The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Is Wrong About Everything Except Mitch McConnell

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

Hosts Andy Levy and Molly Jong-Fast listen to audio clips of unhinged Republicans, including one of Donald Trump crapping on Mitch McConnell’s popularity, and they agreed with him, sorta. Plus! Molly and Andy ask important questions about Dinesh D’Souza’s election-fraud conspiracy film, “2000 Mules,” and Karen Elson, model and fashion activist, tells Molly about her work to unionize models in the fashion industry and the hazards they do face at work. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Zhang Fast, no relationship to Kim Jong-un. I'm a left-wing pundant and a writer at the Atlantic Invo. And I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon, 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 the wisest and funniest and funniest people in science and media and politics that help make what's happening today clearer. Our world has been turned upside down, and on the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and how we'll hopefully get ourselves out of it. Hello, and welcome to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Today we have an extra special guest with Karen Elson, who's of course is a supermodel and singer-songwriter, as well as an activist for fashion workers' rights, and she's going to talk to us about that plate. But first, let's have some fun.

All right, you guys ready to listen to some clips? Why not? Let's go. Mr. Trump, the former president. Tell me more. He held a little rally, and he had some thoughts on Mitch McConnell. Mitch McConnell is the least popular politician in the country, according to the, but no, he's an old broken down crow. I want to be nice.

I don't want to call it. Oh, I wanted to have that word right. I just want that I couldn't do it. I'd go home, and the first lady would say, why did you use that foul language, darling? I love you so much, but why did you use it? He's at all broken down piece of crow. No, but David fits in with him. I mean, look, he's not always wrong.

I don't understand why crow. First of all, are people calling each other crow now? Because I did not know that was something people called each other. You don't hang around the omelet station enough at the Mar-a-Molly, clearly. Do you call people crow as a put-down? because I've never heard that. I mean, old crow is like a whiskey, I think. Right.

I mean, this is all very confusing to me. I don't know. Maybe he meant to say crone. Maybe he wanted to call him a crone. I mean, he clearly wanted to call him something worse. Well, yeah. I mean, he wanted to call him a piece of shit or whatever. Yeah, whatever.

But the weirdest part of that was like, your wife is not the first lady. Like he said, I'll go home and the first lady was no. No. No. Jill Biden is the first lady. Thank you very much. That's right. That's right.

That is true. It's very true. Very, very, very true. That is quite true. Very good point. So you agree. You know, with him, one of the things about listening to him is I always don't, like, I listen to him and I always think, what the fuck are we even? Like, it just is baffling.

So that's all I have to say. Every time I listen to him, I just, I just, I want to know what he wanted to call him. Maybe, maybe I don't. I'm assuming piece of shit was where he was what he wanted to say, but I don't know. Yeah, I don't know. Donald Trump, wrong about everything else, right about Mitch McConnell. Right. I mean, I will say Mitch McConnell got him three Supreme Court justices and likely kept him in power, right?

Like, I mean, kept him from being removed. He really was ultimately. I mean, I think he served Donald Trump to serve his own interests. He worked a lot for Donald Trump. And so Donald Trump pays him. I don't have any love for Mitch McConnell. But Donald Trump pays him back by attacking him. Yeah.

He's right about McConnell, but of course, for the wrong reasons. Exactly. And there you have it. Not our brightest congressperson, Ms. Lauren Bobert. She really thinks you guys should see the new Dinesh to Sousa movie. 21 mules. What about some of the misinformation from the former president, Trump, as far as saying that he won the election? Well, I think that we need to have hearings to that. We are certainly here to talk about this board, but we need to have hearings. And that's what I'm looking forward to in a Republican majority in the House of Representatives, have hearings into the 2020 election. I hope that you've seen 2,000 mules. I would like to investigate if any of that is provable. If we can have geo-tracking when it comes to January.

6th and come to people's homes who were holding a sign outside of the Capitol and interview them, have the FBI interview them, interrogate them. Well, I certainly think we could use that same technology to look at people who may have been harvesting ballots illegally and possibly potentially even paid to do so by nonprofit organizations. Like the thing is, she's right, I guess, that if any of that stuff with the ballot harvesting had happened, we could probably track it. And the fact that we can't is because it didn't happen. That's the leap she's... Many people are saying. That's the leap she can't quite make because that involves two neurons firing off each other in your brain and that's one more than she has. So it makes it difficult for her. So,

you know, I just... Boy. Wow. I mean, I think your conspiracy theory is two batches. when Tucker Carlson rejects it. Is that fair? Probably. Is there an example of that? Well, we've seen that Tucker Carlson suppressing Dinesh D'Souza, according to him on Twitter. I mean, amazing.

Oh, right. Okay, because Tucker won't, they won't promote this Lauren Bober's favorite movie, 2000 mules. Who are the mules? I assume they are the people who carried the ballots illegally. I don't know.

I mean, nobody knows who the mules are. That's what we need to find out, Molly. And so who the mules are? We need to hold hearings to find out about the mules. And once the Republicans are in charge, I'm looking forward to hearings to find out who, whomst the mules are. Hoomst, that's right.

I'm excited for those hearings because nothing better than watching a jacketless Jim Jordan scream at a poor election worker. For having picked up a ballot drop box at some point in their life. I mean, for doing what they're paid very little to do. Hand over your ways data. Yeah, exactly. It's always interesting to me when Jim Jordan actually takes an interest in what's going on around him.

Listen, the man yells like you can't believe. Speaking of bad takes, Fox News host, Will Kane, has an opinion on the popularity of Roe versus Wade in America. position is worthy of mockery and presumed bigotry. So the Democratic Party today would embrace destroying every process of the positions of the Democratic Party 10 years ago. But here's the second part of why you haven't seen that when Democrats have control, because they know it's unpopular. The truth is, Roe v. Wade was a shield to a very unpopular opinion accepted within the Democratic Party. I don't care how many polls people show me about what people think about Roe v. Wade. I love Laura Ingram.

Well, that's fascinating. That's actually not Laura Ingram. That's one of the other morons. Judge Box of Wine? No, you can't quite hear the screech of her in it. It's one of the more NPC hosts. Now the Fox people have decided they're going to say things aren't popular when we know the polling. Like the polling says is popular.

Right, but that's why he said he doesn't care about what the polling shows. Right. You get around that, Molly. You just say, I don't care with the polo. I know it in my heart that I don't like it. And ergo it's not popular. Right. I know the math shows that 2 plus 2 equals 4, but...

Math doesn't care about my feelings. Look, Will Kane, someone I was dating friendly with. You know him. Don't you know him. And what he's doing now is there's no real polite way to say this. He just sold his soul. He is just out there saying shit. that I'm sure he doesn't believe. That's all I have to say about that.

Do you think he doesn't believe it? No, I don't. Oh, interesting. I mean, I do think he doesn't. I do think he doesn't believe it. So you think he believes it? I don't think he believes it. You don't think he doesn't, right?

I do think he doesn't believe it, don't you think? Yeah, I do. I think he just wants to be Tucker Carlson because he knows there's money there. Yep. Karen Nelson is a singer-songwriter, supermodel, and activist. Welcome to the new abnormal,

Karen. Hi, Molly. Let's talk about the fashion workers' rights union that you are involved in and explain to us a little bit about what it is and what it does. Ultimately, I've been working with the Model Alliance for a long time. It's not technically a union. So within the modeling industry, no union actually exists within the model industry. And I think what the Model Alliance, with founder Sarah Ziff, has been trying to do is essentially to create checks and balances within the fashion industry and ultimately build scaffolding because, you know, the fashion industry and the modeling industry like any other workforce is a workforce. It is, you know, we are hired to do a job. We do a job. Therefore, we should be afforded the same rights as any other workforce. But I think

the general feeling about models in general is that we are not necessarily viewed as a labor force, right? sort of the illusion of, quote unquote, beautiful women having struggles is a very difficult one for people to wrap their head around and to think that maybe there are things, egregious things that happen in our workplace, such as, you know, on the worst end of the spectrum, such as sexual harassment, abuse, you know, and as you go down, understanding that there are things just within the business dealings, the sort of huge lack of financial transparency that exists between our agents and what we see and not getting paid, for instance, immigration violations, yada, yada. I mean, it's a lot to unpack.

So we have had other models on this program. We actually had a model on who was talking about this French modeling agent who had sexually assaulted a lot of models. And I feel like it's more hazardous workplace than most. Do you think that's right? Yeah, I do. I mean, I think hazardous in the sense that I think when you're putting a lot, you know, I mean, I'm 43 years old and, you know, a little backstory. I started modeling when I was 15 years old. By the time I turned 17, I had lived in London, Paris, and Tokyo by myself. And with very little in the ways of sort of being chaperoned and whatnot. And a lot of things happen.

And I think when you put young vulnerable people who don't have a lot of experience in the grown-up world, into a situation where all of a sudden they have to be business women, they also have to look and perform in a certain way. And they're sort of, you know, in the mix of things, various power plays and power dynamics at play, I think it can often be a, it's rife for inappropriate behavior and for things to slip through the cracks. I speak for myself on this,

that definitely a lot of things slipped through the cracks in the beginning of my career. And to this day, things slipped through the cracks because there isn't sort of a set of rules and protocol that we and other people we work with have to follow. So you actually testified in this Gerald Marie case in France. I didn't testify in that case. Gerald Marie, I used to be a part of his model agency, but just being completely honest, I didn't have many dealings with him personally. I didn't testify in that case at all.

I mean, do I have opinions about that? Absolutely. We had Carrie Otis on who did testify and did have a terrible experience with him. But the question was, again, with the French courts, whether or not the statute had, whether that was going to be able to be prosecuted. You know, honestly, at this point, I don't have any idea. But what I will say is I went recently, I was at the French consulate in New York where they gave Sarazek, who's the founder, and the CEO of the Model Alliance, they gave her basically the French version of a knighthood for her advocacy and activism for models.

And what I gathered from, you know, from people who were within the French government who were at this, at her knighting ceremonies, that the French government take this matter very seriously. And that they have been taking a lead on digging, you know, digging under the surface and lifting up the hood of the modeling industry in France and trying to see what they can do. And they are being much more active about what they can do than say, you know, other countries,

which is why, again, this model of the Fashion Workers Act, which if passes in New York State, will be a huge success because it will just give checks and balances. You know, I mean, and it's really primarily on sort of financial transparency, but it also stops things like retaliation, you know, because that's a big thing in the fashion industry. I think many models can attest if they've left an agent and the agent is upset with them that there can be a period of time where the model is retaliated against, where the agent may speak poorly about the model to potential clients. And again, I think that it is very destructive and it can have an impact on a person's livelihood.

And I think those things need to stop. I mean, I certainly experienced those things. And the great, again, the great sort of disconnect is I think people believe with models that we are like rolling in money and that, you know, you're on the cover of Vogue, therefore you must be just bags of gold coins that you're leaving the shoot with. Often, when I'm doing a editorial shoot, say, for a Vogue magazine or L magazine, you get maybe $200 for the day of work. And often a lot of, you know, when you're doing advertisements, that's different, but you do the editorial to. get the advertisements, but nothing is certain. So there's a lot of debt in those early years that gets accumulated. And when there isn't financial transparency, you know, this has happened to me even recently where I agree to say, walk in a fashion show in Paris, and I'm being told

you'd get X amount. And when I do the math, maybe after the fact, I realize, oh, I've gone three, four, five thousand dollars in debt to walk in this fashion show because nobody told me that my flights, hotels, taxis to and from the airport, that the commission structure is different to how it's usually sort of build and yada, yada, yada, yada. You can go into debt.

And if that's happening to me, a person who I would say, I have some business savvy and I've been in the business a long time so I know what questions to ask. If I am still confused, you can only imagine what an 18, 19, 20, 21-year-old who is sort of fresh out of their, you know, where they're from, they're, again,

sort of thrust into this world where they don't know what questions to ask. It just, again, there just needs to be some sense of accountability. Right. Explain to us how you got from modeling to music. So, you know, I was actually doing music before I became a model and that was my first love. Always singing, always in choirs, playing music. and I became a model, like I said, when I was 15 years old, and I grew up in Northern England in a working class town,

and it was an opportunity of a lifetime. It was sort of my get out of jail free card, you know, and I had to leap and take that opportunity. So music took a sideline for a while, and then I guess after I had kids, I have an almost 16-year-old daughter, and I have a 14-year-old son. After I had my children, I realized I've got to start making music again,

because that's also a big part of mine. my heart, and I just started doing it. And that's really it. Let's talk for a minute about going to Sierra Leone in the Middle East and your work would save the children. It's such an interesting story, actually. So when I lived in Tokyo when I was 16 years old, my roommate was this woman called Kat Henkin. And she was a model at the time. And through her own life path, she then became an agent, I believe an agent for CIA for some time. And then she moved into the nonprofit world and became a representative of Save the Children and works currently with Save the Children. She would ask me if I wanted to go on, you know, if I wanted to go on a trip. And our first trip together was to Sierra Leone.

And it really opened up my eyes in the sense of, again, I'm an avid traveler. I've traveled all over the world. Where I grew up, you know, as a particularly sort of impoverished part of Northern England. And when I got to Sierra Leone, what really opened my eyes again is that they were just, you know, a few years out of their civil war. There was clearly, it was for sort of maternal health and the rates of women and children dying, you know, mothers during childbirth and obviously infants, post-childbirth. And it just opened up my eyes to the world in general. And then my next trip was saved for children I went to Zattery refugee camp, which is on the border of Syria in Jordan. And again, especially when you see what's happening in Ukraine right now is what my biggest takeaway from being at Zattery refugee camp is that refugees are like you and me.

You know, we are all sort of at the mercy of fragile democracies. And democracy these days feels more fragile than ever. But this sort of illusion in our lives that, oh, this doesn't happen to, you know, this will never happen to us. We saw on January 6th, again, democracy is a friday. agile thing. And again, being in Zatari, I talked to women who, you know, they were architects before. There's one one I spoke to and she was an architect before the civil war happened in Syria. And she fled with her husband and three children. They had to drug their children in a car.

Their car was being pelted with bullets. Her husband was captured and tortured for weeks. And here they are they all living in a corrugated, you know, a corrugated. it's sort of fenced in environment, struggling to figure out when they will be able to go home, if ever. And again, just that sort of humbling notion that we are all the same. We are all dealt the certain deck of cards that we're dealt with. And nobody is unique and nobody is above the pains of how you matter we can dish out, be it positive or negative. And again, seeing what's happening in Ukraine, I think it's yet again, we're getting to, the world is getting to witness how, how in a blink of an eye, life can change for many people.

Yeah, that is so interesting. Karen, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I really do. On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science.

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