The Daily Beast Podcast - These Are Mary Trump’s Favorite Parts of Donald’s $100M Suit

Episode Date: September 24, 2021

Mary Trump explains to Molly Jong-Fast why she just might send Donald flowers to thank him for suing her. Crooked Media’s Brian Beutler looks at what Dems can do to deal with the Trumpy Supreme Court. And linguist George Lakoff breaks down how the party’s “false theory of reason and communication” holds it back. 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 an excellent show. Crooked Media's Brian Boiler. We'll join us to talk about what the Democrats should do to get past the mansion cinema gridlock. Then we'll talk to linguist George Lakeoff, author of the classic political theory book, Don't Think of an Elephant. And we'll talk to him about how Democrats can message better. But first, we had to bring on Pod Favor,

the author of Too Much and Never Enough, as well as her latest, the reckoning, our nation's trauma, and finding a way to heal, Mary Trump. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Mary Trump. Thank you, Mala Jong Fest. I'm so happier here. Me too. Okay, so I want to apologize for getting you sued.

It's going to take a little bit more than an apology, I think. Edible arrangements are coming your way. A fruit bagel. Can I sell it for $100 million? It's not $100 million worth of fruit. But I mean. Well, that's probably just as a bit of fruit. well. Where would I put it? Can you imagine? So I was impressed to see the new abnormal in a Trump

lawsuit. My husband was a little worried, but I told him that we, you know, it's fine and that he, you know, it's only a hundred million dollars. So talk to me about, were you surprised this was coming? I mean, does this seem like new? I had no idea. So, Lachlan Cartwright, whom you know, called me Wednesday night. It was fairly late. But I, like, eight or nine or something. But, you know, I've known Lachlan since he outed the publication of my first book. I remember it well.

Yes, last spring. And he's a really good guy. I just did a long interview with him a couple of months ago. And he tells me that Donald's suing me. And I wasn't thinking, I'm on. the record. So I was a little taken aback. So that's where the he's,

I think he's a fucking loser quote came from because I wasn't being careful. It's a good quote though. It is a good quote. It's just not as grammatical as it would have been otherwise. But it's a good quote. And I think it speaks to what America thinks about Donald Trump. So let's just talk for a minute about the lawsuit because I think it's important. that we talk about one of the most hilarious parts of the lawsuit, which is he accuses you of

stealing documents that you were given in discovery to discuss. Yes. First of all, the documents were tax returns, other kinds of tax documents, banking records, etc. That were given to me in discovery during a 2000 lawsuit that I filed against my grandfather's estate. All of those documents belonged either to my grandfather, my grandmother or my grandfather's business. So in other words, none of them belonged to Donald in the first place. Right. Secondly, the lawyer who handled that case when I went to get the documents

in 2017, he had been my attorney for a long time, but he still had had them in a storage somewhere. And he told me that I couldn't take them out of the office until I got my brother's permission, which wasn't true. because they were my documents if you, you know, make a copy if you want. But anyway, but just to be safe, I took some of them anyway because they were mine. And who was going to check? And then I discovered that there were two copies of everything anyway. Right.

At which point, he's like, oh, okay, knock yourself out. So yes, that is quite amusing that a lawyer, we think that that was a reasonable thing to say in the first place. And those documents have nothing to do with Donald, although they didn't prove an awful lot of interest. saying things about him, didn't they? Yeah. And it also, I think, one of the most important things that strikes me is that you have this kind of proof that it's true. Yeah. I have proof that it is true. And the other thing that, which by the way, he's not disputing. Right. Which is one of my favorite things about this. There's so, there's so much in this lawsuit that's fun. That's just, that's just one of them. The other one is that somehow these New York Times reporters coerced me.

There's a difference between convincing somebody over time coercing them. But I apparently am such a weak child that they were able to strong arm me into smuggling my own documents and handing them over. You know, my other, probably my most favorite thing about this is that he quotes the Times article extensively, which outlines all. all of the awful things Donald has done. And then he quotes extensively from my book. Like, thank you. I mean, I'm like, okay, should I be angry? Should I send him flowers for selling more books for me?

I think it's the latter. Donald and Megan McCain are like my best sales. Yeah, Megan McCain, I mean, she's really, it's not clear to me. I mean, it's just a fascinating adventure. And the irony of this is that you get to do discovery against him again. Yeah, you know, it's never going to come to that. Right. Clearly, the lawsuit, as my attorney Ted Boutreau said, who's handling the First Amendment stuff,

said it's dead in the water. It's doomed to fail because it's so shoddy and it really doesn't. How did I damage him? Right. Even if, you know, you can argue that there's a contractual breach, which there isn't. But even if you could, what damage did I do to him? Right. What do I give him a buck?

So it isn't going anywhere. I think Robbie Kaplan put it best when she wrote on Twitter. The way to sum up this lawsuit is to say Donald is essentially with this lawsuit saying, I may have defrauded Mary Trump out of tens of millions of dollars that she should have inherited from her father. But she never should have figured that out because of the confidentiality agreement, I fraudulently induced her to sign. Yes. That's it. It does strike me that everything is a lawsuit to him.

So he forgets how that could be damaging. Clearly, this is a desperate person. And it may be to distract. It may be simply to help me sell books. Who knows? It's a non-starter. And I think potentially, I don't know that he's this smart. and I don't think he has lawyers left at this point who do anything other than operate out of strip malls.

But he's probably quite worried about my lawsuit against him because this is how the Trump family communicates. Right. I used to do each other. My lawsuit, which I brought last year, alleging widespread fraud that's against him and my other uncle and my Aunt Marianne, has a really good basis for succeeding. And there will be discovery because, one, it's a. incredibly well-crafted suit. Two, there's a lot of merit. And three, I'm not backing down. You know, I'm not settling ahead of time. Yeah. Good for you, man. I just interviewed you yesterday at the Commonwealth Club, though, neither of us were in California. We were both in our

houses. And we talked about the reckoning. So for the people who listen to this podcast and don't listen to the hour and a half YouTube, I just want to talk about the book. What I think is amazing. So the first chapter of the book is this really personal experience of you going to an impatient rehab to deal with trauma. As some people can relate to, I didn't handle the results of the 2016 election very well. Yes. And in fact, I had this thought, which was that you may have been the person most upset by the 2016 election. I was. I took it incredibly personally, which is ridiculous. But I did. I felt really betrayed. You know, it also didn't help that I had people I considered good friends at the time who voted for him, knowing what they knew. And I pretty quickly unraveled. I mean, 2016 hadn't been a great year either simply because he was around so much. And, you know, they won the primary. And like, this awful person has a greater than zero percent chance of getting it to the Oval Office. How is this possible? And I tried to fit, like, why was he so triggering? Why was this so triggering to me? He had nothing to do with why I have people.

PTSD at all. And I realized that it was pretty simple. It's like once again, it felt like the absolute worst person gets all of the success, all the rest of us are just left to flounder. And the injustice of that put me in a tailspin. And I realized at one point, either I do this voluntarily, or I'll get to the point where I don't have a choice. So I thought it was better to do it voluntarily. I think that it was smart. And I, as someone who is sober, almost 24 years, you know, I went to rehab when I was 19 at Hazelden. So I relate to the inpatient experience. I mean, it is, you know, especially now when you talk about this, it's a huge luxury to be able to go to an impatient. I mean, it's thousands of dollars. It's unreachable for, I'd say, 99,

or maybe not 99, but 95% of the people in this country, unless they're willing to go into enormous amounts of debt. That's another problem. I mean, I'm very fortunate and I feel, well, I don't feel lucky that I have PTSD, but I certainly do feel lucky that I have access to that kind of treatment, but it shouldn't be this way, especially considering the fact that we are now facing the greatest mental health crisis in our history. And to one degree or another, even though some of us don't know it, we are all. affected by this. And if we're not, then people we love are. Our government needs to put enormous resources into educating people about what they might be suffering from and helping them access

treatment at schools, at the local level, the community level, et cetera. I actually think that the Biden administration needs to create a new cabinet position for mental health. Yeah. One of the things I came away from interviewing you last night was just that this is still a case of America versus fascism. And you are a person who knows your uncle pretty well and knows what's going to have, you know, and I mean, I think that it's pretty good money that he's going to run again. What can Democrats do to save democracy? It's not America versus fascism. It's American democracy versus American fascism because there have been fascist rates in this country since the beginning. And I would argue that the Jim Crow South was a closed fascist state for almost 100

years. Yeah. And you write about this in the book. You know, while America is promoting itself is this great purve democracy during World War II. So the impulses have always been there. The structures have always been there. So the Democrats, and I find it really appalling that we have to have this conversation, the fact that there are Democrats sitting senators, some of whom have been in the Senate for decades. Don't understand these things is kind of mindling. The fact that we have to convince them that it's actually their job to save American democracy. And yet instead of doing that, they think that the right thing to do is to make common cause with people who are fascists, who are anti-democratic, counter-majoritarian people who would destroy democracy in a second

if we allow them to. They need to get serious. They need to take the threat to. They need to take the threat seriously. They need to remember who they work for and who put them in office and that there are so many more of us than there are of them. They need to get rid of the filibuster. Biden needs to put four more seats on the Supreme Court and double the size of the federal judiciary. And they need to get down to the hard work of ending voter suppression and helping people economically and rebuilding our infrastructure. And if they do those things, Republicans will never win again. It's really that simple. If they don't do it, Democrats will never be allowed to win again. Yeah, it strikes me that we are really finding ourselves in a situation where Republicans are reacting to this fact that demographically,

they're in trouble. And their reaction is to just make it impossible for democracy to keep going. That's the only card they have left to play. We were talking about cell phones with Donald and Megan McCain. Imagine how much of a cell phone. it would be for the Democrats to let that happen. Right. And it feels to me like it's happening. Like, it doesn't strike me that Biden is taking decisive action. It seems like Democrats are playing from the usual playbook and Republicans are playing from the 1934 Germany playbook. The Democrats are playing by a playbook or following a playbook that doesn't exist anymore because the Republicans blew it up. So that's kind of a.

absurd. Right. Don't you think? I mean, it just, it seems crazy to me. And I don't know how to get Democrats, you know, Manchin is mad about, you know, a climate bill for obvious reasons because he takes money from oil and gas and because he represents a state where coal is one of the, you know, exciting things that they do there. But ultimately, what Mansion doesn't realize is like, you know, they may not come for him now. But eventually, this. Republican Party is going to make it so that there are no, you know, that it's over. No, of course. And the thing that I find really infuriating is what else is it going to take? They're threatening to not to raise the debt ceiling again. How many times this is neither.

They did it 500 times while they were, you know, increasing tax cuts for the wealthiest among us. And now they're threatening to blow up the whole country economically because they know that Biden would be blamed for it. I always think about the Senate parliamentarian. When there was a Republican Senate parliamentarian, that person put Arctic drilling in reconciliation. Arctic drilling, which is fucking preposterous. And now we have a Democratic parliamentarian who's saying, like, you can't put dreamers in there, you can't put this in there, you can't put that in there. Like, you guys, Democrats are moral for no reason.

Right. And not only that, but it's a purely advisory role. They don't have to listen to her. And moral, though, like, I think some, because there's nothing moral about keeping dreamers out of reconciliation. I think it's, they are so bound by their dedication to these, again, no longer existing rules. And they don't want to look bad or they don't want to look mean.

I don't know. Okay, fine. Then in order to save things like the filibuster, you're willing to risk our becoming a fascist country. Go for it. And they totally are. And I mean, I think it's striking to me that Mitch. McConnell successfully got, I mean, it wasn't Mitch McConnell, it was Harry Reid, but they got rid of the

filibuster for judicial appointments. Mitch McConnell stole three Supreme Court seats and Democrats are like, oh, but we must keep it. No, fuck it. Just get rid of it. Like, get going. Come on, people. These, there are no, there are not 10 sane Republicans. There are not even six sane Republicans. I don't even think there's one. Right. And I think the, the reality is even the quote unquote, sane Republicans, the ones that voted, voted against Trump's armed insurrection. Even the Mitt Romney types, even those guys are completely beholden to the Republican Party and won't do anything to pass a Democratic legislation no matter why. Right. And I mean, think about it. Just because they're willing to stand up for the rule of law

once in a while. Right. Like Liz Cheney and Adam Kingsinger, they still voted with Donald 99% of the time. And they are, even Liz Cheney is. as much responsible as any of the rest of them for how we got here. So, yeah, it's lovely that she's decided to do her job now. Yeah. Great. And I'm not going to take that away from her. It's lovely.

But too little too late. Exactly. It's just completely unfair. So what happens next for you, Mary Trump, this fabulous lawsuit. Sorry. I'm obviously very worried. I'm so worried it's making me laugh nervously. Yeah, exactly.

You know, it's funny, I've had friends checking in, and I'm like, this is so good for me. I swear, I think, deep down, I think he likes me. No, I'm kidding. He probably still likes you more than Eric. Well, I think everybody likes me more than they like Eric, but it's not really saying much. And certainly, Donnie, I think it's, to me, it's a sign of how much they are freaking out. because it's not just that it's neutral. Like, it's not that it doesn't lay a glove on me.

I think it's actively bad for him. Right. And also, like, why now? Right. Exactly. You know? Yeah, why now? I think he needs to change the subject.

Right. And it's not going to work. But it always has, and this is the problem with him. He's always gone away with it. Why wouldn't he get away with it again? He's always been able to pivot away from what's really going on. Why couldn't he do that now? I just think right now there are so many bad things happening for him

that it's going to take a lot more than a frivolous lawsuit to take people's eyes off the ball. Yeah, that's really true. Thank you so much, Mary Trump. Please come back. I absolutely well. Thanks for having me on again. And I'm looking forward to my $100 million for free.

It's a big basket. Hey, folks. If you haven't heard, every single week we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladadad 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. That's new abnormal.thedailybeast.com. Brian Boytler is the editor-in-chief of Crooked Media. Welcome to the new abnormal, Brian. Thanks for having me back. We're very excited to have you. What the fuck? It's a good question.

It strikes me that Democrats have a tiny window and they're wasting it on fucking Joe Manchin. Am I wrong? I guess the question is on which super important thing that they're supposed to be doing. And I guess, like, in any case, the answer is probably yes. But it's hard without some sort of forcing mechanism to make everyone in the Senate vote the same way. And I think that what we're seeing is that it's the imposition of some sort of, if you don't get on board and do this, ex-crisis is going to ensue that can actually get, you know, even the most recalcitrant members to start acting like they're part of the party.

Yeah. I mean, yesterday Biden brought basically everyone in and was like, give me a top line number, according to a very conservative newsletter that I read this morning. So who knows? But is that what you think happened? And do you think it worked? I think that the basic pitch, whether there was demand, I think that there was almost certainly a demand for specificity. Because the problem that Mansion and to some extent Kirsten Cinema are created, is that they aren't saying what it will take to get them to support the Build Back Better Act. And until Democrats can get 50 senators and 218 House members to agree on the specifics of that bill, the whole Biden agenda is dead. And that's a catastrophe for the whole party, but particularly for the frontline members that are supposedly like foremost of concern for Democratic leadership, and obviously Biden wants his agenda to pass and not completely fall apart.

Once there's some specificity out there, once he says this is what it'll take to get me on board, and there's a commitment that, yes, I will vote for this once we get it closer to what I want, then the negotiations are out of this dead end or this morass where it's just a dialogue of mistrust between the people actively trying to make sure the whole agenda passes and the ones who are threatening to tank at all unless the stuff they don't want to vote for gets thrown out. This stalemate can't last very long because we have a debt ceiling that needs to, I mean, we're like about to crash into government funding in the debt ceiling in December. So it's interesting. It's like with the rules as they as they stand, yes, the, you know,

the deadline imposed by the existence of the debt ceiling is mid-Octoberish. But you see if the Party could just get it together and say, hey, we're not going to honor these nihilistic threats that Mitch McConnell's making. We're going to abolish the filibuster and raise the debt limit unilaterally or just abolish the debt limit altogether so that, you know, Republicans can't mug any future Democratic presidents either. Not only does that solve the debt limit problem, but it just solves basically every problem, right? It gives Democrats infinite running room if they need to take more time with their legislative agenda, right? Like if it created a problem for them that the parliamentarian throughout the immigration reform, that problem goes away, you know. That fucking parliamentarian, continuing.

I mean, I just think, I think what you're saying is right. And I think that, you know, I'm not sure if you saw. There's a video that Democrats released yesterday, which had Mitch McConnell saying, like, fuck the debt ceiling. And then six months later being like, we are absolutely not going to touch the debt ceiling. You know, I mean, obviously the guy's a hypocrite. Yeah, so, I mean, there are a few ways that debt limits standoff can end, right? One is if Republicans are bluffing and they just 10 votes to increase the debt limit materialize, which seems like, you know, possible, but you don't really want to risk it. The other ways are basically Democrats can either cave to Republicans or act on their own. And what are Republicans demanding? They're basically demanding the Democrats abandon buildback better. Right, like Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Donald Trump, what they're all saying is Bill Beck that are so terrible the Republicans shouldn't vote to raise the debt limit, with the implication being that if Democrats just abandon the stuff they want to do with their elected power, then Republicans won't destroy the country.

These are all things that were created by Republicans that they use when Democrats are in power, but abandon when Democrats are not. And after 2011 and Republican success extorted a bunch of concessions from Obama to raise the debt limit, Democrats stopped giving them. anything meaningful. And it stopped being a weapon that worked. And so I don't think that you're going to see Democrats say, okay, fine, we're going to give up Biden's whole agenda. And in exchange for that, you'll help us raise the debt limit. So then the question is, how do Democrats do it on their own? And I think that obviously, like, the most sensible thing would be for them to just abolish the filibuster and raise it, you know, fuck around and find out, basically, should be the message to Republicans. The other alternative is to try to modify the budget.

resolution with new votaramas and take, you know, many weeks to engineer a way to do it through the reconciliation process. At the end of the day, the important thing is that it get raised without Republicans getting any substantive concessions for it. But I don't know why the party feels like it should have to do all these acrobatics just because Republicans said they have to do it. Like if Republicans are saying you have to raise the debt limit on your own, we're not going to help. Then Democrats' response should be to do it the simplest. way, which is just say, fine, there's no more filibuster. And the debt limit is increased. And also, we're going to pass voting rights and we're

going to protect abortion rights. And, you know, you put us in a corner and you found out. Since you are on a podcast and not cable news, we can say, you fucked around and you found out. I wanted to talk to you about this polling that shows the Trumpy Supreme Court is not very popular. I guess sort of the inevitable consequence of the court just kind of realizing that it has this unaccountable power and starting to do things that are profoundly unpopular. I mean, when it was the Roberts Court, in a way, it's still the Roberts Court, but it was Roberts Plus 4, you know, they did a bunch of terrible things. They did a lot of damage to the Affordable Care Act, but the headline out of that was that the law survived. And so, you know, to the extent that the public

cares about what the Supreme Court does, it's not really particularly in the weeds of it. They just knew that Obama won the case, right? And the health care law survived. liberals suddenly were thought very highly of the Supreme Court. It was they trusted the Supreme Court. Then a bunch of terrible things happen on sort of sub-Rosa issues like campaign finance and the technical specifics of labor organizing issues where these are just not high wattage. And when liberals lose, they don't generate tons of outrage. People don't pour out in the streets.

And so they accrue a lot of damage. but then they enshrine a right to same-sex marriage in Alberghapel. And so progressive support for the court goes back through the roof. And conservatives are disappointed because, you know, their loyal justices aren't abolishing Obamacare. And that's sort of the way public opinion about the court had gone for about a decade until we got Amy Coney-Barratt replacing Ruth Bader Ginsburg. And now John Roberts is sort of not necessary for justices like Alito to, wipe out abortion in Texas. And so Roberts's like very crafty efforts to keep the court popular despite doing a bunch of terrible things under the radar has fallen apart because,

because Alito et al-all are going to make much rash or more unpopular decisions. And that's a good thing in that it's a predicate for ultimately undoing the damage that the court does one way or another. For that to happen, you need the court's bad pulling the stick and you need sort of like a snowballing of terrible decisions, and then you need public pressure on lawmakers to do something about it. So we're basically at step one. It's interesting to me, though, when you see this polling, you see why Amy Coney Barrett and Thomas were out there last month being like, we're not partisan. We just are ideologically completely insane.

I go back and forth on this, but I really ultimately think that they're trolling. I mean, I don't think that they are deluded into thinking that actually their opinions and their lawmaking is just, you know, stems from some above board judicial philosophy that isn't partisan at all. They know what their agenda is and that they're imposing it and that there's nothing anyone's going to do about it. And right. And so, and so their impulses to think we're going to get a lot of blowback and criticism for making these highly partisan decisions. Well, what's the way to deal with that is to sort of preemptively discredit our critics by saying that they're, you know, shrill partisans and actually the court isn't partisan and set a standard whereby they can

convince figures in the media, members of the Republican Party to just ignore the criticism when it comes because they've already said, hey, this isn't partisan. And it's in a way, it like throws it back into the faces of the people who are harmed by their decisions or like realize that their decisions are partisan is like it's a troll. It's like almost very Trumpy in the way it's like glibly gaslighting the people who have their number. What is your message to Democrats who are in power right now, even if they don't believe it? I mean, it strikes me that what your thinking is stop playing nice, start playing like democracy is at stake because it is. I guess I want to add a tiny bit of complexity to it. Beyond doing the

things you promise to do and doing the things that the country needs and doing the things required to make sure that the next election and election after that are fair, your internal fighting that's making doing those things impossible isn't just bad because the good things that you should be doing aren't getting done. It's because it's also making you look like fools. It's making you look hapless and like you're just completely in over your heads and that all the organizing that went into getting you in power to do those things was wasted because you're too incompetent to do it. And that, I think, in a way, is more deadly than if they just said, psych, we don't want to do this stuff, so we're not going to. The damage they're doing to themselves is unfolding on multiple levels because as a result of that, because in addition to leaving themselves vulnerable to voter suppression and election subversion and to backlash from voters harmed by Supreme Court decisions and

by voters who are promised cheaper prescription drugs, they're telling any remaining unaffected voters, like, we can't actually get our shit together to govern in any way. And so they should just act with some degree of resolve. And the act of acting, the fact of acting will solve a lot of the political problems that they've run into over the last few months. You see this happen sort of over and over that like dithering about things, creates an environment where conditions deteriorate, but actually acting gets your base, at least back on your side. Like Joe Biden should have wanted to impose vaccination requirements much earlier. Right.

Because in addition to getting more people vaccinated and making the Delta outbreak worse, he would have at least showed that he was doing something, right? Like he was in charge of the situation. Keeping that in mind, I think, would just make the, like, the party standing healthy. going forward. Thank you so much, Brian. Please come back soon. Of course, anytime. George Lakoff is a linguist as well as the author of Don't Think of an Elephant. Welcome to the new abnormal, George. Glad to be here. So George, I remember when I was a younger boy who was aspiring to work on political campaigns, I was told by everyone around me I had to read

your books before I did anything. And so you've long told Democratic, how to message against Republicans, it seems like they've gotten in a very bad place lately worse than usual. Can you talk to us about what you're seeing these days with that? Well, they've always been at a bad place and it was always difficult to get them out of it. They seem to believe in the rational actor model. That is, if they just say something that is logical and follows from the truth, that ought to work. Rather than understanding how framing works, how they have to frame the issues. That's a totally different kind of thing. They're not used to that. And they're not used to metaphorical thought. So they're, you know, they use it, but they don't know when they're using it or how they're using it.

So the two major problems with the rational actor model is that it doesn't take into account framing and it doesn't take into account metaphorical thought, which are used all the time by everybody. So they have a false theory of reason and communication. So you would say that that's why Democrats are so bad at messaging? Yes. Can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah. This is something. Descartes had this idea that if you just act rationally and via logic, that's all you needed.

And it turns out that it isn't all you needed. People think in terms of framing. This was established by my late colleague Charles Fillmore many years ago. and they've never learned exactly how that works. The idea of framing, I wrote a book on it, and the idea got into the news now and then, so you'll hear somebody say this was framed as such and such, but it's not used actively in a way that's understood,

and it's not used politically in a way that is advantageous. So that is one problem with the use of framing. And they don't know when they're using metaphorical thought and when they're not, because metaphorical thought is unconscious and normal. You normally, if you say price is rose, that's a metaphor. They're not literally going up. And their metaphors all over the place that they're using and they don't know that they're using them or what the consequences are of using them.

So basically, you know, people in politics don't generally study linguistics. Not surprisingly. So they don't know any of this stuff, but they use language all the time and sometimes misuse it in a way that goes against what they're trying to do. If you could think of a very simple way for Democrats to improve their messaging. I have a book. It's called Don't Think of an Elephant. Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. They could read the book. It's cheap. They could buy a copy and read it in an evening. Give me a sort of quick elevator pitch on this. Well, look, if you're going to frame an issue, for example, is the debt ceiling important and why?

Okay? That's an issue. You have to know what the debt ceiling is, and then there are arguments on what the debt ceiling is from a Democratic or a Republican point of view. And you can figure out what those arguments are going to be. So the debt ceiling is and introduces a frame. if you understand what the debt selling is, you understand that frame. And then you can argue within the frame. That's a simple-minded case that's coming up now.

But the cases are everywhere, every day. I mean, you know, anything you're talking about is framed. So, George, one of the biggest problems is the Republicans are acting in super bad faith. Is there any way you would point that out? Republicans are not neutral. They have a view of the world that I've called strict for the morality, which is a lot. longer story, but they want to control things for wealthy people and wealthy corporations. That's the five-second version of it. Democrats tend to want to get things for ordinary people.

That's the three-second version of that. Okay. Those things are going to be in conflict, and the conflict is worked out every day. That took 10 seconds. While that takes 10 seconds, I think the problem is that people don't believe it. And are we at an era of messaging now where you have to go beyond, you know, just saying and there has to be action? Like I think that's one of the big things we're seeing with this legislation redlock is that we're saying if the Democrats don't actually put up, people don't believe your messaging anymore. Just saying it doesn't do it because it doesn't put the frame in people's minds. So there's a factual thing that you can state. But having that factual thing put into a frame that people use to think in terms of all the time is a totally different matter.

So if you understand what a Republican is and how to project from that in new situations, what that means is you have a frame for a Republican. And that frame will fit whatever new situations there are and you're going to get new inferences in new situations. That's what framing is about. That's what understanding something via a frame is about. It allows you to introduce the frame in new situations to get new inferences. That's necessary. And if you understand politics, you understand and then you are framing Republicans and Democrats and you're getting in new inferences and new situations.

That's what's going on unconsciously in your mind. It strikes me that one of the things that people used to say about Trump, who still exists and is waiting in the wings trying to get back into power, is that he is very good at messaging. Can you explain that? He's very good at framing, and framing things his way. Can you show us an example of that? Take a standard thing that Trump's people would understand, namely, politics is a matter of gaining power and exercising that power for what you believe, right?

as opposed to politics is a way of gaining power to exercise it for the sake of, you know, most ordinary people. Totally different views about what politics is about. And that is very much like a Trumpian Republican frame and, you know, a Democratic frame. Thank you so much, George. Please come back soon. That's your sure easy. Thanks. Anytime. 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. Hello, Jesse Cannon.

Hello, Molly Junkfast. Isn't it just a lovely day for fuckery? The humidity is like 10,000 here in New York City. 10,000. 10,000. Let's talk about the dumbest, dumbest, dumbest member of Congress. I mean, I hate to say that because it's like it leaves out Louis Gomer, but she's really making her name for herself, Representative Beaupard,

Bobert. Lauren Boebert. She even sounds like a Muppet. You know, I'd say she's giving a college try, but that brain clearly has not done some college thinking. Hey, man, I can go to college, so let's not, let's not... You went to college. You didn't complete college. I did, like, one credit.

Give me an honorary bachelor's. I'm here, man. I'll take it. I don't think that's a thing people do. But if there's any chance that I can get an honorary bachelor's, So anyway, Lauren Boehbert, well, first of all, she's got two really big problems here. One is that she paid for her rent and utilities out of campaign money. Which, if I recall correctly, felony charge, that could be really fun.

I mean, I don't doubt that she didn't know she wasn't supposed to do that because she is quite dumb, but she also should have known. Mm-hmm. They usually tell you to get a lawyer when you start doing a campaign, as I recall. The next thing that she did, which I also think is pretty amazing. It's a sort of different level of stupid is she was speaking on the floor yesterday. This was the same time that MTG, Marjorie Taylor Green, had up a meme that showed the Green New Deal actually benefited China. I don't know if you know this, but China's one of the biggest polluters in the world. And if there ever were someone who was not happy with the Green New Deal, it would be China.

But sure, okay, it's not, you know, it's a meme, so it's obviously got to be a law. Here we have Lauren Boper. She basically says that rape victims need to have should have a gun. And love. And love instead of being able to have an abortion. Yeah. Yeah. She's not having, if you had a Glock, you wouldn't get raped.

So she's basically saying that it's a rape victim's fault for being raped. and if they had a gun. Now, of course, you and I both know that many more people have guns tend to use them accidentally on themselves or their children. I mean, there's a lot of accidental gun violence that happens in houses with guns. But Lauren Boper, crazy Lauren Boper, still believes that guns prevent rape. That's what happens when you're a gun fetishist and everything's a nail when all you have is a hammer. That's right. Jesse, who is your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy is someone we haven't brought up in a while, but it's definitely a regular, a fuck that guy. We often wonder with some of these trumpy people, is their brains rotten? Are they grifters? Are they acting in bad faith?

One Michael Flynn is proving that just why he's been thrown out of the government and why he's gotten in so much trouble over time. Because yesterday he took to some, let's call it Z grade conservative talk show. I mean, I'm looking at the image of this, uh, split on the screen and I'm like, what in the hell? Who would approve this aesthetic? But he said that they're going to start putting the vaccine in salad dressing. Oh, yes, Michael Flynn. By the way, if only we could get the fucking vaccine in salad dressing. See, this is the other flawed thinking, Molly.

I don't think a lot of the people who are avoiding the vaccine eat a lot of salad. I don't know. You know, the whole thing, we've hit such a preposterous moment in American life. You know, I guess Michael Flynn, his brain is as broken as Devin Nunes. Yes. This whole segment's giving a lot of competition of whose brain is most broken. But, yeah, I mean, I don't think vaccine salad dressing is something you need to worry about. I don't think anybody would want to do a full analysis of what is happening in that brain.

It's interesting because we've had people on here who've said, like, one day Michael Flynn went from normal to bad shit. Well, you know, I think when you read the Gateway Pundit day after day after day, reality just slips away from you slowly. Something in the water. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science. We'll help us understand what's happening to our country and the world.

We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. 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 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. Thank you.