The Daily Beast Podcast - That Time a House Democrat Called Pelosi a ‘Terrible Person’

Episode Date: May 8, 2022

A new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns has gotten lots of attention for its revelations about Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And they get into that on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, but they also tell Molly juicy nuggets about Democratic dysfunction, including texts calling Nancy Pelosi “terrible” and Biden’s struggle with Manchin and Sinema. 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 objective. 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. Hello, and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of The New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special show with New York Times journalist Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin, and they're here to talk about their new book.

This Will Not Pass, which, of course, you've been hearing tons of tapes of Kevin McCarthy from their journalism, and they're going to talk to us all about that today. All right, you guys ready to listen to some clips? Do it. Play it. Let's go. Ms. Marjorie Taylor Green has some theories on what's going on with abortions. It's whispered softly and gently into your ears and into your soul. And he tells you it's okay. And he says it's just this one thing.

You're just going to get it done, get it over with. And then he tells you a promise. He promises you all these dreams that, that you have in your heart. And that's how Satan sells a sin, and that's how he sells abortion. He tells a woman that all you have to do is you're just going to go to this clinic, just going to get it over with, you know.

And then you're going to, that guy, he's going to stay with you. That boyfriend or the guy, whoever he is, he's going to marry you, sweep you off your feet. Boy, that is just the opposite of the ASMR. I don't understand why. So the thinking there is that women get abortions so that their boyfriends will marry them? That is the logic she's trying to say. Yes, because Satan, that's what Satan says.

You know, I know that we, I have postulated before that Marjorie Taylor Green is very stupid and that we just don't give her credit for how stupid she is. But is it possible that there's like other issues there? Are you suggesting the devil whispers to her? I mean, I feel like hearing voices is not. That's not good. Yeah. Again, I'm not making light of mental illness. No, of course not.

Or religious belief. Or the two being the same thing. I'm not making light of any of that, but I'm just saying, do we think that's what's going on there? Yes. She's not a grifter. She fully believes all these things she's saying. she's just, she is bat-shut crazy.

And I'm not making light of mental illness either. When I say that she is bad-shed-crazy, she's just bad shit crazy. I don't know that it's the kind of crazy that therapy can help with or, or medication can help with. It's just, she's bad shit crazy. I'm going team telling on herself here. Speaking of telling on yourself, there's a senator from Wisconsin named Ron Johnson who likes to say. We call him Ron. Oh, yes, yes, Rodanon. He hangs out with some fellows who say crazy things, and then he says, hold my beer. I got some more to go. So let's hear what he has to say about the vaccine. The way to approach this is from a criminal point of view, because that's what has happened. And until we start holding people accountable, Fauci, number one, you're going to see people still falling out, still getting sick. You've got more than 100 doctors here, all of whom will tell you that these shots caused vaccine-induced AIDS.

purposefully gave people AIDS, right? They knew this. The FDA, two weeks prior to their emergency use authorization license, had an internal review, an internal audit function that had the infamous page 16. They knew all of this, and yet they licensed these shots anyway. And then you have the trickery with interchangeable or not, and is it a legally distinct thing or not? This is criminal intent. And until we address this as being that, we're stuck. We're not. We're not. We're not. I'm going to get over this. Let me challenge you there. Please.

That's way down the road. Let me chat. Wait, that's the challenge. Everything you say may be true. Okay. But right now, the public views the vaccines is largely safe and effective. That vaccine injuries are rare and mild. That is the narrative.

That's what the vast majority of the public accepts. So until we get a larger percentage of the population with their eyes open to, whoa, these vaccine injuries are real. Why? You know, step by step, you can't leap to, you know, crimes against humanity. You can't leap to, you know, another Nuremberg trial.

What? What? This is Ron Johnson. He's trying to be the reasonable person here. So you've got this, he was being interviewed. The first voice you heard was this guy named Tom Callender, who's just some anti-vax guy. And then, so he was the one that was talking about vaccine-induced AIDS. and then you've got Ron saying, well, hold up.

I'm not, you know, that may be true, but we got to get the public to understand this. You can't just go straight to Nuremberg trials. He's an incrementalist on killing Anthony Fauci. You know, he's like, we can't kill Fauci tomorrow. We have to, you know, gin up public support for killing Fauci. Ron Johnson was the moderate in this discussion. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a valuable lesson.

there about how did Wisconsin isn't even crazy. I mean, they're sort of a relatively purple state. I don't know how they reelect this guy. I mean, look, maybe they do, but what? I mean, what? My God. I just, I just keep looking at, you know, listening to him, you've got to do it step by step. You can't leap to another Nuremberg trial. He's not saying there shouldn't be another Nuremberg trial. He's just saying it's going to take a lot. We've got to get there. Oh, my God. The detail we lose on audio, unfortunately, is that the anti-vax guy has done the thing that all the most sane people in our society do while they're on a video, which is put his phone flat on a table and then angle his head in a diagonal way over it while he talks.

Oh, that's great. Really is like the chef's kiss on this guy saying all that crazy shit. Wait, I don't understand. What if that means? Like he puts his phone flat on the table and then puts his head over it diagonally. So it's just the picture is framed in the most odd way possible the whole time. Oh, that's nice. Yeah, yeah.

You get a nice view of his nose hair, though, very trimmed. Yeah, good, good, good. Well, that's something. Well, there's more crazy to be listened to. There's this fellow at Newsmax. He's kind of an NPC, so you don't hear about him that much. But, uh... NPC?

Non-playable character. It's what with a kids call it call losers, Molly. Oh, Jesus. I learned it by talking to your teenage sons. He has a theory on who leaked the Scotus ruling on Roe v. Wade being overturned. It's a very good theory. Are the same who tell us there are no more genders anymore. Even the latest Supreme Court justice can't even tell us the definition of a woman.

Can you provide a definition for the word woman? Can I provide a definition? No. Yeah. I can't. You can't? Not in this context. I'm not a biologist.

You need a biologist to explain what a woman is? How then if she can't do that? How then can she and the others on the left argue that we, pro-life conservatives, don't have the right to tell a woman what to do with their bodies? To them, a woman no longer exists. We're not telling them what they can do to their bodies, though. telling them what they can't do to a baby, a precious life. And speaking of Katanjay Brown Jackson, you just saw there,

I find it suspect that the first leak coming out of the Supreme Court in history comes shortly after Judge Jackson is confirmed. I want to know if her law clerks, who I am sure have already been hired, possibly even working at the high court already, before her swearing in, have access to these draft decisions. she would be my first suspect when it comes. Antifa law clerks.

Where do you even start with this? Antifa law clerks. That's where you start. You went to Harvard, you went to Yale Law School, and now you work for Antifa. But she's not on the Supreme Court yet. Her clerks don't work at the Supreme Court yet. Listen, listen, Libthard.

I think we all know. know that the Antifa law clerks don't need to be in the Supreme Court to be in the Supreme Court. First of all, I don't need to take the name calling from a neo-lib like you, Molly. Jesus, hostile work and fire guys. I prefer the term blue check. Oh, you are definitely a blue check. Yeah, blue check. This guy is just, I mean, I feel bad that we're even talking about him to mock him,

even though it's very fun to mock him because he really is like the epitome of an NPC who just wants so badly for people to talk about it, which is what we're doing. But every day it's like how can this get dumber? And then every day it's like, oh, that's how. It does. Somehow it does. Yeah. It's magic. And it's just now, you know, it's a woman who is not even on the Supreme Court yet, but she's responsible for a leak.

Which are Antifa. Yes. Law clerks. It all comes back to Black Lives Matter. You know I'm right. The Marxist organization. I am sticking to my theory that I said the night this happened that this was leaked by the conservative side. I mean, who even knows?

I don't think it much matters who leaked it. I don't know. I don't really care. The right wants to focus on the leak. They know that it's wildly unpopular. Yeah. So they want to pretend they didn't just have a huge victory and they want to focus on the leak. And that they're the victim.

Right, of course, because they, you know, yeah. Always the victims. Alex Burns and Jonathan Martin are journalists at the New York Times and authors of This Will Not Pass. Welcome to the new abnormal. Thank you. Let's talk about how did you guys decide to write this book together? Well, Jonathan and I have been working together on and often mostly on for basically 14 years now. And we talked about doing a book together for a long time.

And we thought about doing one in 2016, didn't do it. And then this time around, just the way the presidential election was developing, we felt like this is really, this is really the moment to do it. It's an extraordinary time. It's not just a normal presidential election. The states are different. The pandemic makes the campaign itself a totally, totally aberrational in American history. And, you know, obviously as the reporting process went forward, it was the pandemic was not the only thing that was an extraordinary aberration in modern American political experience. When did you start on this book? Gosh, that's a good question. I think effectively two years ago now, and we, I think, formalized the plans to do it in the summer of 2020, but we had basically a resolve to do it

starting in the spring. There's a lot of like pretty explosive stuff that I've read in this book and also that there's tape. While you were writing this, did you, were you just sort of shocked at the stuff that you were getting? There certainly was a lot of it that was shocking in real time. There was a lot that was shocking in real time that we weren't sure how much people would care about it six months or a year or a couple months later. The political environment that we're in is so, so dynamic and so explosive that there's stuff in the book that we thought would sort of blow up in a different way that people have responded to, I think, less strongly than we anticipated. And there's been obviously some stuff that people have been very, very exercised about. But it's interesting, you know, just as a reporter, this is my first book. It's Jonathan's first book.

The experience of trying to tell a story over a much longer period of time and to think about what is the material you have that kind of is going to stand the test of time. It's a totally, totally different, you know, journalistic experience. So tell me what things in the book did not sort of take off the way you thought they might, because that is always super interesting to me. Yeah, I don't know if I would say it hasn't taken off, but I think that there was material that we gathered, you know, over the course of 2021 about the real political difficulties of the Biden administration. You know, we were not so sure how people would respond to it because there were, you know, there were periods in 2021 when hopes were still very, very high for the trajectory of the Biden administration. And it looked to us from our reporting like things were, you know, already pretty precarious.

You know, by the time the book has come out, I think it's a pretty mainstream perception that things are not going super great for Joe Biden. So I think a lot of the detail on how Biden got to that place is quite revelatory. I think people will find it interesting and eye-opening. I don't think they will find it necessarily as shocking as they would have nine months ago. Can you explain that a little bit more? Well, I mean, it's not that I think they won't be shocked by anything about Biden. It's that I think that last summer, I think there was still a widespread assumption that, you know, the Democrats are a mess, but they're always a mess. and you're not really sure what's going to happen with build back better, but you're dealing with a bunch of adults here who know their way around the House and Senate, and surely they're going to get to a good place in the end.

And to us at the time, I think we thought they would do better, you know, that they would get something, and that's still an open question. But the notion that, you know, at the end of the day, Mansion's going to fold, and they're going to end up doing, you know,

two and a half trillion. And cinema, she's, you know, she's a pain, and she's sort of a mysterious figure. But, like, no, she's not going to, tank this legislation. Those kinds of assumptions seem to us pretty misplaced. I think now, like they're totally gone as political assumptions. So the degree of difficulty that Biden was having with the two of them in particular last summer, I think is a more just sort of mainstream perception on publication week than it was when we were getting that material. Jonathan, I mean, I feel like

the big, splashy headline is this Mitch McConnell. I feel like, I feel like. I feel like. exhilarated. I'm so curious, like, the experience of reporting on that because it so runs contrary to what I think of him. So McConnell in this moment has seen back-to-back traumatic offense, one of which political, the other which is personal, I would say to him, sort of equally important. He's covered the job of Senate Majority Leader, basically his entire adult life. In the previous day, January 5th, he had seen his majority stuck away, thanks to the two races in Georgia. Now, it's January 6th, or actually at this point,

it's early in the morning of January 7th. And he has seen a capital that he revered desecrated by these rioters who were instigated by a president of his own party. So McConnell is obviously shaken by those back-to-back events, but he also is looking forward. And he believes in this moment that, as he told me, Trump has totally discredited himself and that Trump is not going to be a political force after the events of that day.

And so in his mind, he doesn't have to deal with that headache any longer. And Trump is not going to give him any more political problems. So I think that's his perspective in the moment, Molly. Did you guys, I mean, were you in the, were you covering that during January 6th? Yeah, I was in the Capitol on January 6th in the Senate Press Gallery and then was evacuated with the Senate to one of the office buildings. Were you surprised at how quickly people, it was about two weeks before Republicans sort of went back to their original stances. Were you surprised that it was such a short time or no? I mean, I think I would say it varies by the Republican lawmaker.

Right. But I mean, the lion chair. Yeah. I mean, in some cases, it was even shorter than two weeks. Yeah, a lot of these members, especially in the house, are just looking around. And they don't see a huge interest from their constituents in holding Trump accountable. And I think that's that. I just don't think it's more complicated than that, especially in the House of like, yeah, like, I'm not particularly fond of him.

And, you know, obviously his conduct, I find objectionable. But if my voters, for the most part, are okay with it, you know, I'm not going to stick my neck out here. I think that's sort of the norm in a lot for a lot of House Republicans. Were you surprised about the reaction of the Republican? And Alex was just saying that, like, there's things in the book that have, like, been kind of earth-shattering. Were there other things in there that you thought were earth-shattering but haven't gotten the same kind of attention? And what are that? Sure, it's a good question.

I don't say this to brag. I just think that we spent two years reporting with a wide variety of sources. And one of the things we pride ourselves on is just the range of sources in this book, not all of them by name. And so I think if you spend that much time reported, you're going to come up with a lot of material. I think we have a lot of material that is never going to show up in any excerpt that's not going to be in a tweet, but I think it's pretty eye-opening. I guess I would just point to the tensions in 2021 between the White House and the Democratic Congress and within the Democratic Congress. Molly, we have an episode inside a Democratic House caucus meeting in which Pelosi is confronting this group of, I think it's nine renegade House. Democrats. And we have the text traffic from those House Democrats as she confronts them. And

they're talking to one another via text in and out of the room. And they're, you know, they can't believe what's happening. And they're, they're piling on Pelosi. And one of them says truly a terrible person. Again, like, I get why that in the grand scheme of things is not jumping off the page into the excerpts of a newspaper story. But pretty remarkable, a slice of history, I think, in that moment. Do you think that Trump is upset about these revelations or no? Yeah. I mean, I think that every indication we have is that he's certainly not thrilled that

Kevin McCarthy has heard on tape trashing him in this way. I think he's not surprised by Mitch McConnell at all. You know, when we went to see for an interview in April of last year, he was just ripping up McConnell, ripping up McConnell's wife, Elaine Chow, the former cabinet secretary. Terry with no prompting from us, right? He was already there and already on the war path. But look, with McCarthy, you know, he has said as much in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. Didn't like hearing those comments, but we're kind of fine now. And when we met with Trump, we talked about McCarthy. There's not a whole lot of admiration there on Trump's part. There's no sense that

he sees McCarthy as a world-class political operator, but he sees him as a useful instrument, right? one of Trump's advisors referred to McCarthy. This was in the December of 2020, so before the insurrection, referred to McCarthy as effectively the political director of the Trump organization. This is referring to a guy who could very well be the next speaker of the House, as though he's a staffer on Trump's payroll. And I think that pretty much captures the view of Kevin McCarthy from the Trump camp. When we asked Trump, you know, at the time McCarthy's comments about wanting Trump to resign had not been reported. But there had been accounts of McCarthy calling Trump while the insurrection was in progress and berating him that he had to do something. We asked Trump about that, and he said that never happened.

Kevin would never talk to me that way. And when we said, why not? Trump said, you know, I don't know. And we said, well, why would he tell people that he's so tough on you if he isn't? And Trump said it's because Kevin McCarthy has an inferiority complex. So that's the level of sort of a political respect that we're dealing with here. I mean, frankly, on both sides of this. I just want to, like, go into this for a second

because when I was reading my newsletters the next day after the humongous seismic scoop dropped, my political newsletters all had a lot of people, again, who is to say who they are, saying that McCarthy was safe and that Trump would never replace him for someone with more MAGA. Now that you,

you guys have a lot of insight here, do you think that's true? I think that what we've heard over and over from folks in the House, including folks who are at least semi-smpathetic to McCarthy and certainly plenty of folks who aren't, they think he's made a bad bargain with Trump or a bargain that will prove to be a one over time because Donald Trump isn't loyal to anybody. That's obviously, obviously true. So look, McCarthy has made the calculation that if he's ever going to be Speaker of the House, he needs Donald Trump support in order to get there. I think that's accurate. Right. The question is whether even with every.

everything he has bargained away in terms of his dignity, in terms of his political autonomy, whether all that's going to be enough. And as we've seen with Trump, that could change at any time. Certainly true. You got some pushback from Trevor Noah about this idea of saving the good stuff for the book. What do you say to critics who say that to you? I think it was more of a joke and a dinner speech than pushback. I think I would say two things. Like, well, three. I mean, first, you know, we just don't discuss sourcing for self-evident reasons. But I would say, like, generally speaking, Molly, it's a couple of points. Like, one, anybody who's done reporting or written a book, like, understands that people

are much more apt to offer candid insights when they understand that, like, things are not going to be in the newspaper the next day. And that they're speaking for history, especially their political actors. If they're speaking for history, they're going to be less considerate of the immediate impact of what they're saying. And that will hopefully trigger a measure of candor. I think that generally applies to a lot of different people doing journalism and writing books. And then secondly, journalism is not this like neat fairy tale where materials suddenly appear on your doorstep.

I mean, anybody who's done reporting knows that like there, you hear things second hand or third hand or it's a rumor or it's hearsay. And you track stuff down, you try and corral material over a period of time. And that's sort of the nature of journalism. So I think these critiques that we hear, like we totally get where they're coming from, like, understand it. I just think like it presumes a knowledge about circumstances that these folks who are lobbying, the critiques just don't have. So I don't think a lot of it. I get where it's coming from, but I just don't think it's, it really adds up to much. This was so interesting.

Thank you guys so much for joining us. Thanks for having us. Thanks for having us. Enjoyed it. 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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