and it's not anything that, you know, anybody in Finland wouldn't recognize or anybody, you know, in England or Ireland wouldn't recognize some of it. Because it's a big government program, small B, small G, in the sense that it's a huge thing, people have grown so scared of that idea that, you know, we're debating stuff, at least in part, we're debating stuff we settled in the 1930s. We're having debates over in 1938. Yeah. Obviously, there's a profound failure on the part of Democratic messaging. Right. I mean, we've gotten into a little bit of a fracas here of like, which is worse?

And you have Democrats mad at the media for not covering it in a way, you know, just talking about how much it costs, which makes sense. And you have the media mad at Democrats for not, for they feel like it's not their job. So I'm curious to know, I mean, this seems like a real problem that Democrats have of like just not being, you know, like one party wants to give you an auto. regime and the other party wants to give you free glasses. That's a problem in political messaging. The biggest problem is the fact that we only allow ourselves two political parties in this country and one of them has gone out of its mind. One of them is not interested in governing at all.

I mean, I don't know what they're interested. I guess they're interested in power and doing what's best for their donors, doing anything that has nothing to do with the Democrats and ramming enough Neolithic judges onto the federal courts so that there are other activities will always be safe from judicial oversight. But that's the biggest problem. The democratic messaging is a problem. But the problem is we've got another, we've got two political parties, and one of them doesn't care about the health of the country. No, I agree. It strikes me. I mean, it's funny. I was looking at some reporting the other day, and it was like big losers, climate act, you know, environmentalists or something, you know,

was like that you know how Politico does this sort of horse racey. And I'm thinking to myself, like, the big losers are us. And like, it's not even environmentalists. Like, it's just like my kids. You're right. You know, you're big losers of the people in West Virginia who are going to get flooded out of their homes and go drifting off toward Tennessee because we won't deal with this huge problem. We won't even make a pass at dealing with it. I think that it's really interesting that we're at this point now with the COVID stuff where we've seen that there really is a part of the country that just doesn't believe in science

and won't listen to evidence. And, you know, like I remember when the pandemic started, well, I thought, well, these people, they'll figure it out. You know, they're, you know, they'll get hit by this thing just the way that, because, you know, I live in New York. So we were getting hit by it, and the rest of the country was, like, writing articles. Like, we can't die for New York.

like, you know, let them die, who cares? And I thought, well, these people will get the virus. And then eventually they'll see that it's really dangerous and they have to lock down. And like they never, you know, they had people die. You had Herman Kane die. And they never came around to the idea that like perhaps science is actually right and true. Yeah. I mean, you've got a substantial portion of the population that's been poisoned by the conservative

media octopus since the early 1990s. I'm talking about talk radio. I'm talking about Fox. I'm talking about the little, you know, Fox spin-offs we have now, O-A-N Newsmax. I'm talking about a zillion websites. And, you know, they can't find their way back, even if, you know, their grandparents are dying. They can't find their way back. If the, you know, if the nice person down the street who's always really great at Halloween, you know, dies. You know, the ambulance comes down the street. They can't make the connection because it would require them to make connections with people they've been trained to hate. I have looked through history for this, and I'm going to keep looking because I think if I'm wrong, if I'm wrong, I want to be able to say it. I don't think we've ever had,

we've had epidemic disease hysteria for as long as there have been human beings. I mean, Tacities wrote about it for God's sakes. Right. But I don't think we've ever had. an assault on the cure. I think this is an entirely new thing that we're going to have, we're not going to have a war on the virus. We're going to have a war on the thing that kills the virus or that keeps us safe from the virus. That to me is bizarre. Like, it strikes me as like this sort of profound anti-science, anti-progress rhetoric, like the last gasp of, and I don't understand. I mean, I guess it comes from Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. It's not like this is altogether new. I'm sure if I go back far enough, I'll find resistance

in the 1700s with the idea of smallpox vaccinations. But once it was proven to work, everybody went in on it. The Adams has had their family vaccinated against smallpox. George Washington mandated that his soldiers be vaccinated against smallpox. As soon as people were able to see with their own eyes that this technique worked, most people went for it. if, you know, if they could find their way to a doctor at that point, which is a whole different problem. Now, we've had, I've grown up, you know, going from the miracle that was the polio vaccine, which, you know, my mother was in an iron lung for better part of a couple of years because she caught the pneumatic form of polio. The polio vaccine, smallpox was off the table at that point.

You know, you just got the smallpox vaccination when you were, when you were like three or four and nobody thought about it, all the way to the point now where we're rebelled. Belling against it, against this miracle, this scientific triumph. I remember how enthusiastic my parents were about the SOC vaccine, especially my mother, my mother, who thought Jonah SOC died, you know, came down on a fiery chariot. And I can remember how happy I was at the Saven vaccine because you didn't have to take a shot anymore. You know, that was a big deal. People rejoiced. People were, you know, people were proud to be American because Jonas Sok was the guy who invented the, who invented the defense against polio.

And Sock didn't even patent it. He gave it to the world. That was a big deal for the United States back then. We've reverted, you know, I don't know, at the very least, you know, sometime back into the 1700s. It's kind of amazing that we've gone so far back. Who would you say is the person who broke American politics? Not to put too fine a point. Well, I mean, you can argue that a lot of the problems we're facing now were baked into the Constitution. The Electoral College doesn't make any sense anymore, but you can't get rid of it without a constitutional amendment. The Senate is risking its own destruction at this point. They simply cannot function as a legislative body anymore because you've got to get 60 votes on everything, which is a standard, by the way, that the original

constitutional convention rejected. They had a chance to vote on that and they voted against it. that you would have to have a supermajority to pass a bill. You know, our Constitution, while a magnificent instrument for 1789, we have some fixing up to do. Let's put it that way. And it's not like we haven't done it. Of course we've done it. We've amended the thing 20 odd times. But as far as, you know, the current state of affairs, I take it back to the original attack

on reason, which I put on the Reagan administration, and the Reagan campaign, actually, of 1980, which was the first presidential campaign I ever covered. I covered it for the Boston Phoenix in 1980, 19709 and 1980 was my first dipping my toe into national politics. If you look at supply side economics, which was the heart and soul of the Reagan economic plan, it's as crazy as anti-vaccine theorizing. Every economist, except for the people who have a vested interest in it and, you know, Arthur Laffer's grandchildren will tell you it's an absurd theory. George Bush, the elder never said anything more true than when he called it voodoo economics. The numbers don't work. You cannot cut taxes and raise revenues. I mean, you can't budge the Republican Party off that one.

You can maybe imagine that you can get them back on the science of, you know, vaccines or get them back on maybe on recognizing that we have severe environmental problems that are going to give, you know, provide us which beat for our property in Ohio someday. Right. You're never going to budge them off tax cuts. Right. No, no. You're going to have to wait for three generations of Republican politicians to die before they ever change that. And I think that was when this kind of wishcasting that they do came in to Republican politics, that and, of course, the complete reversal of the party on racial issues, which began before Reagan, but which Reagan took, you know, full advantage of.

Those two things, I think, were the seedbed of what we have now. Yeah. It's really interesting. And yeah, you definitely see, I mean, there was this Reagan documentary that came out. We had the guy on the podcast. He was really interesting. And you really saw the many, many ways in which Reagan just broke American politics. Though I still feel like Newt Gingrich really deserves a special mention.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, that was the second stage of the rocket. You know, the first stage of the rocket falls away. And the second stage of the rocket put you in orbit. Newt was that. Because Newt mastered the technique, which we certainly have seen over the last four or five years, of pilloring the political opposition for stuff that you do. I mean, remember the congressional bank scandal?

They were bouncing checks and it didn't matter because they were covered and blah, blah, blah. And Newt turned that into, you know, one of the issues that he rode to the speakership on. He bounced more checks than anybody else did. But he didn't get that covered because he was. It was too much fun to watch this, you know, this underdog fire breather. And by the time anybody looked up, the guy was Speaker of the House. And he had generated, you know, an entire cadre of, you know, like-minded people in the Congress, you know, in the 90-94 midterms. And then again, you know, yeah, I'd say 94 midterms for sure.

The contract with America guys. A lot of them were one-termers, but still, it completely established a template for running for, school boards and state legislatures and Congress and for the Senate. And now we're in like the third or fourth stage of the rocket. But there's no question that that in this process, Gingrich was a pivotal figure. And the only reason he didn't do even more damage was because he started to screw up. Right. This is true. And he became a Republican got rid of it. Too corrupt for the Republican Party. Well, too corrupt and he began to lose. I mean, you know, he rammed it, you know, On 1998, he kept saying that the impeachment of Bill Clinton was going to be the issue in the midterms, and the Republicans lost a bunch of seats, and the Republicans got together and said, you know, this is ridiculous. They ran through the impeachment anyway. He began to lose, basically. And I mean, they could, you know, they could understand if he was corrupt. I'm an old guy. So, you know, there are very few speakers of the House that you couldn't, ultimately, I like my lifetime that you couldn't call corrupt in one way or another. But he began to lose. And he began to become an object of ridicule.

That can't happen. Yeah. Oh, it's so interesting. Thank you so much for joining us. Gee, that was fun. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizza Gate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz? The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from the Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers,

orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Subisang and Will Sondi, Checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's Fever Dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, Jesse Cannon. My junk fast, what it is today. What it is every day. I hear somebody has new social network. It's called truth. And you know, that it's serious because it is in all caps. And when something is in all capital letters, you know it's true.

This is a general rule I use. Yeah. Let us talk about truth. Wait, I want to know if it's on all caps, should we be saying it like, truth? Should we be yelling it? I'm thinking more, it's more like truth. Truth! One of my favorite things about truth is that it's a SPAC, but it's not really a SPAC,

but it has the initials of SPAC. But let us get back to Truth, which somehow Trump Media Technology Group is that, I'm sorry, but all of this is amazing. My favorite part of this is that it has a non-disparagement. So, like, you know how people go on Twitter and say things like Twitter socks or this sucks or that sucks? You're not allowed to say, first rule of fight club, or in this case, Truth Club is that you cannot say bad stuff about Truth Club.

And for that, I say, I mean, what's fun about the Trump administration, which no longer exists, but the Trump himself is that he's a fucking moron. What's bad about it is that the Republican Party sees no problem with that and is basically kidnapping themselves and holding themselves for ransom. But Donald Trump's truth gets my fuck that. guy. Jesse? I don't think we're going to be joining it because I don't think we're going to have anything nice to say about them. Who's your truth for today? Tell me your truth. Let me speak my truth. My truth is a guy that has been referred to on this podcast as Bingo von Bongo, Dan Bongino.

I love him. I mean, I don't love him. I love to hate him. For those who've forgotten about him, since he's been on this podcast as a target of fuck that guy, he's a conservative talk show host. He He loves the police. Like literally, he would do anything for a cop that has wrongly shot somebody. But he also hates the vaccine and is threatening to quit his cushy new job as a Rush Limbaugh type on Cumulus Radio over their vaccine mandate. But there's a funny thing about this. He's also a Fox News contributor, but he knows that that's the top of the food chain. So he's not criticizing them because...

You'll remember Fox News has a very stringent. Yes, yes. As I've reminded the viewers, I work next door and walk by and see them getting checked in and see the dumb employees who won't get vaccinated at their local COVID testing place that I get tested at as well. Yeah. I wish that these Trumpy people could like walk through Midtown and see because every fucking building in Midtown has a COVID testing truck in front of it. Like there's a reason that New York City is like running and still has like relatively low COVID tests. tests, it's because you go into a restaurant and everyone checks your card. You go, you know, like we actually do what you're supposed to do to keep COVID down. I mean, that doesn't mean we won't get it, but we are actually quite careful.

It is 100% true. And you know who's really careful is Fox News because at their door, they are making sure you have your COVID test if you're not vaccinated. And I know it because I hear them all talking about it while they wait for their results. That's right. Just as I do too. When they're not on paternity leave. This is true. But for that, I just want to say, we know that one day Mr. Bonjino hopes to have a coveted slot on Fox News.

So he has to make sure to not bite the hand that feeds him. And for that, I say, fuck you, bingo von Bongo. That's right. 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. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode.

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