The Daily Beast Podcast - The White House's Racist Kool-Aid Man Episode

Episode Date: April 28, 2020

In the third episode of The New Abnormal, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast discuss goat blood, Donald Trump's 4th Filet o' Fish of the day, and how to put the fancy in sycophancy. Then the dynamic duo talk to Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng, The Daily Beast's Trumpland reporters, about whether Jared Kushner has any real responsibilities — or is just padding out his college application.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Junkfest, novelist, an editor at large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor at large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. The new abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leadership, and ideas. Molly and I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America, and we realize that putting our country over party

and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this. We'll be joined by smart guests from media, politics, culture, medicine, and science. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sands from invading our respective bunkers. Well, so, Molly, how was your weekend? You know, there is no weekend. Every day is Groundhog's Day. I mean, is it Saturday? Is it Friday? Is it? I mean, what day is it?

Day one million of the long eternal now. That's right. The only reason that I know it's the weekday is because my kids are all doing Zoom school in every room. Every day does stretch into the next, but I think that this weekend provided us in the last five-day window, let's say, kind of a moment of dark humor that we needed in this. And that's Bleachgate. Even now, it's still drivet. ragging on and on, and he cannot escape that this was an epic moment of stepping on his own mushroom-shaped equipment. But this has been a truly epic window into Donald Trump's completely So we're not supposed to inject ourselves with bleach? Is that a no? It's been a truly epic window into Donald Trump's itty-bitty little brain. I feel like I should read the actual

quote because it is the quote that ended the pressers for now. And by the way, you have to remember that as this is going on, Dr. Burks, with her scarf, is sitting there staring at him looking like she wants to die. He says, and is there a way we can do something like that by injecting inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see, it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs. So it would be interesting to check that. I think the thing that I've loved the most about it was the entire conservative media apparatus, as they do, immediately swung into Trump's defense. And their first wave of it was, well, it could be right. He could have access to knowledge you don't know about it.

It could be ultraviolet. There's technology. And they're digging up like these obscure medical journal references and trying their best. Even though they know, he just completely shut the bed. Then, of course, over the weekend, he flips it to, I was being sarcastic. It was just one of these moments where, you know, Gallo's humor is still humor. And you have to kind of appreciate the madness of this guy. is that people are like, okay, we're going to do the thing that's worse for any dictator or any authoritarian.

We're going to laugh at him and about him because of his behavior. And I think that's why Trump had a very bad weekend. He was tweeting like a, he was tweeting like he was getting paid for it. My favorite moment, though, was that Breitbart piece where it said, no, the president didn't actually say you should inject bleach. But actually, he did, in fact. The upside is he walked off the White House press room stage on Friday because he was showing. Look, he knew how bad it was. He did not want to be there for questions.

He understood in the game of professional wrestling presidency that he's put on all this time, that he had become the clown figure, and he did not want to be there. I mean, it's amazing, though, he had spent, like, weeks pushing the malaria drug, but it was the injecting bleach that was a bridge too far. Right. I mean, the malaria drug stuff was its own separate, bizarreo world exercise, where obviously someone went to them that some kook he trusted told him that or told Jared that. His followers were able with Dr. Trump's miracle elixir to go out there and say, well, there's

possibilities. We might as well at least test it. Nobody can make that case about bleach. Nobody thinks a lysol enema is going to cure COVID. It's a moment of grim humor, but I'll take it. And I will also take anything that rattles his staff to the point that this has rattled them. Well, it's interesting because then on Friday, he did a very abbreviated presser. Saturday, nothing.

Sunday, nothing. Monday, there was going to be nothing. And now, supposedly, there's going to be something. At the time we're recording this podcast, he's back on for a presser today. But I have a feeling that the cast of characters in the White House is rapidly trying to find a shock collar for the guy. They understand that every day he's out there, this frames the race as a referendum on his handling of, the coronavirus. Every day he's on stage by taking all the spotlight, all the credit, and trying to take none of the blame, Americans are forced to make the referendum judgment about his performance

in the last several months, and it's not a good picture. His polling has drifted down to some record lows, and in the swing states, it's really terrible. What I think is interesting is they didn't stop those briefings because the president was hurting himself. It wasn't until he got really nuts. Oh, look, they have no control over the president. They recognize that Donald Trump, it will always have to have obedience and worship constant servitude from people. They're never going to cross him. I mean, Donald Trump could go to Mark Meadows and say, hey, I'm going to walk out today and say the cure for COVID is to tear the head off a live goat and drink its blood. And Mark Meadows wouldn't say, Mr. President, that's fucking crazy. He would say, Mr. President,

I think that's brilliant, sir. You should do it. I'll call Jared and we'll corner the goat blood market. Yeah, these people are not functional members of a national administration. They're the last circle of sycophancy. They put the fancy in sycophancy. I also think part of what got Trump so rattled besides Bleachgate was that New York Times article about how he spends the entire day, drinking Diet Coke, eating cheeseburgers, and watching Fox News. It's not that that's a secret, but I think he hates the idea that people get a glimpse of what he really is and does, Because he's so image conscious, he's so aware all the time of where the camera is and how he wants to appear.

The idea of Donald Trump with a little greasy chin spot from his fourth Big Mac or filet of fish in the day, that's an image he doesn't want people to have in their heads. And now you all do. But the amazing New York Post story that followed it was one of the greatest puff pieces only possibly, with Mark Meadows saying that he worries that Trump won't eat lunch. because he's so busy. This is a sign that Kaylee Makalakawaki, whatever damn name is, has taken her role as comms director and demonstrated that she could definitely

positively handle the press relations for her sorority. This is not the A team pitching serious information to the public that counteracts and is a countervailing force to what everyone understands about this guy. You can't spin. He's the hardest working man in show business. when we know that he spent weeks and weeks during the run-up in this crisis when he was well aware of what was happening, when he'd been briefed, when the government knew golfing and going to rallies and spending time at Mara Lago and aggrandizing himself in a variety of other ways. This sudden post hoc, oh, my God, he's working so hard. Yeah.

But it is amazing to me. I'm always so impressed with this guy has like the most powerful job, arguably, in the Western world. world, and he's got so many resentments. That's fundamental to the psychological landscape of the guy. His dad told him apparently from the time he was in short pants that he was a worthless piece of shit. He's the most angry and embittered person in the world. He feels completely put upon at all times. He is a small man in a big job. All that stuff is a desperate little man trying to paper over his huge portfolio of inadequacies. One of my favorite moments when he, after he finished his bleached soliloquy, was that he pointed to his head and he said, I'm not a doctor,

but I have a great. And then he pointed to his head because he must have forgotten the word for brain. Someone tweeted, wig. I mean, it just was an incredible moment, even by the sort of depths of which we have plumbed. What makes it so crazy, it's all random, it's all noise, it's all this moment. But that noise is right now masking the fact that in two months, we will have had 58,000 Americans die. And everybody's talking about the Vietnam number. And that was over the course of 11 years, basically, where we lost 58,000 people. And look, not every single death could have been prevented by Trump, even if Donald Trump

had somehow had a soul transplant and a brain transplant in early January. We would still have faced a terrible toll. I mean, the South Korea number is like 300 now. Like I said, I'm trying to be as generous as I can, and that's not terribly generous about him. But not every single one of those deaths is you can lay directly on his door. But we're going to get to a point where it's not $58,000. Because while we may be peaking and approaching the top of the curve and plateauing in some places, the idea is not that suddenly we hit the peak and we drop off to zero.

This is going to be a long haul. You know, those two pieces, both in the New York Times and the Washington Post over the last few days, talking about the amount of time during these briefings that Trump spends talking about himself, or bitching about the press, fighting with his imaginary or real political enemies, or talking about how, what a great job they're doing, coming up with, you know, wacky lies du jour to aggrandize himself, is enormous. And the number of minutes that he has spent in these speeches expressing any kind of of grief or condolence or understanding or empathy with the American people who are suffering right now,

not only economically, which is what they're focused on. They want to get the economic battle to happen, but the American people who are suffering because we're at like one degree of separation now. Everyone knows someone who's been either ill or has died. And that number is going to keep going up. The distractions and the craziness and the and the humorous times we get like this, we got to take them as they come. And frankly, you've got to enjoy a little bit of just watching this, this beast flail around. But, you know, we're going to be back again with this question. And so I think we may have seen the, do you think it's the end of the press briefings? Unfortunately not, because today he's going to go back on. I mean, now the new thing is that he wants

to show how hardworking he is, which is because of that piece in the Times on Thursday, which talked about how lazy he was. So I don't think that they're over. I wish they were over. because they spread so much medical misinformation. Other thing I think, which is important, I mean, just to backtrack for a minute when we're talking about coronavirus, like in New York, it's now one out of a thousand people have died of it. And part of the thing is we've been on lockdown for such a long time that we're all kind of going a little bit nuts.

But even though our numbers are going down, they're not, all of this, you know, these ideas of the peak are sort of misnomer's because it's a peak for now. Right. You know, if you go back to normal, it becomes just a baseline. And so I feel like there's a sense in which the way that people talk about it is so contrary to the way that Trump behaves. The more he talks about coronavirus, the less good it is for the American people because he paints such a rosy picture and because he has such a lack of knowledge of, like, just the fundamentals of what it means. means to live through a pandemic.

Every time he gets on television, I actually think more of his supporters will die because he has so much magical thinking and he just can't stop projecting this idea that it's going to go away in the summer or that it's going to, you know, we're going to find some cure for it. And we will in 13 to 18 months. The piece I wrote last week on, I guess it was Thursday, calling him the idiot alchemist. People who were saying, no one could take it seriously. He no one believes he said that. And I'm thinking, do you not know his base?

Have you not met these people? They do take him seriously. They believed, and I actually saw a piece of polling about this very early in the crisis, probably sometime in mid-March, late March. They asked people, you know, when do you think a vaccine will be developed? And Trump supporters thought that it was going to be within weeks. Like six weeks to six months was one of their brackets. And Trump supporters, like 85% of them were in that category.

It's also safe to go back to work right away. Let's get the economy moving right away. The economy's not going to do what he promises it'll do, but he needs that battle right now. He needs to turn the base up to try to get them back on board because he has slipped. He's slipped in a lot of the national polling and a lot of the Swing State polling. Well, this week we'd like to welcome two of the Daily Beast star reporters, Lachlan Marque and Oswin Supang. Am I saying that right, Swin? You absolutely are.

You get a gold star for Thai pronunciations. just don't call the language Taiwanese, and we're okay. I really want to thank you. We're so grateful you guys could make the time to come on the show today because I know you were both up to your heads in a White House that has been in no small degree of chaos, even for a White House that is typically in sublarge degree of chaos. And I'm hopeful we can start out from the moment Bleachgate hit

to where we are right now. It was one of those things that was incredibly sudden to some of Trump's top lieutenants in the White House, because this was one of those moments. where when we were working our sources who work in the West Wing and high up in the top echelons in the administration, basically within minutes or hours after the president coming out and saying that insane injection and UV Ray, officials in the White House were immediately telling reporters anonymously and gossiping amongst themselves trying to figure out what the hell just happened.

This wasn't something that Trump had been floating internally as that. shit as it sounded for days or weeks. This wasn't something his lieutenants or senior aides were familiar with. It caught them all by surprise and it was one of those things where nobody really knew where it came from. People working directly under him immediately assumed that he was just riffing in public and they all knew that come the early morning hours of the next day, if not the later hours of that evening, there was going to become the latest mess that they would have to clean up and vociferously defend, which is what they dutifully did, including his top spokeswoman Kaylee McAnney, when they came out and just said, oh, he was giving useful medical advice and how to

consult your doctor. It'll leave it up to the fake news media to completely misconstrued and tear it from its context. It takes him three hours to completely upend that media strategy that his White House has just scrambled to divide, which is very typical for the Trump West Wing. And it's been this way ever since late January 2017. There have been numerous cases that Lachlan and I have covered day in and day out where the White House expels concrete human resources to try to figure out the best way that they can play defense for their boss who just like fargo-bargled or Omni shambled his way into the public view. After they spend all this time devising, okay, this is our communication strategy. This is how we excuse publicly what he did and just blame

the news media as much as we can for it, he'll come out minutes or hours later, whether it's with a tweet or a public statement or a pool spray with reporters, to basically say, eh, fuck that, we're not doing that anymore. That was completely wrong. Listen to what I'm saying right now. The shambolic nature of how when the federal apparatus of the Donald J. Trump operation is marshaled to do X, Y, or Z thing, the president will just, you know, crash through the wall like a really racist Kool-Aid man to say actually no, just ignore that.

I'm a comedian who's saying the bit I was just doing was stupid and now we're doing a new thing. It's just that the thing that makes this especially maddening is that he's doing it within the context of a global pandemic and crashing economy. So like the circus-like quality of it really does matter

because the stakes are unusually high. It's just that we are watching this really stupid game show right now, while bodies are piling up on the ground. So I hope everybody gets a good old belly laugh from that. So the president was the one who decided I was being sarcastic? Yes. He's the one who decided to lie about that. And then later, with all the crazy tweets this weekend, that was him back on the sarcasm. I guess we could call that irony instead of sarcasm. You know, this is a White House that is

constantly beset with these kind of crises of their own making. And you guys have covered a lot of these various, you know, roller coaster rides that he's been on. Is there a sense, inside the White House staff about what you just said, Swin, about the seriousness of the moment. You know, because when it's peace and prosperity, it's one thing to have the sort of, you know, reality TV clown show thing. It's sort of almost amusing at times,

and everybody gets the joke. Do these people have like a moral moment where they're thinking, holy hell, this is awful? Are you hearing from any greater or lesser degree of those people? Because I've been talking to a bunch of folks, some Senate and House chiefs of staff

and staff type the last couple days. Their bosses are still not going to do anything, but they're like, this is the worst that it. it's been. This is as bad as the crazy gets. We can't, you know, we can't live this way, et cetera. Yeah, they obviously can live that way. Is there a similar kind of feeling in the White House right now? This is Loughlin. I've been saying at least, and I think others have been saying this since sort of the beginning of this administration. And it's true with every administration that

the real test in terms of like competency and management of an entity as large and sprawling as the federal government is some crisis that is not of your own making. So we've had this like total circus for the last three years. But for the most part, It's been either relatively low-stakes stuff when you compare it to a global financial collapse and pandemic, or it's been just sort of controversies or scandals that are sort of entirely, just like a total own goal on the president's part of those of his allies. This is the first time that you're getting the sort of trial by fire that really defines any administration, you know, something on the order of like the 2008 financial collapse or 9-11 or Hurricane Katrina or something like that.

And so it's not something that we, meeting the country, but also the Trump White House has really had to deal with, even after like three years of just observing this sort of circus from outside and being just like every day, there's something else that's causing you to sort of slap your forehead. We're only now really in the middle of what I think is like the first big test. And that means that we're only now seeing the damage that can be done from the types of stuff that we've been writing. about since the beginning of the administration, you know, the degree to which fealty to Donald Trump is required for service of this White House, et cetera. You know, that's like bearing itself out in real time. And I think the really underlying motivation for the entire kind of Trump project in government has been this desire to unify president and his allies against some enemy real or perceived. And so that has then, that is now translated into the context of the coronavirus.

On one hand, you know, that's why the president is talking about sort of this invisible enemy, you know, that he's in a wartime footing trying to fight. But in terms of like domestic politics and the day-to-day back and forth between the president and his critics, it's meant that his team is animated by this shared antipathy towards the domestic political adversaries that can be, you know, seen as or presented as like the enemy in this situation. So, you know, that ends up being obviously the press corps and the Democrats, etc. having spent the first like eight years of my time in Washington in the opposition, you know, anybody who has notes that it's much easier to sort of rally the troops around a common foe. And I think consciously or not, that's like what drives this administration's approach to domestic politics. So, you know, when you see the president go up there and sort of brush aside his medical experts in order to rail on Nancy Pelosi and CNN, etc, it's that long burning desire to like find that domestic enemy to, rally himself and his supporters around.

And Rick, quickly go back to something you were pointing out earlier because I think it's important in addressing your broader question of like, what is it like when you talk to Donald Trump's most prominent lieutenants in the administration? And do they have a sense of moral urgency or existential dread with what's happening right now and how the president has been bungling this both in his administration's actions and his own personal conduct, including on TV? Is there anything going off in their heads that makes them think, oh, maybe this is the moment where I get off the train. You were mentioning that you were talking to all these different people who you know in GOP land on Capitol Hill, who are maybe petrified personally by this, but aren't going to do anything about it. I think there is a good chunk of people working within the Trump administration who actually do have a concrete grasp and concrete effect on policymaking and day-to-day actions who feel similarly. At the end of the day, it does not matter one lick, one

one petty if they have some psychological misgivings about it if they're going to do nothing. Right. But I would have to say in the large number of people who Lachlan and I have communicated with in the administration and in the broader Trump orbit over the years and over the past few months during this borderline unprecedented crisis, I would have to say the majority of them, at least in my experience, are either all in or will refuse to allow the reporter to believe that they're not all in. There is this subgenre of Trump world reporting where it's like, oh, look at all these people who are anonymously privately horrified. I think that is overplayed compared to the number of people who have just completely bought into the personality cult, thinks the ends justify

the means, are anti-ant Trump enough that they're now pro-Trump, or just believe that the media is out to get him and that they and the liberal Democrats are by far the greater foe than any errant tweet that President Trump might set. But my question, for you then is do they think Trump is doing a good job with the pandemic? A lot of them do. Even though we have like more people dead than Vietnam. I don't know what to tell you. The standard operating procedure and the line to be held in the modern day GOP right now is that Trump is doing an amazing job and everybody else is spewing fake news, in part because whatever his excesses or his fuckups are, at the end of the day, his job is their job. And they're not going to admit that they're spending

each and every day fucking up during the coronavirus pandemic. Just to push on this a little harder, they must see New Zealand and Australia and South Korea, the other countries that have been able to not kill a large percentage of their population. I mean, don't they see there's a disconnect there or now? I don't know. I haven't asked them a lot specifically about that, but I would imagine that there's many ways you can rationalize that pretty easily. I mean, well, the primary talking points of the conservative movement and the Republican Party for decades when it comes to health care reform is that the United States is a unique country with a unique population and unique needs.

You can't do one to one comparison between us and Taiwan or us and the Netherlands when you're talking about national health care systems. I don't see any reason why sycophants and psychopaths of the Trump genre can't apply that to a global pandemic. Right. So can we talk about briefly one of my favorite subjects? Swin, you read about this on today, on Monday, I guess. What's up with Jared leading the charge for the coronavirus response? Swin, you were getting called out for fake news by the new White House Strategic Communications Director today. Yeah, I saw that. Yeah, I'm one of the senior comms advisors. I love it. It's great. I mean, it's funny because both off the record and privately and apparently publicly and apparently publicly on Twitter, when you're talking to White House brass about what exactly the hell Jared Kushner has been doing for the last few weeks. If you quote to them senior officials, inevitably, there's going to be a lot of anonymity granted there because, you know, a lot of people working the administration or working on the task force don't necessarily want to lose their jobs in the middle of this. But if you quote to a bunch of the White House comms people, people who are saying they have not gotten updates that they need from Jared on X, Y, and Z. There has been lagging process on initiatives that Jared Kushner's shadow secondary coronavirus task force has spearheaded. We just,

don't understand where the results are from this supposed whizkid. If you get that, you'll get a pretty steady stream of talking points about how I don't know what these people you're talking to are talking about. Jared Kushner has been front and center as the head of the administration's efforts on the public-private partnership and ramping up testing and coordination with governors in the states and is doing a lot of work when comes to policy and messaging. Okay, so you've told me, and I've heard this a million fucking times from you people that Jared Korshner is a figurehead. That's great. He's been giving a play thing in the shape of this secondary, almost imaginary task force.

I shouldn't say imaginary. I should say nebulous. Imaginary is so good, though. And he's basically been given a trinket to play with and yet another fancy title. But what is he actually doing? What we're saying is not that he's not physically present in the White House, but where are the results? What is getting done that wouldn't have gotten done without it? and what's the deal with all these people who are saying that there are lagging or non-existent results for X, Y, Z, and so on and so forth. And you never really get a satisfying follow-up answer because the thing they don't want to grapple with is not just with the coronavirus work that Jared Kushner has been doing,

but so much of his gigantic, but also at the same time, empty calorie portfolio that he's had since early 2017, is based on being a figurehead and having something that he can put on his college application. It does it. Just to give you a parallel example, there's this anecdote that Lachlan I recount in our book that came out a couple of months ago on Trump and Trump World, titled Sinking in the Swamp. And I highly encourage your listeners to buy a copy. It's a very good pandemic for you. Available everywhere fine books are sold. Exactly. There was this moment in 2017 when Jared Kushner is in the White House doing an off-the-record briefing with a bunch of members of the esteemed elite media that Trump supposedly hate so much. It's before a big overseas diplomatic trip, and the purpose of him being there is to tell the reporters exactly what Trump stands on NATO and what they expect to accomplish with their

transatlantic alliances and what's going to be accomplished on this very high-profileged. trip that takes place during the first year of the Trump era. And the other senior officials who are assembled in the room kind of start getting confused by the end of it, because as Jared is briefing these reporters off the record, it really sounds like this unpleasant and incoherent word vomit that is not at all dissimilar from what his father-in-law does. With their eyes jaundiced and their eyebrows raised, after the briefing ends, Michael Anton, guy who, Rick, I'm sure you're very well familiar with, who used to be a senior official on Trump's national Michael Anton, in the 1999-200, Rudy Giuliani campaign against Hillary Clinton, he was one of our policy nerds.

But anyway, Michael Anton runs after Jared Kushner to be like, so I just want to get refreshed on what you were saying to the reporters in that room about, you know, NATO and Article 5 and all that stuff. Obviously, I'm paraphrasing here. And then Jared cuts him off and says, oh, yeah, Article 5. What is that again? Oh, my God. This is the guy who was going to rescue us from the coronavirus. coronavirus. Minister of all portfolios. I feel safer already. This is the great out, I think, of the administration. You guys may be able to reflect some of the thinking you're hearing about

in there is they can take credit for the good stuff and for anything that goes wrong. They can say, ah, it's New York. What do you think? Cuomo fucked it up. Sure, yeah. I mean, you know, one sort of example that jumped out at me a dare to go. You know, there's been this ongoing Trump campaign sort of legal war of words, not even actually just a war of words because they now sued a TV station, but, you know, Priorities USA, the big Democratic super pack is going after Trump over coronavirus. They're airing, you know, tens of millions of dollars in ads basically hitting them on his response. Trump campaign says these ads are factually inaccurate and therefore any broadcast station that airs them is opening themselves up to a lawsuit.

They've already sued at least one station. And, you know, I was reading over these letters that they were sending back and forth. The Trump campaign would send the station one letter and then the priorities lawyer would respond. And one of the things really struck me and it was the campaign was talking about a claim in the priorities ad where they talked about $20 million worth of personal protective equipment that the U.S. had shipped off to China early in the pandemic. And the Trump campaign said that's false. That was shipped entirely by private donors and companies. The U.S. government had nothing to do with it. Well, if you go onto the State Department's website, there's actually a press report. And it's Mike Pompeo being quoted saying, we're so glad to be

offering U.S. military aircraft and the assistance of the U.S. government to get this personal protective equipment shifts to the areas that are being so hard hit by this pandemic. This is probably late February, early March. Yeah, I mean, it's technically true that this equipment was provided by private sources, but the administration was more than happy to take credit for it, you know, at the time before it was a major political football by saying, you know, well, we made sure this got where it was going. And now that this is being wielded as a cudgel against Trump, and Democrats are say, well, wait a minute, you were shipping $20 million worth of PPE, you know, halfway across the world and now we're desperate for masks here. They're saying, oh, we had nothing to do with it.

It was just an amazing bit of, you know, exactly what you're talking about, this effort to shift blame away when it becomes a political liability, but embrace the precise same policy to the extent that it can be used to show just how great the administration is doing. Support troublemakers like us who speak truth to power. Believe it or not, your actions speak louder than our words and our super-egos can get very loud. Visit new abnormal.Thedailybee to sign up and become a beast inside member. Well, folks, it's time for the segment we call Fuck That Guy. Fuck That Guy is about the profiteers, the scumbags, the liars, the people that are making

this crisis much worse than it has to be. These are the people that are out there right now spreading misinformation or disinformation, telling you to drink bleach, doing the things that are hurting people right now. Well, you know, most of the time we pick an individual to be the fuck that guy candidate. I'm going to highlight a group of individuals who deserve today's fuck that guy. And they are the Republican Senate caucus. Did you ever think you would be saying this? Ever, never, no.

You know, as of this moment, it's a strange new world, Molly. Right? I'm already off the Christmas card list, so fuck it. It's okay. I can't find a reference to a single member of the Senate. If it's out there, I'd love to see it, who went on the record this weekend and said, The president is wrong,

and even considering using bleach or disinfectants in the human body to treat COVID it is crazy, please don't do it. It's the easiest layup in political history, okay? It's a free throw. This is a slow pitch over the plate. But as usual, we're greeted with a deafening silence from the Republican Senate caucus. And in fact, we learned this week in a memo leaked by a Senate consultant named Brett O'Donnell, he told Republican senators not to defend Trump on the coronavirus. Brett is a crafty writer, but a rather conventional strategist. And I'll say that because the idea that you can change the subject to China, which is what he's directed the Republican senators to do. Ignore Trump, talk about China. That's great for the pre-Internet era and for the pre-COVID era.

Because you know what matters right now? COVID, dealing with it here right now. The origin story of COVID and the behavior of the Chinese government, I'm happy to go after that, you know, ad infinitum. Instead, they were out there saying, why, the perilous yellow horde could be approaching at any time now. We must harden ourselves against the Asia. You know, they went off this jingoistic deep end. They're making a huge mistake. But at this point, they can make the mistake all they want. It's a toxic slurry now in the Senate on the Republican side of cowardice, ambition, and opportunism.

And it's so perfectly on brand for these guys now that they are the recipients of today's fuck that guy. So my fuck that guy is my namesake, but I actually was not named after him. But he does have the same last name as my mother's son. second husband, who I'm now stuck with the name, Kim Jong-un. So we are in a state of, we don't know if he's alive, he's Schrodinger's dictator. Is he alive? Is he dead? No one knows.

Fuck that guy. I mean, he is a fucking fascist dictator. He's disaster. He has one of the largest concentration camps except for China. People are starving. And he's riding horses and wearing a ball cut. fuck him and killing his relatives. So he's my fuck that guy.

So let me ask you this. Yeah. It's obvious, you know, Kim Yo-Jong, who is his sister, is sort of touted to be the next one if he is in trouble. Where do you stand in the Zhang leadership contest? I mean, do you have the support of the military or the North Korean Navy? Is there any power base that you have in the North Korean leadership succession fight? I think I'm like number seven.

You know, when they bring in the Jews, you know you're in a lot of trouble. We're talking about the things that make you not want to kill yourself in Trump world, and this is the good news of the day. And so we're going to talk a little bit about these, like, really good Biden swing state polling numbers. Okay, but so, Rick, explain to me why I shouldn't just ignore these, like those 2016 polls. Look, there have been some good polls for Biden in the last few days. as I've always told people and told you, ignore national polls by and large. Okay. This is an electoral college battle, and the battle is going to be waged in one in a small number of states.

I also always tell people, you know, don't look at any polling numbers where the sample looks terrible. We had some very robust numbers out of a bunch of different polling averages in the last few days that shows Biden with a healthy lead in three of those big swing states. And that's Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Florida. While that doesn't close the book on things, it is also very much reflective now that the Biden's strategy at the moment of letting Trump run out enough rope to hang himself by being the showman and failing at the actual mission of doing the work of the country is working. And it's a referendum on Trump. We also saw some polling that wasn't directly about the race that I think is very telling and very interesting. And that is that in all these states where governors are confronting this problem, their numbers are going up and up and up. And Trump's numbers have been declining.

They're approaching what we call the lower boundary. That theoretical lower boundary where just pure tribal republicanism is going to keep him with 30 plus percent. But I will say this, there have been a lot of good news. You had a poll for the Senate in Michigan where Peters was back up and he'd been having some trouble with James. You've got Cunningham leading Tillis in North Carolina, which I think that is going to be the battleground. I think that is going to get lit as hell. That's crazy. There's some other polling that has Tillis up or tied.

That's going to be a big fight, though. And look, you're going to look at places like Mecklenburg County in the suburbs of Charlotte. That is a place where COVID is hitting and hitting hard, and that is not done yet. It is going to be ugly, and that's a very big pool of voters out there. You've got Kelly leading McSally in Arizona in almost every poll I've seen. Do we think there's a chance that Lindsay Graham? It makes Mitch McConnell dump money in a race that he didn't think he would have to do. He didn't think he'd have to go in there and spend money on Lindsey Graham in South Carolina?

That was the last thing on his mind. Now, I haven't seen any numbers out of South Carolina that I, you know, place any bets on yet. But he is clearly punching above his, James Clue punching above his weight. Lindsay is probably going to meet up with the same faith that everybody who goes and sucks up to Trump does. everything Trump touches dies, and it will become, why weren't you working for us? You were kissing Trump's ass all the time. We'll see how it plays out. You know, there are a lot more races in play right now for the Democrats than they could have imagined six months ago. On that note, we'll wrap up episode three of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks in the Daily Beast and beyond in media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening in our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and we don't want you to miss an episode.

If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFast and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on Friday. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscription. Subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the Beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.