The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump Shows Complete Inability to Answer a Simple Question

Episode Date: October 20, 2024

The New Abnormal team shines a light on Trump’s strategy when he is asked about a topic he doesn’t want to address.  Plus! Dr. Alice Chen, the founder of Doctors for Harris, joins the Bonus Podcast to talk about the many ways that Donald Trump and the storm of misinformation he brings with him everywhere he goes, is actually incredibly bad for your health and your families. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. 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 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 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. Today we have an extra special guest with Dr. Alice Chen, the founder of Doctors for America, who will talk us about the many ways that Donald Trump and the storm of misinformation he brings with him everywhere he goes is actually incredibly bad for your health and your families. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips. All right.

So here we have daughtering old dementia J. Trump at the Economic Club of Chicago with Bloomberg and her in chief. John McElthwaite. And I'm going to shock you here. He does not demonstrate his mental prowess. Should Google be broken up? I just haven't gotten over something the Justice Department did yesterday

where Virginia cleaned up its voter rolls. and got rid of thousands and thousands of bad votes and the Justice Department sued them that they should be allowed to put those bad votes and illegal votes back in and let the people vote. So I haven't gotten, I haven't gotten over that. A lot of people have seen that they can't even believe it. The question is about Google, President Trump. It's so clear. And shout out to the host who I thought that he did a phenomenal,

job in that entire interview of trying to bring Donald Trump back on track, but also like taking him to task. Because everybody else would have just sat there and been like, oh, yeah, that is, you know, yeah, the Google, that's, you know, whatever. And just gone along with Donald Trump's, like, stream of consciousness. And it's like, let's bring it back to what this was about. So, yeah, it's wild. Yeah, Donald Trump has, we're pretty much down to one talking point now. And it's, it's immigrants it's the dirty brown people are coming here and raping your daughters and taking your jobs etc etc and so every time he gets a question he doesn't care what the question is he just wants to talk about that and he wants to talk about illegal voters and again by that he mainly means immigrants i think

he also means black people in that case but that's all he's got it is an absolute monomania for him I don't think he's capable of having anything else in his head right now. So it's just he has to try to turn everything to make it about stolen election slash immigrants, which for him is they're basically the same story because of replacement theory. But anyway, yeah, he's just gone. I think you're missing one other one, which is when he talks about the J6 rioters, like they're a boy band and he keeps calling them J6. That's true. They're opening up for BTS on their next tour. Yeah.

But yeah, no, you make a great point that any thing he does, like, you know, he pretends this is the weave, but it's really that he can't answer these questions. So he just goes to the thing he can talk about endlessly, which is the dumbest shit ever about the stolen election. Yeah. Rip to Liam Payne, by the way. Yes, yes, Rip to Liam Payne. Okay, well, here's the demented one talking foreign policy now. And as he's demonstrated all week, he's a real master, just total grasp on reality of what's happening here.

I think Zelensky is one of the greatest salesmen I've ever seen. Every time he comes in, we give him $100 billion. Who else got that kind of money in history has never been? Netanyahu. And that doesn't mean I don't want to help him because I feel very badly for those people. But he should never have let that war start. That war is a loser. Ukraine, remember, is not Ukraine anymore.

Every city almost is knocked down to the ground. All those beautiful golden domes. are laying on their side smashed to smithereens. He should never have let that war start? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what we're going with these days. Okay. I guess I'm wrong because my memory was that Russia and Putin invaded Ukraine.

That would be right. A fifth grader could grasp this level of hard policy, but this demented old bat cannot. Mm-hmm. Mm-mm-mm. I mean, this is the same guy that during the debate and a number of interviews, like won't say that he wants Ukraine to win, right? The war.

And so this is just more of the same. This man cannot, like, he cannot win. He cannot win. Like the just the catastrophic dominoes that will fall if he does. It's too much. Yeah. Well, we now get to another chapter in a very sad book, the book of Nancy Mace. Here she continues to debase herself in what I can only imagine is hopes that Trump

realizes J.D. Vance is going to 25th Amendment him and the taxi back from the inauguration and drops him. Here she's going to try to show that she'll stand by her man as she talks to CNN's Breanna Keeler. And last night I want to ask you, this Univision Town Hall,

we just learned that he reiterated his rhetoric and actually went further about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio. He said, quote, they're eating other things, too, that they're not supposed to be. Do you think that rhetoric is helpful? Well, I think that there's a lot of rhetoric that's unhelpful. You're talking about a man.

But I'm asking you about this. I'm asking you about this. If you're going to bring up, if we're going to bring up rhetoric, let's talk about the rhetoric. I want to talk about spring. I want to talk about Springfield, Ohio. How many, how many attempts have they had to try to assassinate him? In Ohio, I mean, there were, there were videos, wacky videos online and there were allegedly police reports. So if we're going to talk about rhetoric, I think we should talk about both sides. A rhetoric from both sides. I am someone whose house has been vandalized three times in the last four years. My car has been vandalized twice. I receive threats on a daily basis. I can tell you there's a lot of rhetoric out there that's not healthy for our country or its citizens.

And what about this particular rhetoric about Ohio? I don't have any qualms about anything that Trump has said about Ohio. I think if we're going to talk about rhetoric, again, let's have a conversation about the rhetoric online, how elected officials are threatened, how there are attempted assassination attempts against Donald Trump and others. This is something that we should have a straightforward honest and bipartisan conversation about. It's something that goes on where I know that Democrat officials are threatened, Republican officials are threatened, because of the violent rhetoric. I'm not worried about Ohio rhetoric. I'm more worried about rhetoric that might get somebody killed. what he has said about Ohio has been false and has arguably endangered people there,

but you have no qualms to be clear, as you said, about his rhetoric about Ohio? I don't have anything, nothing that I've seen about what he said about Ohio gives me any sort of pause. I am worried about violent rhetoric. Even the lies. That puts me and my family in danger. I'm afraid when the mutual media docs where I live, Congresswoman, I hear what you? you're saying about yourself. I care about everybody. I care about everybody. Do you? I absolutely do. And I, you know, and I see it on both sides too. And I've called people out. I call the balls and

strikes. But to my knowledge, no one in Ohio has been threatened because of something Trump has said about Ohio when there have been people that have given interviews about some of the challenges they've had with immigrants that are there. I haven't seen that. I think I've seen more cat memes and jokes about it than anything else. All right, I'll send you some information. Congresswoman, thank you so much. Not I'll send you some information. She could do her own research.

She just provided a masterclass in fuckery. That's what that was. Like you want to talk about Bob and Weaves. Oh, all I saw was something funny like cat memes. Oh, really? Because you didn't see the headlines about the bomb threats. You didn't see the headlines about little children having to be evacuated from their schools. You didn't see the municipality buildings having to be shut down. You didn't see the vandalism

that took place at the hands of your rabid fucking base. Like, miss me with it. And then on top of that, she lies. I mean, she says, well, it's my understanding there have been police report. No, there were no police reports. Well, there was a video online. The video could not have been debunked more quickly or more thoroughly. She is truly pathetic. She's reaching Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio levels of pathetic. Personally, I'd like to thank Mr. Trump, though, for making me relate to the Haitians more. They're eating things they're not supposed to, and so oh, bye. All right, it's been a fun debate week, because there was a bunch of Senate debates.

I think the standout performance of this cycle in the Senate was Colin Allred versus Ted Cruz, so let's watch them go. To respond. Oh, that was really something. I have to say, you can't be for the mob on January 6th and for the officers. You can't. It's not funny because you're a threat to democracy. I was on the Senate, I was on the House floor when we went through the votes. I remember when you objected to the results in Arizona.

Y'all at home might remember where you were on January 6th, what you were doing. I know where I was and I know where he was. I remember when they told us to reach under our seats for these gas masks, I didn't know we had because they had deployed tear gas in the rotunda. The officers locked all the doors. We borrowed the doors the president walks through to deliver the state of the union with furniture that we usually use to hold paper. I texted my wife, Allie, who was seven months pregnant with our son Cameron

and home with our son Jordan, who wasn't yet to. Whatever happens, I love you. I took off my suit jacket, and I was prepared to defend the house floor from the mob. At the same time, after he'd gone around the country lying about the election, after he'd been the architect of the attempt to overthrow that election, when that mob came, Senator Cruz was hiding in a supply closet. And that's okay. I don't want him to get hurt by the mob.

I really don't. This election is his accountability. You cannot just be patriotic when your side wins. If for the first time in 250 years, this project of ours, this shared American project, that we did not have a peaceful transfer of power, the folks responsible have to be held accountable. That's why Liz Cheney has endorsed me as it got involved in this campaign that's saying to Texans everywhere, do not put Ted Cruz back in the position of authority because he's done it once, he'll do it again. Well, that was good.

Yeah. I'm not used to hearing good things. things, Jesse. I don't know how to react. I don't know how to react. I mean, it's nice because my therapist said that it was needed, but I said Jesse would refuse to, you know, to help us during these trying times. I'm starting to feel like Ted Cruz in this situation.

Don't you think, Danielle, that Jesse should give us his credit card number so that we can give it to our therapists? He do. I do. Yeah, unfortunately, it's going to get to Clyde from. Declay. All those things I'm not supposed to be eating. But Alvarez, he did that.

The debate was just shot after shot after shot, particularly the, you know, don't laugh. Republicans want to turn all of what they have done into a joke, separating kids from the border. Oh, January 6th is a love fest. That's Donald Trump's new, you know, new talking point. And what Alvred did is he,

provided the visual context to what was happening inside the chamber. We all saw what was happening outside, but how he walked us through what was happening inside and where this spineless MF or was like no notes, no notes. Texas has a huge opportunity in All Red and, you know, and I hope they take it. Yeah, I mean, I'm skeptical. I feel like every six years or whatever it is, we get our hopes up that Ted Cruz is going to be defeated and he never is. I mean, it would be amazing. And I wish Colin Alred all the luck in the world. And my God, it would be amazing if he actually pulls it off. And yeah, I think, I can't say that I watched that debate from beginning to end, but the various clips that I did watch, he handled himself really, really well. And I think he

showed Ted Cruz for the sniveling weasel that he is. I just don't know in that state if it's going to matter, but boy, I would love so much to be proven wrong about that. I thought what was particularly interesting is Asif and Warnock in previous cycles, I thought were some of the better debate performances, but they very calmly handled rebutting their opponents, whereas All Red, I would say was the most aggressive debate performance. I've seen while also maintaining a very big moral equivalency of drawing contrast between him and Ted Cruz is like, I am going to talk aggressive. I am going to put you in your place repeatedly, but I'm also going to make sure I show that you are immoral and I am moral. And it was really

amazing because I will always say Ted Cruz is a great, great, great debater. There's a reason he always challenges people to debates. He was handled like the bitch he is. Yeah. 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.com pub slash October Surprise. Beast. Pub slash October Surprise. Folks, I am very happy to welcome to the new abnormal Dr. Alice Chen, who is the founder and former executive director of Doctors for America. Dr. Chen, I want to start off today with getting your thoughts as a medical professional on how you think that the reproductive healthcare conversation around abortion, IVF is playing right now in this election. It's one of the first times in my memory

that I can remember healthcare truly being one of the major focal points of an election cycle. How do you think that it's playing out right now? Yeah, so I'm going to answer your question as a doctor as a woman and as a mom. And the country is so polarized in so many ways. When you look at the question of reproductive justice,

When you look at the question of whether women have the freedom to make their own decisions about their own bodies, whether families have the ability to make their own decision about what happens with them, how they're going to sort of have children and when. These are questions that are so personal. And I think a lot of voters are hearing this whole conversation and thinking, gosh, I want to be able to make decisions for myself. I want to be able to have a conversation with my doctor and not have the government looking over my shoulder and making my doctor nervous about having to go to jail for giving me the quote unquote wrong advice. I think a lot of a lot of women and a lot of families are looking at this

issue and saying, gosh, I want to be on the side. All the people are saying, you get to choose. You as a woman, you as a family get to choose what you do with yourself. I think that that is 100% right. As I have watched this play out, it's amazing to me how Republicans in particular feel like they have the authority over women's bodies and women's lives and how they think that we're just going to just, you know, casually fall in line and give up our bodily autonomy, give up our economic autonomy and go back because that's the whole premise of the campaign, which is make America great again. And by again, they mean at a time when women, quote, unquote, knew their place. And that's what I feel like this election is centered around.

It is like what is the place that women find themselves in? And do they want to go backward or do they want, you know, to continue on a path of progress? Exactly. And the other thing is that, you know, say, okay, we're going to blanket ban and everybody who prescribes certain medications and does certain procedures has to go to jail. And they're not taking into account at all, all the many reasons that you might need methotrexate for your various medical needs where if you're having an ectopic pregnancy that you're going to need to remove that pregnancy or you lose your life.

All of the different medical reasons that doctors need to be able to make decisions with their patients. All of that is off the table if you're just banning it all outright. Yeah, and that's their mission. I want to switch gears now and talk with you about what I think is another issue around our health, which is the flood of disinformation that we are being bombarded with and have been, for the last roughly nine years. That this distortion, it started seemingly small with crowd sizes and the Trump administration

lying about crowd sizes, don't believe your eyes, you know, believe what it is that I'm telling you. And then it has manifested and has morphed to the point where on January 6th, 2021, we're watching as plumes of smoke come out of our Capitol building that had been breached by insurrectionists and rioters,

police officers brutally beaten. And Donald Trump tells us, most recently this week, it's a love fest. It was a love fest. January 6 was a beautiful thing. Some of us can look at these moments, and that's just two. We also have the AI image that went viral of a little white girl on a raft with a puppy in the middle of Hurricane Helene. And then the lies that came out after that of.

of FEMA, going to take people's homes and, you know, don't take the money. And now it's costing people their lives and their livelihood. And this is something that began so small nine years ago and is now morphed into something that I feel like is almost unstoppable. Talk to us about how you have seen the growth of disinformation and misinformation and misinformation and how it's harming us. Oh, my goodness. It is harming us in so many ways.

And, you know, I'm a doctor. So I think about health. think about all the different ways that the disinformation is hurting people's help. I mean, we started with COVID, right? Well, we started before that, but with COVID, you know, we knew that masks would save lives. We knew that having vaccines would save lives. And then you have Trump and all of his, all of his people out there saying, oh, no, you don't, you can come to a rally. It'll be fine. Oh, you might die afterward. But you know what? You chose it. You know, you can inject bleach to get yourself over COVID. But like, we have treatments for COVID. We know,

exactly what to do. No, no, no, no. You should take ivermectin, which we give forces. And then you're looking at patients who are like, I can save your life, but they're listening to someone who is not a medical doctor, who is nowhere close to being a medical doctor, saying entirely wrong things, and believing it. You look at, you look at come all the way to now, and you talked about FEMA. I mean, FEMA workers, when there is a hurricane, when there is a flood, when there is an earthquake, when there are bad things that are happening in community, FEMA workers, they leave their home is behind. They leave their lives you home. They swoop into the wear. The help is needed. And it is their job. They put their FEMA jacket on and they come and they help you.

Right? They help you figure out what to do with your flooded house, what to do with the wildfire that burned through your neighborhood. This is what they do. They're not there for glory. They're not there for power. They're just there to help people. And then you have Donald Trump and his allies saying, they're these scary evil people who are out to get you. I will save you from these evil, terrible FEMA people. And therefore, people are not getting help with the recovery. And when you don't get help from recovery when you're in a crisis, like that has a lot of long-term effects on your mental health, on your health, on everything.

Thank you so much for bringing us kind of back to COVID and back to the ways that, again, any other leader would have seen this traumatic moment, this traumatic time in our country and thought to themselves, how can I bring people together? If for no other reason, if for no other reason, then for your own legacy, if for no other reason, not because you're empathetic, not because, right, not because you're sympathetic, no. Let's just say it's for your own legacy. Donald Trump would have had an opportunity to tell people wear a mask. Put my face on it because, you know, he's a grifter.

So, you know, that's what he did. I know, sell the mask, whatever. Sell, you know, sell the mask, whatever it is. But he would have had an opportunity to really be seen as a uniter. But there is something, Dr. Chattain, there is something about him that just can't bring himself to do even the basic decent things. And so in the middle now of another series of historic storms that we know are brought to us by climate change, not only does he denounce climate change, but he put. the very workers who put their own lives at risk, helping people on the ground, now they have to pause efforts over the weekend because of militia threats. Talk to me about that climate of fear

and anxiety that Donald Trump and the Republicans are able to exacerbate. Absolutely. I mean, it's like they see a problem and we know there's a cause and there's a solution. And they'll say, No, no, that's not the cause. It's not a solution. It's those bad people over there, and I am your solution, right? You look at climate change, right? He's talking about phoeming, he's talking about all these, like, things that are, he's just making things up, right? Climate change makes hurricanes more common, right? And so, what is the Biden-Harris administration doing? Addressing climate change. What has Tim Waltson? Address climate change, right? We know how to do this, and we can do it together. This is such a great moment for us all to come

together, figure out how do we make sure everyone still has work, that everyone can be a part of a clean energy economy, be a part of the solution, make sure we are resilient against hurricanes and floods and droughts and whatever is happening in your community. This is such a moment for us to come together, just like the COVID pandemic was. And so this is what we need. We need a leader like Kamala Harris who says we're all in this together. We're all going to figure this out together. And not someone like Donald Trump, like JD vans, who are saying, no, no, those bad guys over there and those bad guys over there. Don't trust your neighbor. Don't trust anybody else.

Just trust me because I have your solution. It's just, it's distracting everybody from the real problems and the real solutions that we can figure out together as a country. The joke was oh, well, the Trump administration, they're operating on Earth 2. The rest of us are on Earth 1. But now it

is over the last, close to a decade, that the gravitational pull has pulled us all onto Earth 2 in this place of crazy. And I want to understand like the amount of work and effort that it takes to kind of keep our heads above drowning with the amount of disinformation that we were are receiving even if we are trying to tread water trying to to stay above the disinformation and the lies talk to us about how it still is

causing harm as a doctor take care of so many different types of people right and i look at folks who you know for example right now it's flu season right and it's It's time to get your flu shot. And flu shots save millions of people getting the flu every year. And they save tens of thousands of lives a year. Then we know this. We know of coming looking at the people who get a flu shot and people who don't get a flu shot.

And people are saying, oh, wait, but I heard that they're scary and they're dangerous and people or it's killing people and all of these things that are not true. And therefore, they're not getting that shot. Every time a patient tells me, no, I'm not sure. I'm a little worried. I think to myself, are they going to end up in a hospital in an ICU and I could have prevented it.

But these folks are out there spreading these lives. You have the same thing when you look at clean air, clean water, clean food. These are things that everybody needs in order to live a healthy life, right? And these are things that like this administration, the Biden Harris administration has worked on, right? We're working on like clean air regulations, cleaner water, getting rid of lead pipes, all of getting rid of pesticides that we know are dangerous for people. The administration has worked on all of these pieces.

And then you have the other side that's saying, no, no, actually like, we're going to fix it, even though we're in the pocket of the chemical industry and a big oil. And we appointed all those folks to positions of power last time. And we will again this time. But listen to us. It's so dangerous on a day-to-day basis and on a long-term basis in terms of our daily health, the way we go about our lives. And then how are we building our country for the future? Yeah.

I think about that, too. I think about the numbers of young people, children who are not getting vaccinated. You mentioned at the top of people, you know, oh, I'm not sure, unsure, whatever. Well, that is trickling down into very low vaccination rates for children for things that they used to get vaccinated for without even thinking about. Measles had started to make a comeback because parents aren't getting their children vaccinated. This idea of living in this alternate world and how it can affect our, health, I think that it's important for us all at this time with weeks until the election is called

to really think about like what the health of our nation will be moving forward. If Donald Trump were to be reelected, where do you think the health of our nation will go? Yeah. So this is such a crucial point and one that I hope like all those listeners out there are going to jot down and talk to your friends and family because that is the antidote, right? that is an antidote to disinformation and misinformation. It is talking to people who are part of your life, who you trust because they are important people to you, and talking about what is the truth and what is actually going on. The bottom line is that Trump is bad for our health. He's bad for our health on so many levels. He's bad for our health because of climate and climate change and his denial of climate change and lack of action or really going backwards on action that we need to do to take care of ourselves and protect ourselves against more hurricanes,

more floods, more power outages, all those things that affect our health and lives. He's bad for health because of all of the misinformation around science. If we have another pandemic again, he's not going to be the one who's going to lead us out of it, right? He's going to be the one who's going to lead us straight into getting more infections and having more problems because he's going to veer right away. Here's the solution. He's going right off and say, I'm going somewhere else and you're all following me, right? He's bad for our health because the safety of our water, our air, our food, he's not regulating them.

He's not, he didn't regulate them before. He's not regulating them in his next term. It's going to be even worse, and we need the leaders who are going to do the right thing. And so as the doctor, as a mom, I just cannot stress enough how much Donald Trump is just terrible for our health. He's terrible for our kids. And we have to go out there and talk to every single person we know, especially in those battlegrounds things, but every single person we know about why this is so, so important. If, in fact, the vice president is able to win,

are you confident in our ability to kind of restore or begin to restore a sense of normalcy as it pertains to our intake of information? I think confident is probably a strong, a little stronger than I feel, but I feel optimistic. I feel optimistic that if we do not hand the megaphone back to this man who just peddles lies and just can't help himself, just cannot stop lying. If we take away that megaphone, I think it deflates the whole movement around whatever we say. We can say

whatever we want, we can spread whatever disinformation we want and we'll just keep climbing higher and higher and get more and more power. And when I look at the way Kamala Harris talks about the country, I see the way that she really digs into issues in ways and that show that she understands how complex they are and how much we have to be thoughtful about the solutions. I really think that having someone like her in the Oval Office in the White House will help us do much better as a country in looking at the challenges that we face and grabbing the opportunities that we have as a country with our eyes wide open and not having this mask over our eyes. I think that you're right. You couldn't have said it better in terms of the mask over our eyes. I think that the way in which we have seen Donald Trump

or the way in which Donald Trump has been presented to us, has brought us to this place of deep disinformation, deep distrust of institution and agency because you would have thought at some point somebody would have warned us, would have called this out and put a stop to it. And the fact that here we are nine years later, hoping and praying, you know, canvassing and texting and donating

and hoping that he doesn't get power again is an extraordinary place for us to be. Dr. Chen, I thank you so much for your insight and your analysis and really, you know, framing up the health issue for us because I think that it's incredibly important. Really appreciate you. Thank you so much. 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 Seamus Calder. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy

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