The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Jr. Loves Boats, Hates Rhinos and Is So-So on Democracy

Episode Date: September 1, 2020

Ike Barinholtz—of Eastbound and Down, Suicide Squad, and Mindy Project fame—loves, and I mean LOVES, Donald Trump Jr. It was a passion that grew white hot on safari. “I went with DJ TJ, we went to beautiful Tanzania back in 2014 and it was amazing,” Ike tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest edition of The New Abnormal. “We talked to the locals and they were really great. And then this really nice man, he was a guide. And he took us to just the most majestic group of sleeping rhinoceroses and we just blew their fucking heads off. It was beautiful.” But Ike admires one of the president’s top four smartest children for more than his guns. Ike also appreciates Don’s nuanced political views, especially when it comes to boats. “Look, everyone is born with a boat. We know that, but only people who really commit—to not just the boating lifestyle, but also the MAGA lifestyle—have earned the privilege to fuck up all of the wakes in a lake. And so once again, DJ TJ is right and that's why I'm supporting him in 2024.” Plus! Trump Senior turns the White House lawn into a NASCAR parking lot. Melania goes dictator chic. And Molly—this part is serious, I swear—recites a Tiffany Trump tweet over an electropop beat.  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. Hey, so, Molly, do you feel like it's a better or worse thing for the coming fascist dictatorship if the Department of Justice head, Interior Minister Bill Barr,

fires more senior intelligence officials from the DOJ and replaces them with political appointees? Only if you stop the briefing at the same time. Hey, you know what? John Rackcliffe, the current acting sort of pseudo-DNI, has also stopped the briefings. It's almost as if, and call me crazy, we're a couple of weeks from a major election where the same people who were fucking with our last election, who was that? I think they packed so that Hillary. Was it Russia? Yes, it was. Well, now we're not going to have Congress get briefings from the Justice Department or the intelligence community because they don't want them to reveal what they know is going on, which is Vladimir Putin's

little elves are back at their busy work. But here's the question, here's my question, are there, is there busy work, because I've been reading about this today, is it the stuff that comfortably smug and all this sort of Trump Jr.? Is it the stuff that those guys amplify? Is that their busy work? Or is there busy work? A lot of the stuff that Trump Jr. amplifies comes from accounts that are either first or second degree botnet accounts. And some of those are obviously, they're all lavishly pro-Trump. Some of them are lavishly pro-Trump with clear evidence of grammar indicating that English is not their first language.

I mean, except... It's probably not juniors either, for that matter. Right. I was going to say, if we're going to get into, like, different Trump children, I will say today Tiffany struck out as also being a Trump sycophant, so that was nice to see. Did she do something after the convention? Yeah, I would like to read this tweet to you. If you would please.

In the style of her musical stylings, because you know Tiffany, like, all of the Trump. has had multiple careers. Please stop lying, Joe. You may think we are too ignorant to see through the lies, but God knows the truth. Please stop lying, Joe. You think we're too ignorant

to see through your lives. Like that? In her tween pop thing that her father paid for? But I also think fundamentally God is probably not the person you want to invoke when defending your father

if you're a Trump. I would say this. that invoking God, unless you're screaming, dear Lord, have mercy on my soul, while you're a Trump family member, is probably not something you want to do. You're like, you're like lightning bait. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I guess the thing that I think of...

The family that crimes together. Right, exactly. They want, they've got to protect the golden goose, which is their father. But it is interesting to me to see that these kids, you know, one of the criticisms of this R&C Healthcape Week was that the kids really did. it was just Trump's kids telling everyone how much they liked him, which in itself does not necessarily make a person a good president. As someone said, all the speeches essentially came down to, please, daddy, put up my allowance.

And so it is interesting to see. It does feel like the Trump kids are trying desperately to keep daddy in office. I don't know. It's interesting because I feel like it vacillates between this. There is no one left in the Republican Party who's not a Trump sycophant or a Trump enabler at this point? Oh, no. They are fundamentally, their purge has worked. Their purge is a success. Their purge has pushed out every single person around him who would dare to say anything. Yeah, it's weird. I mean, so do you think, I mean, a lot of people I'm talking to who are living in constant,

terrifying fear that Trump will get reelected talk about how the election before Hitler had a very high turnout too. I mean, are we just on the precipice of fascism? And is there nothing we can do to stop it? Our critics on the right will instantly say, shut up, cuck, it's not fascism when we do it. What about Obama? What about his executive orders? But all of the things, we've talked about this before, all the things that are on that sort of checklist of fascist milestones and that great Umberto Echo article from years ago about it, they're playing every single note on that guitar. They're playing every single one of those notes. It's the adoption of all the national symbols as symbols of the leader. It's the use of racially motivated fear. It's the use of saying your enemies are both strong and weak at the same time.

It's all the showmanship and the spectacle. It's a phenomenal article that one point about strong and weak. You know, on the one hand, you listen to Trump and it's like, unless you vote for me, the world will collapse because the antifa cannibals will be here tomorrow. They will eat you all. They'll kill everyone. My God, the horror. And yet he then says, we can solve it in one hour. Just let my people go in there. One hour. It'll be over. So is Hiroshima, but, you know, not the way you're kind of wanted it.

Can we talk for a minute about Joe Biden's speech? Because so I feel like Joe Biden did a really good speech of just hitting back on all that, right, because Trump world was like, Biden won't condemn violence on the left, right? Meanwhile, Trump, of course, Kaylee McEnany today was like, they, a reporter asked, does the president condemn. the actions of Kyle Rittenhouse, who is accused of shooting two protesters, and Kaylee was like, the president's not going to weigh in on that. Naturally. Like, murder? It's just murder.

Now, let's not put Kaylee McAnney in any category where we would expect an honest answer, because the president has weighed in on it, because he spent the weekend rage tweeting, including a bunch of things about the fucking, you know, caravan leading into Portland. And by the way, hundreds. And by the way, I tweeted a picture. this weekend because it reminded me of those ISIS caravans that used to form of, they all have those like white Toyota high lux trucks all over the Middle East, those technicals, with ISIS flags in the back seat or in the back bed. And it just reminded me the same thing. And we've talked about

this a little bit. There's a process of radicalization of particularly of young men. Right, young white men. It's young men around the world. How do you think you end up with teenage suicide bombers from ISIS? You end up with because there is a psychological aspect to young men when they're told everything you want and care about is about to be destroyed, your families included, you are the only person who can stop

this raging, dangerous mob from hell. You've got to take a stand. And whether they're telling these kids it's the Jews or the infidels or Antifa or BLM, the end result is too frequently the same. And, you know,

not every, I'll go through this for the million of the fucking time, Trump supporters. Not every Trump supporter is a gun-toting maniac who's going to go and shoot up a blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But the motherfucker that shot up the Walmart in El Paso was, and the motherfucker who shot up the tree-vice synagogue was, and apparently young Mr. Kyle Rittenhouse is a big old maga. Now, I'm sorry. Who could have seen that coming? And as the gun guy in the group, you know what? You don't walk around with your fucking tools hanging out, okay?

Well, also, you don't go to places. Also, as a 17-year-old, it is not legal for him. him to carry a long gun in the state of Wisconsin and public. Sorry, game over. But look, and I've seen the video seven or eight different times now, and I've heard all the, it was pure self-defense. You know what? A jury will decide that.

And they will. They'll make that decision. And those people chase him down the street for some reason. And provocation is not an excuse for them trying to attack him or him shooting them. This is just the Kyle Rittenhouse problem distracts you from the fact that under Donald Trump, There are a lot of armed people. There are a lot of incidents. There's been one on the left, okay?

The guy that shot up Steve Scalise in the Congress and the Congressional softball game was a fanatic Bernie cuckoo pants progressive. But we've seen a lot more of these people and the FBI themselves say the real risk is not the MS-13 children in the caravan because, you know, the five-year-old girl with the Hello Kitty backpack, man, I'm scared of death of her. But rather, these guys who are the boogaloo's and the... the alt-right guys and whatnot. You know, I mean, the idea that they'd go after Biden for not condemning violence on the left,

when there was actual murder on the right is kind of nuts. But it's this thing of hit them before they can hit you. Here's the thing in politics that Republicans know, the secret Republicans have known for a long time. If you attack me on issue X that you perceive as my weak spot, I'm not going to respond to you. I'm going to attack back on your weak spot. Joe Biden, and I think he did a good job today to start refurb.

framing some of this stuff. This whole thing about Trump being toxic was very good. It was very strong. And you look at Joe Biden and he does, it's one of those things like when you see the magic trick up close of Trumpism, this whole thing of Joe Biden, the radical far-left anti-Far communist leader. He's in the pocket of AOC. When you look at it up close, it's just fucking ludicrous.

It's like a movie set with like a really shitty matte paint job. You get up close to it and it doesn't look like, you know, it doesn't look like, you know, it doesn't look like something fabulous. It looks like a fake, like what it is. So Biden did that today. He like peeled that off a little bit and pushed back onto Trump the division and the hatred and the bullshit. Who has the Bernie email? Do you have that, Molly or Jesse?

Bernie sets out an email that said, right is all week at the R&C is calling Joe Biden and Kamala, socialist. And he said, if only they were. Why do you think Trump's favorables didn't go up at all? Because he did. Because he's a giant bag of suck. I know, but just get like, they did like four days of like people. I mean, they got a lot of this very dishonestly, but they did have people who were African American and who were women saying he doesn't hate women and he's not a racist. Now, none of that is true, but I'm surprised that it didn't give him any kind of bomb.

Well, there are three big reasons why it didn't give him a bump, Molly. The first off is that Donald Trump's bullshit is priced in, okay? People know he's lying. They also understood that every message that was going on during that convention, every single message was about Donald Trump. It wasn't about them or their families. It was about Donald Trump. It was about praising the great and powerful Don. And all of it was designed as a praise fest for the dear leader.

So when people are in this country looking at 200,000 deaths from COVID by the middle of this month, and 40% of the people in this country can't pay their rent or mortgage this month. and unemployment rose again by a million jobs lost last month. All those things add up. And at some point, like the bullshit distortion field around Donald Trump, just doesn't have the same effect it used to. Even when you do the big show, even when you do the big, you know, the fabulous, turn the White House into a NASCAR parking lot and go buck wild with the fireworks and all that stuff. It just doesn't work after a while.

So, I mean, you would think that that would probably bode well for Biden. Look, the ratings were excellent for Biden. The ratings were very good. And the fact of the matter is, when Donald Trump sees that Joe Biden beat him in TV ratings, he shit a brick. Yeah, and that's why we had 5,000 tweets. A golden brick with an accompaniment of gazillions of tweets. And you're going to end up with that feeling sometimes that things are out of control or Trump is ahead or he's manipulated everything and he's winning. But what it really means is that Donald Trump,

Trump did all the magic tricks and the numbers didn't go. And one of the polls I saw some of them that they were touting is like a huge thing. He's up two points in this poll. Well, the margin of error was three points. Oh, okay. Well, there you go. That would be call failure. But looping back on this, Biden's performance and the DNC's performance was designed to bring people from the middle and even part of the right into the zone.

Trump's was designed to keep the 28 percent who are the hard Trumper base, the crazy, Trump haughty fanatical edge of the base to keep them happy. So what did you see? You saw the St. Louis couple. You saw all the communism and all the socialism. But I have a question for you, if that's true, like I think they were trying

because they had a lot of African American people and a lot of women saying he's not a racist. Everyone says he's a racist, but he's not a racist. They are wrong. He's not a misogynist. Like I feel like Trump's base likes him for the misogy and the racism.

So I do feel like having those people was a way to reach out to the middle. No, no, they were after those people, okay? They wanted some of those people from the middle, okay? They wanted to try to recapture some of those suburban Republican women with a college degree. But in this titanic battle of numbers, those people see in their heads, not Kaylee McInney saying, untruthfully, by the way, oh, he called me after my surgery. You know, she wrote a book two years ago. Wait, what?

mentions discusses her surgery in depth, all kinds of in-depth, okay? Right. Doesn't mention in her book. Oh, and by the way, Donald Trump and Ivanka called me to blah, blah, blah, blah. Weird. Because let me tell you what the rest of that book is. It is Starfucker Palooza. And if that had happened, she would have fucking said it in her book.

That's my belief. But, Molly, these people in the suburbs, they know who this guy is. They know kids in cages. They know the pussy grabbing. They know the insult comedy shit. They, in 2016, made a hard. decision in their heads. They said, well, fuck, Hillary Clinton, I've heard for 30 years, he's the devil. Or Donald Trump, maybe I can take a chance. Maybe it could work out. Well, now, with COVID and the

economy and the incompetence and the proof that Donald Trump is, in fact, a fuck wit and not a good president, has become very clear to them. So you could tow out tomorrow, 20 actresses to go on camera and say, Harvey Weinstein was such a gentleman to me. He gave me the most courteous and professional treatment and never, ever asked me to give him a rub and a tug. Anybody can produce that kind of shit any time. And you may have noticed many of the people on that stage were willing to lie, as you may have noticed, a time or two,

I don't know, call me crazy. Again, Kaylee Mandacity, again, Kelly Ann, again, you know, all of them. Except, of course, for the one teller of truth, the one speaker of the fundamentals that have shaped our world and our universe. No, no, no, Junior's consort. Who was it?

It was Kimberly Gilfoyle. Don't cry for me, Argentina. The most beautiful thing about that. I'm not going to let Kimberly go on this one yet. I can't quite unhitch from this one yet. That performance was so bonkers-McBatt-Shit, and that was the best take they had. Well, but also, we need to talk about Swin's story that he called Kimberly afterwards. If that was his favorite of the speeches, and you know, Stephanie Wolkhov says that when she was doing the inauguration, Trump said he wanted to have a North Korea kind of thing. So the idea that Trump is

modeling himself on Kim Jong-un is like a little bit terrifying. I actually wrote about that in my first book about, you know, he wants rocket parades. He loves the trappings of fascism and of authoritarianism. Yeah, he also loves the actual authoritarianism. Well, oh, yeah, but look, it always starts with the fancy uniform with the sash. I mean, I predict by the time this is over, he will have a Hugo Boss cut uniform of some kind. Well, Melania wore one on Wednesday night or Tuesday night. You notice that? Yeah, that was

like straight prison guard. Eastern European military chic. Nazi prison guard, yeah. Not great. And now we have unhinged Trump all weekend. Well, the reason you have unhinged Trump is very simple. Donald Trump, whenever

he has to behave for a few days, whatever he's told, hey, the world will fucking end. You act like a dick for the next 48 hours. he has to have his revenge on his handlers. He has to come out after he's been a good boy and act out like an asshole, which is, of course, what he was doing this weekend with the tweeting and the fucking golfing. Because America, just a reminder, although there's a pandemic sweeping the country still, it's about to have a worse second wave still, and we'll kill 200,000 people by the middle of this month still.

And the economy's in the shitter still. Donald Fuckwit spent part of the weekend golfing. Because, you know, with our cities on fire from the, dangerous Antifa thugs, and the world about to collapse, if you listen to Donald Trump, into a morass of socialized whatever, he still has time to take care of himself. You know, if you don't have your health, what do you have? So he goes golfing, because fucking, of course, he goes golfing. Ike Berenholtz is an actor, writer, director, known for his fantastic roles in Eastbound

and Down, the Hunt, Suicide Squad, and, of course, for the amazing movie, he wrote and directed and start in the oath. So we find ourselves in 2020. Where are you, Ike? What are you working on? What is happening? What are you doing? I am in Los Angeles, California. Yes, I've heard of it. We had an amazing event yesterday. Me and my friends went to the valley, and we had a great rally from Mr. Trump. Wait a second. I drove in. I drove in from where I live about 120 miles away and just kind of cruise down Ventura Boulevard in my F-150, which somehow has caterpillar tracks on it. And I just kind of laid my horn for about two, three hours. And I think I swayed some undecided voters. So it was a pretty great day. Did you have any flags?

It was funny because we got there. And then my friend reminded me that I left all my flags on my boat. I was hoping we would get to the boat. Yeah, you know I'm a beautiful voter, right? You know that, right? I'd heard. Yeah, so we got there. But like I said, look, everyone focuses on Ohio and Arizona, but people don't think about the swing voters on Ventura Boulevard between Jones on Third and Asenabo. There's some folks there who are still on the fence. So I think we did a lot of good. I think we did a lot of good. Can you explain to me what you like about boating for Trump? Well, look, for years, for years, me and my friends would go on the lake and zoom around on our boat and yell at each other and get blind drunk and disrupt other families having a good time.

And it was fun, but we didn't have a purpose. And it wasn't until we realized that we could hold up Trump signs, that we could really make a difference and sway some other boaters who are, because that's the thing. People, again, talk about swing voters. No one talks about swing boaters. That's right. And so I can't tell you how many times I've, my boat has gone the SS Ivanka, had gone past another boat and I've just blasted my air horn. And they're like, what the fuck are you doing?

And I'm like, I'm for Trump. And they're like, get the fuck out of here. And then I zoom away, but maybe they will vote for Trump. Who knows? You never know. That's the thing. You've got to keep trying. Are you concerned about voter fraud?

I, boater fraud is a very real thing. that's why you can never buy your boat in the mail. You have to buy your boat in person, and it's tough. It's tough in the age of COVID to go to a boat store, but we really do, the boaters for Trump, we do discourage a boat by mail. We really think this is something that you should be doing in person. I was told by International Polymath, Donald Trump Jr. Yes, my good friend, yes. That boating is not a right. Boating is a privilege. It is. Look, everyone is, is, is, is, is, is, is, born with a boat. We know that. But only, only people who really commit to not just the boating lifestyle,

but also the MAGA lifestyle, have earned the privilege to fuck up all of the wakes in a lake. And so it is. Once again, DJTJ is right. And that's why I'm supporting him in 2024. How many animals have you killed? How many animals have I killed? Well, let me see. I went with DJ, TJ. We went to beautiful. Tanzania back in 2004, 2014, and it was amazing. We talked to the locals, and they were really great, and then this really nice man, he was a guide, and he took us to just the most majestic group of sleeping rhinoceroses, and we just blew their fucking heads off, man. It was beautiful. We just took out, we had DJ, TJ has an elephant gun, and we took turns just turning this majestic family of endangered species into just a big old puddle of Kool-Aid.

So I'm going to shift gears here. You wrote directed and starred in a movie that I loved in recent years, The Oath, which I encourage our viewers that they would very much enjoy it if they haven't wanted it. Oh, thank you. It's unavailable on Hulu. My thing rewatching it this weekend and then having my parents do the same is it was absolutely more Prussian and I think one of the worst things like certain hosts of the show, show may have even been putting out things about how dystopias have underplayed their

head, but right now, your dystopia that you made seems to have aged perfectly. Have you had any thoughts since you wrote it about what you've seen more of and what's coming to view in the picture since you made this movie? Yeah, a very angry film. I made at the time where I definitely saw that fascism was alive and well in America and was really starting to bubble. It's only gotten much, much, much, much worse, much, much worse. The movie came out and just not a lot of people saw it when it came out, but recently, like a young lady on TikTok gave a little TikTok video about why the movie's true and what's happening right now.

So a lot of younger people, and I guess K-pop fans have seen it. Oh, K-pop. Yeah, it's very depressing. It's very depressing. And it's just, it just shows you, yep, still fucked. We're still fucked. So while it is, yep, we're still fucked, you do have a very insightful kind of thing about the commentary of like what this does to vote. family, but also what it does when you're not getting out there in the streets.

You really well, and I was saying before we started taping, like, I saw a little too much of myself of the main character to a degree that disturbed me because I know they were being mocked. What do you feel like there's a lesson to be learned from that, like, right now? Like, would you encourage people to not just be the woke family warrior? What would you encourage? Basically, the first time, I'm a very lucky man. Like, I grew up in the best possible time to grow up in the world in America in the 70s, 80s and 90s. I think we did too.

Yeah, it's the best. We are so lucky. And so in my lifetime, there hasn't been, like, I have not seen mass mobilization movements happen a lot in my lifetime. The first time I really kind of remember it was Occupy Wall Street. And I was like, oh, cool. And then after Ferguson, we started seeing it more and more. But I think the power of the street, it's at an all time high in this country, where we saw whether it was the women's March or the March for Our Lives or the George Floyd protests. People know how to mobilize and they want to mobilize and they're fucking fed up. So, you know, my character, I think, when I was trying to make a commentary of like you said, Jesse, a guy who was a bit of a backseat social justice warrior who's, you know, his safe place, he's furious and he's got a lot of righteous indignation. It's real mad, but his kind of his MO is to bitch about it, read Twitter and bitch about it to his family. And I think we are seeing now people who are taking the next natural step, which is to hit the streets and, you know,

do like a big show of force and remind the people who want to take the power from us that there's a lot more of us than there are of you. No, I think that's right. Speaking to this idea of like being an enraged liberal. And so I'm curious to know what you think is the smartest thing for them to be doing. Well, I think right now, look, look, we're in this very, very precarious time where the most important thing right now at this moment is some kind of galvanization between, which I think you're, you are. kind of safe. Look, Rick Wilson, right, and David Sorota are voting for the same person. Okay? So, like, that's like the most important thing is to come together right now, except the real reality that Joe Biden is our nominee, right? Maybe he wasn't your first choice.

I'm more of a Bernie Liz Warren type of guy, right? But we got Joe Biden and he's a fucking decent guy. And our job right now is to get him to win and get rid of the fucking, literally like the penguin from Batman. What I would say, though, is that the worst thing we could do is push hard to get Joe Biden elected and then go back to sleep. I was thinking about that too. Go on. Yeah, I campaign for Barack Obama in Ohio in 2008 and gave it everything I got. I was so excited. And then he won. And I think myself and a lot of folks on the left, especially like, you know, quote unquote, libs, we kind of went to sleep a little bit.

We're like, oh, few, the cool black guys in charge. This is going to be fine. We're okay. And, oh, Mitt Romney, no, Obama killed him all. we're good, we're good, let's go to sleep. And I think while we were sleeping, a lot of forces kind of came together and, and kind of gave us Trump. And so I would say two things. A, I would say if Joe Biden wins, please Jesus. Please, I'm a Jew and I'm begging to Jesus. Yeah, me too. A lot of Jews got religions. Oh my God. I honestly like believe in hell now. Like, I'm a Jew, but I believe in hell. And I'm like, anyways, so I would say two things. One, I do truly think that if you call yourself a centrist,

If you're someone who's like, I'm kind of in the center, you need to pull as hard as you can from the left. Even if you don't agree with everything the left says, I kind of don't. But like the big issues I do. Like nothing is bigger to me than fucking health care. We need health care. It is insane that we do not have a federal health care program in this country. It's so uncivilized. Right.

So we live in a very right wing country, right? So you have to pull as hard as you can from the left because the right is pulling with everything they got. And if you really want to end up in the center, pull hard from the left. And then the second thing I would say, is if Joe does win, that's when the work has to begin. Because if we go back to sleep and Joe just gets the shit kicked out of him, which we know is going to happen, right? I don't mean, in the election.

I mean, if he is the president, he's going to try to do stuff and there's going to be levels of resistance we've never seen before. And if, let's say, there's a health care bill. And let's say the resistance is so great that Joe feels pressure just to kind of, you know, put some band-aids on Obamacare. That's when the work begins. That's when you have to go out into the streets and let them know, that this is not going to do anymore. It's not going to work. And if we don't do that, if we don't

pull hard, if we don't try to get some, like, what I would call, like, non-racist populism in the Democratic Party, that position will be taken by people on the right. And then I don't see us ever winning another presidential election. So those are my two things. Pull from the left and don't stop after election. No, I totally agree. So as well, I guess the sad theme of this party, For my questions are going to be is I've been rewatching your content. I rewatched all of Eastbound and Down this year. Oh, Eastbound and Down is so good. My favorite comedy of all time and you are the best nemesis to Kenny Powers.

But one of the things I did really feel, though, is Kenny really brought a lot of Trump thoughts to my head. I wanted to see if you had any thoughts on where you see Kenny Powers and Donald Trump having a similarity. Oh, yeah. That's a good question, Jesse. I want that question. I think it was the swimming of the Chapo guys kind of really pointed out that, like,

Danny McBride has really captured, like, Protestantism and evangelicals in America. Like, all of his characters are versions of that. And especially, my God, the righteous gemstones, which is like, it's like, he has a crystal ball and can read and see what's going to happen to Jerry Fall. With the fall. If anything, it's the same thing, though, underplayed the head. Yeah. Yeah, like, if next season he says to his wife, hey, I need.

you to take the bullet for this and say you were shooting on me and don't mention that I was whacking off watching. Like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it would be, yeah. But I definitely think Kenny would, uh, well, I would, I would have to imagine Kenny would probably be voting for Trump. But I would imagine that he would give some kind of context to it, um, when he's talking to Stevie and it's something like, no, I don't fucking like the guy. I think he's a fucking idiot, but I want to be his friend.

I want to go to the white. You know what I mean? Like, he would have, Kenny is not like an idealist. right? He's not an idealogue, right? He's like, I want a border wall. He doesn't give a shit about that. It's whatever gratification of how it can benefit him. Quibona, Kenny Powers. So it's like, I definitely feel like he would, but it wouldn't be so black and white. He would definitely have ulterior motive. And for the record, Ivan Dechenko almost certainly would have been named in the Mueller report at some point. Like, he was at Trump Tower with Rudy at some point, and like,

he would definitely be involved. No question. Now, don't you think Kenny Powers would be a voter for Trump? Well, he would be a jet skier for Trump, which I think is Trump's next thing is like, I want to give a shout out to all my beautiful jet skiers. Are there? Weirr runners. Well, what will we have a good Trump imitation on here? Mine is my Trump imitation. There's, there's, it's not good. There's two. There's a very, very low energy.

Like the RNC, his speech was terrible. I thought it was very low energy. 70 minutes. And my wife pointed out, she's like, he's not standing. He's like full on leaning. He's like leaning on sweating. But then the one, my favorite Trump is the one where he's like rally Trump where he's in a good mood. And he's like giving shoutouts to like, he's like, they say Pete Hanksith isn't handsome. And I said he's very handsome. Like, you know what I mean? That's right. Sticky Trump. Sticky Trump. Casino Don. Casino Don. That's right. No, teleprompter Trump is the worst Trump. Oh, so boring. I'm not even sure Trump's supporters like teleprompter Trump. Someone made a good point. It's like there are no like late night talk show hosts who are mega people. Trump is their late night talk show host. He's doing crowd work.

He's doing crowd work. So they love that. But when he's just reading off, you know, boring stats about how he saved the VA and shit, like they're just like, do you think that Trump TV, right? Which is what Trump will do after this is over will be like, do you think? you'll be on it all the time? Well, I want to say first, full disclosure, I have three different projects in the works at Trump TV. Tell us a little more.

Well, one is just like a straight up kind of. It's a sitcom, actually. It's a sitcom. It's called me and Eric. And it's from the point of view of Eric Trump's stuffed animal. And it's a friend. And it's a little bit like Alf, I would say. But what about how to marry your daughter?

Oh. Oh, how to marry your daughter. Yes, yes, I like that. White-ish. White-ish, yes. You know, a lot of people are like, oh, they're freaking out about the election, which I get. I'm always wrong, guys.

I do think if people do a lot of work and they reach out to their relatives and their friends and their coworkers who are voting for Trump and give them a, you know, please and beg them not to blah, blah, blah. And if Trump doesn't fuck with the election too much, I think Joe Biden will win.

And I think there might be a couple days, where Trump is, you know, teasing. I don't think. I think we have voter fraud. I don't think I can leave. And it's going to make everyone crazy. But I do think, I do think, please God, don't be wrong. He will leave. I think you're right, Molly.

He's going to buy O-A-N and rebranded as Trump TV. And he will be on it constantly. And I cannot wait to see the fucking cast of characters that they get to host. It's going to be like Pete Higgs. Bingo Bongo. Lou Dobbs is ball sack. And like Maria Barteromo, it's going to be just like the fucking biggest group of retrobatts. Dan Bonino.

Oh, Dan Bonino, my favorite, my favorite man with the squarehead. So can you tell us, have you been able to do anything? Are you working on anything during COVID? Yes. Luckily, I write and we sold a animated show kind of a year ago. So, you know, an animated show is kind of the best thing you can. could be working on in the last six months just because it's all kind of remote and stuff. So, you know, I got three little kids. So being a teacher and daycare, homeschool, yeah, that's,

that's been a lot of work. I'm very lucky. There's a lot of people who are in a really bad shape right now, so I'm counting my blessings. 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. Dot the Daily Beast.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast and podcasts like The New Abnormal.

Thanks. Let us proceed with the fucking of that guy. Yeah, my fuck that guy is every fucking social media platform right now that are allowing this stupid, dangerous, fake, bullshit, QAnon, dog crap, lying sack of bullshit. it 6% story to trend. And I hate to even say it's the 6% story because a bunch of Russian bots took a CDC website,

a line from a CDC website out of contacts, and said, only 6% of people who died of COVID really died of COVID. The rest died of something else. Well, of course, when the death certificate says respiratory failure and you had COVID,

guess what fucking killed you? COVID. Anyway, so all the social media platforms came out with this very high money, we're blocking these people movies. And yet, it's still trending on Facebook and on Twitter and all over the goddamn place, because our social media platforms are weaponized against us and they're going to kill us all. That would be my fuck that guy. Thank you very much for coming to my TED Talk.

So my fuck that guy is going to be Steve Scalise because Steve Scalese shared, and you know, Steve Scalise is a member of Congress who was shot by a leftist and had many, many surgeries and had been through a lot, which is why I think a lot of us want to give him the benefit of the doubt. But this weekend he shared a manipulated media that had this guy, Addy Barkin, who has ALS and can't talk, and used his manipulated voice to narrate a fake video about Biden defunding the police or whatever lie it was. And Addie's very sick and can't talk. And it's just a really heartbreaking way to mistreat someone. He defended this morning on Fox News.

I don't know how you defend that. It's so indefensible. And there's been a lot of really... I think he might have taken it down. I see a tweet saying that... Maybe he's taken it down now, but it was up for many hours, and it was really heartbreaking.

See, folks, that's the kind of brutal fact-checking we do here on the new abnormal. Well, look, and I've written a ton about this, more than I really care to even admit, the deep fake shit that is coming in the next 60 days is going to blow your God, damn mind. That's a deep fake.

Molly isn't really answering her doorbell and her dogs aren't actually losing their shit. It's just Antifa trying to make her look bad. 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 JongFast, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studied The Daily Beast podcast at thedailybeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com

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