The Daily Beast Podcast - The Moment a Republican Says This, Tune Them Out

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

This week on The New Abnormal, co-hosts Andy Levy and Danielle Moodie discuss the battle between the RNC and mail-in ballots—and the debate over what constitutes a democracy versus a republic. Then, author and historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat talks about one of Trump’s latest horrifying interviews. Plus! Author Arthur Goldwag on his new book and America’s susceptibility to conspiracies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What a great show we have for you today.

We're going to be joined by author and historian Ruth Ben Gehatt, who's here to talk about the recent Time Magazine interview with Donald Trump and the growing fascism in America. Then we're joined by author Arthur Goldwag, and he's here to tell us all about his new book, The Politics of Fear, the peculiar persistence of American paranoia. But first, let's have some fun. Folks, this weekend, I don't know about you, but Andy and I needed a break. And so the rap beef of the century gave us that Kendrick Lamar versus Drake, which gave me a new anthem for Donald Trump, which is, I hate the way you walk. I hate the way you dress. I hate the way you talk. I literally hate everything about you.

There was no nuance in one of the three stellar. diss tracks that Kendall Kumar put out, but it is how I feel about politics this fucking year. I hate everything about it. Thank you, Kendrick. I appreciate you. That was really something this weekend, and I'm a big fan of Kendrick. I actually have little, I like to call him K.DOT. It's a little name I made up for him.

Sometimes I call him Kenny, but I really am a big fan of Kendrick. I've never understood Drake. He's just so boring to me. His music is so boring. I don't know why he's so popular. And Kendra just demolished him. And I know we're supposed to be talking about Trump in this segment, but the way my jaw dropped when Kendrick called Drake certified pedophile and then like one line later said trying to strike a chord and it's probably a minor.

A minor. I was like, oh, you can't come back from that. Bless him. I know Drake has tried and he just put out a new one. late Sunday night, but just stop. I mean, people were calling Kendrick petty pendergrass and petty LaBelle. And what was it, Kay Doughtenheimer? It's just.

We say all of this to say, dear friends, that if Kendrick can just ride us through the election cycle, we will fare very, very well. It was Pulitzer Prize winning hate, which is what I'd like. show to win for its coverage of Donald Trump. Speaking of Trump, we will say this, I don't know. It doesn't have the same ring to it, but 10th time is the charm. Does that flow with everybody? Because that's how many times Donald Trump has now been fined for contempt.

I don't know what these judges are waiting for, particular merchant, who now has threatened Donald Trump directly with jail time, which I guess he would serve a long time alongside his Secret Service people. But he is now threatened him with jail time if Donald Trump doesn't get his shit together. He's done it now 10 times. What the fuck makes you think that number 11 isn't going to happen by the end of the time we tape this show? So I just like, how many times are you going to threaten? How many times are you going to find him $1,000, which is what he spends at McDonald's for lunch, like, and think that that's going to resonate? I cannot think offhand of another person who has gotten away with what Donald Trump has gotten away with in terms of

violating court orders. There's a little bit of me that understands it, and I get why Judge Merchant is kind of loath to throw Trump in jail? I mean, he made some good points, Judge Merchant. He says, you know, not only would it be disruptive to the court proceeding, he said, quote, I also worry about the people who would have to execute that sanction, the court officers, the Secret Service details, and others, and talked about the magnitude of such a decision. Yes, all of that is true. Like, throwing Trump in jail, it's different. It hits different, Danielle, I guess. But look, at some point, throwing $1,000 fines at a guy who, at the very least, claims to be a billionaire, that's like putting a dollar in the swear jar. Like, that's not going to make you stop

swearing, really. At a certain point, which seemed to be what he was saying this time, and we'll see what happens in the future, because there ain't a way Trump's going to be able to not violate the court's orders. So I guess we'll see where this goes going forward. But look, At a certain point, no matter how much I understand what it would mean to throw Donald Trump in jail for violating a gag order and how serious that would be, at a certain point, it's honestly, this is really not fair to people who have, you know, like, shown up for their hearing 10 minutes late and been held in contempt and thrown in jail. I want to say we can't have two different judicial systems, except we do. But at a certain point, it can't be this blatant, is I guess what I'm saying. If to the judge's point and to what you just laid out, that throwing Donald Trump in jail would just be too many obstacles, too many things to consider in order to get this done. My thing would be then, and I'm not a lawyer, but my thing would be that then each of these violations now starts to be $100,000, $200,000.

Your violation should be on par with what you say that you have in the bank. So if he is a billionaire, yeah, $1,000 is not going to do it. But if all of a sudden these violations that happen literally every fucking week start to ratchet up, $100,000 here, $200,000 here, and by the time we get to June, you know what I'm saying, he's at what he should have had to pay. Tish James in the other case that he had that was knocked down, the other fee that he had of close to half a billion dollars,

then you're starting to get somewhere. If Donald Trump feels no pain, there is going to be no change in his behavior. And that is what we have seen. Yeah. And that's been the story of Donald Trump's life. He just keeps doing shit that's illegal, unethical, immoral. And he never really suffers any consequences for it. And most of the time, it actually, you know, magically gets him ahead.

So we've talked about this before. He has absolutely no reason to think that anything has changed. up until the time it actually changes. And it hasn't changed yet with these $1,000 fines. And that's why I do have sympathy for Judge Merchant here. I understand that he has to deal with the possible ramifications of throwing someone like Donald Trump in jail. And Judge Merchant basically says this at the end of what he was saying. He says, as much as I do not want to impose that jail sanction, I want you to understand that I will, if necessary and appropriate, because it's a direct attacked on the rule of law. And at a certain point, it's going to get there if he doesn't stop,

where it is no matter what the ramifications are of throwing Donald Trump in jail, the ramifications of letting him continue to get away with it are worse. And you could argue, I think, convincingly, that it's already past that point. But I think at a certain level, Judge Merchant has to say, okay, in his mind, that point has been reached. And I'm wondering, you know, speaking of reaching a point of just obscene and crazy, which I don't think that we'll ever reach, you know, the point of quote unquote, no return with Donald Trump. But just recently at a closed door GOP fundraiser that he had over the weekend, according to the New York Times, you know, he went completely off the rails again when referring to the Biden administration as a Gestapo administration and goes

on to say, honestly, maybe people who listen to this show can help us make sense of this. But this is what Donald Trump said. Quote, when you are a Democrat, you start off essentially at 40% because you have civil service, you have the unions, and you have welfare. And don't underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote and then they cheat on top of that. They cheat. Andy, you're good at MadLibs.

What the fuck does this mean? So I think what he's saying basically is that everyone in the civil service, everyone in a union, and everyone on welfare is basically voting Democrat because the Democrats give them things. I think ultimately that's what he's saying there. When he says they get welfare to vote, I think what he's saying is that the Democrats give people. welfare, not because they want to actually help people, but because it's sort of a, this goes back to, you know, everything Trump does is transactional. And he can't conceive of a thing where you do something for a moral reason. So in his mind, he's like, oh, if they're giving people welfare, it's because that's to make sure those people vote for them. So I think that's what he's saying

there. It's always hard to tell with him. That's where I'm going with that. Donald Trump in many ways then if that is the interpretation tells on himself and tells on the Republican Party, which is that we don't have any policies that people actually want to vote for. We are not creating any policies that are about strengthening unions and workers' rights. We're not creating social safety nets that will help the most marginalized among us, right, and the most economically disadvantaged. We're not doing anything that is going to allure, a trap. people to our party. And so Democrats then by virtue of all of the things that they advocate for and try and push

are already at 40%. Then I guess, yes, you're correct. And then on top of that, it's just convincing what, another 10 to 15% to just do the right thing and that Republicans don't actually give a fuck about you. Because what they care about, which is what they tell you all of the time, particularly when, you know, they're talking about, you know, if you care about your shareholders and then your children, which is what Doug Bergman said, then you'll vote for Donald Trump. He actually said that. The governor, if you care about your shareholders, dot, dot, dot, and your children, you'll vote for Donald Trump.

So they're telling on themselves. People just have to listen. Yeah. Look, all of that is, as always, it's them telling on themselves. When Trump says of the Biden administration that they're running a Gestapo administration, you're talking about the guy who, who, you know, as we've talked about Project 2025, wants to replace the civil service with Trump loyalists. If you want a comparison to Nazi Germany or to any autocratic regime or any dictatorship, that's what you do. You replace everyone in the government with loyalists and you make loyalty the main qualification for holding that position. Everything they do is projection. We've talked about that ad nauseum on this podcast and it's been talked about elsewhere.

So, yes, you're exactly right when they say that about, you know, again, Donald Trump cannot conceive of a relationship that is not transactional. Right. Just he's not capable of it. His entire life has been made up of transactional relationships. And usually there are transactions that favor him. So he cannot conceive of someone wanting to, again, give poor people money or give people food stamps or EBT so that they can feed their kids. He cannot conceive of people wanting to do that for any reason other than there being some kind of quid pro quo. And in this case, you know, in his mind, that is we give you shit and you vote for us.

And that to, I mean, to that point, Andy, on the transactional piece, this is how he came out and said that people who join the military are dope. Yeah. Or whatever he said because he can't think of a reason that you would sign up to join our military to defend. our country because of your patriotism, because of your family lineage, right, of a family of military service, that he couldn't imagine that. So why would you do? There's no money in that, right? So unless there is some advantage for you. I mean, this is the kind of person, the kind of character that these Republicans are voting for. He don't care about you. He doesn't even care about your causes, right? The transactional nature between Donald Trump and the Republican Party is like, you give me unfettered

power and I'll give you a rollback on abortion. You remove all of the guardrails and I'll let you in prison as many undocumented people as you want. That's what it is. It has nothing to do with being centered, honestly, in any type of value. It's like all Donald Trump wants his unfettered power and the Republican Party want to steamroll our democracy. And so they have linked up and they're like, okay, we'll give you this, you give us that. And I think that if the American people could just see that very stripped down bare reality, then they would understand that there is nothing in it for you to vote for Donald Trump and the Republican Party. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, what you said about the military is dead on. I think what he did, he called people who joined the

military suckers. Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. You could replace military with Peace Corps, Doctors Without Borders, any group that is more to your liking that is something that is not set up to enrich you personally, but is meant to be doing something for a greater good or for other people or whatever. He's just not capable of understanding that. Like, you could sit him down and try to explain this to him and say, look, there are people who, you know, actually want to do things for others and believe that that's an important thing to do. And he would just look at you slack-jawed and just wondering where his next Big Mac is. Like he would not even be registering what you're saying, because it's just, you might as well be speaking Urdu. You know, he just has no way he could

not comprehend it. No, which is, you know, again, about character. Yeah. And I continue to say this all the time, Republicans are not using dog whistles. They are very clear about who they are, what they want, what they don't care about, that they no longer share the same morals and values. And there is no better person that embodies that right now than my God, dog killer, Christy Knom, like who, first of all, don't know who published the book. But I don't know what editor looked at that chapter about her dog cricket and said to themselves, Oh, this is good. You're really connecting here with the fucking reader when you're talking about killing your dog.

But we know that she wanted to do this because she wants to show how tough she is. Look at me. I'm a Republican. I handle guns and I'll shoot animals and put them in shallow graves. She gets a bunch of pushback, right, from everyone that has a heart on. this chapter and then Andy doubles down on it. In fact, talking about President Biden's dog commander who apparently bites people and saying that commander should quote, meet cricket. Make it make sense for me, Andy. Well, I do want to point out that Christy Nolmes publisher is

called Center Street. I believe it's a division of Haché publishing. They also publish such notables as Vivek Ramoswamy, Newt Gingrich, and everybody's favorite swimmer Riley Gaines. So it's about what you'd expect in terms of levels of intelligence. You mentioned that Republicans aren't even using dog whistles anymore. I think if Chrissy Nome ever uses a dog whistle, dogs need to run. Oh, shit. They need to run as far away as possible from that whistle. They need to go against every part of their evolutionary training.

just run, run for your lives, dogs. We sort of knew this was going to happen. There were going to be people, even Republicans who were like appalled, but there were going to be the ones who were going to say, you know, she's talking about being a tough leader and having to make the tough decisions. And there's almost something like, you know, I know she's a woman, but it's a macho thing. And of course, we're seeing that now. You know, there are people who are actually defending her and it's just unreal. And I just think I keep going back to me picking her as as Trump's vice presidential running mate. But I really wish I hadn't said that, although I'm still, again, I'm still not sold that this is disqualifying in 2024.

But she is just doubling down on it ridiculously. It's the Trump playbook. It's the never apologized playbook and never admit that you maybe made a mistake or, you know, shouldn't have done something. And it's the equivalent of tweeting through it. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know how people defend this. I don't know why people defend her.

But these are the same people that, you know, defend Donald Trump that say that the January 6th insurrectionists, you know, tourists. So she's tough. She killed a puppy. She killed like an 18-month-old puppy and there are people defending it. So like, again, what else do you need? What else do you need? She's a puppy murderer.

Speaking of dogs, the R&C has a new lawsuit. It has filed suit. This is according to law and crime.com. It's the 83rd such lawsuit in the last six months filed by the RNC. They want to stop the legal counting of votes in Nevada after election day. Right now by law, you can vote. They count ballots for up to four days after election day. Again, these are ballots that are received up to four days after election day.

as long as they're postmarked by election day, they are legal and must be counted. The RNC wants to stop this, which of course it does, because as we've talked about on this podcast before, they are the party of wanting fewer votes. They want fewer Americans voting because they know they don't have the numbers if everybody actually votes. This is one of their latest salvos in trying to lower the vote count. And their claim is that this somehow, that by counting ballots that arrive after election day, even if they were postmarked by election day, this dilutes ballots that are actually submitted on election day, which is absolutely insane, except I guess it dilutes them in the sense that, well, yeah, because there are more votes to be

counted. But seems to me it's perfectly okay to postmark a ballot by election day and then given the vagaries of the mail. Which they hired someone to slow down. Right, exactly. And like, you could postmark a ballot, you could mail a ballot two or three days before election day and it might not get there till after election date. I guess you're not going to count those either. That's what they want. So the whole thing is just insane. Of course, it is just another one of the ways that they want to lower the vote total in America. You said it. They don't want people to vote. They don't want people to vote. And if you do vote, you need to vote on that same day. And, you know, and then it's going to be like, oh, we're not going to count ballots after the fact. And, oh, if you're not voting by, oh, between 6 a.m.

and 9 a.m. on said election day, we're also not going to count your vote. Like, you don't create policies that are popular for people to want to vote for you. The only reason they do is because they are locked inside of a cult. And so you're not trying to win people's votes. So you either need to suppress it, steal it, or disregard it. That's their strategy, plain and simple. God, I'm so fucking over these people. They hate democracy. They do not want a democracy. And you hear it all the time. One of their favorite things to say is America's not a democracy, it's a republic, which is a historic garbage. We are a representative democracy. The founding fathers were quite clear on that. They all believed that we were a democracy, but they love to say that because we don't vote

directly on every issue, that instead elective representatives do that, that we're not a democracy. And it's garbage. And the minute you hear someone say that, and they're always a Republican, The minute you hear someone say that, you can absolutely tune them out because they are lying to you. And this is right along those lines. Rounding things up with the RNC real quick. So the RNC's chief counsel, Charlie Spies, has resigned two months after getting the job. And, you know, you want to talk about fucking crazy. So first of all, bravo to them for even having an attorney.

I didn't know that any attorneys worked at this place. But nonetheless, according to CNN politics, quote, his hiring, Charles Spies, hiring rankled many Donald Trump loyalists who viewed the veteran Republican lawyer as at odds with the former president given his previous work for Jeb Bush, Mitt Romney, and Ron DeSantis. So not only do you have to be a Trump cultist, you can't have worked for any other Republican. ever in order to work for Donald Trump, which means that you can have no expertise, no knowledge outside of what Donald Trump tells you. Do you, like, do folks get how fucking sick this is? That this isn't just like a remaking of the Republican Party in Donald Trump's image. It's actually getting rid of every single person that has any institutional knowledge that had any experience working in what used to be a bipartisan manner whatsoever, that like all of those people are gone.

So anyone that is in the Republican Party that is left, that is in the RNC that is left, are just people whose own experience is Donald Trump and Trump only. Tell me you're in a cult without telling me you're in a cult. Yeah, it almost sounds like a Gestapo administration, doesn't it? Weird. Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal professor. and author Ruth Ben-Giott, who is the author of Strongman from Mussolini to the present, and the author of a very fantastic newsletter, Lucid, which you should all be subscribing to through Substack and catching her appearances on cable news, giving us the rundown. Ruth, you and I just had the privilege of being on Amin Mohadine's show recently and talking about

Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and just the rise of fascism in the United States. The backdrop of that being a recent Time Magazine article, an interview with Donald Trump, where he basically laid out the new vision of America, which they have referred to in Time magazine as Imperial America, changing not only how this country functions and what it means to be a citizen in a country where you lose rights by the day, but also what America's role will look like in the world. I want to get your initial reactions to that Time magazine piece that really went viral and made the rounds. Yeah, thank you. I'm so glad to be here to talk about this. It's very sobering. It was an interview that allowed Trump the space to tell us

exactly what the vision is, and those who think that he's just out of it or lazy or just a clown should all read that piece because he has a very particular vision of what he wants. And this time interview put together with Project 2025, they are a blueprint for the transformation of America into an autocracy. And authoritarianism at its most basic has a few goals. And one is to remove any checks on the authority of the leader, the executive branch. And another is to allow the leader's party and his cronies to commit crimes and do violence without being held accountable. So these things were evident in the kinds of the whole discussion over his immunity and what he wants to do, which will involve mass repression. So it's all very sobering, but it's good that it's there on the public record.

You know, it's sobering, Ruth, I feel like, to people who are paying attention. So to people who are in the industry and space of analyzing and understanding historical patterns of politics, my concern is that this is a story that's coming out six months before the election and largely probably four to five months before most Americans, a majority of Americans, will be paying attention. Do you think that this kind of coverage is resonating with the mainstream in the way that, like, I want alarm bells to be sounding? It is resonating. It's resonating in different ways. I'm also an analyst of images. And although the interview was very damning, the image of Trump that was selected was very imperious, very, looks like he, He's kind of at the peak of his powers, formidable. And that really is almost like damage control to the Trump that we've been seeing in his criminal trial, where his personality cult is quite diminished.

He's sleeping. He's farting. He's not in control of his body or his emotions. So I was disappointed. You always have to look at those things because that is how his followers are going to see it. And so there is that part of, you know, the Maga. They're not going to be bothered. by anything in there. Indeed, they might approve a bit. They probably do approve a bit.

Because one of the big points I want to make is that Don Trump has been marketing authoritarianism and strongman rule to Americans for years now. So he's marketing the idea that all this, all of these repressive things are necessary for the freedom of the nation, just like January 6th was necessary. And so on the one hand, he's selling those things. He's also doing it by praising foreign dictators for many years over and over. over again. And so he's a marketer. He's a propagandist. And so those who have bought his product and are buying his product are not going to be swayed by that time interview. What we want is the the audience of the undecided, the independence, the people who no longer like him. And so we need shorter versions of that time interview to come out much closer to the election. And I would also add to that right now,

the criminal trial that is underway that is not being televised for the public is doing us a disservice. Because I think that to your point about imagery, being able to see Donald Trump in real time, not a sketch or a transcript, but in real time with our own eyes slumped over, falling asleep inside of a courtroom, I think would do the American people like a great deal of service to say, you have this. image that was created about Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe, Slow Joe, Old Joe, and then this caricature that was created of Donald Trump, where they put his head on top of like Arnold Schwarzenegger from the 1980s movies put it on top of his body. But you would see this kind of real-time comparison of what aging looks like. We're not, to your point, going to sway those that are enthralled and enrapture with Maga. But there is still that slim, independent group that isn't,

but they are still concerned with Joe Biden. And I'm wondering to you, what does it look like over the next couple of months of steadily ringing the alarm of the fact that if Donald Trump is elected, Project 2025 takes off like a rocket ship. on the day of inauguration and that there is no turning back from there. Yeah, it looks like a version of a coup or authoritarian takeover, meaning they are very clear, if you really read Project 2025, one of the things they cite is that there's a quote, existential need for aggressive use of the vast powers of the executive branch.

The existential need is telling because authoritarians always present their takeovers, the crackdowns, which are done sometimes at speed like Hitler did, as being warranted by an emergency. This is what I call the shock event. So Hitler had the Reichstag fire. And whether or not they caused these things doesn't matter. So this existential need is straight out of the authoritarian playbook. I think we need to let Americans know that the scale of this, it's the speed and also the scale,

that they're going to know people who are affected by this. It's not just going to be undocumented immigrants who they may not know who are taken away. Everybody's going to know somebody who is affected by this and everyone's going to be touched by it. And on that note, one of the things I was most worried about from this interview is he was asked whether he would override the Posse Comitatus Act that forbids the use of the military against civilians. Here's what he said. Undocumented immigrants are not civilians. Yeah. Now, this caught my eye. He's also been dehumanizing them, as you also have pointed out, calling them vermin. So there's that vector. But a third of my book is about military coups and military

dictatorships. And what happens, if you are saying that a group of people who are not in the military or in security services are not civilians, this opens the door to use the law to declare them combatants, to declare them terrorists, and which is what, dictators always do. And thus, to what happened in Chile after the coup, is that military courts were used to try civilians. Torture was used on civilians with that same argument that regular people, in this case, you know, he's talking about immigrants, but it's regular people in Chile's case, we're not civilians. And so you could use the whole force of the military against them. So that's what's coming. It's like he's going to take from, you know, fascism, from the history of military

dictatorships from Orban, that's the muse of Project 2025. And like the whole heritage of authoritarianism is going to come down on us if he comes back in. And Americans need to know that because of the scale of this operation, they will be affected. The issue that I have to, Ruth, is that maybe it's Hollywood or just our nature in America that everything happens with great speed, which is what worries me is the gradual nature with which all of this is unfolding. That it isn't as if Donald Trump, when he was elected in 2017, after he enters the White House, that like tanks were rolling out in the street, that people were being disappeared. I think that Hollywood and that kind of imagery of this instantaneous takeover allows there to be this

opening that what is happening is not as bad because it's not happening with the haste that we have always envisioned it to happen. And so can you speak to the gradual nature and then what I envision as the accelerator that will happen in 2025 if he is elected? Yeah. This is a really good point because we forget. I mean, there are times when the initial crackdown, as in Nazi Germany, happens very quickly. But then it still takes time. Even in Nazi Germany, you know, the reason Jews didn't leave right away, even after the Nuremberg laws, is that we look at things with hindsight. Whereas when you're living through something, usually, again, even in Hitler's case, it happened over time. And people adjust their expectations, especially people who can't just leave the country.

Now, all of these dictators and authoritarian today, they've been there for a long time. I always like to point out, Putin has now been in office as long as Mussolini, and Orban has been in office as long as Hitler. Even Putin has been doing things gradually. And so, for example, there was a lot of very interesting satire of Putin himself, cartoons, public projections on buildings, all kinds of a whole culture of satire. up to about 2006, 2007. None of that's permitted now, and there are laws now against, you know, offending the leader or the government. So these things happen gradually.

And so people in 2006, Putin's Russia, it was like, well, I can criticize the leader. I can make a joke about him. It's not so bad. And that's also, Orban has followed this kind of gradualist thing, partly because it takes a long time to carry out what we call autocratic capture, where you purge the judiciary, you purge the election apparatus, you domesticate the media, and then sometimes things can happen in a big push.

Like I'll give you an example. In Orban's Hungary, in 2018, he got 500 media properties, the owners of 500 media outlets, to quote, donate them to a government allied foundation. Now, I still don't know because there is, you know, people don't fall out of windows in Hungary. but there's a lot of threat that goes on. So how did he get this? In one fell swoop, he domesticated a huge amount of the media. And what that means is that when you have elections, the opposition's messages don't really

reach people outside big cities. So it has consequences. So that's an example of something that can happen at one point that accelerates. But otherwise, things evolve gradually. And so Donald Trump has been gradually drip, drip, drip, conditioning Americans. We're now on our eighth year of his, or ninth year, if you start in 2015, of his propagandizing, of his discrediting elections, of his praising dictators, of his building his personality cult. So this has already gone on slowly.

And that's how we get to a point where the Supreme Court is like calmly discussing whether he could get, he should have immunity for killing someone. I mean, really? That's where we are now. But it's taken time already. I love the term of domesticating the media that you use because in so many ways, it's already happened. And Donald Trump was only in office for four years, that this softening, if you will, the needing

of our democracy like dough and the stretching of it and the breaking of it has happened over the last nine years. It hasn't just been about, you know, the language that he's used or, the breaking of political norms, it has been, it is now moved, like you've said, into the court system where they are debating things that should have been shut down when they were even thought about. Should a president have absolute immunity? Well, the last 44 before Donald Trump didn't, and they managed to do their jobs. So why all of a sudden would we change course? Because you have elected one criminal. If America has now been primed,

if we have been needed, if we have allowed political norms to evaporate, if the guardrails are all broken off, has there ever been a time in your research where you see this kind of backsliding stopped? I mean, we're a very unusual place because of states' rights. We're an unusual place because of the guns and the potential because of that for political violence. And there are other things that make us unique. And one of them is that we think it can't happen here and on all of that, that whole denial. And so Americans for all kinds of reasons are actually, including geography, we got Canada on one side, Mexico on another, and then we have oceans. We're not Poland, which has a history of, you know, communism. And then before that, Nazis invading them. And they

mobilized when they needed to and turned back recently. They got rid of their, far-right government. So we don't have that. So there are times when that's happened, there are U-turns that that countries make, but there's smaller countries in which they managed to get together a pro-democracy movement in time. And we've had examples, even in Hungary, the last national election, you had six parties coming together to try and defeat Orban. They made some errors so it didn't work. We only have these two parties. That's the the other thing that's a problem. It was supposed to be an asset. We're so stable, but it's a huge liability because there's no movement. And the party that's fossilized around Donald Trump,

that's why, you know, Nikki Haley's getting like 150,000 votes in Pennsylvania, even though she's not even on the ballot. We're just, that party is stuck around him. And those who don't like him don't have anywhere to go unless they vote Democrats. So there are things that are making it very difficult structurally for us to turn this back. On the other hand, I always say never underestimate the American people. And we know that the reason that the GOP is using election trickery is because their policies are not popular. They're too extreme, even with Republican women. So the challenge is to somehow in the next six months get a pro-democracy movement together that appeals to centrist and independent, especially women. And that can, you know,

could be our own turnaround. Dear. Well, we'll have to leave it there today, Ruth. And come back to you in a couple of months. Always appreciate you making the time for the new abnormal folks. And if you have not read Strong Men by Ruth Ben-Giott, it is out. You should pick it up. It is a survival guide.

We appreciate you. Thank you. Likewise. Author Goldwag is the author of Colts, Conspiracies and Secret Societies. and the new hate, a history of fear and loathing on the populist right. His new book out now is the politics of fear, the peculiar persistence of American paranoia, and it documents America's long history of susceptibility to conspiracy theories. He joins me now to talk about it. Arthur, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for having me. So you write that what motivated you

to write the book was the selective nature of memory. Can you tell our listeners what you mean by that? So much has happened since I started the book, but I got the idea for it at the very, very end of the Trump administration after he had been voted out of office and before he had actually left office. And I was looking forward to the time when Trump was going to stop dominating American politics and people were going to start forgetting how close to authoritarianism we had come. I had to recalibrate as I started writing because Trump did. not go away. Yet, you see all the time, if you look at the polling, the selective nature of memory. And people remember Trump's stewardship of the economy in ways that the figures don't bear out at all. Trump is consistently asking, you know, are you better off than you were in 2020? And 2020 was a terrible year by every possible metric, except the memory remembers it differently.

Yeah, it really is unbelievable what we're seeing right now. So the underlying thesis of the book you write is that Trumpism is what happens and what has always happened, albeit under different circumstances and with different names, when two of the main wires that feed into the American identity cross. So talk about that for a little bit. What are these wires? The two big things in America, we were founded largely by religious refugees who were looking for a place where they could not necessarily have freedom of religion, but have their own religion. And then the American state, I mean, those were the original colonists. The American state is founded by people of the Enlightenment that were looking for a secular polity. And what I write

is Puritanism is perfectly compatible with capitalism. And the secular state is perfectly compatible with capitalism, but they're not quite compatible with each other and they conflict in all sorts of ways. And we have yet to settle the argument that the founders were having as to what kind of state we want. Do we want to be a secular state? Do we want to be a religious state? And we're seeing this argument playing out right now over the abortion question, over all kinds of questions. Every country in the world has to struggle with irrational thinking and conspiracy theory and tribal hatreds and all that.

But the form that they've taken in America is, I think, this conflict between whether we're a secular state or a religious state. And the particular hatred that defines so much of American thinking is anti-Catholicism, which is hugely prominent in history and very, very absent from contemporary life. It's a pretty remarkable thing that something that was so enormous in the 1700s, 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s and 1800s and 1900s has just disappeared. Yeah, it is really remarkable when you read in your book and others about just how prominent anti-Catholicism was in this country.

It's such an excellent point that you make that the role of religion in fomenting conspiracies, particularly here in America, can't be understated. In addition to the historical anti-Catholicism, you've got maybe the or-ir conspiracy theory of anti-Semitism. And you also have, we see it now with the way Trump is increasingly using the biblical and end-times rhetoric of evangelical Protestantism in service of getting himself re-elected. I think it's really important to not get caught up in what Trump actually thinks about anything. Yes. Trump is pushing buttons, and Trump has found that these buttons have always gotten tremendous results. I say in the book, if being pro-immigration would have gotten him elected, then he would have been pro-immigration. What he's doing is he's pushing a particular set of buttons and recapitulating things that have happened in American history before we had a populist movement in the 19th century, which was a lot like Trumpism.

And that, you know, Trump doesn't say he wants to take your health insurance away. Trump says he wants to give you better health insurance. And the populist movement in the 19th century, it was racist. It was anti-immigrant. But it had a lot of progressive elements in it, too. Anything Trump says is transaction. It's to get a result. But it does resonate with these movements in American and other country's histories as well.

Look, I couldn't agree more that everything he says is completely transactional. and it's just, like I said, it's all in service of getting himself elected. He doesn't actually believe the rhetoric that he's spouting. But as you say, he knows what works for him. And there's an interesting quote. It's a great quote from one of my favorite books, Ombardo Echoes Foucault's pendulum, and you use it in the politics of fear. And it's a quote about the protocols of the elders of Zion. And the quote is, it was again the plan of the Jesuits and before that of the ordination of the Templars, few variations, few changes. the protocols were self-generating, a blueprint that migrated from one conspiracy to another.

And this sort of struck me as maybe the essence of your book that when you look at conspiracy theories historically, you do see the same thing over and over again adapted for different times. You certainly do with anti-Semitism, which there's so many varieties of anti-Semitism. There's religious anti-Semitism. There's political antisemitism. There's conspiratorial antisemitism. And the protocols, I call it the Beethoven's ninth of conspiracy theory. It brings so much of this stuff together. But when you look at it, what it does is it cuts in pace anti-Jesuit propaganda

and anti-Mason propaganda and then attributes it to the Jews, basically. It's one of the greatest works of adaptation in the history of hatred. No, absolutely. And I want to talk about, there were a couple of things you talk about in the book that help give rise to conspiracy theories. And also, there's a word you use that I love over and over again, a stickiness and how which conspiracy theories have this stickiness that they just keep lasting and lasting. And maybe they evolve a little bit or change a little bit, but they're just, stickiness is such a great word here. And there's something you say in the book. You say that Barack Obama's victory over the war hero, John McCain, might have been even more traumatic for the racist right than 9-11 had been. I thoroughly agree with that.

I often say that the election of a black man to the presidency, you broke a lot of people's brains in this country. But that to me, that goes to what you're talking about here with the pace of change and accounting for the stickiness of things like that. People fear change, especially when it might take away some of their unearned privilege. And conspiracy theories are sort of geared to play right into those fears, aren't they? That's what they are. And it's funny. I've been reading a book by an Australian journalist from like 10 or 15 years ago. And he interviewed Jonathan Haight, whose big book back then was about the psychology of political hatreds.

And he had done this analysis that conservative people were introverted and feared change. And liberal people were extroverted and positive thinkers. And that basically conservatives were motivated by fear in many respects. And I don't know if hate would still be saying this now, but this is what he was saying back then. It struck me that conspiracy theory is about fear. It's a response to anxiety. The worst part of anxiety is the loss of control. And conspiracy theory restores control.

It explains things. It makes things make sense. And it makes so much psychological sense to people that it doesn't really matter to them that it doesn't make rational sense. It makes you feel so much better. Yeah, and it makes you feel also that, you know, if bad things happen to you, they're not your fault. They're the fault of the Jews or the Catholics or the Masons or whatever, whatever the conspiracy is. And that sort of ties into something I found really interesting in your book. You say that it's important to remember that while conspiracy theories can and do travel from the bottom up,

they are more typically propagated from the top down. This to me is, a, undeniably true, I think. but also just so fascinating and you show how to sort of harness that fear or even sometimes create that fear that the people at the top, whether they're autocrats, it's just whoever's in power, they want to keep people in a constant state of fear. And what better way to do that than to talk about this horrible other that is trying to take everything from you? Yeah, and it's funny because I came at this. I write in the book. I'm not a social scientist and I came at this from writing a popular book about cult's conspiracies and secret societies.

What I came to say is that cult leaders and authoritarian leaders use pretty much the same techniques to keep control and that the same kinds of things that attract people to cults get people attracted to authoritarian regimes. And it was brought home to me in a very specific way is when the book got published, I started getting attacked. I started getting hate mail. And the hate mail was very conservative. And what I startled me about it

was that the things that I was being accused of were really old. And I didn't know people worried about things like that anymore. People were telling me I was taking money from the Rockefellers. I hadn't heard about the Rockefellers in a long time. I mean, it was like, and then people started telling me

that I was taking money from the masons. And it was just this strange thing, but it was because here's that there's this existing body of theory, like in the Umberto Weka quote. It's just infinitely adaptable. So they adapted it. It's fascinating how conspiracy theorists really do seem to love autocracy. And you write that it's not weird that there are populist conspiracy theories because there's a lot of injustice in the world. And you say that what's baffling is why the anger of those injustices inspire is so often misdirected and why people who claim to be as vigilant as they are for their rights and liberties seed them so readily to self-serving authoritarians. I mean, we're seeing this play out

in real time every day here with Trump, with him saying things like, I alone can fix it, I am your retribution. It is just amazing how people who are convinced there is a group of people pulling the strings, and yet what they seem to want is an actual puppet master. I'm certainly far from the first person who's noticed that there's a ton of projection in conspiracy theory. That's a lot of what it is. You accuse the enemy of doing what you want to do. But going back to the roots of this country, you know, you have, Protestantism is a serious

revolution. It's a spiritual, conceptual, political revolution. And the world was at war. It's one of the bloodiest wars in history. And America comes out of this calder. And it's hard being a Protestant. It's easier in some ways to be a Catholic because there's a whole structure that takes care of your redemption.

It answers your questions. And it's hard being a small R. Republican. The kings are divinely ordained. They know everything that's right. They communicate with God and the church. And in a democracy, you're on your own. And there's a kind of envy, I think, for those lost certainties. And when people describe the terrible super state that they're fighting against,

I think to a certain degree, it's something that they would kind of like to have. Wouldn't it be nice if all your questions were answered? Wouldn't it be nice if you could actually summon somebody with all that power to wipe all our problems away in five minutes. First day in office, just eliminate all these problems. There's something seductive and alluring about that. Yeah, absolutely. Before we go, I want to play off of that and get your thoughts on QAnon, which, at least to me, in some ways, is sort of the protocols for our age. You have a really interesting theory in the book, and you say that it seems to you that QAnon is unlikely to survive as a movement for very long. but the underlying structure of its narrative will abide.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, absolutely. I totally believe that. Because it's a very simple narrative. It's the Gnostic narrative. The people that say that they're in charge are impostors, that if you recognize that, then you're part of the solution. And there's going to be a great cleansing where the impostors will be removed,

the real authorities will be restored, and there'll be peace in the world. That's the QAnon story. If it's too esoteric to talk about Gnosticism, just look at a movie like The Matrix. It's the same story. And the reason that you have, Gnosticism is such a big theme in popular culture is because it's very appealing, because, again, it's a response to anxiety. And as crazy as QAnon is, and as corrupt as it is, because it's kind of a made-up up thing. People made it up to get clicks. It kind of works, too, because it's universal and a very

tried and true formula, very time-tested formula. So there'll be another Kwan on someday. Just no doubt about that. Yeah. The book is The Politics of Fear, the peculiar persistence of American paranoia. Arthur Goldwegg, thank you so much for being here and walking us through what you're talking about. Okay. Thank you so much for having me. Danielle Moody Andy Levy Kick us off Danielle on

It's still up in the air Whether this is going to be a glorious week or not But kick us off with your fuck that guy And let's see how it goes Andy glorious weeks Left us about nine years ago I'm just gonna tell you

Like it's just a fucking week You know But to kick off this fucking week Alien Cannon We haven't talked about her enough In the last couple of weeks because, well, I try and avoid things that raise my blood pressure, which is a judge that is clearly in the pocket for Donald Trump

that was hired by Donald Trump in order to stop any criminal investigations into Donald Trump. And that's what Ailing Cannon has been doing down in Florida overseeing the documents case or not overseeing the documents case, as I like to say. Nonetheless, apparently every Republican takes a page out of grifting ass Clarence Thomas Thomas's book where I guess you and I, Andy, are like out of the loop that apparently everyone else has a billionaire that is bankrolling them. Like it's weird. Like where do you go for this? Is it sugar daddy.com? Is it, you know, sugar politics? Like how do we find a billionaire benefactor? but Aileen Cannon, apparently much in the same way as Clarence Thomas, accidentally didn't put down that she took luxury vacations to Montana and she didn't disclose them.

And because all of these people think we're fucking idiots, when NPR was asking to disclose is when all of a sudden these trips mysteriously then appeared on said website. And then they offer up that, Andy, there must have been some type of inadvertent glitch in the website. It was a tech issue. It wasn't that she was hiding these trips that then mysteriously, I guess the glitch worked itself out when investigative reporters at NPR started digging around. The glitch fixed itself. These people grift. They lie. They cheat.

their families and their friends. This is a kleptocracy. We don't live in a democracy. And this is the woman that's overseeing the documents case, doing exactly what Donald Trump has put her there to do. So it's just infuriating that these stories come out, but it's not as if anything changes. It's not as if, oh, my God, alien cannon's going to recuse herself

or that she's going to disclose more or anything. No, it's just same old, same old. So sometimes I just don't even care that these stories reveal themselves because all it does is show us that we have been living in a multi-tiered justice system where there are just people in black robes that get to create the rules that the rest of us abide by and they can say fuck you to the rest of us. So for that reason, starting out this week strong with Alien Cannon as my fuck that guy. Yeah, NPR broke this story because they did a whole investigation into federal judges in general and found dozens of judges who didn't disclose luxury travel that they got for free and a whole bunch of other things. Go to NPR.org and read the whole thing because it's absolutely unreal. 40 instances of judges going to events at luxury resorts and not filing a report within 30 days. It goes on and on and on.

And Alien Cannon is, as you said, one of the more prominent judges on this list because of the trial that she's overseeing now. And it's just we have to have a reckoning at some point with the judicial system in this country and with judges who just are playing really fast and loose, if not completely ignoring ethics rules that are set up. And it's got to happen at some point because it seems like every day we hear, another way that it is just getting out of control. So yeah, fuck those guys. Andy, round us out at the start of this week in America Healthcape. How are you kicking off your fuck that guy this week? All right.

Look, my fuck that guy is someone who was a senior advisor to President Barack Obama. He was his campaign manager. And what is he up to now these days? Oh, he's launching a podcast with Kelly. I'm talking to hear about David Pluff or Plouf, as I like to pronounce it, but I think that's wrong. Or Pluff. I think any of those three pronunciations are okay personally. And I grant our listeners permission to use any of them.

It's my feelings that matter here. But anyway, he's launching a podcast with Kellyanne Conway, who needs no introduction. It rankles me so much when this happens because it sort of turns me into a populist. and it turns me into, I guess, more of a Bernie Sanders populist than a MAGA populist. But it makes me think they're all the same person. Like it doesn't matter what party they're in. They are all, as far as they're concerned, they all belong to the same class, this political class. And that is where their overarching loyalty belongs.

And they will do things like this. Kelly Ann Conway should not be a public figure. She lies for a living. She gave us the lovely phrase, alternative facts, as a sort of euphemism for her lies. To give her this veneer of respectability, she is not respectable. She should not be considered respectable. In any kind of just society, she would not be considered respectable. And yet here is David Pluff, Plouffe, former senior official in the Obama administration, giving her this sort of the imprimatur, if you will, of respectability by hosting a podcast with her. And to me, all this does is it takes away any respectability he has. But obviously, he doesn't see it that way. And look, my guess is this will be

a very successful podcast that a lot of people will listen to. And I sound like a angry old man shaking my fist at the clouds. But every time I see something like this, it makes me mad. Because it's like, you wonder how we got here. You're part of the problem, buddy. You know, because you keep giving these people chance after chance after chance to be respectable when they should have been voted off the island a long time ago. Fuck that guy. Yeah, I would say that I'm disappointed, but this is all par for the course and this is why people get sick of politics because they see the revolving door of bullshit and the normalizing that happens. And I had said at the beginning of the Trump administration that everybody that was a part of this administration should have been

locked out of politics for the rest of their political careers. But instead, they are able to onboard themselves into dancing with the fucking stars, into podcasts, onto CNN, onto MSNBC, and all of these other places to kind of to normalize their behavior. And I'll say this, that guest of the show, Ruth Ben Guiat, posted about the announcement of this podcast and said, quote, calling all normalizers of extremism and institutionalized lying and election denial and dictators for a day and coups. It's all just politics. As usual, I guess.

Yep. Fuck those guys. Yeah. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder. Want more great listens?

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