The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump’s Election ‘Coup’ Is More Like a Fake Orgasm

Episode Date: November 13, 2020

Does Donald Trump even know what a coup is? Doubtful, which is one of the reasons, in this episode of The New Abnormal, that co-hosts Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast don’t believe whatever nonsense the president is pulling counts as one. That, and the fact that the military needs to support said coup and they won’t. “They may be telling him that [they are], but it is the fake orgasm of coups. They're making noises that sound real, but it's not real,” says Rick. Still, the scammer-in-chief and his GOP minions are persistent, and asking for money to help fund these state lawsuits. (“If you wrote this in a Hollywood script about a family of presidential grifters, it would be too on the nose,” adds Rick.) The Beast’s National Security reporter Spencer Ackerman makes his TNA debut to explain the lead up to Mark Esper’s departure and how the Pentagon is basically planning to f*ck Joe Biden. “I'm not the guy who does the comforting stories,” he laughs. Then, columnist and Veep producer Frank Rich tells the crew the ways Trump is much more incompetent than Selina Meyer and Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania John Fetterman makes a very strong case against there being voter fraud in the state. Plus! Rick explains how Trump’s presidency is like a robot floating through space and Molly gives a new name to his followers. Hint: It has the word cult in it. 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, and 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. Hello, Rick Wilson. Good afternoon, Mallory Talk Fast.

We went two days without podcasting. And yet, I feel whole again. What did you do during those two days? Oh, you know, I don't really have much going on, so it's been quiet. You know what the president did during those two days? Tweeted? Tweeted. Issued a variety of ludicrous tweet threats and empty boasts of President von Munchausen,

basically. Well, also, he did watch a lot of television. As one does, if you're Donald Trump. And then he did go to a Veterans Day event at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. For a remarkable six minutes, I am so proud of Little Donnie. I've never seen him without an umbrella, and he did not use an umbrella. So I'm not sure what to make of that. I've changed my whole view of him. right? And the hair was sprayed to the health.

The hair was basically sprayed down with some sort of industrial level or industrial level adhesive because he showed no signs of the rain falling down on him. Now, some would say that's just a sort of mystical aura that surrounds him for his godlike presence, or it's aquanette. I think like the last two days I've gotten, and actually Margaret Sullivan wrote a really smart piece about this in The Washington Post, the idea that is this a coup, is this not a coup, how do we cover a coup? Something that is like the president pretending to maybe threaten a coup if he could, but he sort of knows he can't, so maybe he's just trolling. Make our audience feel better, Rick Wilson.

The upside of this is that Donald Trump doesn't understand what a coup is. There's a really fundamental principle here. Definitionally, to pull off a coup, the military has to support you. The military does not support Donald Trump. The idea that Donald Trump's stooge is that he's installed in the Defense Department are going to somehow order active duty troops into the street to enforce the Donald's will. They may be telling him that, but it is the fake orgasm of coups. They're making noises that sound real, but it's not real. I think that it's interesting to see a situation like this where it's like we know it's undermining the very roots. And earlier, I talked to Masha Gessen about this. It's undermining the very roots of democracy, right? Sure is. And yet,

it's also kind of he's doing it for the brand. Look, he is doing this for three big reasons. And I've become more and more convinced of this because I have gotten so fucking many emails and text messages for Trump fundraising appeals to my to my dumper account that we use to gather those things. Those appeals are so lurid and so insane. And so only you can stop this deal in Pennsylvania where those people voted in Philadelphia, those people with that. color, skin, you know how they are. The whole drama queen hair tearing bullshit trying to convince the rubs. When you read the fine print on those emails, it says, unless you give $8,000 or above, the money goes into debt retirement for the campaign, not for the legal defense fund. And so you have to

laugh at this thing because there's no there there. There's no actual meaningful effort to do this. the lawyers that he's hired, as much as they seem to be willing to incinerate the basic fabric of democracy, they also seem to not be sending their A-team in because judges are laughing them out of court in Arizona, in Wisconsin, in Michigan, and in Pennsylvania, because the idea that these cases they're bringing have any merit is just absurd. I think that the fundraising part of the grift is really a big deal right now. The fact that they're saying they have to retire campaign debt means there's campaign debt. Right. I'm sure there's a lot, right? I mean, isn't that sort of the Trump brand? Yeah, it's very much the Trump brand. It's rack up a giant bill, skip out of town before the debt collectors come. This is so on point for Donald Trump and his family and their crime enterprise.

Again, if you wrote this in a Hollywood script about a family of presidential grifters, it would be too on the nose. But I also think that there's something we really have fully considered here is that like a robot drifting through space, it's still making me. motions. It's still doing things. It's still programmed to have certain functions, but it's basically dead. And it's going to drift through space for a long time making noises. Maga! Fraud! Winning Vigley! But it won't change the orbital velocity of this thing into the sun. It's done. But it's not dead to its supporters. Look, in World War II, when American forces deployed across the Pacific, okay? They would build air strips on these times. tiny little islands in the Pacific. And all those islands at the time were indigenous tribes who had never seen an airplane or a radio or a generator or a Jeep.

Cargo cults. The cargo cults. And so when American forces departed, they would build bamboo replicas of jeeps and airplanes and helicopters and tents made out of bamboo to look just like the American tents. There's a cargo cult in the development around Trump right now. And that cult will go on for a long time. because of this is an almost religious fervor on the part of his followers. And so that cult will continue. It will drive for many, many years, a group of people who were the true believers. They will never stop dreaming about it. They will never stop saying, oh, if only, they will never stop having these fantasies that they saw the only moment of greatness in American history. And that they were the ones who touched the hem of the robe of the god king.

So that makes me think that Junior can't recreate this. Well, look, Trump is suing generous in so many ways. He's so unique in so many shitty ways. And Trump grew up in that page six gossipy tabloid culture of New York, transitioned to television, built this character he played for a generation to the American people. And it's hard to duplicate it. Now, I do think Junior, it poses a lot of risks because Junior, speaks the current version of that, as I always say, he speaks fluent asshole. And he knows

what the current Republican base wants, which is not anything close, by the way, to substance. They want fury. They want fuck you. They want the extended middle finger. They wanted to be the avatar of their pissy inferiority complex. You will see a bunch of Roger Davis's standing outside the hospital window, like in Bob Roberts, staring up, waiting for the light to come back on. So, Molly, have you been following the mysterious recount process? Yes, we're the finest Republican lawyers. Did you notice that they're finding tens of thousands of illegal voters? And by tens of thousands, I mean to say...

Ten. None. I mean, I just find the whole thing to be completely unsurprising in every way. And I'll tell you the big reason why. Voter fraud is really hard to do at scale. Voter fraud is always like a one-sie-to-sy thing where some like local precinct guy will have like yeah, I got my cousins voter registration coming to my house. You know, they'll do two or four or ten or whatever, but it doesn't scale.

And this country actually has pretty good election systems. Overall, our election systems work pretty well. Yeah, they're static in all of them, but they're not disasters. And the predicate of the Trump lawsuits has been that there's some massive wave of illegal or improper ballots. And I think it's charming. Their lead law firm that's made $20 million off of them has been saying, we're not representing Mr. Trump in any allegations of voter fraud.

No, just in a million other areas of voter misconduct that you haven't, you didn't use the word voter fraud because it has a specific legal definition to the courts. Wasn't Jones Day saying that they only represented the Republican, the GOP of Pennsylvania, and not the Trump campaign? Yeah, it's like saying, I represent the bath party, not Saddam Hussein. Right. I think it's interesting. I mean, I also wonder, like, do these people know how Trump pays lawyers?

I hope they figure it out. But, you know, there's only one group of people that can't get fucked by Donald Trump. And that's television because all the money's up front. There's no credit in buying ads on TV. But they've sent people as a matter of course in Trump's business career. So these consultants on the campaign, I have. I hope they didn't believe that Bill Steppian was going to just go, it's all good, we got it, we got the money.

I don't know what you guys are talking about. I just read a report from Chanel Rihanna of O-A-N that says Dominion's voting machines have counted nearly a million votes for Joe Biden that he wasn't supposed to have. Well, okay. I think Chanel is a time-limited flavor. She may be Mrs. Donald J. Trump Jr. someday. But yeah. You know, I keep going back to that Matt Gates thing, man.

You mean him tweeting hard eyes at Tiffity? Can you imagine the dynastic character of the Trump family? I'm trying to like analogize him as like the son of some, or the son of some duke who gets who the mad king says, marry my daughter and we will elevate your family and your life. How much money do we put on that he takes their name? I am Matthew of Trump. So, I mean, I hesitate to say that anyone in this Republican Party is good in any way.

But one of the things that Trump and his many allies in his Trumpy White House have been trying to keep Biden from getting the Presidential Daily Brief, which, as you remember, Trump gets in crayon. No, Molly, let's be fair. Sometimes they perform it as a tableau vivant. Right. Occasionally, they use claymation figures. It's not just crayon. But Joe Biden might actually read the PDB, which nobody in Trump world wants. And so they're trying to keep him from getting it.

And some Republicans have actually spoken up against this, including... Jared wants it for investment purposes. But yes, including Lackford and also Susan Collins. So Susan Collins and Jim Langford have come out. There's a lot of muttering inside the caucus right now. And there are a lot of people who are convinced that McConnell is telling them, the truth, which is this is a play to keep the voter enthusiasm up for the Georgia Senate runoffs. I don't know how you sustain that, that line of bullshit, because...

Till January. January is coming. The elections on the 5th. It's going to be really hard to convince voters that you're going to try to hold this voter fraud horseshit together long enough for it to be effective. They're going to have a come down really soon now. And you think that'll affect the Georgia runoff? I do think it'll affect the Georgia runoff. I absolutely do.

I feel like the calculus here is that Republicans are hoping that Trump will get involved in Georgia. Do you think he will? I have mixed feelings on it. Part of what I'm thinking is he will just say, fuck you, I'm too lazy. And if the Republican senators keep breaking off, I do think he'll be very pissy. He may well not. Mitch is sort of making a very big gamble here. He is making a very big gamble here. And I think there's a certain degree to which he's not in a great spot right now. Georgia flipping from a red to blue state. And it's not terribly blue yet. A flipping drummer red to blue state in this election, both with the African-American vote revving up so high,

and with the suburban white former Republican female vote breaking so hard. There's a part of him right now, I think, that's considering whether or not this is a viable strategy. And whether he wants to put his fingerprints on two races that may be the coda, the sad coda for his administration. I mean, what we've seen a lot in this election is that people voted against Trump, but they didn't really do the Democrats any favors down ballot. So I'm curious to know why that this would be different. That's the question here. It's going to be a matter of if McConnell can try to frame the race for Republican voters

as it's this or the apocalypse. Maybe they have a pathway. I suspect what they're going to try to do is say, Reverend Warnock is black. Did you notice he's black? Also, he's black. Reverend Wernock's black. Also, he's a black pastor who's black. I suspect that's going to be the underpinning.

strategic basis there. They're going to try to run Purdue as like, he's a basic bitch Republican. Don't be afraid. Right. How can you run Kelly Loughler as like a crazy QAnon Kelly? And then Purdue as like the normal guy. How do you run those two people in the same runoff? It's a fascinating question. It's one that I don't think they've solved for it yet, to be honest.

I think they've got a conception that they can get away with it by saying, you know, It's this or Mitch McConnell can't give you more judges. It's this or the apocalypse. And I do believe that the contrast between Loughler and Purdue has a through line, and that is they are both corrupt. They both sold stock and made investment decisions based on proprietary briefings about COVID. And I think that's one of the main reasons she didn't end up leading the pack here. Before that, I thought she would probably clear the runoff.

See, we had Reverend Warnock on the show, and I thought he was amazing and very inspiring. And, you know, he's the pastor in Martin Luther King's church. Oh, I know. No, I'm well aware. I'm just telling you what they're going to do. But don't you think that black turnout can be juiced by having an exciting black senator? I do. Both sides are going to basically try to frame this race as a referendum on Mitch McConnell.

And I think that's largely correct. But I think we have to expand the throttle or expand the aperture a little bit and frame it as it's not just a race against about Mitch McConnell. It's a race about whether Mitch McConnell gets to continue Trumpism. And if you frame it that way, I think you replicate a lot of your turnout. I think you redo a lot of the things that helped turn the state blue in the first place. I also think there's a big opportunity here. Fred Wellman, my vets coordinator, he came. back to me yesterday and said, there's 750,000 veterans in Georgia. It's a lot. Yeah. 268,000 of them

are African American. 40,000 of them are African American women. Oh, wow. Good for them. One of the highest concentrations of female vets anywhere in the country. And we're going to make sure to talk to those people because this is a real and I think very compelling turnout space because veterans have turned against Trump and veterans of color with the scale. And, they're out in Georgia, you activate half of that number, okay? You are in real business. That's a big pad. So it's going to be a very interesting, it's going to be a fascinating race. It's going to be a difficult race. I'm not going to soft peddle it. It'll be a hard race. It's still a red state in a lot of ways. And there will be a temptation to push Reverend Warnock in particular far, far, far, far,

far, far to the left by people on the left. But I saw Reverend Warnock on morning, Joe, this morning, and he was pretty deft about handling it. And he just said, you know, we're going to go back to this argument that we're just going to have all the time now. If Democrats' message better, they won't have this problem, you know. And I mean, I know we disagree on this, but I do think, like, you know, I was listening to Alyssa Slotkin the other day. I'm talking about, you know, one of the problems I do think in the Democratic Party is that there isn't enough leadership from the Midwest. I completely agree. And I think that the idea that I've beaten, my head against the wall on, you have to pick candidates that work for the states and districts you're

running in. Right. They can't come out of ideological central casting and say, the guy in Massachusetts needs to look just like the guy in Missouri, because they better not. But I also think that Democrats need to work on voter registration and all of the nuts and belts of party stuff that they never do when they have a Democratic president. Right. There's a whole lot of basic bitch organizing principles that often get washed away. People get involved in a million other genius ideas that aren't the fundamentals. Yeah.

I mean, the Democrats want to win the state of Florida, as I begged them for for, I don't know, God knows five years now. Spend all your money for two years on voter registration. Don't even bother, you know, pouring millions of dollars into long-shot races. Spend all your money on voter registration for a couple of years. It'll pay a huge dividends.

Huge, huge dividends. Spencer Ackerman is a senior national Security correspondent for The Daily Beast and the author of the forthcoming, reign of terror. Talk to me, what the fuck is going on in the Pentagon? What's going on is a purge. What we still don't know, and I want to be really clear about what we don't know here, is what that purge is ultimately for.

So to back up, on Monday, Trump fired Mark Esper, the, by any reasonable measure, loyalist defense secretary. Esper, however, broke with Trump in June during the Black Lives Matter protest wave when Trump wanted to use the military under what's called the Insurrection Act, which is essentially a way to respond to protesters with infantry. And Esper very belatedly recognized the problem with this. It's important to remember, however, that the first day that Trump, you know, called for this. Esper, in fact, backed him up on a call with state governors and said that we need to, quote, dominate the battle space by which we met American streets filled with American citizens. After a wave of criticism, Esper in June reverses his position and says

that's inappropriate and has sort of been on life support with Trump ever since. And on Monday, Trump finally, you know, pulled the plug. And instead of, as seems to be the legal procedure here, elevating the Deputy Defense Secretary in Esper's Place, he puts in the National Counterterrorism Center Director, Chris Miller. And in addition to Miller, he puts in a bunch of kind of MAGA hyper-loyalists, including people who have said really disgusting things about Islam and who helped Devin Nunes concoct a bunch of phony intelligence scandals. So that's sort of where we are now, and we're waiting to see, I should also mention, that they also put in the NSA's new general counsel, a former Michael Flynnade on the NSA named Michael Ellis.

There are no heroes here, I think it's fair to assume. So some of our worst fears, though, are that Insurrection Act versus, today there was the report that Iran now has 12 times the enriched uranium. and that they'll go for that war. Do you have any concerns that are in you about what this may all mean? Yeah, so that's why I wanted to start off by saying we don't yet know what this is for. A range of sort of rumors and speculation has been flying, and I've been talking about this with current and former defense officials, and one that remains a kind of active concern is that Trump is gearing up for a final military strike on Iran.

And that's a live possibility. I don't know how likely it is at this point. Why? Well, among other reasons, Mike Pompeo is on his way for over a week-long trip that he leaves for tomorrow, to Saudi Arabia, to Israel, and the UAE, which is the anti-Saudy coalition. Just a couple days ago, Pompeo approved an absolutely massive package, something like $30 billion of F-35 fighter jets and armed capable drones to the UAE as well. So one explanation for why people worried about this is because it would kind of be a last shot

to kind of destroy any possibility of returning to the Iran deal, which in its kind of broader application is about not just stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but ensuring that there is some kind of lowered temperature on hostilities between these two very active adversaries. See, I always feel like with this administration, legislation is the last thing they'll ever do. Not that this is legislation, but I'm always surprised at how little action they actually take, which is why I feel like it's unlikely. But am I wrong? Am I overly optimistic?

Well, I think just a lot of people are very concerned by how the entire Pentagon leadership pretty much, with the exception right now of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and also the Deputy Defense Secretary has just turned over in a rapid fashion when Trump has lost the election. There are other speculations about what's going on here. Among them, one I think is particularly plausible given the placement of Cash Patel, the former Nunes aide and Ezra Cohen-Watnik, the former Mike Flynn-Aid, and Michael Ellis at NSA, the former Michael Flynn-Aid as well, is that they're going to rummage through a whole lot of intelligence. So they have stuff that they can provide to either Republican legislators or conservative-friendly media that can be the basis for kind of

however many years worth of attacks on the Biden administration incoming. And I think that's that makes a lot of sense. Right. Strikes is a lot of plausibility. And also there's the possibility that with them in place during what will become the transition, they can also bottleneck information from being passed on, certainly from being passed on as long as they're in place. And that can also gum up the intelligence picture when there's a presidential handoff. What I haven't heard what is obviously top of mind for a whole lot of people is the question of whether like the point of this is to execute a coup and keep Trump in power militarily. And everyone who I've talked to who knows Chris Miller, who's a former Green Beret, who then went

on to be on the Trump National Security Council is that they don't think Miller will do that. They think that Miller's got a reputation for probity and integrity. What none of them are able to really adequately explain to me so far that I've found is like, so why is he doing this? Why is he decided that he's going to preside over this purge

and allow all of these people who have some pretty questionable reputations to come into these senior positions? I don't have a good answer for that. The people I talk to don't have a great answer for that. The kind of most optimistic one I've heard is that, like, you know, he just wants to punish, that is Trump, just wants to punish Esper, and he, you know, has a high regard for Miller. I don't know. I think that we've heard a lot of, you know, optimism placed in people, particularly with Miller's background, kind of background in uniform and like, you know, how did John Kelly work out for you?

How did Jim Mattis work out for you? Well, that's good news, right? As these things go. I mean, you know, we're really talking about, you know, scraping the absolute bottom of the barrel when we have to say, like, good news, you know, the incoming acting defense secretary who may not be in this job legally, people who know him say he's not going to let Trump execute a military coup. Yeah, well, we take what we can get.

You had that report, though, and you kind of alluded to it, that Trump's installing all these people for more long-term things. So we're talking about releasing a bunch of information to congressmen who could potentially bring it on Fox News and things like that. Like, you know, Trump had all those grievances about how many Obama people he had to deal with when he first came into office. Is there any other thing they could really do to gum up the works of a Biden administration that we should be worried about? Yeah, I think in particular, if one of the reasons, and I should say if, that Ellis's NSA is to, you know, potentially stop information that Trump might not want from getting from, from NSA or getting from what NSA's dual-headed as Cybercom, the entity that performs, you know, military cyber attacks, from getting to a Biden administration. And if, you know, that's information

that, you know, Biden would use to make policy, that's a pretty substantial issue. As well, you know, a guy who called Barack Obama a terrorist leader is now the head of the Pentagon's policy operations. He doesn't have a chain of command role, but he has an enormous role when it comes to, you know, defense policy. And that's, you know, you can spin out a ton of scenarios whereby that's something that they could use to limit, you know, Biden's options. Some of those, you know, might be more, you know, amenable to the left than others. I am very curious to see if we are, in fact, going to get a more accelerated drawdown from Afghanistan before the end of the year. That's.

something that Mark Millie, the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Central Command, have been resisting, but is also called for in the U.S. Taliban deal, a huge question surrounding the incoming Biden administration, which is going to be essentially a redo of the Obama administration. Will they stick with the Taliban deal? When Biden says that, you know, now he wants to end endless wars all of a sudden, there's a mechanism right now to end it. Is Biden going to stick with that? It's his defense and state department team's going to want to stick with that. So this is something that the outgoing Trump Pentagon can, you know, create a fact on the ground. And Biden would be, you know, somewhat boxed in even if, you know, that is or isn't the way his foreign policy is going to ultimately go.

So Trump world will be able to hide malfeasances committed by Jared Kushner, say, with this installation. I mean, I don't know of specific things. Right. But there are a lot of suspicions, like, the what-sapping with Mohammed bin Salman that Jared has perhaps behaved inappropriately with Saudi Arabia and other countries. So they would be able to cover stuff like that up, right? I mean, you can imagine a circumstance like that if those conversations, as I imagine they would have been, have been intercepted. And there's, you know, an issue of concern on there. If you have the NSA's general counsel in place as a trance.

Trump loyalist conceivably, one of the things that this guy might want to do is say, like, that's too sensitive. We can't pass that on. Or like, that's, you know, not something that's appropriate to pass on or like there ought to be, you know, these or that, you know, restrictions on it. So it's possible. Can Congress do anything to stop any of this? I don't think so. So it is just like for the next 70 days, 70 plus days, this is how it goes. This is how it goes. And we just hope they don't decide to go to war. Yeah, that's right. It's very comforting.

That's all I got for you. I'm not the guy at the daily beast who does the comforting stories. No, I know. Before we get into things, we have a fun little treat. There are so many insane things happening in the world right now, and two episodes a week just aren't enough to cover it all. So, the new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks for Beast Inside members only. We'll release a new one each Sunday.

But listen carefully. Only beast inside members will have access to these. So head over to the new abnormal. dot the daily beast.com to become a beast inside member now. That's new abnormal. The Daily Beast.com. Frank Rich is an essayist and op-ed columnist who's done amazing rings of the New York Times and New York Magazine, as well as being a producer for some of our favorite shows like Succession and Veep.

We're so excited to have you. Thank you. I'm thrilled to do it. I'm a big fan of yours. Oh, well, the feeling is really mutual. It's funny because I was watching Veepe the other day, and I was thinking about Sherman Tans. Yes. And I don't know if you saw the show.

So I'm just curious to know your thoughts on when it was happening. Well, I think, you know, look, one of the, as Dave Mandel, the showrunner of Vee, whom I know you know a little bit about contact with, is said, Veep is maybe more relevant now than it was when it was on the air, at least up to a point. And when you see things like, you know, the four seasons thing in Philadelphia, actually somebody tweeted, this is better than V, but also, you know, there have been actual reenactments of our episodes like stop the count, start the count, you know.

That's right. Stop the steal. Stop the steel. So we're glad we're not doing that show anymore because we could, you know, Julia, Louis Dreyfus, Dave and I talk about it. We're happy about where it is. We're not happy about where the country is. I would say what's going on since the election, since election day or since the election is cold over the weekend. Trump is probably completely inevitable. He feels he can warp anything, any reality to his own reality. So whether it's hundreds of thousands of people dying in a

pandemic or it's him losing by hundreds of thousands of votes, he will, he will, he, We will just deny it and try any way he can to make it come true. Clearly, he's failed with the pandemic. And if anything, it's getting spiraling, as we all know, because of his complete failure to manage any level. As far as what's going on with trying to essentially tamper with the returns, deny the returns, bring up false charges of fraud, try and interfere with the electoral college electors through Republican state legislatures.

I don't think it's all going to come to naught. And to me, the more interesting part of it is that essentially the Republican Party, to this day, is still completely enthralled to him, scared by him. And no one will speak up. I mean, I haven't looked, I'm sure Susan Collins is quite concerned. And I know that there's Mitt Romney and Ben Sass. But look, look, these people who are,

were most likely candidates for president of four years from now, are one, those 71 million voters, and they want to win the nomination. So the Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley's, you know, Nikki Haley's, and God, egregious Mike Pompeo, they're just, you know, they're licking his boots, and that's where we are, and that's where we're going to be. And my hope is, I think other people are hoping, is that Georgia may actually backfire, Just the same way that Trump's constant vilifying of mail ballots and insisting people vote on the day hurt him. I think it actually hurt him.

So this may hurt him. And that would be nice. We can't count on it. Every reason to fear, no matter what happens, actually gridlock for the next four years, or at least two. So, Frank, I'm curious, you know, now that we feel like the monster is a little defeated. And you talked about the mission accomplished a Bush. Do you feel there's a mission now that we should be on the left to try to make sure we don't get the next horrible authoritarian? I think that, you know, I feel I'm one of those who feels the Republican Party as it now stands, should be burned down.

I mean, I really think it is a white supremacist party, basically. And I feel, I'm not saying we should literally burn it down. And I'm not saying there should be a revolution or any of that. But I'm speaking, I hasten to add, I'm speaking figuratively, not literally. But I think we have to face the fact that this country is very divided racially. And it's something that we have to address through the system. And that includes continuing to call out Trumpism without Trump. I mean, Trump will linger in some form as we know, like, you know, the Wizard of Oz.

But I think that it's a real issue. And very few people in a major political part, party want to face up to it. And we can't just wait for demographics to solve the problem electionally. And also, I feel the other mission is all the rocks that have to now be overturned in every cabinet department in the Trump administration, we know there's probably a lot of crimes, but also the savage stuff that's been done to turn back climate change and environmental practices to corrupt the system of justice, including civil rights enforcement, to get voter rights back in full form and combat voter suppression. We don't even know the half, I suspect, of what went

on under Trump in any of these places. And so it's going to be, you know, Biden is right, build back better. It's going to be a lot of building back, not to mention that has to be better. Yeah. The thing that I'm always struck by by this White House is how little actual war trumped up. He does none, as far as I can tell that. Yeah, I mean, like, nothing, not even, right? I mean, he makes, I feel like he golfs. Right.

He tweets. He tweets. He tweets. But, I mean, could you have imagined when doing Veep that you would have a president that is so, like, I mean, I just, it just strikes me as beyond parody. In some ways it is, although let's face in Selena Meyer, oh, he got interested in policy, would have directly affected her own well-being. So in some ways, she anticipated Trump. She wasn't as incompetent. Well, she was pretty incompetent, but she wasn't as boorish and racist, you know, and that was more in being more Joan O'Ryan as he ran for president. But I guess there is a history

in our country of presidents who didn't do much and delegated everything, and we didn't necessarily know what the classic example, of course, would be Woodrow Wilson, stroke and essentially, as I understand it, could do nothing during much of his presidency and his wife ran things with obviously cabinet members or whomever. And we've had presidents who were very intensely involved, like Nixon, for instance, but George W. Bush was obviously much more involved than Trump, but, you know, he was vacationing on the ranch when he got the intelligence that to be attacked by Islamic terrorists. And he had a kind of lackadaisical, genial attitude,

much as he did in his business career before he entered politics, where his father was more involved. So Trump's just taking this to an extreme of literally doing nothing. I mean, I think he eats, goes to the bathroom, tweets while he's in the bathroom, tweets when he gets out of the bathroom, plays golf, poses with people, People that are overpaying to have weddings at Mara Lago. That seems to be it.

We know he hasn't have any real relationship with even his own family. My friend Tony Schwartz has been eloquent about this dating back to when he wrote the art of the deal. And he never heard Trump even mention his children. He just didn't. You know, it's really, it's like whatever. And he's a lonely, I'm not saying this because I'm sympathetic, but he's a lonely, empty guy. You know, guy is almost too complimentary,

sort of an empty vessel, really. I think that's so on point for Trump, because in all the research I've done on the guy, once you drill into the fact that even building buildings and even doing television, just all of it, the thing he cares about the most is the moment where he gets to stand in front of the cameras and shove his thumb in the air and be in the spotlight,

there is nothing. there. It's this vast, empty wasteland of narcissism, and there's nothing else there. It just, it's always struck me that, you know, the reason he doesn't have any actual success in the world is all this stuff is just an infrastructure to get him to the spotlight. And that's not a business model for the most part. And for a president to be like that, it's terrifying. Yeah, I think that's completely apt description. It's such a strong. strange thing too. I mean, that he lives to be on camera. It's like something out of a Twilight Zone episode. It's so weird. It's beyond Selena Meyer, to take that example. And you feel he doesn't

take any pleasure in anything except piling up money or what he claims to be a lot of money, cheating people, including the IRS and his own investors and ultimately the American public when his president, being vindictive and having power of people. We know he doesn't read, but Honestly, could you picture him watching, I don't know, a television show that's not about him? I mean, would he stand and watch Breaking Bad or The Sopranos? Or I can't, or, you know, you just, he has no sense of humor. He has literally no sense of humor. He has cruelty in terms of making what he thinks of funny nicknames for people which are childish.

There's just nothing there. I don't know if you guys remember, in the very beginning of the administration, in what I called the before time, there was that joke that Trump's sitting around watching the guerrilla channel. It's just there is nothing there. I keep coming back to it over and over again. People like, oh, he's a nefarious villain who's got a scheme. I'm like, he has no schemes whatsoever. The people around him have schemes, but he does not. Right.

And since he didn't surround him. with the best people, you know. It's lucky for the country that there wasn't, of course, we have a few weeks to go. There wasn't more apocalyptic damage than there has been. And what concerns me, as assuming whence's out, is that people like a Tom Cotton, they're much smarter. They're much smart. Even Ted Cruz, God help us, are much, much smarter.

Absolutely. More capable than Trump. I know we're always supposed to avoid these particular analogies. but when Julius Stryker in Germany had de Stürmer, you know, it was useful for Hitler at first because it was so crude and so over the top and so

the Jews were stereotypically portrayed and it was horrible. And it worked for a while, but then as Nazi propaganda became more sophisticated, they tried to clean it up. And it wasn't pictures of Jews as insects or whatever.

It was suddenly, you know, the beautiful Aryan family. So they're going to try to take the same nationalist populism and the same authoritarianism and try to clean it up and put a new face on it and run some pretty television ads without the crude japery of a Donald Trump. I completely agree. That's exactly what I think is going to happen. And they're completely cynical. They see 70 million voters, 71 million voters have there.

And yeah, they could well succeed in holding on to. that base. There's a lot of talk about Trump having a reality television show after this is over or something where he play as president. How bad do you think that is for democracy? Like, what do you think, because you know television and you know media and you know politics, how bad could that be? I can't thought about that. I'd be curious to know both of your thoughts. My feeling is not that bad. I think it would be, I think it will move on, the world will move on. the Republican Party, for all the reasons we discussed, will be just as bad. But the fact is that these very ambitious Tom Cotton's, Ted Cruz's, will want upstage him and will find ways to upstage him, possibly, of course, in collusion with Murdoch, most likely in collusion with Murdoch.

And Trump will be more of a side show. It's in the interest of these people who want to run for president of those Republicans to downsize it. And I think over time they will. Also, Trump's not getting any younger, as you were just saying, he doesn't do any work. As we saw during the campaign, even for his own supporters, it becomes boring when he goes on at the length of a Fidel Castro. Right. I don't think he quite realizes that. No one will tell him that.

And if he does it on O-A-N or Newsmax, it's more like a Rush Limbaugh-Sized platform. It's not like a Merda-Fox news platform. Do you agree? I think that's right. I think, you know, look, the idea of him forming a streaming network, I think he will do that. But there were two things about Fox that you can't replicate now. Love him or Hate him, Roger Ailes was a genius of creating television. Arguably the greatest television producer of all time.

Evil and creepy as it may have been. Right, I agree. And Murdoch caught a moment culturally where there was nothing else in the market on the cable side for conservatives. Now there's like a lot of thousand flowers bloom. So I think it's a harder lift for him than he may think. It is. And he just doesn't want to do the work, too. I mean, that's the thing.

He really, he doesn't want to be entertaining. He doesn't, or do the work to be more. He doesn't, you know, he's not, I don't think it's going to go back with Mark Burnett and do something that's really produced. It's just going to be him erupting and droning on. And I think he's going to be crowded. and we're by his fellow Republicans who want to usurp him with the same views, and he is going to be by the Democrats.

Man, what a King Lear scenario of Donald Jr. and Ivanka get more ambitious as he weakens with age. Exactly. It's totally, it's totally lear. I mean, it's completely, which, of course, is a play that Trump knows so well. I know he's been to, I know he saw Brian Cox's great production. He often quotes how sharper than his serpent. too. He has a fabulous child.

Exactly. Exactly. It's the essence. Yes, he's on top of it. I want to end with one thing, though, just an appeal from the American people. More Kendall Roy rapping next season. My lips are sealed, but we'll have fun with this crazy hateful family, I promise you. John Federman is the lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania and the former mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania.

You've become a star. You went from, like, Pennsylvania. politics to national figure overnight, kind of. Are Republicans going to steal Pennsylvania? No, I don't believe so. As a practitioner of all of this, you always know that, at least it is with me, that there's always going to be elements of, I call it professional wrestling, you know, the old rake to the eyes and, you know, the folding chair, you know, routine.

But it's not usually serious or, you know, with a point on it necessarily. Although that's, that is evolving. I don't believe at the end of the day our legislature is going to take those steps. I don't even think they could from a constitutional basis. I posted on a thread the other day the language where the secretary of the state certifies it and then the governor has to sign off on it. So I don't think that. And it would also put them in a logically bizarre place saying, you know, we won our races.

That part's true. But this other part, no, this other part's not true. And it's just kind of silly. So whatever kind of outlandish things that they're saying, I don't ultimately believe that that would be their intent, nor do I believe they would even have the statutory authority to do something like that. The idea that they could win the Senate and then somehow the presidency would be voter fraud is kind of amazing. Yeah.

And more so for your listeners that probably don't know Pennsylvania politics is that they massacred us, you know, down ballot in Pennsylvania. You know, there were some that thought that we could take back the House and maybe even, you know, make the tie up the Senate. And we lost ground in both chambers. So it puts them in that logical fallacy of saying there's widespread mass fraud, except for all of our races. It's just so absurd. And then one layer to the absurd onion is the fact that Governor Wolf was governor

in 2016. The same system was in place. And they loved the result in 2016, you know, like if we were this cheating apparatus that, you know, you think we would have let Hillary Clinton win by or lose by, you know what I'm saying? It's so patently absurd on so many levels that there's literally nothing they could hang their hats on. Now, again, that doesn't stop some of them from saying what they're going to say. But there's absolutely nothing to it. And I keep pointing out that the one legitimate documented case of voter fraud in Pennsylvania, just happened to be a registered Republican in Luzerne County who tried to vote for his dead mother. And my point is that every Republican in Pennsylvania wants to be that hero that finds that gold nugget voter fraud in Pennsylvania.

And eight days later, where is it? You know, they can't find it. And they know that's true. So, like, all of this is professional wrestling. And they all know it is, now whether or not They would ever admit that, probably not, but there's just absolutely nothing to any of it. What I think is very exciting about you as a politician, and we had Charod Brown on the show recently. So I get very excited about the idea that there are people who can sell progressive politics. And so I think a lot about this idea of the Rust Belt Democrats being able to meet people where they are. And you strike me as that. Yeah.

And that's what I always strive to be. But I also run on what I believe is my truth. And I know you can't live off 725 an hour. And how can Florida, a Republican top to bottom, vote on that when we are struggling? And we talk about the war on drugs. And we talk about all these other issues. And it's just like I don't see them as progressive. I just happen to see them as there's actually a lot more common ground that if you scratch the surface and get beyond, you know, the Foxx. news kind of whatever is, is that, you know, you're kind of true about it. It's kind of true. And that's what I always hope to push towards. And to be clear, there are people that are unreachable on both sides that no matter what you say or do, it's just going to fall on deaf ears. But Pennsylvania is not that place. Otherwise, you can't explain how Barack Obama could carry Luzerne in 2008 by, I believe, double digits, still carried it with Mitt Romney in 12, and then got their door is blown off by 20 points by the president in 16, you know, and then the governor and I won Pennsylvania by a 900,000 vote swing just two years ago. So, so there's a lot of people to your

point that, that, that are in that space. And there's a lot of derision about, well, the Rust Belt diners and all this other stuff. And I don't would never use or believe the whole pencil tuckie. I don't buy into the, they're all, I mean, it's not like Pennsylvania. is a wonderfully diverse state, and there are elements in the Republican Party that you can't reach. But there's also elements in any segment of society that are unreachable. So talk to me about what you've done in Braddock. You know, Braddock started out as like San Jose of, well, the late 19th century and early 20th century. You know, Andrew Carnegie had a bank here. He had an office here.

And he is indistinguishable from Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates of his time. So you could just imagine what Braddock was to what, say, San Jose is. And imagine visiting San Jose 125 years ago, and it's a largely abandoned place. And you have one random software company left or whatever. And it's like, wow, how could this have happened? And that's what happened here. This region produced half the world steel. And then there was that economic apocalypse, and it all just went away.

And Braddock had lost 90% of its population. And I set out, really, to start, you know, before the planes hit the Twin Towers, to just start working with young people, helping them get their GEDs, helping them get back on the track to what would be nevertheless, moving from the margins into the lower rungs of the economic mainstream, like just basics. getting a job, helping them get a driver's license, helping them overcome like barriers like a petty criminal record or, you know, any one of these issues. And it really drove home to me just how one lucky I was and how structural and endemic a lot of these issues are with people that aren't born with my good fortune. And that was set the stage as well as some other issues for my first run for mayor. And that's how it all began in 2005. Is it true, and I've read this, you can tell me if it's true or not, that you actually let people live in some of the properties you own for Frey?

Early on, yes, they were just essentially allowed to, because people can't possibly imagine this, especially living in bigger cities, that you could buy homes for $10,000, like, you know, that you could move into because of abandonment, it was so problematic. I mean, 90% of the population moved away. Yeah. A lot of these challenges created themselves. So this idea of just trying to create successes under this whole umbrella of market failures. And I mean market failures in like the economic where industry moves away and all of the externalities fall on those that remain. And trying to close that gap is the purpose, in my opinion, of public policy. And that's what I went to graduate school for is this idea of can there be an intervention that,

that makes sense that can make people better off. And I point to my wife as another example of that. She discovered this through her own perspective that America throws away 40% of its food. And I'm not talking about people scraping their plates after dinner at home. I'm talking about Trader Joe's, you know, filling half a dumpster, you know, every week or more, with perfectly good food that they got new stuff in or whatever. And we began, she began a partnership in an organization that collected all that. So not only is it a win-win because this food isn't taking up dumpster space and landfill space,

this is first-rate quality food that can feed hungry people that doesn't cost anything. And that's taken off. And what corporate America throws away would horrify you. Oh, yeah. And it's a reaction to like, again, bridging that gap of market failure. And that perspective was made possible by her roots in this country as an undocumented family that struggled to get by. And she said something really profound when we did an interview yesterday or two days before she said,

I want to accomplish in my life what would have made my mother's life easier when we first came to the country. And I'm like, wow, I mean, I couldn't say that any better. Where did her family come from? Brazil. I mean, they were doing just fine in Brazil. And they were subjected to, as many people are, as just a lot of violence. and a lot of chaos.

And her mother just up and said, you've got a day to fill your suitcase with your favorite things. And when she was seven, they came to the United States. And her story has informed her perspectives and her desire to want to contribute to making other people's lives better

and easier in a way that some people may have helped her mother and what she would like to see, you know, done for people today as well. And that's, again, the power of not only immigration, but also the value of diversity and having a different perspective brought in to inform. I thought all the food these stores throughout was just bad or it was rotten. I'm like, no, it's actually first rate great. And when you see these things getting chuffed, it bothers you because we have a crisis. of food insecurity in this nation, and we have dumpsters full of great food, and that needs

to change. How are we going to be able to protect the integrity of our elections right now? It doesn't need to be protected because it already is secure. And if you could delete the noise coming from the White House and others, this election would have been a ho-hum, you know, that's the truth. We pulled off the largest election in Pennsylvania history without any fraud, without any voter intimidation, without anything. Now, that's not to say that there weren't small, you know, but again, six million people voted. You know, the law of large numbers would indicate that there's going to be some small issues, just the way air travel is remarkably safe.

That doesn't mean there isn't going to be a delay or you might get stuck on the runway occasionally. But overall, it's ridiculously safe and secure. And they're claiming that it's not safe to fly. And you're like, well, where's the crashes? where's anything? And they're like, well, I know it. I know it. And it's like, and I said this a lot, is that at what point does screaming voter fraud become yelling fire in a crowded theater? It is not protected speech. Well, that's what worries me, too, is that part of the population believes that the, that doesn't believe in the legitimacy of this election. And I'm...

Respectfully, I don't know. I think this is one of those quote unquote protest belief. I think they know that. I think they just, for whatever reason, want to, you know, dig in or it's payback for the Russian conspiracy or whatever it is. You know, everyone from the president on down knows that there isn't any fraud. And they know how this movie's going to end. And, you know, it's just part of that protesting that I just wish we could say, look, you love the result in 16. I didn't. Now you don't love this result and I just want us to move together because here's the truth. We are headed to a record high level of virus infections in Pennsylvania and in this country and we're headed for a long cold winter and we need to come together because the tragedy other than the lives and the trillions

and loss is that the virus is no longer the enemy and each other is and that has to change. Thank you so much. This is amazing. Well today folks, as you know by state and federal law and international treaty we are required in every show to include the segment fuck that guy the fuck that guy this time will be fuck those guys the collective people yes it is a collective and comprehensive assessment of some fuckery du jour my queen of fuck that guy is emily murphy who works at a little known agency called the gs a she is meant to sign off on the transition of joe biden president elect and she refuses to, she is my, fuck that guy. Fuck you, Emily Murphy.

Fuck you. Well, my fuck that guy is former number one in his class at West Point, who clearly forgot the fucking oath he swore. Secretary of St. Mike Pompeo, the State Department is not forwarding the messages from foreign leaders sending congratulations to President-elect Biden as a way to cause tension, as a way to cause a set of diplomatic pieces of static from having to deal with. and because they're a bunch of petty bitches. And Mike Don Pompeo also is in my Fuck That Guy roster today because of his amazing statement

where he came out and said there'll be a smooth transition to his second trope administration. The guy combined being mendacious and sweaty at the same time. It just was not a good look. There are other people in my Fuck That Guy list today. The people that are doing an international black market for negative COVID tests, fuck you guys. Wait, is that a thing? It's a thing. I read about it today and I was just like, get the fuck out of here.

What's wrong with you people? 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. you'd like to follow us on Twitter. I'm Molly JongFest, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for

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