The Daily Beast Podcast - This Is When Trump’s Staffers Realized He Was Out of Control

Episode Date: November 8, 2022

Daily Beast columnist David Rothkopf interviewed over 100 people involved with the Trump White House for his book American Resistance: The Inside Story of How The Deep State Saved the Nation, and according to his sources, it took almost no time for Trump’s staffers to realize what kind of boss he was. He tells New Abnormal host Andy Levy about the ways these staffers had to adapt to Trump’s ineptness as well as obliterating the argument that Republicans are better for the economy (spoiler alert: they’re not and he has proof.) Also on this episode, Defector Media co-owner David Roth joins Andy as co-host and compares Elon Musk (aka Twitter’s new obliterator, er, owner) to a substitute teacher who has lost control of his class and Michael Edison Hayden, investigative reporter at spokesman at the Southern Poverty Law Center, gives the inside scoop on the “hard-right, neo-fascist” billionaire takeover of the publication Newsweek. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. And I'm producer Jesse Kennan, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. What an excellent show we have today.

First, we're going to be joined by David Rothkoff, who's the CEO of TRG Media and the Rothkopf Group, and the author of the new book, American Resistance, The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation, and he's going to talk to us about why you should trust the Demsmore with the economy. Then we'll talk to Michael Edison Hayden, senior investigative reporter and spokesman for the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he's going to talk to us about some funny stuff going on over at the magazine Newsweek.

But first, we have Editor of Defection, Host of the podcast, It's Christmas Town, and The Distraction, David Roth. Joining me now is my guest co-host for today. It's David Roth, the editor and co-owner of Defector. David, thank you so much for being with us. Hey, man, thanks for having me. How are you? I'm doing well. I'm doing well. We need to start with the big news of the day, which is that there's a rumor that Dasha

is dating Louis C.K. Yeah, and this is why I'm able to come on the podcast today. All of Defector is we've just taken the rest of the day off. We actually took the website down until we're raised. ready to know, you know, just what to say about it because you don't want to rush anything on this. Yeah, no, I don't even think we should talk about it until we have a second source and also no one knows what I'm talking about right now. Did you see what the actual gossip reported was there, like the supposed incident?

They were at a Goddard film? Yeah, it's amazing. It's so good. They're just rolling around downtown, pointing at girls and making fun of them together. All right. So let's really start with the big news of the week. which is that Twitter is burning to the ground. Maybe. It certainly seems to. It's been a little over a week, I guess, since Elon Musk took control of Twitter. And it just feels like every day is a brand new adventure on there. And I've found myself on it more in the past few days than I have been in a long time because it's sort of a what's going to happen next feeling. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, obviously, you should go without saying that it also totally sucks at.

It's miserable. But, you know, whatever. We're talking about Twitter. Everybody knows that there's an element of that involved. The comparison that I've seen a couple of times that I think is the most compelling to me is that it has the feeling of a classroom in which the substitute teacher has completely lost control of the kids. And so there's an element like, Musk is posting like yesterday, which is Sunday as we record

this. Musk posted probably 200 times that day. And some of it is just him periodically like coming out with these non sequiters, like being like Twitter is going to become like the most trusted source for real information on earth and also America's favorite dessert topping. It's just like real like bombast, aimless stuff. And then the rest of what he does is like truer to what I think his actual essence is, which is just replying like yup to that like cat turd two guy.

Yeah. Like he's a, he is a reply guy. He is not a poster. Right. He has terrible taste in who he replies to. But he is. busy. Like, if everybody else, the hundreds of people or thousands of people that have

decided to fuck off forever from the site, he is picking up the slack. He is doing their posting volume for them right now. I was saying to someone that it sort of has the feel right now to me. It's like being in Paris the night before, like, you know, the main Nazi column is approaching. It doesn't have, all these metaphors are kind of appropriately, like... But it's just like, you know something horrible

is coming. And so some people, are choosing to sort of party the night away and dressing up in their finest and just having a ball before the whole world goes up in flames. And other people are out there signaling, hey, the Nazis are coming. This is not cool. Like, stop partying. But there's this real sort of sense of, you know, doom is right around the corner. So, you know, and some people just want to get their kicks in. And other people are just like, yeah, this is really bad. Right. It's funny, too, because it's like both of those responses are valid. Yes. You know, like, it is, I think, going to get worse. not necessarily because they're going to be letting a bunch of like fringe anti-Semites back on the site.

Like they already have. You know, they're already there. I didn't see them necessarily the first time around. And if it winds up back where it was in 2015 where like every time someone replies to a post that I do about the Mets telling me to get into a gas chamber, I actually see it. Right. Then like that would suck. I mean, it would make me use it less. That is fundamentally like a problem of like the site not working properly.

in terms of there being assholes on there, like that's always been the case. It just does feel like nobody is really steering it at this point. I mean, like, certainly like Elon's hands are very much on the wheel. He is just like doing the sort of tuneses, the driving cat thing. That does not look like he's really got any sense of where he is on the road or what he's doing at this point. I've seen a lot of comparisons to the Tesla driverless mode. Yes, right. Running over kids and whatnot.

Yeah, just like steer it, like somehow programmed to steer into school buses. Like that that's just like a fun little bonus that you get with your car. And in this case, there's this element of like, he clearly didn't give it a great deal of thought. Like this was something he was maybe doing as a bit or maybe not. Whatever it is, he just doesn't seem to be a very serious person to me. Like, like, I don't take him seriously. Not in the way that I like, you know, think he's funny. I want to be clear he's not funny.

Right. But I just feel like in all of this, like he, after taking over the site, he made this weird decision. He was like, I'm just going to fire half the people and then I'm going to figure out what this website is and does and how it might make money. And I think he got that order of operations wrong. From a small business owner perspective on my own part, don't fire half the people, willy-nilly based on like whether they've written more lines of code than other people. And then the rest of it is just sort of like, I don't know how a guy could spend as much time on Twitter as he does and seem to have no idea, like, what it's used for or how it works. Yeah. And the other thing is, like, for a guy who's supposed to be this sort of new wave of visionary businessman and outside the box, and then you fire people based on how many lines of code they've produced, like, that's some 1950s shit.

Oh, yeah. It's incredible. A colleague of mine did a post that is, like, certainly the most viral tweet ever to be issued by a member of the defector staff. Barry Pacheski pointed out that if someone is the C, you know, EO of three companies simultaneously. If they're doing it at that time, then it tells you that that's not a real job. It's not a serious job at all.

Right. And in this case, it definitely seems like the sort of thing where, I mean, I don't know if he necessarily knows, I mean, obviously, not everybody knows how to run a social media platform. I don't know how to do it personally. That's one of the reasons why I opted not to buy Twitter when one of several, which I'll go into over the course of this podcast. But the other stuff is like the inability or, like, lack of interest in listening or learning in terms of like how the thing works or how it might

be made to work is really like that's the the part of it that feels like the only real new wave bit because I think the rest of it you're right is like completely antique boss brain shit. Yeah. But then this other idea that somehow like because you were the fourth guy involved in creating PayPal, you understand all of the secrets of the universe and like are the master of every money-related domain. I mean, I guess maybe it's healthy if people are seeing this and are like, wow, so it turns out that's wrong. I think it's going to take a lot to get American culture to stop venerating extremely rich people as a impulse. But like, Lord knows Elon is doing its part there.

Yeah. And it really is, and I was talking about this last week on the pod with Mike Isaac of the New York Times. I was saying that if anything, like we really are learning what a weird period and dumb period we went through where we thought, you know, Silicon Valley was the best and the brightest, and they were going to save us all. And we sort of had that, you know, there was a big societal impulse towards that. And, you know, how all these guys were just, they were the saviors of humanity. And we're learning now just how stupid that was. And how, like, kind of boring they are, too. I mean, this is the thing about it that, you know, I think that I understand to a certain extent where that comes from because like people want to believe that we are on a sort of a linear track

history-wise moving forward into some sort of future as opposed to like just um playing hungry hungry hippos forever until the sun goes out which is more what it feels like to me but in this case it's like you know the smartphone which i think is the one real invention that you can give silicon valley credit for is like it changed everybody's lives it's pretty amazing it made it impossible to make a fun movie for one thing. Like, you can't really be, you're not answering a pay phone. You can't, like, you know, there's nothing. You're never out of touch.

Right. Like, no one, not even the, I mean, I can't imagine, like, maybe if Michael Mann tries it or something, you can't make a movie where people are texting and have it be, like, I'm just, I don't think that that is doable. Other than that, pretty good product. You have to throw in, you always have to throw in a line that says, you know, where the guys like, ah, no service. Yes, right.

Because otherwise, it's like, any of these plots could be resolved in, like, five minutes. Right. by somebody calling a lift and going home. But after that, it just seems like every product that we've had has been some sort of like arbitrage play by people who, in retrospect, are backed by like that soft bank innovators fund or whatever. It's the same buttheads, billions of dollars, creating these products that like revolutionize the process of getting a cab,

but it's not a cab. or of any of the shit that has not added, it hasn't made anybody's life better. It has marginally made people's lives more convenient or it did back when it was still being subsidized by Masayoshi's son and now is no longer even got that going for it. And so what you're left with are these guys who are now extraordinarily rich, pretty mid,

I would say in terms of their ability to inspire, communicate, create, whatever. I mean, they're not the dumbest Americans, but they're certainly not people that are like bestriding colossuses of the culture or whatever. Like just fucking guys in sweatshirts who like don't read, you know. And now we're sort of stuck with it because of the way that money works and the way that politics works vis-a-vis money, that like everything sort of starts to flatter the people that have the most. And it turns out that what these guys are into is like pretty spooky and gross in a lot of cases. and also like not at all, you know, grounded in any idea of the common good or society existing, full stop.

And so it's just like a bunch of kind of boorish, boring guys who, I mean, in Twitter, I think the experience of being on there, as you were saying, it feels kind of like a microcosm of this. Like, it's just whatever whims pass through Elon's head. That's what's going to be the site. And he probably will lose a bunch of money on it or whatever. he's got a bunch of money to lose. But, like, he is as reckless with it as he can afford to be, which is as reckless as anyone could possibly. It sucks for the rest of us that, like, actually like using it and fucking made friends there and, like, doing spoofs and goofs, you know? Yeah, and it's just, but, you know, going back to what you said about the smartphone, I think, you know, it does feel like, like Steve Jobs was really in their language.

He was a unicorn. And all these guys are sort of trading off of his image. and, you know, because, as you said, he really did come up with something that revolutionized the way we live our lives, and which doesn't mean he was a good person or anything like that. Right. I was going to say he was also a bit of a cretan too. Yes, absolutely. But all these guys are trading off of that. And, and, you know, you see it every time there's a, you know, there's a Silicon Valley presentation. They do it the exact same way Steve Jobs started doing it with Apple. And it's just, they are just, you know, know, to a person, to a man, because it's generally white dudes, they are just, you know,

lifting his entire, Jobs' entire stick and selling themselves as his equal. And they're just not. Right. Like, they don't even have original ideas necessarily. Like, they are able to come up with, like, some sort of legacy sector that they think they can disrupt in a way. But, like, fundamentally, I think the thing that's behind all of this, I mean, beyond, like, I think you're right that, like, aesthetically, there's something really funny. I mean, Elizabeth Holmes is forever the queen for this, by just wearing this, just doing cosplay as Steve Jobs, which is awesome. Like, more people should do that. They should all wear the same glasses, in my opinion. The bit that, like, I think I've found myself more frustrated by, of late, is that, like, the smartphone is a ingenious invention that

did a thing that people wanted. I think a lot of where the rest of this has gotten in, and this includes, I think, Elon to a certain extent, even with Tesla, which has been, you know, there's a great deal of government subsidy involved in that. But like, fundamentally that is, he's filling a niche that the car companies are, have been very slow to fill, I think in part because they haven't been spurred to action by the state and the way that I would have liked to have seen the state do. But in all of these instances, they're looking at the sort of state of play in things and realizing that the amount of money and determination and shamelessness that they have means that they fundamentally got the high.

hand on regulators, on the state, on whatever it is that would stop them from doing exactly what it is they want to do. And so far they've been right. But that's more of a problem of, you know, government capacity and institutional rot than it is of like Jared, whatever his name Travis Kalanick. Yeah. I was going to say Jared Kellanick, who's the swing and miss heavy outfielder of the Seattle Mariners. No, Travis, the other one, who's worse, they can come up with anything? Like he just, it's like they built a little thing that does a thing. It sends a message. The main idea is that they realize that, you know, taxi companies and cities alike were going to be slower to respond to their shit or would eventually be brought to heal because they are

broke by design after a couple of generations of making them that way. I guess credit words do on that. It just doesn't seem like it's added a great deal of valued anybody. No, I think, you know, before we move on, I just want to say, you brought up Elizabeth Holmes and I was going to say, I think on the spectrum from like Elizabeth Holmes is Steve Jobs, most of these guys are much closer to Holmes than they would like to admit. Oh, yeah. And I think that's something that, you know, we need to learn and more and more people need to be aware of it. And more and more people need to be saying it. Yes, so many are saying it. But they don't want me to say it. You know, they don't, because they don't, it's very nasty and unfair to Elizabeth. I'm going to use that as a seg to talk about

Donald Trump. Oh, neat. He was speaking the other day in Florida. He took a shot at Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, who if he decides to run, it's going to be a Trump versus DeSantis situation. And Trump took a little shot at DeSantis. And as he loves to do, he came up with a little nickname for him. And the nickname he came up with is Ron DeSanctimonious. And my original reaction to this, which... Can Jesse add some air horns after that? You got to get the morning zoo.

All we got to bring back all the morning zoo sounds. I, you know, I tweeted this after he said, this really does feel like a first draft, doesn't it? Yeah, it's not his best work. No. It's funny, too, because I think everybody's been waiting for the version of Trump that just sort of did like a speed run of cruel nicknames at the various dorks he was running against in 2016.

And like just instantly knocked them down like he was at a carnival midway shooting gallery where he was like Bobby Jindal. I don't like his suit. Very cheap. Who's next? Like, you know, sort of like running through. these dorks. Right.

And DeSantis is a flyweight. Like he's not, and you saw this in his debate with Charlie Christ, who he's going to beat by probably 20 points because Florida is just turning into Victor Orban's Hungary at a rate of speed that nobody anticipated. Right. But Charlie Christ, who is like, I think basically at this point, a replacement level politician to move that baseball term into politics. Like, he's a freely available talent that you could call up from AAA and you.

he can give you four innings and allow three runs and it's going to take forever. And then you've got to trust your bullpen to get you through the rest of the game. Charlie Crisp was landing haymakers on him. And all he could do was make the, like DeSantis has copied all of Trump's body language, which I think is probably part of what, I mean, Trump is mostly jealous because he's always jealous. But I think that's part of it is that he looks at DeSantis doing the like the sort of head gestures and the little pinchy fingers and the accordion gesture and all the classic Trump physical bits of business that we love. And I think he probably looks at this guy and is like, I don't look like

that, right? Because this looks like, he looks like an Australian shepherd following a laser pointer. Like, he does not have the juice to really like project presidentially. But that said, Ron DeSanctimonious, that's not the kill shot. Even Ron DeSantis can just sort of walk that one off, I think. Yeah. And it has so many bad things going for it. I mean, first of all, Trump is going to slip over it a million times. He's going to. going to screw it up because it's not a word that flows off the tongue. But yeah, it's like you can hear, like, I almost said Ron DeSanktonius. And like, I don't know if that was a, I love Santonio Holmes so much.

I don't know where my brain was on that one. But like if I almost screwed it up, like Donald Trump's brain at this point is like a Heathbar that's been left in a hot car for a long time. Yeah. And it's going to, you know, you're just going to end up with a whole bunch of hilariously misspelled signs at rallies. Oh, yeah. It's going to be bad.

It needs to be shorter and sweeter. I mean, I had, you know, I had pitched on Twitter a while ago. Trump was playing up how dull he thought Rick DeSantis was. And to me, like, dull Santa's is right there. Yeah, I mean, I think that like what he's going to wind up with, again, because I do think that Trump has lost a little bit off the fastball is that he'd call him like gay Ron and everyone's going to be like, that's not nice. Don't do that.

Yeah. But then the funny thing to me has been the people on the right. are very upset that he is giving a nickname to DeSantis, which is just hilarious. The publisher of human events said it was weak. Everyone's favorite moron Matt Walsh, called it a dumb nickname, and said Trump is going to need more than that. Red State editor didn't like it. Rod Dreher called Trump an idiot. It's like, where have you guys been? Like, suddenly you don't like this?

Right. Also, like, we expected more team spirit from Mr. Trump. Right. You just get hatched out of an egg? You were like, well, I thought he was a pretty loyal guy. DeSantis had been very nice to him, you know. Yeah, I thought he cared about the Republican Party writ large. I hadn't really paid much attention to see what had happened to every single person

that had ever worked with or supported Trump in the past. So this is pretty shocking to me. Yeah, it really is amazing. Joining me now is David Rothkopf. Among other things, he's the founder and CEO of TRG Media and the Rothkopf Group. columnist for the Daily Beast and the author of the new book, American Resistance, The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation. David, thank you so much for joining us today. It's a pleasure. So before we get to the book, I wanted to talk to you about a daily

beast piece that you co-wrote with Bernard Schwartz called Republicans are bad for the economy. Here's why. Walk me through this. If I'm correct, the thesis is one, a large segment of the electorate says the economy will drive its vote this week. Two of this large segment, a majority say they will vote Republican, and three, they are making a big mistake. Do I have that right? That's pretty good. That's a good summation of what it is. Thank you. So is it that voters generally trust the GOP more in the economy, or are we just in a situation where when voters are not happy with the economy, they look to the party that doesn't control the White House, the House of Representatives, and sort of the Senate, so they're leaning towards

the out-of-power party? I think there is over-top. over the past several decades, there's been this assumption that Republicans are good for the economy, possibly because they're associated as having the support of business. But it's a little bit like the assumption that they're good for national security. It's just wrong. And what I was trying to do in the article that I wrote with Bernard was lay out how many ways it's wrong. Because this is not a matter of opinion, you know. Ten out of the last recessions started with Republicans. If you take all the presidents since World War II, there were 14 presidents. Of the seven who oversaw the strongest economies, six were Democrats. Of the seven who oversaw the weakest economies, six were

Republicans. Most job growth occurs under Democrats. Democrats have GDP growth. And over 4%. Republican GDP growth is just over 2%. And of course, these Republicans, the ones who are currently in office, they have their own record. They were in charge for a while. The only thing they did was they passed a tax cut that helped the top 10 percent and actually increased taxes on the bottom of the population and blew up the deficit. Under Trump, there was a terrible job creation record. They have obstructed every single effort by the Biden administration to try to lower costs for consumers. So they talk about inflation, but, you know, the real causes of inflation are a COVID epidemic and the impact on supply chains that Trump made worse, profiteering by big oil,

which is a core to their base, and a war started by Vladimir Putin, who many of them have supported or helped along the way. And then, you know, the Biden administration record is actually kind of extraordinary among all presidents. Most job creation in the first couple of years of any president, more jobs created than the last three Republican administrations in their entirety. Record GDP growth in year one. We're continuing GDP growth here. We have inflation lower than other countries do. He lifted millions out of poverty. with the American Rescue Act and so forth. So, you know, I don't mean to recount the whole thing. The point is, I wanted to take this out of, you know, let's have a debate about this.

So there are two sides to this issue and just sort of lay out the facts. And the facts are stunningly clear. So one of the things I noticed in your piece is you sort of anticipated a common refrain, which is that, well, it's not fair to look at Trump's record and Biden's record because of COVID. And you're like, no, not so fast on that, right? Yeah, of course not, because, you know, there were a lot of ways that we could have been impacted by COVID. Just as hundreds of thousands of Americans are now estimated to have died unnecessarily because the president suppressed data, because the president didn't prioritize social distancing,

masks, provision of testing, where we should have done it. Because the response was inadequate. and in fact amounted to something of a cover-up, not to mention the knock-on effects of suggesting people should bleach into their veins, or the results that we see today that ever since we've had a vaccine, deaths in red counties are higher than blue counties because they made it into a political issue. So he made COVID worse. So if he made COVID worse and COVID caused some of these effects,

it's got to be on him, right? It was not just, you know, this was an act of God and he had no control of it. Yeah, it's a lot to me. It's a lot like the Republican Party passing a law in Pennsylvania that says you can't start counting ballots until election day, even, you know, even with all the early ballots that have come in. And then saying, well, if you're not finished counting by the end of election day, there's something fishy going on here. It's like you set up these circumstances and now you're trying to use it to your gain. I constantly, when I see Republican arguments like that or the arguments on inflation, which they know the president didn't create, they know they had a bigger role in encouraging and they know they're doing nothing to stop it. And yet they sort of hammer at home. I constantly think that their arguments are kind of like third grade arguments. But this is how a child would argue. They really think the American people are dumb and that they're going to fall for it. Now, there are some dumb voters out there, obviously. But the majority of the American people are not, and they're just not going to fall for it. I just think

all of us who have a platform have an obligation to sort of focus on getting the truth out there and not both sidesing the truth, right? They're not two sides to this. Truth is one thing, you know, reported as it is. Right. I mean, the problem here is that we have a media, which seems to have a constant need to both sides, everything. I do want to ask you about something you said you talked about inflation and you mentioned as one of the causes profiteering by oil companies, which I think is 100% correct. And I think it extends beyond oil companies. And it feels like this has been a very undercovered story. Am I wrong to feel that way? No, you're absolutely right. It's not undercovered because people don't know about it because people do know about it. And, you know,

Democrats and, you know, some of the smarter observers in the Congress, Katie Porter, some others, You know, they've laid it all out very, very clearly. And, you know, all you have to do is look at corporate earnings reports. Right. Look at the corporate earnings reports of big oil companies. They had record profits. And at the same time, we're pushing up prices, you know, because they were lamenting global conditions.

It's complete baloney. If they're achieving record profits, that means they were taking a bigger chunk of it for themselves and passed along the cost to the end use. Yeah, and so along those lines, if you extend that historically, one of the things you say in the piece is that Republicans have done a great job fooling voters into thinking that there are simplistic economic philosophies of tax cuts and minimal regulation are good for business, but facts, history and logic show otherwise. The obvious question is, how have they done it? What's their secret sauce? I think their secret sauce is, A, being associated with the business community. And, you know, you've got to ask yourself, the business community knows they're not good for. business in general, the economy in general, why do they support them? The business community supports them because the Republicans cut taxes and cut regulation, which means that whether the pie is bigger or smaller,

their slice of the pie is bigger. You know, that's how big business benefits from that, and we've seen it. Their portion of the economy, the portion of the rich of the economy has grown and grown and grown as long as these practices have been supported by the GOP. I also think they spend money to support the idea And I think a lot of Americans don't really take the time to understand economics. It's complicated. You know, at least it appears that way to a lot of people. But when you break it down to simple things, are we growing or not growing? Is your piece of the pie getting bigger or smaller?

Are certain people benefiting and other people suffering? It's very clear. You don't have to have a PhD in economics from Harvard to figure that out that this isn't working out for us. Yeah. And I also think that there's this, because I really, remember reading this a lot as a kid. And obviously when I grew up, our, you know, gender norms were very, well, now they would be considered outmoded and correctly so. But we always, I remember always

hearing that, like, you know, well, Democrats are like mommy. They're very lax and they have emotions. But Republicans are like daddy and they are, we need, you know, we need daddy to, to tighten the belt and to do the tough things that need to be done. And I feel like that's how voters still feel, or a lot of voters still feel about the Republican Party that like, well, if it were up to Democrats, we would just be throwing money at people all day long, whereas Republicans are more fiscally responsible and they understand, you know, the function and value of money. Yeah, you know, that sounds like an interesting argument. Let's look at the record, you know. Every single time a Republican is an office, the deficit grows. When Democrats earn off, the deficits shrink. So who's throwing money at the problem?

And it's clearly the Republicans. Oh, well, so maybe they're helping everybody. No, when they build up these deficits, the benefits go to the few, not to the many. Democrats, you know, the mommy, are the ones that have managed every major national security challenge that we faced over the past hundred years with a couple of exceptions. Democrats, the mommies, are the ones that want to tackle the big issues like let's deal with climate change, let's deal with guns, let's deal with the health care system. You know, there's nothing maimying about that. There's nothing maiming about letting the old people in your society suffer and die and live out their years in dignity. That's tackling a tough problem. The Republicans don't do that. You know, it wasn't a momying thing for Joe Biden

to say, let's do the biggest infrastructure bill in the past 50 years, or let's make a strategy to be more competitive. He was trying to help create jobs because of the hard realities we face. So it's just BS. You know, the reality is our Republicans take care of themselves. Democrats are left to clean up the mess. And amazingly, every single time they come in, they do. Yeah. And you mentioned that, you know, you said Biden and the current Democratic Congress that they've created more jobs than the past three Republican administrations combined. And in the piece, you point out, you know, the various pieces of legislation that they've got passed. Do you think it's just, had they done a bad job selling this? Because it does seem that all of these things, while completely true,

at least from what you read, that doesn't seem to be the feeling of a lot of mainstream America or however you want to define it. Well, you know, we live in an interesting time, right? A substantial portion of our population lives in a media bubble that doesn't report any of this, right? Because you're not getting that story in Fox News. Of course. You're not getting that story from right-wing media sources. They're not getting it at all. Then you get the rest of the media.

And the way the rest of the media tries to do this is to cover it on a both-sides basis. But, you know, how does a story play out? Well, the president says, I did this and it's good. That's a yawn, right? If a Republican then says, no, that's bad. That's better TV. That's, you know, that's better internet because you're looking for conflict. And nobody's fact check. Nobody's saying on these shows or very few of these shows, but you blew up the deficit. But you played a role in COVID. But you're taking cash from the big oil companies. But you support Putin. But, you know, inflation isn't the

responsibility of this administration. And every time they try to deal with it, you block it. It would be simple to get this message through, but clearly it's not getting through. So could the Dems do a better job? Probably. Could the media do a better job? Possibly. Would it help if the people who have their heads in the sand, because they're getting fed everything from Fox and the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal editorial page pulled their head out of the sand or wherever it is? Yes. Yeah, I thought you were going to go somewhere else with that. So I want to move on because I want to talk about your book. As I said at the top, it's called American Resistance, the inside story of how how the deep state saved the nation. So tell our listeners, who are you talking about when you say the deep

state here? Well, I'm going straight at the people that the Republicans accused of being the deep state, right? This is a term that became popular around the time Trump was running for office. And the idea was that there was this unelected mass of people in the government who didn't respond to the will of the electorate. You've got to ask yourself, why are they spreading this law? essentially about America's public servants. And the answer is, and we saw it during the Trump administration, people who are public servants who dedicated their life to serving the country, whether they're career foreign service officers, career intelligence officers, career military officers, career civil servants, they are loyal to the constitution to which they take an oath of office.

They follow the law. And what happens when you place the law above the will of an individual like Donald Trump. Well, they resent it deeply. And so what they're trying to do is discredit with group of people with the deep state myth, much the same way they try to discredit the honest media by calling it fake news. And so I thought, look, let's go and tell the story of these people, because by the way, a lot of these people, they're Republicans. Many of them are independents. This is a nonpartisan story. But time after time, Trump, who was way crazier as president than we have yet to report, who had insane ideas launching missiles at Mexico, moats on the southern border full of alligators, launching wars against North Korea, pulling all of our troops out of Europe. What happened? These people were the

guardrail that worked when the courts didn't, the DOJ didn't, the Senate didn't. That's an important story to tell, and I let them tell it in their own voices. And most of them, as I said, are Republican. But the final point is this, because they were so effective, the GOP is now trying to make it possible to fire them. Under Trump, they came up with a provision called Section F, which would allow them to fire these people easily, get rid of them, replace them with his own flunkies. As soon as Biden came in, he reversed it. But now it's not just Trump. Newt Gingrich, other people in the party are saying, yeah, this has got to be a centerpiece of what we do because we can't control the government the way we want. want to if we don't get rid of these people. And so this is something to, you know, this is not

high profile stuff. But if you don't understand what they're trying to do here, then you won't understand that their goal is essentially the same as any authoritarian in history. They want to pull away the things, whether it's the right to vote or responsive courts or an effective DOJ or a civil service that follows the law that block their grab for power. and block their desire to put a minority in charge of the United States, contrary to the intentions of the founders of this country. Yeah, they basically want to get rid of all the, you know, guardrails of democracy is what it sounds like. Right. Yeah, yeah, no, they want to get rid of the guardrails. These people were important guardrail. Their stories are fascinating, and I tell it about

war and peace, about COVID, about elections, about immigration. And, you know, again, I let them, whether it's Fiona Hill or Vindman or Fauci or whatever. I let them tell it in their own words, including people like Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirsten Nielsen, Secretary of Defense, Mark Esper, you know, very prominent members of this past administration. And so to me, it's super compelling stories, but it's also a red flag.

This is authoritarianism on the march. We need to stop it. And by this, I mean this effort of the Republicans to silence these people. Right. One of the interesting things in your book, you write about how there were certain senior, very senior military officials would take some of Trump's more insane orders and, you know, they would accept them, say yes, sir, or whatever. And then they would, I guess they would slow walk them so that they couldn't actually take effect. What are the kinds of things we're talking about here and who are the people? Well, everybody in the government very quickly realized that Trump was out of control and not like any president in history.

And in fact, of the 100 people I interviewed, I would say all of them said they realized this either during the transition or in the first few weeks of the administration. And they all found their way to work around it, whether it was saying, no, Mr. President, this is the law, or going to the Congress with oversight or using whistleblower provision. And, you know, many of these generals who are trained to sort of say, yes, sir, face a conundrum because they're not supposed to follow orders that are illegal. and we're not supposed to do things that are not in the U.S. national interest. So, you know, Donald Trump would call up the Secretary of Defense, say Secretary Mattis, at night and say, we've got to strike the North Koreans now. And, you know, Mattis's response would be interesting idea, Mr. President. Maybe we should talk about it tomorrow over the line.

And other people had to do the same thing. You know, you couldn't bring up Russia in front of Trump. So John Bolton, who I'm no fan of John Bolton, but he said to the people handling Russia for him, look, I'll handle Trump. You do it. The law requires you to do. You follow through on this thing. And I'll isolate you from him because you can't bring these issues up with him. And anybody who crossed him would soon be pushed out of office. So, you know, part of the book is understanding what these many different kinds of workarounds were. And why this was not insubordination. Why what they were doing was actually their job and what the law required. It will always be amazing that we lived through a time in history where John Bolton was sort of the voice of sanity in an administration. Sometimes. Yeah.

It's like even Bill Barr, right? You know, Bill Barr was a disaster. Right. But at the very end, when Trump said, okay, let's have a coup, Bill Barr said, no, I can't go that far. Well, we have to be able to get our brain around the idea that Bill Barr was a disastrous attorney general who did a huge disservice to the country with the Mueller report and everything else. But in this moment, when he did the right thing, it helped. And we need to understand that.

The book is American Resistance, The Inside Story of How the Deep State Saved the Nation by David Rothkopf. David, thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate it. I appreciate the invitation. With me now is senior investigative reporter and spokesperson for the Southern Poverty Law Center, Michael Edison Hayden. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Hey, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So you wrote a piece for the SPLC website that I was so glad to read because it was about something that's been going on for a while now, and I feel like has been under-noticed, undercovered. The headline was Newsweek embraces the anti-democracy hard right. And the piece was a look at Newsweek's editorial pages, which have been overseen for, I believe

it's like the last three years, by a guy named Josh Hammer. Now, editorial pages for news magazine type publications are generally not run by political activists on any side, but that's not quite the case here, is it? No. And it's not like, he's a political activist is almost kind of understates what he is. I struggle. We actually, in earlier drafts, I went with the words political operative. And then I was told that maybe that activist is maybe more effective in conveying what you're trying to convey. It's difficult to describe exactly what he is because he's connected to just a network of reactionary think tanks, these type of weird places that are funded by, you know, sometimes by dark money, sometimes by billionaires that you can discern. And yeah, it's almost like he has gone

straight from that world to taking over a known brand and kind of distributing the kind of reactionary talking points they want people to be talking about. So what are some of the kinds of things that Newsweek has run on his watch? Well, I think one of the first things that people should think about here is when there's been a lot of talk about this 2000 mules. of both the film and documentary by Dinesh D'Souza. And, you know, we don't always cover Dinesh D'Souza. He's kind of like, kind of a joke, kind of a reactionary conspiracy person who has no credibility whatsoever.

His work, whatever it is, his entertainment has been debunked so many times, right? Hammer has him on to talk about 2000 mules. And with the other things, it's just sort of like, well, this is, you know, just sort of like asking questions, what's this about, you know, what's your evidence behind this? And really, the rest of the podcast, this is on, Newsweek's, like now they're basically their flagship podcast, essentially. The first thing that comes up when you search for Newsweek on podcast apps, you know, he starts to talk about all the details behind this 2000 Mules, which is a completely discredited book and

film suggesting widespread fraud in the 2020 election. That is a really good one off the bat. And it's just, it boggles the mind for anybody who has any understanding of what Newsweek should be or is supposed to be. And I know so many good journalists who have come out of Newsweek. It's just, it's spectacular that something like 2000 Mules is getting airtime there. I should point out, actually, that among those people that you mentioned, you yourself came out of Newsweek. I did, yeah. And we will unite the second prompt with the first prompt. I spent a lot of time reporting about Jack Posobic at Newsweek at a time where I was worried that I was reporting on someone who is like stupid and inconsequential because he seemed like such a bonehead.

But he was involved in so many, so many disinformation campaigns. And now he's since become kind of one of the most famous, radical right activists in the country. And he has not only appeared in Newsweek's opinion section in written form, he has appeared as a guest on the podcast to spread conspiracies about the raid in Mara Lago and suggest that it is Merrick Garland enacting revenge for being blocked from a Supreme Court seat. Statements like this are never questioned. There are no follow-up questions. What do you mean by that? What's your evidence? It's quite startling stuff. So I have been saying for a little while now that Josh Hammer might have the largest, sort of coolest name to being the biggest dweb ratio in human history. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And the fact that he has a podcast and it's called the

Josh Hammer Show and like not Hammer Time, to me, it's just more proof of that. That's definitely true. He's, uh, the name kind of has, uh, has action star or even porn star vibes. Right. And you know, it'd have to be whatever. And, uh, yeah, he's this bow tie wearing guy. This is an important thing about him because of his kind of think tanky, you know, thing, like, where does this guy come from in the first place type thing? Like so many of these think tank creatures, he has brought in, in his dweeb sense, these adventures, like all of a sudden, you know, we're going to do a whole bunch of pieces on Ron DeSantis right after he goes on what looks like a paid trip or a sponsored trip or an invitation from Christina Pusha Desantis's. So,

press person and he takes photographs with them and shakes his hand. He does a sort of a quasi dispatch type of thing from Hungary. And he's meanwhile being sent to Hungary from a very wealthy group that is very closely tied to the Hungarian government. A lot of these weird conflicts of interests arising here. And nobody at Newsweek is asking any questions about it, at least publicly. Yeah. And they don't reveal any of those conflicts, I believe. No. I think one of the first things that might have caught people's attention if you're a consumer of news, if you're kind of like online or whatever, you would remember that Newsweek ran a very bizarre op-ed in the run-up to the 2020 election, floating the possibility that Kamala Harris is not

U.S. citizen. Do you remember that one? Yes. That was written by John Eastman, who is, of course, you know, one of the most, one of the loudest kind of anti-democracy activists in the country right now. And the reason why that's significant is that had to add all these weird notes. to that and they even had to run a separate opinion page justifying why they published it in the first place. They kept saying these things like these are John Eastman's opinions and this is

John Eastman's things without at any time disclosing the fact that Hammer refers to this guy as a friend and a mentor. He was with him at University of Chicago that he was with him at the Claremont Institute. And on Claremont Institute's website refers to him essentially as a mentor. So very, very bizarre stuff going on. And it has all the markings of something where you have a force kind of bringing this guy into visibility and no one can explain why. Well, and talk about, you know, Hammer seems to have also this, I mean, I don't know if it's an actual in real life relationship with Arizona GOP, senatorial candidate Blake Masters, but he's been open about donating to his campaign, etc.

How has this been sort of portrayed in the Newsweek editorial pages and on Hammer's Newsweek podcast, etc. Yeah. Okay. Well, I think let's start with this, which is, you know, Newsweek regurgitates these days especially, regurgitates a lot of material that they pick up in other publications. So they're not breaking the story, but they're re-reporting other people's story and trying to package a really snappy headline on top of it that gets traffic. I'm aware of this process because I was there. A lot has been written about this in Columbia Journalism Review and other places. I mentioned that because on Newsweek's own website, there are multiple stories. about Masters, his racism, his kind of essentially anti-democratic, worldview, his flirtations with election denialism, et cetera.

So there's all these things on there that have no relation to Hammer that would suggest that this is a bad guy to kind of endorse. In February 2021, he gave $500 to Masters. Yeah, Hammer gave that money to Masters and did not disclose it. Writing for the site, a fellow named Austin Stone, who runs like a consultancy group, and has hosted at least one major fundraiser for Blake Masters and gave him the maximum. He's also had a guy named Nick Lundquist who works at Austin Stone's business.

He's also given money to Blake Masters. So a crew of people who are kind of involved in Blake Masters have been writing opinion pieces for Newsweek. One other thing to note is that Hammer was in attendance at this fundraiser that Austin Stone was there. And also other Newsweek contributors were there. Christopher Rufo was there, the guy who is, involved in all the critical race theory stuff. Rahim Qasam, the guy who very mysteriously disappeared from Bright Part UK, have some stories about that that I probably shouldn't mention on this podcast because they're a little iffy,

but let's just put it this way. People should ask Rahim Qasam why he left that publication. And, you know, a bunch of these people who have written for Newsweek all of a sudden appear at Blake Masters thing. They never disclose it. They never explain why. And later on you have Hammer speaking on his podcast. available on Newsweek's homepage telling people, if you live in Arizona, please go out and vote for Blakemasters, for beta.

That's just amazing. Before I get to a more general question, I know there's another Newsweek podcast called The Debate that Hammer co-hosted with the journalist named Celeste Headley. What happened with that? Yeah, so Headley is a journalist who has worked for NPR. It hosted, you know, a number of NPR shows. You'd listen to NPR in the past. You've probably heard her name and her voice. She was, you know, co-hosting this. And it was sort of supposed to be. kind of a centrist, bipartisan type thing, two voices, going, hashing out the news. You know, she had an incident in which the two guests that were booked for this thing were both reactionaries, one of which was a libertarian who writes for reason, I believe. And another one was Dave Rubin. If people are not familiar with this, a big YouTuber who's hosted people like Mike Sarnovich

and other kind of people who were part of the old right movement. She took objection. They kept using the woke as a pejorative, saying that, you know, the main thing is we've got to eliminate wokeness and woke. And then she said, hey, you know, I was the only person of color here. I want to, you know, I want to make a note. This term is a little bit weird to be using in this context. I find it a little bit uncomfortable. And they jumped down her throat, essentially, and Dave Rubin began to challenge her on her race because she is part Jewish and part black. He wanted to challenge her that she was a person of color. And yeah, it's really,

really, really weird stuff. And Hammer was failed upwards from there, was given his own solo podcast. after not removed altogether from Newsweek. And he did not, obviously, defend her in this situation. Not only did defend her, he defended his friends. And when Dave Rubin went after her on Twitter asking his followers, he's got a big, obnoxious following base, asking his followers, you know, what racist she essentially, in so many words, showing photographs, hammers out there like liking those tweets publicly. And Newsweek has shown no signs that they're going to do anything about it.

That's just amazing. Since the article has come out, you tweeted some stuff that I thought was kind of funny. So I'll ask you, in general, how do Hammer's co-workers seem to feel about him? Well, I mean, I've had five people, I'm not going to name it, five people reach out to me afterwards and offering to help, offering what kind of information could we give you, telling me things about this traffic numbers. I have heard, and I did not put in the story because I want to get, I want it more deeply verified, but I've now heard it from at least three or four sources, that Hammer's traffic

on the site is not great. Even further, with such a traffic-hungry publication, makes you one. I'm like, God, like, what is he doing there? In Newsweek, they used to give me a bonus based upon traffic and used to use that as justification to keep my paydown and others. That's been written about. This is a traffic-starved publication that is, in so many words, dying based upon what everybody has said.

And yet, they don't seem to mind that this guy is not really doing huge numbers. So, yeah, I've had five people reach out to me since then looking to try to help with a follow-up story, kind of putting those things together. I have other stories that I'm working on right now. But, you know, the interesting thing is not one single Newsweek employee has stopped and said, hey, you know, Josh is a good guy. This is the reason why this is like this. And we have a balanced approach, really, and whatever.

It's total silence. And, I mean, his deputy editor is this, I don't pronounce her last name, Bataa Unger Sargon. Yeah, she peddled this kind of book going after, so it's, you know, so-called woke journalism and whatever and has appeared on Tucker. And not even she has publicly stepped up to say, hey, this is, this guy's great. this is unfair. Really, really bizarre. That is very telling, I think. A sort of, I don't want to say side note, but an interesting maybe sidebar in your story was you reached out to an organization called the Pointer Group. Yeah. Explain to our listeners, for those who may not know what they

are and then what they told you. Yeah. So for a very long time, anybody who's come up through journalism, you know, the journalism world is known Pointer as kind of being the standard bearer for journalistic ethics and just sort of like what journalists are supposed to do and what they're not supposed to do and sort of as a nonprofit cover the the field of journalism. A couple years ago, I think it was like 2018, they got in some hot water for their ties to the Koch brothers. Okay. The person who had those connections to the Coke brothers is the person running their ethics exchange and essentially told me in so many words, we're looking into this and I'm going to get back to you. This is like in July. After they, you know, I came back to them and looped

in September and I said, hey, here's what he's done since then. Have you looked into this? And they're like, you know, I don't think you'll fully understand what we're doing here and all these different things and just kind of talking around it and just and just being like, yeah, you know, this is not what we're about. And I was like, well, they did introduce you to me and so forth. And then so I asked him, I was like, well, you know, given what they're talking about, you know, in this opinion section, given what he is producing, would you be willing to work with gateway plan, which is, of course, the hard right disinfo blog, which, you know, has done, run basically proud boys, propaganda, other things.

And they said, yeah, well, she's, yeah, we'll take the call. We would take the call from there. I said, well, you know, upon taking the call, would you be willing to take money from Gateway Pundit? And she said, if they're committed to making changes that we advise, then yes. So, I mean, I found that quite startling. And pretty scary, quite frankly, because it's not a story that is necessarily going to blow up the internet, but it is a story with huge symbolic residence for me.

because all of our institutions, pointer, these things that we used to know, Newsweek, whatever, are being co-opted now by these hard right reactionary, you could argue, neo-fascist figures. And we got to worry about this stuff now because, you know, I mean, it's really closing the circle on what kind of information we can really trust. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And like I said, that's one of the reasons why this story has seemed undercover to me since I sort of became aware of Josh Hammer and the whole thing at Newsweek. I do think that these are all, you know, I don't even know if you want to call them

Harbingers at this point because it feels like it's already here, but that this is one of the examples of exactly what's happening to a lot of our media these days. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me, finally, Andy. Yeah, absolutely. Go to SPLC.org. Yeah, backslash, hey, watch, I think. That's it. Yeah. entire article, it's fascinating, and also, as Mike said, it's a little bit scary. Mike, thanks again.

Thank you so much. David Roth. Andy Levy. So Dave, who's your fuck that guy for today? There's a lot of sort of names in my head right now, various candidates whose names I cannot wait to flush forever. Blake Masters is the one that came most immediately to mine just because one of his last posts, I guess you'd have to call it his closing argument, because he's not going up there now and being like, you should all be serfs and my friend Peter should be your king. He's not like, that's not part of the stump speech necessarily. But there was a picture that he put up that was, I think it was like lock and load four more days. And it was him in, I guess, a cop car.

There's a bunch of police patches. There's a large gun behind him that has a police department sort of badge on it, like a tag. And it's the sort of post that would be read as a credible threat if it were not issued by a verified candidate's account. But as it is, you're just kind of like, oh, well, this is just what a Republican politician would do now, that they're like, only four more days, then we're going to fucking kill some guys together. Stand with me, brothers.

It does have an on my way to a school feel to it. Yes, it does. And he's such an uncanny presence, too, that there's this sort of thing where it's like, it's like if you drew up a frowny face on a penis. Like, he just kind of, it's not like a great image necessarily under the best of circumstances. But then you put him in the barn jacket

that every Senate candidate has to wear and you put a gun in the background. You're just kind of like, I don't like this. I don't want to see it for six years. And I don't know if that's enough. Maybe people in Arizona do like it. But it's a lot easier for me to understand like Carrie Lake, who's another runner up of mine for this. Because she looks like a newscaster and she has a ringlight for whenever she goes on TV.

So like everything's like real fresh and porous. Yeah. Like Blake Masters is unsettling in every instance that you see him. And I would hope that that would be enough. Yeah. Carrie Lake looks like every woman in Star Trek, the original series. They just shot them all with like soft light and Vaseline on the lens and stuff like that. And that's exactly what she looks like.

Blake Masters is what if they made the whole party out of call of duty griefers? Yeah. Like every time I see him and all these guys, that's all I think of is these are the people who like, like, if you're ever playing a war video game, they are the most annoying people to play with or be stuck in a match with or something like that. They're just all the most fucking obnoxious people in the world. Yeah. We're very lucky, I guess, in some ways. not as a society, but as two people doing this podcast, that so many guys like that got Republican nominations this year, because that's like who Peter Thiel likes and, you know, again, where the

money is. And they're all super supplicant where Trump is concerned. And so that also helps. But he and J.D. Vance are two of the most unappealing types of people that you could ever hope to meet in your life. Yep. Like just sort of like unconstructed adult libertarian weirdo in master's case. And then for Vance, it's just this like weird striving business boy type who like hates everyone that he's ever met in the past and resents them for having gotten in his way. Like those are people where if you make eye contact with them in a workplace setting, like you know not to do it twice. I think it went with national office. Yeah. So my fuck that guy is along these same lines, Ronnie Jackson, who. Love him. Dr. Ronnie. Sort of came to fame as a

He was Barack Obama's doctor, and then there was an incident or two. And now he is a, of course, he is a Republican congressman from Texas. And he tweeted over the weekend, and keep in mind, when I read this, the words that I'm emphasizing are the words that he put in all caps. So he tweeted, I will never eat one of those fake burgers made in a lab. Eat too many, and you'll turn into a socialist Democrat, real beef for me. Great stuff. Thank you. Medical doctor, Ronnie Jackson.

Yeah, he's, but it just got me thinking. And I tweeted, I said, all these people are so fucking weird in the exact same way. Yeah. Well, they have to. It's like what you said about them all being supplicants to Trump. They've all sort of taken his cue and they're all trying to be him. So they're all weird in this one specific way. And obviously, none of them are as quote unquote good at it as Trump. They're like defective clones of a defective human. Yes. It's like any normal person attempting to do that bit. is going to wind up sounding like they've suffered a traumatic brain injury. Right, exactly. Because what you're doing is imitating having suffered some kind of injury. Like the idea that, like, your closing argument, like, you've got, obviously he's running in some stupid gerrymandered Texas district where it's like 750 miles. And it's whatever, shaped like a MC Escher staircase designed to avoid every possible registered Democrat.

So he doesn't have to make an argument. Like, no one's expecting him to do anything or like even expecting his staff to answer the phone when they call with a complaint. But, like, that's how you have to entertain them is just being like, I am the biggest, dumbest asshole in this district, and that is why I should be in charge. Like, maybe you can walk by a Beyond Burger in the supermarket and not, like, cry, yell, and rip your shirt. But I can't. It is also just amazing how they are the absolute biggest snowflakes about stuff. Oh, God, everything, even the possibility of it. Yeah.

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