The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Says Women Love Him Because He Makes Them Feel ‘Safe’

Episode Date: October 13, 2024

The New Abnormal team have skewered the former president’s comments that women love him, calling them “sick on every level.” Plus! Talia Lavin joins the podcast to talk about her new book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus episode of the new abnormal. We thank you so much for being here. Journalist and author Tali Eleven joins us to talk about her new book, Wild Faith, how the Christian Wright is taking over America. But first, let's have some fun. Are we ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Our first clip is very silly.

It's this silly guy who's seen. have been silly boots before his name is Governor Ron DeSantis. He's doing all that he can to not say something nice about Joe Biden's response to the two hurricanes. Response, I know you've been in close contact with the president on these. And it, you know, we don't want to, there's an election coming. And we don't want to politicize this at all. But we all remember Katrina and some of the narratives around what happened. How do you characterize the federal?

response at this point, Governor, right from your point of view. I've worked well with the administration. The presidents approved our request. We're going to be sending post-landfall major disaster declaration requests. I think that that's going to be approved. We leverage whatever resources are available to us to be able to help our people get through this. And that's been my, ever since I've been governor, I've worked with both President Trump and

President Biden. You know, you haven't really seen politics get into these storms. I think we both understand that people's lives are at stake and you got to rise above. You know, that wasn't bad. Yeah, I was expecting worse. I was honestly expecting worse. I thought that he was going to say something like I haven't heard from him or like whatever. That actually was not bad.

But, you know, it's just extraordinary the lengths that they will go to to try not to provide like an actual compliment. and just be like, President Biden has been a really good partner during these catastrophic events that my state has been dealing with. Like, it's just, it's mind-blowing. But that was actually not bad. I'm surprised white boots, you know, did something good there. I think that's the nicest he could have been without getting death threats from Republicans. Oh, shit.

Wow. Yeah. My take was kind of similar is that he remembers what, happened when Chris Christie paled around, quote unquote, with Obama after Hurricane Sandy, and that Chris Christie was then became a rhino because God forbid he came near the Muslim Barack Obama. It's just ridiculous to me that like these people have to tie themselves and knots all the time to one defend Trump and then to try to say the most milk toast response about any of this

that they possibly can. instead of say the truth, which is help is on the way in inspiring people who are in one of the worst moments of their lives. Yeah. And of course, things have gotten so much worse since the Christy Obama thing. I mean, you know, we've talked about it on this show. You've got a whole bunch of Republicans thinking that Joe Biden caused these hurricanes. Oh, dear God. And stories about, you know, FEMA not letting people out of Florida and all this stuff. And so they don't want to hear that, you know, In fact, the Biden administration has put politics aside to help out because that's what you do in a national disaster, unlike, by the way, what Donald Trump did in his administration, despite what Ron DeSantis tried to say there. All right. I'm going to throw you guys for another loop here, begging Donald Trump not to throw his enemies in jail, which really I did not see coming. How will you restore faith in our justice system? A lot of people will say, well, he's just going to do to them what they did to him and get back at them.

A lot of people say that's what should happen. You want to know that. Right. Well, but I think, you know, punitively using government institutions is what got us in this mess in the first place. And our town hall that we did back in February, one of the lines that really resonated, did I think with people is when you said, my revenge is going to be my success. Well, I do believe that, but I will say this. They have started a terrible precedent.

We've never had this. We do have that in third world countries, banana republics, a lot in South America, where they go after somebody politically that's an opponent. We never had it to any great extent, really almost at all. But you're not going to do that. When you get an office, you're going to look at all your political enemies. I want to make this the most successful country in the world. That's what I want to do.

He's full of shit, you know, and like, I don't know how many times that we have to hear that. And you know why this has all been unprecedented with a former president of the United States having 34 felonies and hiding documents and because we've never had a criminal as president of the United States before. So we've never had to, well, okay, okay, let me say. I know. Criminal of this. I know. We've never had an overt criminal. as president of the United States that has just continues to crime in our faces. Donald Trump

turned America into a Banana Republic because he should have been prosecuted and never been allowed to run for office again. But thank you, Merrick Garland, for your year plus of inaction that has us here. I know the framing of this is, you know, even Laura Ingram. And I get that. But no, because she set up the whole question by implying, not by implying, by saying, by saying, by saying, saying that it's true that the Biden administration slash Biden Justice Department, whatever you want to call it, has levied all these charges against Trump for political purposes. You know, she is acknowledging Trump's framing of this. And the fact of the matter is she's lying.

And I'm confident saying she's lying because she's not stupid. She's a lot of things, most of them really bad. But she's not stupid. She knows what she's saying isn't true. And she's still framing it in that way. And that's a choice. She's making that choice to lie to her audience. And so I'm a little over seeing a lot of stories since that clip aired first aired a couple days ago being like, you know, though too much even for Fox News.

Well, no. Not really. Yep. Not really. The thing I will say is, you know, I just really want us to tone down the rhetoric. I want Donald Trump to talk like our Republican mayor in New York, Eric Adams, who once said, instead of my success will be my revenge. He says, my haters are my waiters at the table of success.

You know, just tone it down to something like that. My haters are my waiters at the table of success. Oh, yeah. I have news for all the people who sit at the table's success. They're all indicted right now just like Trump. I was going to say, the table's empty. Yeah, it's a buffet. It's a buffet.

You don't have waiters where he will probably end up going. Jesse, I do have some bad news for you regarding his party affiliation. Really? I didn't notice that I messed that up. I really didn't notice. I had no idea. No idea what I was saying there. No idea. Thank you. All right. Now we go to hell. Here's the most horrifying clip I've played in a while.

Oh, God. This is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu talking to Elon Musk. So if you were, well, you can't be president of the U.S. last time I checked, right? But assume you are. Not officially. Not officially. Okay, so you're the unofficial, unofficial president. Who is the unofficial president?

Elon. There's this new thing that's going on on Twitter that they're saying that if Trump gets in, that Elon is really going to be running the show, and that's what this is in reference to. Either way, what? It explodes like his fucking cyber truck or goes over a fucking cliff because either way, it's going to be non-fucking functioning. It's not as if the wizard behind the curtain actually has a brain in his head. He is the fucking scarecrow.

So, okay, great. I hate these people. Why do you do this to us? Was this a shithead talk? Is that where this is? Is there some series out there that I don't know about called shithead talks? Every time I am faced with the thought of Elon Musk having more power, I think of how much we have failed as a society to tax and not make people this powerful. he basically on Tucker Carlson this week when he said if Trump doesn't want I'll be in prison

My suspicions are is that's because that's what he's doing with America pack is he's doing so much illegal shit with this Giving people $47 to vote in the next election. It's it's fucking disgusting and we should never have given someone this much power No and you know somebody said the other day if Elon Musk was actually on the side of democracy How would you feel? And I still said, and I stand by this, that no one should have this amount of money and this much power. No one. I think it's a travesty and it shows us how capitalism works for the greedy and the grifters. And it's just, it's, it's honestly, it's very sick. It's very, very sick. And also looking at him makes me sick. But I digress. Have you guys heard of this guy Donald J. Trump? You know, he's the protector of women, and he's going to tell you all about it. And it wouldn't resonate at all with the other side. You have to have the right messenger.

Somebody said, oh, we love Trump policy, but we don't like Trump. I think they do. They said the women don't like me. I think women love me because they want to be safe. And with me, they're safe. With other people, they're not safe. It's true. Was E. Jean Carroll safe with him?

Was E. Jean Carroll safe with him? where the other, I don't know, 20-some-odd women who came out and said that they were sexually harassed and or assaulted safe with Donald Trump. Donald Trump is a sexual predator. Yeah. And the fact that he is openly allowed after being an adjudicated rapist to run for the presidency is despicable. And to listen to fucking women in that audience, like woo-hoo. and clap. These are the same ones that wore t-shirts that said he can grab me wherever he wants.

Mm-hmm. It's sick. It's sick on every level. It's sick on the personal level because of all the stuff you just said. And it's also sick on the political level because there is nothing about Donald Trump that is going to keep women in particular safe with abortion bans and, and restrictions on reproductive freedom and reproductive medicine in general. And it's just, you know, Yeah, promising immunity to cops who have a high propensity for domestic abuse and things like that. Yeah, really nice things that are really going to keep women safe. Yeah. Well, speaking of the ladies, I have to say, y'all, I think we underestimated Fox News as Jesse Waters.

Oh, God. Because right here, he's going to demonstrate that maybe he has just a little more braid that we thought because this is one of the best trollings I've seen in a long time. And I should say he's here with one Santa Monica Gerbils, Stephen Miller here. We just have to address the elephant in the room. We're getting a lot of texts from women about Miller and his appearances and his appearance. Our audience at prime time believes you're some sort of sexual matador. What do you have to say for yourself? Well, I'll make you the advice to any young man that's out there.

I'm married now. I have children, but I wasn't married that long ago. I was single. I was in the market. If you're a young man, it's very important in election season, who's looking to impress ladies to be the alpha, to be attractive. The best thing you can do is to wear your Trump support on your sleeve. Show that you are a real man. Show that you are not a better, right?

Be a proud and loud Trump supporter, and your dating life will be fantastic. Are there no mirrors on Earth, too? Look, I've said this before. On his home planet, Stephen Miller is considered quite attractive. I said that repeatedly. So I think he just, that, that's, you know, that's the culture he grew up in. And it doesn't matter that here on earth, he looks like a reptile creature out of a John Carpenter movie. Or, or Skeletor from He Man.

Yeah. This fanboying that they are doing with one another about looks and alpha male and, and sexual, virality and all it. It's really like distorted and crazy. Oh, yeah. Especially since it runs contrary to fact, which is that all of these people, yeah, all these people complain to every writer who will listen that they can't get dates. Yeah. And they specifically, as one of the reasons, give the fact that they are Trump supporters. Yes. And they say that women don't want to date them because they're Trump supporters and how unfair that is. Yep. They want socialism in the dating economy.

Yeah, no, absolutely. That's the point of turning back Roe v. Wade and getting rid of no fault divorce and, you know, putting women in economic peril by not allowing them to control their own bodies is so that they can be in a situation where they are once again dominant. Because in an open actual like dating market where women have agency, they don't choose in cells. They don't choose the fucking freak shows. So, yeah, they're not doing. well on the sites. I don't know which direction you have to swipe, but I would just swipe so they go

in the trash. Jesse, I have to correct you again, they don't want socialism for dating. They want fascism for dating because socialism for women would mean that they own the means of reproduction. That's a good point. I'll take that correction. The biggest election of our lifetimes is less than a month away, and the news is only going to get crazier and more important as the countdown continues. As each day brings new headlines and critical campaign updates, the future of the country may be decided by the stories that cut through the noise and capture our attention during the next few weeks. If you want to stay informed through all of the twists and turns, The Daily Beast's new daily newsletter, October surprise is the reliable resource you're looking for. It will keep you in the know on

everything that's happening as we race toward election day. Sign up now at Beast. Pub slash October surprise. Beast.pub slash October surprise. In the intro to her excellent new book, Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is Taking Over America. Talia Lavin writes, If you are reading this book, you are an enemy combatant in a war of the spirit

that began before your birth and is being waged every day by determined ordinary people you wouldn't look twice at if they passed you in the street. Wild Faith is out October 15th, and Talia joins me now. Thank you so much for being here. Oh, my pleasure. Thank you so much, Andy. Absolutely. So I want to

start with something you talk about early in the book, and that's the satanic panic, which those of us who are old enough remember all too well from their sort of heyday in the 1980s and maybe into the early 1990s. But one of the things you talk about is how it never really ended. And this feels like such a super important point and that not enough people understand or are talking about. Yeah, I agree. I make brilliant observations throughout this book. which you should buy. But my general theory of moral panics is that they never die. They just hibernate.

They go on hiatus and then they return. They're inherently cyclical by nature. And something we saw in the interim, sort of the during and the after of the satanic panic in particular, was all of this evangelical literature that was, you know, super, super bestselling within its niche, which, again, is like this totally siloed media environment. But what we saw, in essence, was all of this literature about demonology really becoming super mainstream, these sort of thrillers where demons are fighting for the soul of a town. You know, one such series was written by Frank Peretti. It's called This Present Darkness.

I would describe it as like unintentionally comical. I would agree. Yeah. And, you know, we've seen there are these like demonology sort of taxonomies like pigs in the parlor. but has been selling steadily since the 70s. So in essence, what we're seeing on the Christian right is this viewpoint where Satan and his minions are imminent in the world. They are present.

They are impacting daily life and politics on a very consistent basis. And that, you know, harks back to the segment of the intro you read, where in essence, everything is viewed through the lens of spiritual war. that it's manifest in everything, particularly in politics. And so you wind up with this incredibly dark Manichaean worldview. And it can really, it's like the satanic panic stuff can break out at any time. Just because in essence you're looking at people who's, you know, possibly even primary lens on the world is through the lens of conflict with Lucifer. I want to keep going on this a little bit because I think it's something, and you mentioned this,

in the book, you say that popular media, and I would include a lot of journalists in that, the attitude that is taken towards these beliefs is, as you describe it, gentially amused condescension. And I think that is 100% true. And it's also, it's just a failure to accept that they believe these things literally, that it is spiritual warfare, it is a literal battle between themselves who they consider the forces of good slash God against their enemies who are literally the agents of evil or of Satan. As something you point out in the book, when the Christian right refers to someone like Anthony Fauci as a demon, they are not being metaphorical, are they?

No, and like demoncrats is quite a literal appellation. If we're talking about media, ooh, complicity or failure in this arena, I mean, that is a long and ongoing saga. It's an interesting and pretty grating combination of sort of taking evangelicals at their word when they say they're the moral guardians of America and sort of the people who are keeping. Like family values. Yeah, family values, the people who are safeguarding America's purity. And there's the sort of naive acceptance of that unearned to my mind moral authority. There's also a commensurate and very much parallel. Of these people are unsurious rubs.

And also the most prominent among them must be sort of cynically not believing in what they say they believe. And I am a very firm proponent. And in my first book, Culture Warlords, I hung out in neo-Nazi spaces a lot. And basically, my take is if someone is telling you what they believe, they tend to believe that thing. If someone tells you they are pursuing an ideology, that generally is because they are pursuing that ideology. So, yes, these beliefs are very literal. These beliefs very much shape worldviews and shape everyday and political behavior. And I think that that is really discounted.

So often, you know, we in the media will assume that everyone essentially has our own kind of secular rationalist perspective. There are very few reporters from evangelical or ex-evangelical backgrounds, vanishingly few, frankly, national reporters with some notable and excellent exceptions. So what you have is sort of this simultaneous granting of unearned credence. And then at the very same time, you have this condescension, this sort of inability to take differing beliefs seriously, because they seem outlandish and very well they might. But you did not grow up in the context that these folks did. And to them, your lack of concern about this existential conflict is as outlandish as their principal concern about it.

They're like, how are you so sanguine about this obvious demonic takeover of our public institutions? Well, and also, again, as you point out in the book, because to them this is literally, spiritual warfare and their enemies are literal demons, pretty much anything and everything they do is justified, whether it's banning books, trying to erase queer and trans people, trying to steal elections, calling in bomb threats to hospitals, committing acts of violence at abortion clinics or murdering doctors who perform abortions, all of that is fair game for a large segment of these people, is it not?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, a phrase that I've developed over the course of the three years or so, I spent researching this book is there's no such thing as hypocrisy in a holy war. I mean, if you consider that the stakes are this high, right? What wouldn't you do to defeat Satan? Like, what would you decide was too far in defeating, like, the fallen angel himself, Lucifer, how far would you decline to go? I mean, and, you know, we're really seeing that even this week. Like, I mean, when you write like a whole book and spend years researching like a particular political dynamic. Of course, you will see that dynamic represented everywhere.

It's like when you've just learned a new word and you're like, oh, wow, why didn't I notice how often people use the word pecuniary or whatever. What I'm seeing is, first of all, that the Trump campaign has fundamentally adopted a religious narrative around it. And we saw that profoundly in the recent event in Butler, Pennsylvania, which, where essentially there was this like martyrology cult around Donald Trump, where he was presented as a living murder who had been saved by God, you know, in order to be the salvation of the United States.

I mean, that was really the presentation that was offered. And so it was this explicitly religious framing of Trump and Trumpism. So that's sort of its own, you know, you can you can take that or leave it, but there are many people who earnestly believe it. And then, you know, you have Mike Johnson, who is as Speaker of the House, the most powerful evangelical in America, who is at this very moment declining to bring Congress back into session to provide hurricane relief. And you may very well say, oh, you know, what happened to Christian charity? What happened to Christian kindness? Again, I would say, don't fall into the trap of sort of allowing these people to define themselves as the sort of unbelled.

for snow-white guardians of morality just because they're real weird about sex. Mike Johnson is acting tactically within the context of the Holy War that he very much believes himself to be waging. In other words, he is making a calculated decision as someone who very much has been quite open about wanting to create a kingdom of Christ on earth, someone who has wanted to put power back in the hands of Christians, explicitly espousing this worldview, which is sometimes called dominionism, which is basically the way to make the U.S. a Christian nation, is to thoroughly erase, I mean, frankly, not that the firewall between church and state was ever particularly persuasive, but to explicitly create a theocracy in the U.S.

And I don't know about you, but I don't want to live in a democracy. No, I'll pass on that as well. Yeah, it tends not to work out well for people who are not of that religion. Yeah. Among other problems. I mean, it's also fundamentally incompatible with democracy, the roots of the Christian right in literal segregationism means it's also a direct threat to multiracial democracy. But at any rate, what we're seeing in Butler, but also any number of these Trump campaign, context is really this framework of spiritual war on the national stage. And I think we can view

Johnson's decision to essentially politically hamstring Kamala Harris by hanging disaster response failures on her neck while essentially refusing to sanction the budget for it. That's a tactical decision in a holy war. It's like some of you may die, but we'll get our kingdom of Christ on earth. It's a crusade. It's a holy war. And within that context, there's only absolutism, but there is no hypocrisy. Yeah, and they're in the business of saving souls, not lives, I guess. I want to talk about something you get into heavily in the book. The Christian rights strategy, it feels like so much of it revolves around controlling children and controlling women slash human sexuality, because for them, that seems to be one and the same thing. One of the examples you've given the book, which I did not

realize, I didn't understand how much of the current conservative vogue for eliminating no-fault divorce arises from the Christian right. Oh, yeah. And you see this in the person of Mike Johnson, who is in a covenant marriage, which is a very specific type of marriage that's like legally relevant in, I think one or two states, Louisiana being one of them, which essentially is a voluntary doing away with no-fault divorce, where you have to sort of have this mandatory counseling. and this long waiting period. It's not that easy to get divorced in the U.S. right now, even in the supposed halcyon days of divorce.

It's painful and long and protracted, even in a very simple scenario where there's not a ton of property to divide. But, yeah, this obsession with eliminating no-fault divorce, which we see crop up over and over in GOP state party platforms. There was even, you know, a push included in the 20th, 16 National Party platform, which I'm like, okay, your guy has been divorced like so many times.

But, you know, fault could be found, I suppose. In essence, what you see. And this is also consonant with some of J.D. Vance's statements where he talks about, you know, women should stay in violent marriages. He has made that statement. There is this constant denigration of divorce. You know, you have people from focus on the family saying God hates divorce in every case. You have these absolutely grim marriage manual saying, you know, die to yourself and your own needs.

Sacrifice yourself at the altar of God so you can remain married to this like shitty man who makes you feel bad. So this is the uncompromising view of marriage that you see in the Christian right. And because this is fundamentally a theocratic movement, which seeks to impose its specific religious values on the nation as a whole and is unabashed about that. and very open about that. Hence you see no-fault divorce. I mean, one thing that's striking, though, is when you look at the results of the three-decade battle to introduce no-fault divorce,

i.e. to end these laws where you had to go to a court and prove adultery or physical abuse in order to get divorced, like simply being unhappy, what did not suffice, is that there was this drastic decrease in femicide, killing of women. obviously also domestic abuse and suicide rates fell among both men and women, but particularly women. I mean, what the proposal is when it comes to taking away no-fault divorce, as if women are racking up divorces like they're candy and it's not like, oh, the problem now is, you know, just every lady has been divorced like seven times.

I mean, come on. It's a very cruel and femicidal solution in search of a problem. But it does fit with the overall, you know, and I've seen this expressed so many times by people aligned with the Christian right that, you know, sex should have consequences, which is weird. Yeah. Like, that sex is sort of this arena of mortal sin. It's God's business. He is very invested in what you do in the bedroom. and if one of the consequences of sex is death, you know, and if one of the consequences of marriage is death, that is acceptable because, you know, we're dealing in the arena of the soul and mortal sin.

And so, again, this goes back to just what we were saying at the beginning, that these are fundamentally different and incompatible world views held by this, you know, these tens of millions of Americans who are this incredibly organized political movement. that has very outsides influence in the Republican Party and has been building power for 50 years in a very systematic way and also trying out lots of things and seeing what sticks on the wall. And, you know, that has a commanding majority in the Supreme Court.

The conservative majority is not just conservative, but also overtly religious. At this point, I mean, Amy Coney Barrett grew up in a Catholic cult and so on. So we really reached this apotheosis of their power. They are coming from a worldview and a viewpoint in which everything is colored through the lens of spiritual warfare,

war for the soul of the country and everyone in it. And then that is simply just not the worldview of the majority of Americans. It's difficult to comprehend, but it is true and it is earnestly believed, and it is absolutely drilled in to people from their earliest days to approach politics like this, in this completely absolutely.

and fundamentally religious way. We've seen it in the Inquisition and in all sorts of contemporary theocracies. When you mix politics and religion, you get this burning zealotry because you're trying to legislate souls. The book is Wild Faith, How the Christian Right is taking over. It is out October 15th. It's fantastic. It covers a whole bunch of things we didn't have time to get into, including tracing the

rise of the Christian right from back in the 1970s. Talia, thank you. so much for being here. I really appreciate it. Oh, yeah. It was my pleasure. And if you enjoyed the dulcet tones of my voice, I narrated the audiobook, which you can pre-order. And thanks again. I'm happy to come back anytime and talk about messed up, fucked up, horrible shit happening in our new abnormal. So thank you. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of the new abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and

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