The Daily Beast Podcast - The Trump Org’s Implosion Starts with a Divorce

Episode Date: July 13, 2021

Daily Beast political investigations reporter Jose Pagliery explains how the divorce of Jennifer Weisselberg and Barry Weisselberg was the match that lit the Trump Organization on fire and why Trump is in more trouble than we think. Plus! Bloomberg opinion columnist Robert A. George tells Molly Jong-Fast how Sen. Ron DeSantis’ COVID response set up mind traps for progressives and Heather Cox Richardson, historian and host of the podcast Now and Then, shares what the TV show Lost and QAnon have in common. 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 its 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 day 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 Cannon. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails.

Today we have a super interesting episode. We'll talk to historian and host of the podcast now and then, Heather Cox Richardson, about how history is linking up with our present. Then we'll talk to political investigations reporter at the Daily Beast, Jose Pallieri, about some very interesting legal jeopardy for both Donald J. Trump and Matt Cates. But first, we have Bloomberg opinion columnist Robert A. George. We're so excited to have you. I think of you as like a grown-up, even though I don't know that you're that much,

and you might be a tiny bit older than I am, but I think of you as someone who has been doing this for a while. I have been doing this for a while. Even when I don't share my age, people can sort of figure it out. I work for Newt Gingrich back in the 90s. Yes. Whether I'm a grown-up, it depends on who you want to talk to, but I have been around for a while, yes. Let's talk about CPAC. I mean, there's some rewriting of history here with CPAC, and I want it just for you to wait.

in on this, since you have this history of being in the GOP, people are saying, well, CPAC has always been where the conservative movement is, but it actually has always been kind of a fringe lunatic group. I wouldn't quite go that far. If you want to call it fringe, if you want to call it the right of the right, I think that's fair. But you have to keep in mind, I mean, that CPAC started in the mid-70s. I'm not that old that I was actually going to it then. It first got something of its claim. to fame, if you will, when Ronald Reagan put it on the map in the middle of his challenge to President Ford in 75 and 76. So that was when it was first kind of identified as the conservative border of the Republican Party. Now, obviously, depending on whose establishment at the time,

it's easy to label them as, you know, the French lunatics. But they were people who were starting to test out what would later become mainstream. Republican views, like, you know, the importance of the importance of tax cuts. Because, I mean, the Republican Party going back from Gerald Ford was more simple fiscal responsibility, keep an eye on spending, and so forth. But the real break was when Reagan came in and introduced supply side theory and things like that. And those things got their first test drive in the C-PACs of the mid to late 70s. Karen Tummelty, who I think of as like who I want to be if I ever grow up, said to me this weekend on DM that Nancy Reagan always hated CPAC, which strikes me

as Nancy Reagan was no hippie. I never had the honor of meeting Mrs. Reagan, but the Reagan's were interesting in the sense of he obviously became the standard bearer of the conservative movement, starting when he first, you know, spoke in support of Goldwater in the 60s, and then, you know, it danced around, possibly running in the late 60s and then going into the 70s and so forth. Nancy Reagan was more of a practical slash pragmatic, you know, Republican wife. She was Republican and she was conservative in sort of the traditional sense. But her main allegiance, as the kids might put it, you know, if you're going to go into politics, you want to have a ride or die wife with you.

That's kind of what Nancy was to run, Hillary was to Bill. you know, somebody who is... Who's going to go along with your cry? But it's going to strike fear in the ones who are going to be surrounding the main person and trying to protect them from themselves. Nancy's the one who says, you know, even though we've got all these conservative types around us, I want to have a pragmatist like, you know, having a pragmatist like a Jim Baker as a chief of staff to be the really important gatekeeper. But there has not ever been a CPAC where they've had members of the old.

Oathkeepers walking around with credentials. I mean, that's a new feature. You know, that's where we are now. It's certainly part of what we've gotten because of Trump and everything he's brought in. But to your point about CPAC being, you know, attracting the lunatic fringe, it wasn't always that way. It certainly did increasingly become that from the late 2000s into the teens and so forth. And again, this is pre-Trump. once it gets to the point where, you know, you've got former standard bearers like McCain and Romney, you know, subsequently getting booed at the next CPAC, you kind of see what direction it's going into. And now, yeah, we've got, we're allowing Q&ON types and oathkeepers and, you know, goodness knows what else. And it's gotten to a point that whoever was in baseball said, you know, you like it so much, you have to do it twice.

Yeah. Why is there two? Wasn't one CPAC enough? I mean, what the fuck is going on? This actually kind of is a reflection of how the movement has moved in a sense out of my radar. When I saw that there was another CPAC going on, I was thinking, wait, what? I mean, back in January, you know, late December, January, I was getting things across my Twitter timeline and other social media timeline and said, oh, are you going to CPAC or so-and-so is going to CPAC? I haven't been to CPAC since like 2015 or 2016. But so you knew that it was, you knew that it was coming. This one, it was like, wait, there's a CPAC going on this week and it's going on in Texas. And how did I not hear this? How do we not know this?

Yeah, but it strikes me as, you know, we talk a lot about the Republican Party, or we don't, but we should. It seems like this part of the Republican Party, which is much of it, has become a kind of de facto religion, like the Grateful Dad, right? You have a group that tours with them, right? You have a group that worships them. You have a group that believes in certain insane, fringe, culty theories about them. I mean, it really is, and these events are kind of religious experiences to these people. The Grateful Dead comparison is a good one because I grew up listening to all kinds of music.

And I was a DJ for a few years in the 90s, both, you know, club and bars and. as well as special events and that kind of stuff. I could get into all kinds of music, all kinds of, whether it's classic or modern new wave punk, you know, hip-hop, whatever. I could never get into the Grateful Dead types, the widespread panic. My type of guy. You know, fish, you know, fish, all this kind of stuff. I just couldn't, I couldn't do it for those people who can't tell because of my voice,

I happen to be, I happen to be an African-American. So I would say to some friends of mine, I wanted to create a T-shirt that said, you know, the Grateful Dead, it's a white thing. I don't understand. Wow, that's so good. Now, the funny thing is, I do have a good friend who is another black conservative. His name is Deroi Murdoch, and he is a Grateful Dead fan. And I just, and I just tell him, DeRoy, you know, we see certain things similar ways, but I just can't go there. But no, to the point, CPAC, it's always been, it's always been insidery, but it has become like a cultural cult.

The white thing I don't understand is even more so. I mean, even more so than the quote, mainstream conservative movement, which has always been, you know, predominantly, but not exclusively white. I just need to add an addendum here because my father listens to this podcast and he is a big Grateful Dead fan and heard them in the early days. Dad, we all love the dad. And I promise. Like, this is just not, this is not. I can't have that on my permanent record. Let me take this Grateful Dead.

thing, though, somewhere else. Let's keep trucking along then. Let's do it. Well, well done, Robert. There's this hallucination that we don't seem to understand on the left, that maybe you can help us understand. It's shaped kind of doughy like Trump in the form of Ron DeSantis. The background here is there have been two straw polls that came out of the CPAC, one with Trump, one without. The one with Trump has Trump with 60 percent, and Ron DeSantis with 30 plus percent, and then everybody else with one. Not 30, it's like 23%, I thought. Right. And then everyone else, like, including, you know, Tucker Carlson and all the people who have ruined themselves for Trump have 1%. And then the one without Trump has DeSantis.

Tucker has two, Molly, geez. Well, Tucker didn't ruin himself for Trump. I think Tucker really ruined himself for dollars. What do you think of Ron DeSantis' popularity amongst this base? Well, that comes about because he hit the sweet spot of, being the anti-Quomo when it comes to COVID response. There were a lot of predictions about how Florida would turn out because of DeSantis' is what could be considered as sort of a laissez-faire approach to dealing with COVID. And you heard those stories are saying,

well, you know, he's letting people hang out on the beaches and COVID is going to sweep Florida and it's going to have these, it's going to have catastrophic hospitalization and deaths that are, you know, they're even going to dwarf New York's. It didn't turn out that way. And I think it's, I think it's really important, Molly, that critics of Republicans, whether you're critics of Trump Pure or governors like DeSantis and Abbott and so forth, I think it's really important, particularly going into 2022, that if you're going to want to have credibility with the reachable middle, middle. You have to be clear-eyed. You have to be clear-eyed. I mean, both progressives and the mainstream media,

talk about their belief in science and their belief in facts and things like that. And if the so-called experts say, well, because of what these decisions over here, we're going to have this level of deaths and that level of hospitalizations and positive rates and all this kind of stuff, if that doesn't turn out, it's not just a political hit, it undermines the integrity and the validity of these so-called. experts. And it's saying, well, these people said doomsday was coming and doomsday didn't come. And it enhances the rhetoric that then comes from these same governors. So getting back to the DeSantis issue, Florida basically ended up kind of middle of the pack, not the best in terms of

COVID response. They weren't South Dakota. They weren't South Dakota. And I know two people who lived in New York and who were frustrated that the schools didn't open for five-day-a-week instruction. They picked up their kids because the husband works in finance so he could, you know, work wherever. The wife's a freelance writer. In January, they moved down, they moved down to Florida and enrolled their kids down there, and now they're thinking about doing this, you know, permanently come September. The point is that the handling of COVID by DeSantis became sort of a rallying point for the whole vast people on the right, both of those who believed, who believe that COVID was a serious threat, as well as those who are, you know, who are on the fringe and think it's not, you know, it's being overblown and all this other kind of stuff.

That's the main attraction that DeSantis has to many Republicans. Well, and also the taxes, right, because wealthy people don't want to have to pay for schools, roads, bridges, like, you know. Those things were already in place, but we're trying to, we're basically saying what's the attraction of DeSantis in a business? post-Trump universe. The fact that he's able to do that on the one hand, while at the same time play the cultural right language, the cultural right rhetoric, the hostility towards the media that has basically defined the Trump era. Right. No, certainly true. It is interesting to me, right, and he does do the hostility towards the media incredibly well, right? He's able to just trolled media. He's like Chris Christie. But again, to the point I was making before, when the media

you know, sort of pumps him up as being, you know, this, you know, sort of COVID denier, but the prognostications don't quite turn out. That enhances his power. I mean, except that in a pandemic, a lot of these people were wrong. You know, you learn by the seat of your pants, right? Nobody knew in January. I mean, I followed this pretty closely because I may not be a doctor, but I'm a terrible hypochondriac. So anytime there's a pandemic, you know, somewhere in the world, I am following it. And, you know, we didn't know how it spread. People thought it spread, you know, we're cleaning our groceries. Like, you know, that you can, that was not politics. That was just, you know, this sort of scientific method of like learning as you go. So I don't

think, I mean, right, like people love to say that, and this is actually something I feel a little bit passionate about. People love to say, like, well, Anthony Fauci, who people on the right are very excited to blame for things. Amply Fauci said not to wear masks. And now he says to wear masks. So obviously he doesn't know what he's talking about. And it's like, but nobody looks at things like Trump said to, you know, like if we compare this to some of Trump's record, right? Like, you know, zinc hydrochloroquate. They're giving malaria medicine to treat COVID. It doesn't work at all. You know, he's saying that shouldn't fear the virus. I mean, I'm just saying like there are mistakes and then there are bad faith. I agree with that completely. The Fauci mania on the right is, I'm, I'm

I still have difficulty of absorbing all that myself. You're right. I mean, there's a difference between those who say, well, as you said, in the very beginning days, we were all frantic. We were putting on plastic gloves and we were doing the sanitizer, you know, 10 times a day and on and on until we realize, you know, what was overstatement and what wasn't. But where we are now, about 18 months plus from when COVID hit the U.S. and, you know, 15 months or so from its early peak, there are certain things that we do know

and certain decisions that various governors made. And we've seen the interesting arc, if you will, when, you know, Cuomo was at his height and DeSantis was like down at the bottom. And I'm just talking about this in political terms. No, no, I agree, I agree. That management of Florida. And, oh, by the way, the fact that he said that all schools should be open as well. Right.

turned out to be right. That definitely turned out to be right. And there's still, you know, and there's still a number of Democratic governors who are too easily influenced by the teachers unions who are still, you know, kind of skeptical with that and saying, oh, well, you know, we think we're going to be able to open in September, you know, five days a week, everybody. You know, that's just nuts. I mean, again, to your point before, we know so much more now than we did in March of 2020. And it would be a catastrophe if we allowed, you know, a third school year. in parts of the country to not have full five-day-a-week instruction.

Yes, and as someone who has many children, all of whom have really suffered through online learning, it's a fucking disaster. Excuse my French. The reason why we have to get to something really important. So you wrote a really smart article about Eric Adams.

And Eric Adams is now our mayoral candidate, and I think fair to say, unless something crazy happens, is going to be our next mayor in New York City. I think it's unlikely to see a Curtis Siwa. It's a nine to, you've basically got a nine to one Democrat over Republican registration in New York City. Yeah. It is true to say he's the odds-on favorite to be the next mayor of New York City.

And one of the things that you wrote about, so there's a lot of head scratching in the media about what does this mean and is this a rebuke for progressives and what, you know, what is this? right, because we have to learn from everything or in this case, you know, whatever. But so I'm curious to know, one of the points you made, which I thought was really, really, really important was that you talked about how a lot of African American voters are actually more conservative than the kind of, and I don't want to say Twitter because I feel like it's easy. But a lot of the sort of people who hold themselves up as a pundit class. Oh, without a doubt. There's a great cliche on Twitter that says Twitter is not real life, and that's quite correct. For one thing, you know, real life is not really accountants as much puns as I like to make on Twitter. So, you know, that would be, that doesn't quite work. This goes to the point. And I had, I had actually said this on Twitter before Eric Adams, before the mayoral race really started getting running. I said it almost a year ago after Joe Biden wrapped up the Democratic nomination. for the presidency. And I said, in a certain way of looking at things, the black voters represent the conservative base of the Democratic Party. And when I say conservative, I have a very narrow

meaning of this, in the sense of they are pragmatic, practical, and they are temperamentally conservative when it comes to making basic political decisions. Now, going back to, you know, FDR and particularly the 60s, African Americans obviously believe in a robust, larger federal government because the federal government, going back to Lincoln, was the protector of African American rights, African American's civil rights, against the Confederacy, against Jim Crow, and so forth. So their conservatism, if you will, leans towards a robust federal government versus the white evangelical conservatism, which believes more in states' rights and believes in limiting federal government. So there's a difference there. But at the same time, African Americans are, you know,

skeptical of the shiny new progressive object that presents itself. And that expressed itself in, certainly in 2016, when Bernie Sanders was challenging Hillary Clinton and didn't get anywhere, partly because he didn't get anywhere with black voters. Come 2020, he realizes that that was a big problem that he had in 2016, and he tries to make a more overt offer and message towards African Americans, and he hires people like Nina Turner and other African American spokesmen and so forth. But, you know, comes South Carolina last year, Jim Clyburn endorses Joe Biden, and it's over.

basically sweeps all the remaining southern states, and he's the nominee, and the socialist Bernie Sanders repudiating. Zoom forward to this year, and you've got a multi-candidate field running for the Democratic nomination in New York. Eric Adams, former police officer, former state senator, Brooklyn Borough president. Now, he zooms in on the issue of safety and the increasing crime. But I have a question for you about that because I have all, I always thought, and I am smart because I talk to Harry Siegel, and he tells me what to think. A former colleague of mine too. Right, exactly, who writes for the daily news. He always said to me, and I've always sort of looked at this race as like Eric Adams has real support in Bronx, Queens, and Brooklyn. He really

has on the ground support in a way that some of these dipshits, like, and yes, they said dip sheds. And yes, they said dipshits, please. Like, you know, some of these guys who came in, these Johnny Come Lately's, who, you know, were HUD secretary or whatever 10 million years ago, like sort of waltzed in and we're like, why am I pulling? Are you throwing shade at Sean Donovan? Is that what I'm hearing? Certainly not.

But I'm just saying, like, some of these guys just strolled in in the 11th hour and was like, you know, I went to Dalton and I'm, you know, have a full head of hair, vote from me. And, you know, Eric Adams actually has. people who supported him for, you know, for the last couple years. Like, he really built up a following. He was always going to be, if not the frontrunner, he was going to be one of the early frontrunners. And particularly when the Brogsboro president, Ruben Diaz, Jr., announced that he was not going to run for mayor and instead, you know, was basically going to retire from

politics, that gave Eric Adams a much stronger claim on a relatively broad segment of the public. from the beginning. But the wild card that came in was... Andrew Yang. Well, well, two wild cards. Andrew Yang is definitely one. I hear he's running for mayor of Cincinnati now. I'm just kidding. The policy wild card that presented itself was the killing of George Floyd. Because that put that death and the subsequent protest, it raised this issue of,

is a former cop going to be able to lay claim to one. wanting to run the largest blue city in the country, particularly after we've had not just George Floyd, but we've had a history over the last several years of prominent police brutality cases. So that raised the issue. After the protests, when crime started to, crime and shootings started to increase in New York and in other cities, it put those two policy issues. Police brutality on the one hand, but rising crime on the other, I've known that Eric Adams almost 20 years, it struck me that he would have a good chance of trying to work that middle, of being able to speak to both sides. And that is basically what became his platform.

And one other thing, too, besides the crime, and I didn't get a chance to put this in the column, besides the crime issue, he is also, relatively speaking, small C, conservative on educational issues. He is a, he's one of the people who thinks that the cap on charter schools needs to be raised in New York as well, whereas most mainstream Democrats right now, in a change, particularly from the, from the Obama years, have now turned hostile towards charter schools. So that's another area. And charter schools are very popular in neighborhoods like Southeast Queens, you know, which are, you know, heavily black middle class. And, and again, He's able to hit that sweet spot where working class African Americans live.

Yeah, thank you so much. This was great. Please come back soon. Hey, folks, you haven't heard, every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladad 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.com. Heather Cox Richardson is a Boston college historian and host of the podcast now and then. Welcome to the new abnormal Heather Cox Richardson. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. Well, I'm very excited to have you and you do something that I'm kind of obsessed with, but like you are a historian by trade.

It's a never-ending source of astonishment to me as well, yes. Well, but you work on bringing history as a reference to what is happening right now. Yes, that isn't necessarily something that all historians do, but it is a wonderful way to marry my fascination with the real world and this extraordinary world that historians, get to live in. I always compare it to the holodeck on the enterprise that you drop into a new scenario and you get to do research on what

it was like to live in that era and that time and you watch the world come alive around you on the holodeck and when you can finally see it entirely clearly you get to walk out and close the door and step into a brand new holiday and do it all over again. Let's talk

about what some of the historical the sort of modern crisis is because that it's were just seemed be continually in crisis that you bring a historical reference to in this podcast you do called now and then and you talk about what's happening now and what it was sort of the historical reference for it, which is something I always try to do when I write a piece is to sort of try to figure out where it's coming from. So the one I want to talk to you the most about right now because it's one that I think there is a lot of historical reference to is QAnon-Cults and

cultory. Because QAnon has come up and it is for a capital. all of our imaginations for any number of reasons, mostly because it's so preposterous. But this is not really America's first rodeo with cults, is it? No, it's not. And it's worth mentioning here, of course, that we come up with the ideas for the things we're going to be talking about on the podcast with the help of the incredibly wonderful editorial team. But it's really the brainchild of my friend Joanne Freeman and I, because she's a specialist in the framers in early America. And I sort of cover going forward from about 1820, although she does, she goes as well into the 1870s. And we can see patterns. So one of the

things about Q&ON that jumps out at historians as the fact it's not terribly new is the fact it is so obsessed with the idea of protecting children. And our, if you think about our major cult moments in America, children are almost always at the center of them from the Salem witchcraft trials in which the whole concern was that, that demons were taking over children in Salem, Massachusetts. Right through with some people, we didn't actually get to talk about on the podcast, but some people may remember the whole scandals in the 1980s over daycares and the idea that children were being abused in daycares, which became at the time sort of a modern day witch hunt. And that constant sense of the world is so out of control that I'm going to sort of go to ground and protect the children is really deeply rooted in American society. Yeah, I'm curious to know, if you can think of historical. what is a cult of the last hundred years that you think tracks close to QAnon?

Well, the problem was saying that things track close to Q&N is that it's a little bit different because of game theory and because of the fact that so much of Q&N has at this point taken on a life of its own. And cults in America have not generally been able to do that because they tended, again, I'm a historian here, so you don't want to say this is exactly what happened, but they tended to be organized around a single figure. Jim Jones, for example, or any of the many people who run a cult. Q&On, it seems, again, we don't have all the facts in front of us yet, but it seems to have organized around an individual. But now it's taken on a life of its own.

And one of the tricks to Q&ON on the fact that it is now community built is that usually a game, when you're designing a game, you're designing it to lead people through an incredible labyrinth to an outcome. But in effect, Q is just the opposite. It's designed not ever for there to be an outcome. There's not ever going to be that final victory. And so it's a little hard to say, oh, it looks exactly like, say, you know, the Jonestown crisis or any of the many things we've been through. But if you had to pick two, like it's Ruby Ridge plus, just humor me here. If I had to pick two with that... Yeah. Remember, you're not in academia here anymore. Let me dumb you down.

Well, no, no, no. It's not a question of dumbing down. It's my issue here is that, again, Q&On is a little bit hard to get your hands around because it's the whole thing about children. But it is also about politics and about supporting a cult figure, a person who has now become a cult figure in politics. So if you really, really, really want a comparison, and I'm really sorry to have to do this. do you? I'm going to have to go with, and I'm so sorry about this, you can cut this part. Ignatius Donnelly. Jesse, are you there? You're being recorded, and I hear dead silence. No, no, I want to hear it, man. I'm fascinated.

So Ignatius Donnelly is, he becomes associated with a populist party in the 1890s, and he's from the Midwest. And the reason that I make that comparison is because he, He is way, way, way out there. And he does, in fact, do the introduction to the Populist Party platform. I think of 1892. I would have to check that. And that seems somewhat reasonable. It gets reprinted in a lot of places.

He talks about how the economy is out of whack. He becomes a vicious anti-Semite. But at the same time that he does all that, he sort of has this other life where he talks about, for example, the existence of Atlantis. He's the guy who really pushes that. And he writes this novel called Caesar's Column about, you know, it's this apocalyptic novel in which Caesar's column is actually built, as I recall, with the skulls of his enemies. And he is sort of this way wacky out there figure that is supposed to be identifying this cult

or this, this cabal that has taken over America that becomes, as I say, viciously anti-Semitic. Yeah, oh, that's fascinating. We are like in this kind of strange, you know, but I also think, do you think there's some connection to Scientology here, too? I am not enough of an expert on Scientology to answer that question. I do think that our visual media has been going in the kind of direction that would support something like QAnon for a long time. So, for example, if you think about the TV series Lost, which again, if you started watching Lost, it seemed as, if you know you could trace different theories and people love that show they love the show and then at the end of the day it's like what the heck were the polar bears that's right the smoke the smoke monster would be the one i draw it well i'm always reminded of i mean there was this interesting

clip that duny from cnn had uh where he was at sea pack this weekend and he had this guy the first guy interviewed and he said like this my pillow guy says he has all this proof and, you know, and, and then he doesn't show me any proof. And you see this again and again, like, it's the shaggy dog story, you know, it's the shaggy dog story, and they get distracted by some other thread before they're able to back up whatever it was they're saying, because there is no real substance to any of this. Well, and that was right out of Joe McCarthy. It was Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin in the 1950s who went ahead and really launched that popular version of throwing stuff. stuff at the wall and then moving on because they recognize one of the things that the modern day Trumpers have done is they have managed to use media in such a way that they planted

stories and then the media would cover the stories so they were essentially getting a lot of traction for a very little money. Parker Malloy covers this very well. But that's been a process on the part of the Republicans since at least the 1990s when they began to hold hearings into things like, for example, voter fraud. Well, there wasn't any. But there. they knew the media would pick it up and say, oh, there was another meeting in the case of this issue of voter fraud, and they would get stories to carry forward. And that is a technique that Joe McCarthy planted in the 1950s. And at the time, the media said, hey, we didn't know how to handle this. And the answer was, when Joe McCarthy went away, they never really did figure out how to handle it. No, certainly not. Let's talk about critical race theory, because this feels like a panic we have seen again and again and again in American life. Okay. Yes. What would you like to talk about? Well, so critical race theory, it's the panic in the schools, right? And where do you see it relating the most historically? Well, the thing about where we are right now with all of that. So critical race theory, I mean, I really very quickly, it's a theory that came out of law schools in the late 1970s, really gets picked up in the 1980s. And it's an answer for legal scholars to try and figure out why. the reforms of the post-World War two years, especially after Brown versus Board of Education in 1954,

why those attempts to address individual rights did not, in fact, at the end of the day, seem to have leveled the playing field among people, especially they're focused early on between black people and white people, but then there's going to be off-shoots of critical race theory that are going to include brown people. So it's really a legal theory that says, okay, we can't simply focus on individual rights because that didn't do the trick. we need to actually recognize that embedded within our laws is systemic racism. It's really a look at patterns, but it's one of those things that was taught in law schools and really was not talked about a lot in schools and in colleges, because historians had discovered this in the 1940s. I mean, this is not news to anybody that every piece of our life has been determined by different racial approaches to it. So, for example, the place I like to throw this in is medicine.

I mean, there's absolutely no doubt that your medical care depends on your race in America. And that's just not controversial. Well, if you look at maternal fetal health, I mean, the African-American women have something like a multiple likelihood of dying in childbirth. Yes, yes. And it's gendered. I mean, this is the other piece that critical race theory came up with at the time was intersectionality from Kimberly Crenshaw. The idea that for, you know, for black women, they're hurt on both sides, both as women and as black women. But that, so that theory was out there.

So the real question is, why now? Why is it now suddenly this big thing? And I think that will take us back to sort of the opening during the Obama years of the idea that our history belonged to everybody. And you can see that obviously in things like Hamilton. And the pushback against that, well, first of all, the way that then developed with the New York Times Magazine 1619 project. And the idea that the 1619 project literally said in its first incarnation that you have to set the founding of America with the arrival of African Americans on the shores of the English colonies in 1619 rather than in 1776. And they made a number of claims early on in that have been walked back a little bit that were kind of extreme. And in response to that, Trump then jumps on board with his 1776 project in which he says, no, no, no, no.

America is the least, literally it says America is the least racist country ever. Well, if you're racist, it doesn't seem that racist. Well, but again, as a historian, this is really hard to wrap your heads around because quite literally it reads like a document that was written in the 1830s. And like the Tulsa race riots is like a few bad actors. Right. But it does come to this idea of if you're racist, then racism doesn't seem that bad to you. Yes, there's that.

And then to go further, if in fact, America is the least racist country ever and everything is just, you know, ducky across the board, that means that anybody who is not experiencing upward mobility is responsible for their own fate. And of course, the problem with that nowadays, and I think one of the reasons they're hitting it as hard as they are is that in America now, that's the vast majority of us. So I think that in critical race theory now is used as this bludgeon to say anybody who disagrees with the idea of at this point, the Trumpers, is somehow, anti-American, and it's become crazy extreme. That sounds very McCarthy, though, right? The idea of something being anti-American. I would say it's more than McCarthy. I mean, it's certainly McCarthy-ish, although McCarthy never would have gone so far because of the era in which he was

operating. But I would say we are beyond McCarthy and into authoritarianism. If you are starting to say you cannot teach, you know, you can't teach the Alamo, what really happened at the alamo. But it's more than just crazy in terms of we want to control this moment. It's also crazy in the idea that if you deny people access to reality, you are denying them the ability to make good decisions about their lives. And that is the fundamental way in which authoritarianism becomes powerful. You know, it's interesting to me is definitely a rise in authoritarianism, but where the countries which have gone full authoritarianism have done so badly. Recently, you've seen it.

You have hit exactly what I just cannot figure out. And in fact, last night I was writing, and this was the first thing across the top of my page. It ended up not making it into my letter. But what did they think the end game is? And I don't have what's on the other side of that, because what are our options? Our options are that if, in fact, the people who are now trying to stifle the teaching of our history and trying to get rid of voting and trying to do all the things they're doing

to consolidate power with through the Supreme Court and the Senate and all those things. If they succeed, their options are either essentially authoritarianism, even a step beyond fascism, if you will, a kind of authoritarianism that looks like Putin or Kim Jong-un, for example,

or people are going to fight back. In neither of those cases, is the country going to continue to be viable? Right. And I just like, like, when they lay in bed at night and think, oh, here's a good idea. Like, do they not see that next step? It's just shocking to me.

I mean, I get it. I understand what's happening here, but it is just a sort of, I just am continually shocked by that there are, I mean, there are some smart people in this group that somehow think this is going to end well. Do you see a historical off-ramp for us? From the moment we're in? Yes. Sure. I mean, one of the things, one of the reasons Joanne and I do that podcast is to explain

people that we are in is a matter of preserving democracy. We're in a moment at which democracy is really on the ropes, and we have the chance now to protect it as we have in the past. But one of the things that she talks about a lot and that is so important to remember is that tomorrow is not written. And this is one thing that I find really interesting about this moment, the number of people who sort of say, it's all over, it's done, there's nothing I can do. And I'm like, that's absolutely not the way anybody should approach their lives in addition to the life of this country. Of course we can change the future. Of course there is an off ramp. But that involves people putting skin in the game and saying, no, we're not going to put up with having our voting laws all decimated. We're not going to put up with the idea that Trump actually won the 2020 election. It involves putting skin in the game.

And we are not, we are absolutely not over the edge yet. But I'm telling you that edge is getting closer and closer and closer. sir. Yeah. Oh, so disturbing. Thank you so much for joining us, Heather Cox Richardson. Oh, it was so much fun. Jose Pallieri is a political investigations reporter at The Daily Beast. Welcome to New Abnormal. Thank you, Molly. So talk to me about this interesting wrinkle that could conceivably bring down the Trump family. So this is fascinating. If we were to define what makes the Trump organization so, unique. It has to be that it's run the way you'd run kind of like a criminal organization. You keep it in the family. It's all built on trust. You're not allowed in unless you've been vetted. And if you're at the top, it's because you've been there for 20 or 30 years and Donald

Trump really likes you. To break that apart, break that shell and see what's inside, you need an insider. And let me tell you, from everything I've heard, investigators have had a hard time getting that. Except what happens when you have a divorce, right? You have an insider who becomes an outsider. And that is what helped investigators here. For months, actually years, the Manhattan DA has been looking for internal records of the Trump organization. And we know this because they've come up to the Supreme Court twice now, right?

They want Donald Trump's tax returns. But this entire time, the person who had a bunch of this stuff was Jennifer Weisselberg. And she was married to Barry Weisselberg, who is a Trump organization employee, but but is also importantly the son of the chief financial officer of the company. So she's an insider. She knows this stuff. And when they got divorced, she had it all. So I actually know, Jennifer.

I knew she had been sort of batting around with information. She seemed like she had a lot of information and was not great at being able to hone down what was relevant. How was she able to do that? And how did she get to you? To answer the first question, think the way it played out, as I understand it, is that when she got approached by investigators late last year, she realized that she had to walk a sort of fine line here because the tax returns that would prove that her former husband engaged in allegedly illegal behavior, they also

have her name on it, right? And so she wanted to make sure that she was protected. And so she hired an attorney, and that attorney got a forensic accountant who did a ton of digging and got all the records in the right order. And then, very interestingly, they added another team member to this, who is Duncan Levin. He is a former prosecutor himself at the Manhattan DA's office, where he was a right-hand man to Cy Vance, who's the current Manhattan DA. He was the head of acid forfeiture there. He was the guy who went after these big banks after the financial crisis for the Manhattan DA. And so he knows how the Manhattan DA operates, especially when it conducts financial investigations of a criminal nature, which is what this is. And so because Jennifer Weisselberg assembled this team to protect her, they knew what they needed to put together to hand over to the investigators so they could do the best work with it.

And so credit really goes to not just Jennifer Weisselberg for keeping this stuff around and keeping her head screwed on her shoulders, but the team that she got together to help her go through this. Right. Explain to us the way the Trump organization is organized. So, of course, you've got Donald Trump at the top. And you have his right-hand people. You've got the C-O-O, Matthew Kalamari, and the C-F-O, Alan Weisselberg. And as we understand it, these two guys, this is like Game of Thrones, okay? These two guys have been fighting against each other for decades.

now, you know, competing over who's more loyal to Trump. Trump sometimes pits them against each other. And so, you know, there's some tension there. And that's going to matter going forward, by the way, because as prosecutors try to squeeze everybody at this company, they could very well play into these frictions. But the way it's organized is, of course, you've got Donald Trump at the top, and he controls it all. In fact, all the insiders I've talked to have explained to me the process that they go through, for example, with taxes at the end of every year. where you've got the company controller, Jeff McCona, who is a sort of mid-ranking executive. He's been there for decades. He's very trusted. All the numbers go through him. And then he hands them off to Alan Weisselberg.

And Alan Weisselberg as the CFO looks over the numbers and approves them and then brings in this outside accountant, Donald Bender, over at Mazars, USA. And this outside accountant sits down with Alan Weisselberg and they go through the numbers too. According to an insider I spoke to who was privy to this process, there's a reason why it's done step by step like that, because there are some things that Alan Weisselberg doesn't want Jeff McCondy to know. And there's some things that Donald Trump doesn't want others to know because when Donald Bender, that outside accountant, leaves the room, then Trump walks in. And you've got Donald Trump and Alan Weisselberg. So the CEO and the CFO coming together figuring out, what are the numbers going to be this year? And that's an interesting. question because if anything, you know, what we know about Donald Trump is that he makes up all kinds of junk. And part of that is the value of his business and his assets. Here's a problem because you need to know what the value of an asset is in order to tax it. And you need to know what the value of an asset is in order to ask a bank for a loan. And so knowing what you know about the process and the kind of person that Alan Weisselberg is,

particularly given the indictment we just saw where this guy is fudging the numbers left, and right, that will sort of clue you into what goes on inside the Trump organization when they decide what the values of the properties are at a given time and how much they're going to decide to pay in taxes that year. And so what we know about the documents that Jennifer Weisselberg has turned over to investigators is that even in her position, sort of like as an insider, but not in that room, she's still seen firsthand the kind of nonsense that goes on with Donald Trump and Alan Weisselberg and how they fudge numbers. to be convenient. And what we have in the indictment that just came down last week is sort of a

result of that, because what investigators used were some of the records that came out of Jennifer Weisselberg's divorce from the CFO's son, who, again, is also a Trump organization employee. And the documents in her divorce include really clear statements from this guy, Barry Weisselberg about how he received all these corporate perks that, by the way, he had no idea what value they had and he doesn't know if taxes were paid on them. And this is fascinating. Like, look, I don't cover divorce cases, but I know how they generally play out. And in a divorce case, you don't generally lay the groundwork for a criminal investigation three years later. That's just not how this is supposed to work. Do you think this could be the thing that brings down the Trump organization? It's certainly a start, isn't it? I mean, like, there's, There's definitely some leeway here for Donald Trump, particularly, because he has a few possible defenses. And by the way, you've already seen a glimpse of some of them. The first possible defense is that, well, he wasn't personally involved in this stuff. He wasn't personally involved in handing corporate perks to people and not paying taxes on them. And by the way, let's back

up for just a second. Let me explain why this matters. When a company pays you a salary, They also have to pay unemployment insurance, right? They pay Medicare, Social Security. They owe taxes on your salary. But if a corporation figured out a way to pay you less on the record, right, but then hand you these corporate perks, you know, on the employee side, you might be like, yeah, sure, then I don't have to pay taxes on it. But then on the business side, they're saying, yeah, great, we don't have to pay taxes

on it either. So what investigator are saying here is that the Trump organization did this to benefit itself, but also to benefit its employees. and the employees ran on it. Well, the question about if this is going to be the thing to bring down Donald Trump himself or his company, a lot of it's going to hinge on, well, how much did he know personally? And at first glance, you know, you'd think not much, right? Because, I mean, the prosecutors went after the chief financial officer, right?

They didn't indict Trump. But then you go back to this divorce case where you've got Jennifer Wesselberg's divorce lawyer, sort of like incredulous at the answer that he gets from Barry Weisselberg at one point, where he asked him about checks and about payment and salary. And he goes, you know, Barry Weisselberg, you know, your pay looks kind of weird. You know, you really didn't get a raise for years and you're getting all these perks. And he goes, you know, what person made the decision about your pay? And Barry Wesseberg goes, oh, well, my dad did.

That's kind of weird. Okay. So your dad decided your pay. All right. Who else? Oh, well, my dad and the C.O. Matthew Calamari. Okay.

Yeah, but that stopped. Oh? It stopped recently. And it only started when Donald Trump became president. Before that, it was Donald Trump. And you see this divorceer going, wait, personally, Donald Trump would make that decision. Like, he would decide your salary. And the answer for Barry Welsberg was yes.

Donald Trump decided it. So if we're going to be in a situation where these criminal investigators are going to try to prove that Barry Wieselberg and other people were getting a bunch of corporate perks and not paying taxes on it, they're going to ask, well, who decided that? And Barry Wieselberg has already testified in a whole other case that Donald Trump did that. And so this does lay the groundwork for potentially huge movement from law enforcement, because you've got a guy who already said, who's loyal to Trump, by the way. I don't think that when Barry Wesselberg said this in his divorce case, that he thought that three years from now that Manhattan DA is going to try to take down the Trump organization.

for it. But here it is. You've done a lot of really good reporting on Matt Gates, and I was wondering if you, where you see that case being now. Hmm. You know, it's funny. I am simultaneously covering the investigation that involves Matt Gates, but also the multiple investigations involving the Trump organization and Trump himself. And there are some striking similarities, and not about inviting young girls on planes. Yeah, that's endowment. Donald Trump's past, like way past. Investigators in both cases are clearly trying to go for the head of the snake. But that's not where they start, right? They start with the bottom guys and squeeze their way up. And so Politico keeps doing these stories that are very favorable to

Matt Gates saying, oh, you know, they went after Joel Greenberg's right-hand man, but, you know, do they really have the goods on the congressman? When are they going to move on it? I'm not a federal agent, but I'm pretty sure that the answer from them would be, you know, when we're damn ready. And that's not now. You know, if you're going to go after a congressman, you're going to do it when you're set and that punch is going to hurt. I know that this is in the works. When is it happening? I don't know. There's a bunch of talk that we might see some action on this, whether it's, you know, another mid-level person involved in this sex scheme who goes down this summer. We might see something this month in July. But it's, it's, it's a little-level person involved in

But it's hard to tell. This is a really sensitive case for them, especially when you've got somebody like Matt Gates who has come full force against the FBI and calling out to like the insurrectionist oathkeeper right-wing crazy crowd going, oh, you know, this is the surveillance police state coming out to take down your favorite Trump congressman. When he does that,

The FBI will still do what it needs to do, okay? Prosecutors are still going to bring forward their case, but now they've really got to be careful because they've got to go the extra mile to make sure that this doesn't look political, that this doesn't look like the cock and maybe BS that this guy's coming out with, because we do live in a time where a significant portion of our population is susceptible to these kinds of lies. And if charges come down on Matt Gates and a big chunk of the country thinks that this is essentially a witch hunt, that's going to be problematic. So I think that the feds are really getting their ducks in a row with this one. But it's still coming. It's still coming. Just because you haven't seen anything in a few weeks or even a month or two, it doesn't mean it's gone. This is definitely ongoing.

Because they keep asking questions of the witnesses. And in some cases, it's sort of heating up. I mean, they're asking, I know of at least one instance where the feds had come back to somebody and said, where the hell is that surveillance tape? Why did it disappear? So I know they're still asking these questions. Wow. Thank you so much. This was great. interesting. Thank you. 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 Summer, 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. Molly Jong Fast. Jesse Cannon. What's the fucking deal? Another day of alienating people. That's what we do here.

There's some truth to that. We should call this segment, the things we do that will eventually haunt us in elevators or airplane or any other can find. find spaces. Do you think one day I'm going to end up in an elevator with J.D. Vance? Because I don't want that to be my future. But I don't hang out at the Yale Club. Oh, you think J.D. Vance is too good for you? My fuck that guy, who I am sure I will be stuck in an elevator with sooner rather than later, is a man who almost needs no introduction, but actually he does because he's not that famous. He has historically made quite a lot of money on Republican presidencies.

His name is one Matt Schlapp. Matt Schlapp is married to Mercedes Schlapp, and she worked in the Trump White House for a long time. And Matt Schlapp is the man who runs a certain conservative political action committee, otherwise known for those of us in the cheap seats, as CPAC. CPAC is a meeting of the minds, and I mean that ironically, of course. It's a group of the sort of dumbest and worst people, the Republican Party, that gets together to marinate in their own dumbness and racism. I used to go, but no longer go because I just can't. There's only so much harassment I can take.

But just honestly, it's like it only becomes about people harassing me, which is like, well, bizarre and strange is not actually so interesting. Matchlap has, you know, CPAC operates on this sort of like, you know, on the same kind of principle as cruises, which is if you can fill them, you will run them, right? So there was a CPAC in February and now, because the Republican Party has now become this sort of de facto terrifying religion, there was another CPAC now, even though it's July and not March, in. Republican's favorite state, the soon-to-be-open, permitless carry state of Texas. And so Matchlap had another CPAC. And this CPAC, while usually he just flirts with the crazies but sort of takes his stand against becoming completely crazy, this CPAC involved credentialed oathkeepers, which is a member. They're a sort of militia group that is like Trump, but with lots and lots of guns.

and overthrowing the government, which actually is not so far from Trump, but anyway, so the oathkeepers, Matt Schlapp had the oathkeepers there and allowed them to stay. And so for that, Matt Schlapp, come on, man. You get a hearty, go fuck yourself

and an even heartier Joe Biden style. Come on, man. Jesse, go on. Who is your fuck that guy? I've taken a liking to this J.D. Van. fellow and by a liking I mean it really just just it's constant for me of just how offended I am by this fucking loser and so I called J.D. Vance a loser because he as has been hurt by a K-A-file absolutely abhors Donald Trump but now kisses his ass left and right to try to get this nomination

for the Ohio party because he has to pay back his benefactors who have donated millions of dollars to him with tax cuts. So J.D. tweeted, serious question. I have to go to New York soon. And I'm trying to figure out where to stay. I've heard it's disgusting and violent there. But is it like Walking Dead Season 1 or Season 4? In other words, Sorab or Mari is the whole city like this or just like one park? So of course, Sorab wrote this disgustingly stupid article about how Washington Square Park is a cesspool when really it's mostly just a bunch of NYU. kids with rich parents getting drunk and having fun, just like the 90s, New York that Molly and I grew up in. Not as dangerous as the 90s, but yes, similar. It's totally true. As somebody who went to college next to this park in the 90s, it was much worse.

As somebody who took a peruse through this park, very light and fondly, I just saw a lot of kids having fun and dancing to Miley Cyrus. But so I get very tired of the pretending New York City is a cesspool and that it's so bad when our crime in all data is down. And JD, you know, he claims to love data and venture capital,

yet this performative moronics is what he has to do to try to appeal to try to get this nomination that he's probably going to lose. So for that, fuck you, J.D. 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,

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