The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Has a Nuclear Arsenal—and Can Remember 5 Whole Words

Episode Date: July 24, 2020

Feeling comfy? Secure? Relatively unbothered by the state of the world? Then consider this: The President of the United States, who holds at his fingertips a devastating nuclear arsenal, also is bragging on television about acing a dementia test that involves remembering five whole words and counting backwards by seven. It’s one of a number of pleasant scenarios contemplated by Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “What I am so impressed with in this administration is how dumb everyone is,” Molly quips. She and Rick muse about which rich scumbags will get shout-outs in those sealed Ghislaine Maxwell court documents. Prof. Eddie Glaude, the Chairman of Princeton’s African American Studies Department, ponders whether Trump is the worst president in 150 years—or the worst one ever. The Beast’s Michael Tomasky wonders which foreign government will attack our election this time. And Molly has a few words for all the media geniuses who think Donald Trump has totally changed his M.O. because he’s finally starting to acknowledge the pandemic: “The guy only has one tone, which is deranged.” Plus! Will Mike Flynn do donuts in a tank on the White House Lawn? Will Bill Barr literally wipe his ass with the Constitution, or settle for a metaphorical move? And what does this phrase mean? “Person. Woman. Man. Television camera. Sean Hannity. Bat shit cuckoo pants.” Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, an editor at large at The Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respective bunkers. Rick Wilson. Wait, can we just talk about this person? Woman. Man. Television. Camera. Sean Hannity. Fat shit, cuckoo pants.

That's not one word. Well, I decided that in my cognitive test, it was going to be allowed because when you're a star, they let you do what you want. Oh, that's going to get cut out. So, Molly, listen, I have a thing to both titillate and terrify our audience. That's a guy who's some time in the Defense Department and back in my youth, I can tell you that the nuclear weapons system in this country has very little friction built into it and that the president has sole and almost unfettered authority to launch nuclear weapons at any time he chooses. I'd also like to point out that the current president of the United States, who holds at his fingertips that fell and devastating nuclear arsenal, also is bragging on television about

passing a cognitive test that a toaster could pass. Sleep well! Well, that was terrifying. Look, I don't understand when he's not wishing Jesselan Maxwell well and saying how he knows her from Palm Beach, he's bragging about passing a simple cognitive test. Listen, I have to tell you, I think the Maxwell moment in that press conference was the most clumsy Roy Cone bullshit. Like, hey, you might want to behave or, you know, things could happen. Bill Barr.

You know, you might hear that heavy footstep of Bill Barr's floor. Shimes coming down the hallway. You've been through a lot. You never know. You could be about to go through something. That's right. Yeah, I don't know how Jesslyn Maxwell is going to be held for a year before her trial. So I don't know how they keep her alive for a year.

As we were taping this, there was a big announcement that they're going to unseal these records, which supposedly Dershowitz, you may remember Alan Dershowitz, the president's other lawyer? The president's other, other backup lawyer? Mm-hmm. He may get a little shout-out. You know, I suspect that one of the reasons Trump also did this, not just the Roy Cone angle, was because he fears he may get a little shout-out. You know, that's a shout-out you don't want.

No, it really is a shout-out you want to avoid in almost every possible way. In fact, if you're thinking to yourself, I wonder if I'm in Galane Maxwell's Roll at X. The answer should be, oh, dear God, please no. By the way, I can tell you, for reasons, I can tell you there's a lot. a video and a lot of photographs of Donald Trump with Galane Maxwell. It is surprisingly easy to find, I don't know, maybe, what are you, 60 seconds worth of video of them together, cut into several clips in a format that might be viewed on the internet or television.

It's an interesting phenomenon because there certainly are a lot of people who, and we shouldn't laugh about this because it is child trafficking and child rape, and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands of girls who have been, have had their lives ruined by this experience. I mean, God only knows. And so, but fundamentally, a lot of powerful men are real nervous. Look, as they should be, because Jeffrey Epstein clearly had some sort of emmo in his head of dragging or nudging or bringing or inviting very powerful men into his circle and wanting to have a hold over them. And she was the fixer. the procurists, if you will, of all of these things,

and she probably remembers where an awful lot of those bodies are buried. In an ordinary time, this would be the only news story in the country for weeks on end. The cable networks would be covering this 24 hours a day. Helicopters would be circling the prison where she's being held, and this would be something that is so, it would shatter the media ecosystem. But now 143,600 people dead, a president who is clearly in the throes of some sort of mental illness. What do you mean? You don't think that's normal? Shop, internet. Fish, dog, owl, cat?

26. But with all that, and of course the deployment of the Interior Minister Bill Barr shock troops to the streets of American cities, this story could get lost in the shuffle, but I think it is so consequential, in part because it displays exactly who Donald Trump is. Right. And it speaks to his character in such a way. And look, he was around with Jeffrey Epstein. in New York and in Palm Beach.

You remember, Donald Trump's the guy who on the escalator one day said to another person, in 20 years I'll be dating your daughter. We are in this fundamentally strange. It's like, in some ways, Maxwell is a larger metaphor for Trump's view of the world and what he is. Even if he's not directly a child molester, he's very much in the world of Justlan and Jeremy. And what's his name?

Jeffrey Epstein. Oh, look, again, I said it flippantly earlier. but it's not a matter of not being able to find connections between them. It's a matter of having to winnow down the ones that are the most relevant and immediate. And it was Donald Trump who said, oh, Jeffrey has a taste in younger women. Not 50 years ago or 30 or 20, but like 10 years ago. He knew exactly who this guy was. And as in everywhere, just like in Washington, you know, when I hear a rumor of Congressman X or

or Congressman Y or staff or X or Y sleeping with somebody else, you generally kind of know. they have a reputation. Reputations really do ramify out. Same thing happens in entertainment and in New York society and Jeffrey had that reputation. It wasn't something that just sprang out of nowhere. Right. No, I agree. I mean, it's totally, that's exactly right. You know, I also think that something's that's happening right now of why the crazy reset in the White House, because the reset is ongoing. There's a factional battle that's happened in the White House over messaging. And Trump's saying now that, oh, masks are okay, everything's okay. It was known as the fake tone change. The fake change. And of course, you know, it's evolved now to no one heard about masks until me, I invented the mask. That's right. Many people are saying, sir, your mask invention saved America. They love me for it because no one had heard of masks.

No one would have worn a mask unless I had. You saw it. Everyone knows it. I love masks. But it's also because, you know, people around Trump are getting it and people around Trump are starting to die from it. And it's one degree of separation in this country now. It's not something amorphous or intangible anymore. It's there.

Right. No, I agree. I mean, Bolsonaro has it. Boris had it. It doesn't matter if you're famous. You can get this. It is out there. And of course, because of his incompetence and his malfeasance and his stupidity, we are in

Wave 1 chapter 9. And Fauci just said, he just came out and said, this is a perfect storm. This is not going to end soon. Right. This is going to keep going. And even Trump said it's going to get worse before it gets better. Right. That's the tell.

If even Donald Trump is saying, it's going to get worse. Remember, there are three cases. It's almost over. I don't want that ship coming ashore so it would raise the case number to 20. All these things, this seven months of lies about COVID and deceptions about it. If even Donald Trump is confessing it, then I think that's a message to all rational Americans. Wear your goddamn masks. Wash your fucking hands. I think the fact that Trump said that there was a firestorm about this idea had Trump changed his tone or not. Was he more presidential? Here he's wearing a mask. Then, of course, that night he went to a Trump hotel and didn't wear a mask and hung out with Lindsey Graham and everyone no social distancing, indoor dining. I mean, you know, I live in New York. I haven't been inside a restaurant since March, but okay.

But what's interesting to me was not so much because the guy only has one tone, which is deranged. But what's interesting is he got up there and he said it's going to get worse before it gets better, which means it's going to get so much worse, right? Because for him to say that it means things must be so bad, he must have seen something so bad that even he can't say, oh, it's going to go away in a week. So I'm curious. It has to be borderline apocalyptic for him to start actually slow down enough to say it's this bad.

Yeah, that is pretty worrying to me. And by the way, he did call on schools to all reopen today. Yeah. Well, because kids can't get it except when they can. They're never going to open public schools in D.C. I mean, they're never going to open public schools in New York. I mean, I have all these kids. And the reality is you kill one kid, right?

Forget it. We talked about this the other day, that the thing that teachers are talking out, I'm getting emails from teachers that says essentially, if, you know, you end up with one kid in the classroom, then everybody's going to be back with, you know, everybody's going to have to send kids home for two weeks, it resets again and again. It doesn't make any sense at all. What you should do is go to online learning, like every other dumb fucking Trumpist cultural signifier. Now, the willingness to send kids back into schools has become a dumb fucking Trumpist cultural signifier. Right. Putting this disease down is more important than Donald Trump having the reopening

of schools. I also, by the way, I had a conversation with somebody the other day who said, their theory is that Peter Navarro and the other non-scientist scientists who are running COVID response inside the White House have become convinced that the herd immunity question will be quickly established if we send kids back to school so that these will spread and everybody will get infected quickly. I don't know if that's true, but herd immunity is something that Peter Navarro has mentioned before in interviews. So what I am so impressed with in this administration is how dumb everyone is, right? Larry Cudlow, Peter Navarro, every fucking Wilbur Ross, like, it is literally. Well, let's not forget. President Kushner is also dumb.

Right. He's very dumb. He's a dumb smart guy like Ted Cruz. I don't agree. I think he's just a dumb, dumb, dumb guy. You think he's a dumb, dumb guy? I think he may be a dumb, dumb, dumb guy or a dumb smart guy, but he's dumb. He doesn't understand the world. This is a guy who thought his wife's plan to say, find something new was a great political move when 35% of the people in this fucking country can't pay their rent or their mortgage. Find something new did really feel very let them eat cake. I mean, that will go down in history is probably one of the worst. I mean, that's, I mean, that's, That's what happens when you fire all the writers. Oh, for sure. And find something new. You guys didn't find something new ad, didn't you? Yeah, we ran an Ivanka Try Something New Ad, and it upset Jared so much that he called

Happy Endings Jason Miller on the phone and had him go after us for a week. And what they don't understand is that America saw that Ivanka Trump is a selfish, entitled, spoiled out of touch product of a kleptocratic scum bucket who doesn't think that Americans can see through her bullshit when she says, find something. new. Oh, I'm sorry. Your kids can't get, you can't get food for your kids. Find something new. You're being foreclosed on? You can't pay your rent? Find something new. It's amazing how out of touch these assholes are. Can we just take one minute to talk about all the incredibly awful people that Trump has managed to bring back into the White House? Dr. Sebastian Gorka.

Right. Gorka's back. Giant-headed Gorka, but he's still, I just want to point out my birthday is in like three weeks. Molligra. And I would like to get a cameo. Please send you. Do your work, Twitter. Thank you. Do your work, audience. He's literally brought back all the worst people, right? Gorka's back.

Jason Miller's back. Horrible Michael Caputo is back, right? Look, by the time this is over, Mike Flynn is going to be doing donuts and a tank on the White House lawn. Mega! You know, the chances of that seem quite high to me. Mr. Eddie Glock is a professor of African American Studies at Princeton, where he is also the chair of the Center for African American Studies

and the author of The New York Times Best Selling, Begin Again, James Baldwin's America and its urgent lessons. Well, Eddie, it is so great to have you back on the show, and I want to congratulate you on the enormous success of your book. You must be having a pretty good week. It's a combination of being surprised and overwhelmed, that a book like this would break through in this moment, but I'm excited, and as my mom would say, back home, I'm smiling like a chest cat.

That's really good. That's a good feeling. That is a good feeling. But Eddie, your book is just right for this moment. We talked before when you were on about the primacy of race in our national conversation right now. So I think you've actually struck the exact right moment on this. Yeah, you know, I think the subject matter is, of course, it's fitting. What I mean, though, is the kind of book it is, right?

Right. It has this kind of literary quality to it. I'm thinking with Baldwin. I'm asking much more of the reader. And the fact that the responses have been amazing, that is to say, the fact that people are responding to what I'm asking of them as readers in the way that they are is just really amazing. So I'm dealing with the late Baldwin, and the late Baldwin is not a gentle read. He comes at the country's hypocrisy, the country's betrayals. He is unsparing in his judgment of what we have done and where we are.

And I try to be as unsparing about our current moment as well. So I think the surprise is not because people are clamoring to understand race, but the way in which this book falls in that effort, if that makes sense. I wanted to ask you about the situation that we are in right now with the occupation of American cities. And I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about what does this remind you of and also what is going on? Well, I mean, it reminds me of, I only think just a kind of cursory glance at history, the two moments that seemed to stand out with federal government deploying federal police force would be the civil rights movement and the civil war. Of course, there were moments around union organizing, but that was responded. The response was primarily local with some state and federal backup support. But this is unsettling. I mean, this is the kind of action we would see in countries that have no democratic tradition or who are very young in their attempt to forge or build a democracy. So the fact that that Trump is deploying unmarked federal forces who are pulling up in unmarked cars and

snatching protesters off the street, not providing them with any sense of where they're going or any, not recognizing their rights as citizens of this country, reveals in some ways what some people have described as us being hyperbolic. When people were saying, I was saying, screaming from the top of my lungs, actually, that we're on the precipice of authoritarianism here. I mean, we need to understand the elements of neo-fascism that we're experiencing here. So there's that that we see. And then there's the reality of how crude Donald Trump interprets what has been in the Republican playbook. I mean, it's a caricature of the invocation of law and order.

And he's a caricature of so many of the elements that have been a part of our political landscape since I can remember remembering. He just takes it into a different domain. where the dog whistle becomes a foghorn, where law and order becomes fascism, right? Everything is exaggerated in his hands, so you see the familiar, but the way in which it is expressed, it's horrifying, actually. You know, Eddie, we've talked before about how there's a positive horseshoe where left and right in this sort of Burkean idea of what government should and shouldn't do to any citizen. This precedent does not work for America, in my view. I think you just touched on it. This moment is so disturbing.

It's the worst possible precedent. for one thing. Yeah, and you know, we've all been saying, at least some of us, I shouldn't say we all have been saying, some of us have been really talking about the depth of the problem of the imperial president. Many of us have been kind of saying out loud that imbuing the executive with this kind of unlimited power presumes that only norms constitute checks and balances, right? So if you get someone in office who doesn't give a damn about democratic norms, with this kind of power, they can really do serious damage to American democracy. And lo and behold, we're experiencing it right now. You have a man in office who doesn't give a damn about democracy.

You have an attorney general who believes wholeheartedly in the imperial presidency. Get those two together, then you're going to get deployments in U.S. cities, just like we're seeing. You're going to see the flouting of law in the name of an idea of executive power where he could do anything. It's almost kinglike in the way in which he's functioning. And he has no character. So you combine all of that and it's disaster. And then on top of that, guys, when you look at all of the folks who are complicit, who are enabling, the only thing you could say is one of two things.

One, they're so mesmerized by the idea of power that they're willing to do anything. Or two, they are committed to the same view. So we can't exceptionalize Donald Trump in this instance because people aren't enabling him to do this stuff, which gives us a sense that it comes. cuts much deeper than just simply the ridiculous character in the White House himself. Exactly. You have a historical kind of lens that not all of us have. Can you talk a little bit about the moment that this reminds you of?

In some ways, it's unprecedented. And, you know, we've heard before it's 1929. It's 1918, 1929 and 1968 all rolled into one. So Great Depression, you know, spent the influenza epidemic, the Great Depression and civil disturbance of the 1960s, but it's much more complicated than that, because at the level of leadership, the decay, the decline at the level of leadership is so unprecedented in my mind. And maybe Andrew Johnson's failures post-Civil War, perhaps. I'm not sure, maybe... Can you talk a little more about that? Well, I mean, the thing is that, you know, here you have

a rebellion of the South and the attempt to reconstruct the nation in light of a kind of the brutality, the carnage of the Civil War. And you have... in effect, seeding the country to the traders, as it were. And so at the level of leadership, there is a sense in which the person who is supposed to be acting in the interest of the U.S. Nation State was actually acting against those interests. And so that's the only reason why I'm paralleling this, right, making a parallel here, because in the midst of a crisis that includes the scale of the epidemic, the influenza of 1918, the Great Depression and Urban Unrest of the 60s, you have leadership that is, honestly, it took.

my mind, and I'm trying to find the language, I'm not being as clear as I should, but leadership that actually reflects that they're not invested in the best interest of the country in the face of this. And that makes it all different. It's so interesting. It's funny because we all think about like the scandals of our lifetimes in the White House. It seems so small ball now, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Richard Nixon. These things all seem like they're just inconsequential compared to the scope and the depth and the possible downstream impact of these, of what's happening. right now? Yeah, I mean, so corruption, incompetence, a deep-seated racist ideology, all kind of mixed together in a moment in which the nation is grappling with the devastation of a pandemic

that is killing us at alarming rates, a thousand a day now, right? So the confluence of a corrupt regime with a bunch of stupid people. Am I wrong to describe it as such? No, no, no, no, no, they are stupid people. No doubt about it. I mean, it's a gaggle of stupid people, and then our hatreds and fears all boiled into one. And it just seems like a recipe for disaster. I mean, and we're living it. Can you talk a little bit about where Black Lives Matter is right now? Well, you know, we're at that moment in which the nation rushes to congratulate itself.

And then to expect gratitude. So there was the response. There was the talk of reform. And now we're hearing the counter voices. and the counter voices often take the form of the lie. They often take the form of appealing to our fears and our resentments. So we're at this really interesting moment where the nation has to decide whether it was going to be, whether it was serious or not, of transforming the nature of policing.

Today I was struck. It kind of converges with our earlier discussion about the deployments in American cities, right? Because there's a sense in which there's a connection between what black lives matter, what the protesters have been arguing for, and protesting for, and Donald Trump's kind of appeal and deployment of those forces, the appeal to law and order. So there is this language of the uptick of violence in the country, and particularly in our cities. And so the response not only to the disruption of the protest or by protesters, Portland, right, there's also the response to the so-called violence in cities.

And so then what you get is this clamoring for forms of policing that protesters are actually resisting, A clamoring for the response or the frame that folks are trying to resist. So we were at a moment where we were talking about a different understanding of public safety. And now we're back squarely within the old frame, debating law and order. And no one is trying to ask the question, or very few people are trying to ask the question, why are we seeing an uptick? What does it mean that over 45 million Americans are unemployed? What does it mean that they're struggling to pay their rent?

What does it mean that people are struggling to put food on the table? What does it mean that people who are already in resource-deprived communities are catching even more hell? Where you could see the underlying failures of policy to address the economic devastation unleashed by COVID-19. Well, obviously, some people are going to start making some bad decisions. Obviously, some bad actors are going to try to take advantage of the situation. So what does it mean to talk about failed policies in light of COVID-19, the economic and social devastation that has happened as a result? And what do we need to do to respond to these circumstances? We cannot, in my view, Molly, double down on the old frame because that's what produced George Floyd.

That would produce Breonna Taylor, right? We can't do that, but we understand the political cash value of doing it because Donald Trump over and over again wants to appeal to people's fears and resentments. I just love you. Will you talk a little bit about John Lewis? Oh, you know, I can. John Lewis becomes this amazing point of entry to how we. told the story of the civil rights movement. He's such a complex and powerful figure. To talk about John Lewis is to talk about the student nonviolent coordinating committee. These were the young

shock troops of the civil rights movement. In some ways, in literature, there's an archetype in literature called the Holy Fool. No matter what's happening in the world, they still hold steadfast to their faith. They move throughout the world or throughout the world that they inhabit in the novel or whatever. as this force that gives evidence, voice to this unshakable fate. And you have these young students in the middle of the violence of the Civil Rights Movement, 1960, those wildfire sit-ins that just took off across the country. And they risked everything and organized themselves at Shaw University into the Student Ibonic Coordinating Committee. And then they went into the bowels of the South. They even went to my hometown in Moss Point, Mississippi, and helped desegregate pools. Stokely Carmichael was in my

hometown, right? And John Lewis emerged as a leader among these students who put their bodies on the line nonviolently, not because he wasn't the smartest, as Eleanor Holmes Norton said, but because he was the braven. He risked his life over and over again. John Lewis was the president, was the chairman of SNCC from 1963 to 1960s. When John Lewis spoke at the march on Washington, Archbishop of Boyle was horrified by the speech. Thought it was too radical. John Lewis said patience is a dirty, nasty work. Right. So what the John Lewis that comes to us, he's so deodorized and he's been made Santa Claus, right? But his life is a life of witness and risk, right? And when you tell the story of his activism, he is this, he sits at the middle, in the middle of all of these transformations in Selma, in 1965. He has to march with Dr. King and Selma as an individual, not as the chairperson of SNCC, because SNCC isn't in the argument with what King is doing in Selma. Sixty-five, Selma is so much. much more complicated. Malcolm X had come down to Selma. There was radical, shall we say, conflict

in Selma at the time, although we tend to think of Selma as just simply the Edmund Pettus Bridge and the courage that was expressed there. And part of why I'm getting so excited talking about this, because by telling the story of John Lewis, we reveal something that we often don't want to admit, that the Black Power era and the Civil Rights period, they were not wholly separate events. The people who began to shout Black Power were actually. many of them, young people who risk their lives nonviolently in the bowels of the South. These were non-violent soldier. And so they are our children.

And by telling the story of John Lewis, you know, that story comes into view. And then I have a personal thing. In 1986, John Lewis ran against Julian Bondford that congressional seat. I was at Morehouse at the time. I was really involved in politics, had become the vice president of the young Democrats of the state of Georgia. Didn't do anything with it. I just like that. And this is really kind of ugly things that led me to shun politics forever as a result of those things to get that type.

I was working in the Julian Bond campaign at the time, and it was fracturing the SNCC alum, right? They didn't know what to do. John Lewis then brought up Julian Bond's drug use and said, I took a test, will you take a test? And folk were like, oh, m. He went there. And it was really, really a kind of, it was a reveal of what he was capable of. And then I ended up working in John Lewis's Atlanta office as an intern. And I saw what he did up close.

Just an amazing human being. I think John Meacham is right. He's a saint. But he comes out of a group of holy fools that I just love. I feel like there are people where they don't have that halo. Can you explain to me why history some people are beloved and others are sort of... Well, you know, John Lewis gets picked out for a reason, right? I mean, because I don't think his willingness to risk his life was rude.

in a deep, intimate faith, and it didn't necessarily take the shape of a kind of politics. It converged with the politics, but his faith wasn't producible to it. And I think that's really important. If you fought for the beloved community, I don't want to deny that. But the way in which he risked his life didn't kind of throw him into some rigid ideological space that makes him or made him difficult to digest. He could easily be made into Santa Claus. Bobby Rush cannot be made into Santa Claus. No. Someone like Bob Moses, who has a halo,

Bob Moses has a reputation just as powerful as John Lewis for risking his life. How can I say for accepting the brutality of the South without responding? But Moses is a different kind of character because he made different choices. But a lot of it, Molly, I think, has to do with how we tell the story of that period. And the way in which we tell that story, certain characters come into view. Certain characters are demonized. Certain characters are left out of sight. interesting. One of the things that strikes me so much about we lost John Lewis and earlier, we lost

Elijah Cummings. And C.T. Vivian. And with COVID, too, there's a conversation about African-Americans not getting the same medical care that white people are getting. And I was wondering, I feel like that is an issue that we need to be talking about all the time. Well, let's just talk about a certain level of abstraction really quickly, right? That is always been the case that racial bias has shaped the delivery of health care in this country. And it has shaped how black pain are the pain that black patients experience, how pain prescriptions are dulled out. It has shaped our access to service. It has shaped in so many ways what's available to our communities. So those comorbidities that people are talking about aren't just simply the result of choices. They're the result of structural

realities that define the delivery of health care service to communities of color, particularly black community. So that has always been the case. It has been an open secret. We can go back to the time W.B. Du Bois lost his son because the hospital refused to tend to it, right? People having to deal with racialized medical care has been a part of this landscape as long as my daddy has been on the planet and even before then. So what has COVID revealed? It has revealed all of that gunk. It has shown us. So the people who are most vulnerable to the virus are those who have in some ways born the brunt of the inequality that's built into the system. And what's so striking is that the country has been willfully ignorant about it in order to protect its innocence with regards to

the choices that have been made. And so I say that to say this, that if we're going to be together differently, you can be conservative and I can be progressive, but we should at least hold fast to some common principles of the good. Because of the color of your skin or your zip code, it should not matter whether or not one gets and receives quality health care. It should not matter the color of your skin or the zip code of whether or not you have access to quality, good, world-class health care. But we know that's not true in this country, Mal. It's never been true in this country. And we just have to admit that, but it's hard to because then we have to admit what we've done.

I would say this. The fundamental challenge for us, and I would say it's a challenge for the linking group as well, is we have to remove from the underbelly of our politics, the spectrum. of racism. We have to get rid of it because it haunts everything. So we can't have debates about who we take ourselves to be, about policy, because those debates are always shadowed by the assumption that race is driving policy decision. So whenever I hear states rights, it's always bound up in a particular kind of history around what that language means with regards to race matters. When I hear critiques of quote unquote entitlement programs, which I hate that phrase, Rick, did you have something to do with that entitled programs.

Not me. It's before my time. I've been joking with you. But when I hear deconstructing the welfare state, I'm thinking about the history of what happens when welfare became black, right? So there's all of this gunk in the deep seller of American politics that gets in the way of the kind of debate that we ought to be having about what a just American society looks like.

And it seems to me until we do that, right, it's just going to be will to power kind of stuff. But anyway, that's just me going on and on and on. hard. The new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday, but listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these. So head over to new abnormal.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast and podcasts like the New Abnormal. Thanks. Michael Tomaski is a Daily Beast columnist and editor of Tomocry.

see a journal of ideas. And joining us for this interview is our producer, Jesse Cannon. So, Tamasky, today you wrote a really great column about the death of the world. Well, what precipitated is watching these film clips from Portland and hearing Trump say all the things he has said about that over the last few days. And I think, I don't remember the exact headline, but it sums it up pretty well. Something like if Trump loses, he's going to take the whole world down with him. I think that's where he is. I think he has finally started to realize and begin even in a certain way to accept in his brain that he is behind. He won't admit that, of course. He says fake polls to Chris Wallace. But I think deep down, he probably knows he is behind and knows that at this point in almost August, when you're that

far behind, there isn't much precedent in history for coming back and turning it around. There's one obvious precedent that some of his defenders will point to, which was George H.W. Bush in 1988, 17 points behind Dukakis famously coming out of the Democratic Convention. I guess it was around this time, late July, and then Bush won, obviously, but that was a different time. There wasn't the kind of polarization then that we have today. The country wasn't too hating camps, and it was possible to get 18 or 20 percent of the people to change their minds in 1988, in a way there's not now. So, you know, he's realizing he's going to lose, and he's freaking out, and he just wants to divide the country as much as he can possibly divide it.

That's kind of how it was for Democrat. And John Kerry was sort of that way, not responding to the swift boats. You know, it's no accident that the only two Democrats who won in the last generation were Democrats who knew how to fight back. Oh, interesting. Some people say that the only Democrats who have won in the past 30 years also mobilized the left. Do you think that's a bigger component than the mobilizing the left thing? Boy, it's hard to say what's bigger.

Clinton mobilized the left, not because he took left positions, quite the contrary. But they were out of power for 12 years. Democrats were out of power for 12 years. And that is, you know, wandering through the desert. It hasn't happened but a couple of times in the country's history, I think. That's a really different thing from eight years. So people on the left, labor people were willing to make a lot of compromises to get Clinton in there. Also, Russ Perot helped him a little bit. Yeah, I'll say. With Obama, he did energize the left, I guess. I mean, it's hard to think because now we have a genuinely energized left in this country, right? Which wasn't really the case. in 2008. So he energized young people and people of color. And to the extent that there's an overlap there with left, which there is some, then yeah, I guess you could say he energized the left. But, you know, the left quickly came not to like Obama because he didn't put any bankers in jail and other reasons. And that's an interesting, can we just go back to this for second? Because you're talking about this Bill Clinton thing of how people were willing to make compromises to get Bill Clinton in office. That reminds me of a lot of what's happening right now.

now with Biden. Anybody who's left of Bob Dole agrees that if this guy wins re-election, the country might die. It's not just a question of Supreme Court judges or bad environmental policy. I mean, that democracy literally could die. So people are probably willing to give Biden a longer leash than they would under certain other circumstances, you know, if he were running against Marco Rubio or something. On the other hand, I would say very much in Biden's defense that I think he's moved somewhat to the left. He hasn't really embraced Sanders and Warren positions, but he's adopted a little bit of their rhetoric and quasi-embraced some of their positions. So I think he's made a pretty good faith effort toward the left, actually. So will you talk to us about the Florida

poll numbers that just came out? Sure, yeah. This is Quinnipiac and it's 5138. And, well, first observation, the more standard observation is that Biden's above 50, because pundits like me, I always look at these kinds of polls, and if somebody's above 50, that's considered a big deal. On the other hand, it's 51, you know, so it's within the margin of error of being 47 or 48. The more interesting number to me is 38. Trump's 38. I mean, Biden could be 47, could be 53. But if you're at 38, even allowing for margin of error, you're in trouble.

I mean, how do you get? So there aren't a lot of three-party candidates, right? There's not, assuming Kanye doesn't, I think he's out. Yeah, okay. His fake campaign has ended. Right, and not qualifying for whatever state ballot that was. So instead of winning, drawing an inside straight and maybe winning with 47.5% of the vote or whatever it was Trump won with, he's going to have to be legitimately close to 50 nationally and in all of these states. And how you get from 38 to 50, that's glad that's not my job.

One of the things you've written a lot about throughout your career is where we end up with a divided country and the polarization of everything. So many people think voting for Biden is going to make Republicans come to their senses and things like that. Since this is something you've deeply looked at, where do you see the state of play at, things like that? I mean, look, so the Republicans basically put up a wall against Clinton. That was the first time this happened. Up until then, there was cooperation in the parties. And there was a lot of crossover in the parties back in those days. Even in Reagan's time, there were conservative Democrats and there were kind of liberal Republicans.

And there was a big sort of subset meeting point in the middle. And that stopped being the case in the 1990s. So the Republicans decided we're not going to give Bill Clinton anything. And he hardly got any Republican votes for most of his major initiatives. Some of this can be blamed on nude gingrich, right? Oh, but practically all of it. Just wanted to add that in there. Easily, the second most poisonous person.

in the last 50 years of American political history. Number one is Trump, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean. And so, you know, Obama gets elected. Democrats, by the way, did not do the same thing to George W. Bush. They were against him, but several, many Democrats voted for tax cuts, no child left behind. Then Obama comes in, and I actually at that point did naively think that maybe they would be different this time around.

Obviously, it took about nine hours of Obama being in office for us to see that that wasn't going to be the case. And then Ryan I. F. Tay was misplaced. And they went against the stimulus. And they subsequently went against just about everything that he did. So that's who they are. That's what they're going to do. We know that. So that's why Biden, sometimes he says, I'll work with my Republican friends. He does come from that Senate back in those days when there was cooperation. And there may be a part of his brain that still thinks that's possible. But I've talked to and people around him who say that he understands what things are like up there with the Republicans. But I guess he feels he has to say that because, like, people want to hear that.

But no, the Republicans won't give an inch. That's why it's all for not if the Democrats don't take the Senate. What do you think the chances of Democrats taking the Senate are and where do you see, like, exciting? People who listen to this podcast are very passionate about taking back the Senate. Yeah, well, right now, I think it looks very good. I'm sure people listening to this know the obvious states. Arizona, Maine, Colorado. Those are the three most likely pickups. Everyone assumes that the Democrats are going to lose Alabama. I'm not so sure now. I mean, I think Jeff Sessions would have beaten Doug Jones.

Tommy Tuberville's a football coach, you know. He's also really a moron, right? Yeah. And he has said some things that may not wear well. And, you know, this is Molly. I always, I've written this many times. Politics is harder than it looks. And it actually takes some set of skills to be good at it, to be be good at campaigning. And Donald Trump wasn't good at it. I mean, if you consider lying and saying racist shit 50 times a night at a rally good, then I guess he was good at it. But he did win, after all. I got to give him that, but he's not a skilled politician. He just sort of barged his way through, feeding people's nasty paranoia and stuff. But it's hard to be a good politician. So maybe Tommy Tuberville just won't be a good politician. So I think Alabama is not necessarily faded to be a certain

loss. I think there are other states that could be surprising for Democrats. The Democratic candidate in Alaska is really good. I know. I'm so excited about Alaska. That really gets me. Yeah. And that's close. The polls there are very close. And even Biden is close to Trump there. And that's another factor here. I mean, if Biden can pick off some surprising states, like Alaska and maybe Iowa, which would count as surprising, given that Trump won it by eight or nine points, that gives the Democratic candidates there a better chance, because it means they're less dependent on a crossover voting. They're less dependent on somebody voting for Trump and then crossing over and voting for them,

which is a rare thing in this day and age. And that's going to be the big challenge, for example, for Amy McGrath, because Trump's going to win Kentucky by 15 or 20 points. And that means that's a couple hundred thousand people who have to say, gee, I'm for Trump, but I'm going to vote against old Mitch. It's possible, but it's hard.

It's stretched. What about Lindsey Graham? That seems more possible. It's closer. The presidential race there is going to be closer than in Kentucky. I think even with Hillary, if I'm not mistaken, it was single digits or close to single digits. So Trump is going to beat Biden there, but he's not going to beat him by any kind of 15 points, I don't think. And that gives Harrison a shot.

He's an appealing candidate. You know, he has to make just the right kind of arguments in the closing days in the stretch. But he is a good candidate. He's an appealing candidate. I mean, it's fascinating. It'll be really interesting. say this all works out and we don't have like terrible civil war and Trump actually does leave the White House, which is a lot of, there's a lot of assumptions being made there, but and that we don't all

die of COVID. Say that happens. How does Biden unfuck the country? Well, a lot of it's going to depend, as I said before, on Democrats winning the Senate. And so let's assume that for now. If that happens, I think the Democrats will alter probably not do away with, but alter the filibuster in such a way that they can actually get stuff done. And I, and I think, think even like Joe Manchin is probably down with that at this point because they're all just, even though they, that this one side of their brain says, oh my God, set it rules, said it rules. There's another side of their brain that's just sick to death of being there for years and not getting anything done and not passing anything. And I think that side of their brain is really taking over.

So I think they would do that. And if they do that and change that filibuster rule, they'll pass stuff. They'll pass a $15 minimum wage and they'll pass a health care expansion, lowering the Medicaid, Medicare age down to 60, and they'll pass an infrastructure bill, and they'll pass maybe a tax increase on the very wealthy, and they'll pass something on overtime pay, and they should just come out of the gate. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. It could be, under my most hopeful scenario, as close as we've ever been to Roosevelt's 100 days since then. And I think Biden is down for that. And also climate. I left out climate, but I think he's got a very ambitious. I mean, even AOC signed off on his climate thing. So. Yeah, he took the climate from what's his name, who's so good.

Yeah, he took most of it and just moved it from 2030 to 2035, which is a compromise that politicians can live with. So I think they'll do a lot of stuff. And then, of course, I think he'll also say, I'm going to invoke that defense act, and we're going to manufacture 800 million tests, and we're going to make sure that people can get results back in two days. And if there's a vaccine by that time, I certainly hope, assuming that whoever develops the vaccine will not be as honorable as Jonas Salk and will insist, on holding the patent. I hope Biden and Congress pass a law that limits what they can charge for the vaccine, which of course Republicans would never do. I really hope Democrats do that. So I think on attacking the virus, he can do tangible real-life things that people will see and will make a difference in their lives. And then just on the economy, he can do a ton of things too. So that's my great, oh, that's the optimistic take. If the Democrats don't capture the Senate, of course, none of it happens.

And then it's just mud wrestling for two years and we'll see who wins it. It is so depressing and terrifying. It's interesting to me, like Trump World's October surprise that still haunts all of us were WikiLeaks, right? Right. With Roger Stone then got, he didn't get pardoned, he got commutation. Right, so that he didn't have to testify against Trump. In what is probably the single sleaziest thing that's happened in the last 10 years, right? Right, a lot of competition, but...

Right, but are you scared of like a WikiLeaks style thing going? this time, or you think it'll be more inside the White House? I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of everything. I'm scared of Russia. I'm scared of other international actors who want to see Trump in there, who I don't know what kind of capacity they have, but obviously they're out there. I'm scared of Russia tampering with votes. I'm not entirely convinced that they didn't do that last time. It's just no way to prove it. I wish everybody would just go back to voting with pencil and paper, crayon. I vote in Maryland, Montgomery County, Maryland, on an electronic device, but it's not hooked up to any interweb.

It's just it counts it electronically, but at the polling place. I guess that's okay, but all of these things are vulnerable and all these things scare me. And then, of course, it's not just Trump, but it's the whole Republican Party. State boards of elections setting up two, one machine in black neighborhoods for every four they set up in white neighborhoods. That goes on anyway, but it's just going to be worse this year. So the Democratic Party, and I've started to stoop around this a little bit and other, are as well. I mean, it's not original to me, but the Democratic Party is going to have to have

how many thousands of poll watchers and lawyers on call for election day and election night? I mean, a hundred thousand or something like that. You know, not in every state, because some states, you know, you're not going to contest West Virginia. But there's going to be a dozen states, at least, where you're going to have to have every polling place covered with multiple people. And I hope they're planning for that. Yeah, oh, that's really stressful. Who's your fuck that guy? My fuck that guy this week is Interior Minister and General Shitter upon the Constitution and dignity of the American people, William Barr.

Yeah. Bill Barr today said that the reaction of people to the death of George Floyd was extreme. Attorney General Barr, I hope you someday listen to this in your prison cell, but I want you to know something. Do you know what's extreme, you motherfucker? What's extreme is a cop kneeling on a man's neck for nine and a half minutes, murdering him in the street as he begs and cries out for his mother. That's extreme, Bill Barr.

That's extreme. That's why you are probably my permanent fuck that guy. You don't get to get a permanent fuck that guy. I'm sorry, it doesn't work that way. He's in the Fuck That Guy Hall of Fame. Okay, you can be in the Hall of Fame, but you don't get a permanent, okay? We have one segment on the show. One segment.

Okay, so my Fuck That Guy is going to be Tucker Carlson. I wrote a piece this week about Tucker Carlson. So he went on vacation because of his writer's misogynistic and racist things that he wrote on a message board, which, of course, the irony is, like, you're the writer for the most misogynistic and racist hour on television, and you couldn't get it all out then. You had to go to a message board. But that writer ended up resigning. Tucker went for a pre-planned, as they told the New York Times, vacation.

And then, of course, that pre-planned vacation, So Tucker came back on Monday and his followers docks a reporter for the New York Times because they thought that he was going to dox Tucker, even though the New York Times doesn't dox people and never has. And then on Tuesday they doxed a White House reporter, but someone accused her of saying something rude to Kaylee McEnany. And then Tucker Carlson then did an entire segment on her. And, of course, on Monday there were allegations. There's been a lawsuit against Tucker and a number. of other Fox hosts, which alleges sexual harassment and various other inappropriate conduct. How exciting for Fox.

My fuck that guy of the week is Tucker Carlson. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will 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. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly JongFest and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll

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