The Daily Beast Podcast - Trump’s Likely AG: ‘We’re Going to Put Kids in Cages’

Episode Date: November 10, 2024

Mike Davis, the man who many expect to be Donald Trump’s Attorney General, has outlined who exactly is on the president-elect’s hit list. Plus! Davis told Johnson he has five lists ready to go but appeared to only name four. Plus! Former Los Angeles Times journalist and President of Media Guild West Matt Pearce joins the podcast to talk about the purpose of the press during the second Trump administration. 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.

Welcome back to another bonus episode of The New Abnormal, and we thank you so much for being here. Today we're joined by journalist and president of Media Guild of the West Matt Pierce, and he is here to tell us all about a piece he wrote for his substack in the wake of the election called Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History, contemplating the purpose of the press after the Trump Revolution. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips?

No. But clip us anyway. I don't believe me. This is a bad batch. Clips. As we were discussing before we rolled tape, so all of a sudden a lot of Trump being silent, the front benchers being silent,

and these backbench people I had never heard of before, doing a lot of loud talking. So we have this guy, Mike Davis, who's expected to be Trump's Attorney General, who seems just lovely. He's talking to Betty Johnson here. A man you may remember is recently accused by the Justice Department of taking Russian disinformation money. And we're just going to listen to them be giddy.

Mike, I've never called for lava to rain down from the heavens. But maybe upon Washington, D.C., would you be that sweet red hot lava for us? I've never been called sweet and you call me sweet ginger. So I think I'm then. But during my three-week reign of terror as some acting attorney general before I get changed. out of town with my Trump pardon, I will reign hell on Washington, D.C. We've talked about this, Ben, I have five lists ready to go and they're growing. List number one, we're going to fire.

We're going to fire a lot of people in the executive branch in the deep state. Number two, we're going to indict. We're going to indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumbull, sleazeball, Biden, except for the five-year-old granddaughter who they refused to acknowledge for five years until the political. pressure not to Joe Biden. Number three, we're going to deport. We're going to deport a lot of people, 10 million people in growing, anchor babies, their parents, the grandparents, we're going to put kids in cages. It's going to be glorious. We're going to detain a lot of people in the D.C. Gulag and

Gitmo and list number five, I'm going to recommend a lot of Farns. Every January 6th defendant is going to get a part, and especially my hero horn man, he is. He is, definitely at the top of the part list. We actually went out and have some upcoming content with Jacob Chansley. We did a podcast interview with him. Went out in the desert. We wanted to learn about shamanism. So we went on.

This is what people voted for. I don't know what else to say at this point. This is a guy who should be nowhere near the levers of power, for starters. Instead, he is very possibly going to be the most powerful lawyer. in the country. And I believe everything he says in terms of what he wants to do. It'll be nice if he can't accomplish all those things, but I absolutely believe that that's what he wants to do. For the people who voted for Trump, who claim to not be all about this stuff, go fuck yourself. Because you are all about this stuff, whether that's quote unquote why you voted for Trump or not.

So that's all I have. Yeah. This is what apparently people want. So, you know, go with God. It'll be amazing to see how long we have a constitution. And if that isn't suspended and no accountability. And for the folks that think we'll just get them in midterms or that they'll be in election in four years, good luck with that. I think that'll be an exciting thing to see from a distance because I sure as fuck won't be here. I want to point out one of the things he literally said like bragged about and can't wait to do is put kids in cages. Yeah, yep, yep, yep. I thought that was actually the most telling thing is that they all pretended that that wasn't a good thing. And now they're emboldened. And I'm going to tell you, that's not going to sit well. I don't believe for

one second that's going to sit well with people. I hope not. But again, this is who they voted for. They voted for the guy who put kids in cages four years ago. Right. And they voted for the guy who had lawyers go to the three panel court judges and say, we don't need to give them soap. And we're not required to give them hygiene products, soap or toothbrushes or toothpaste or blankets or any of those things. Like, this already happened. So, like, the quote unquote outrage, and then what? People are going to go protests and then Trump is going to do what? Sick the military on them to shoot them because this time around he can because he has presidential immunity. There is, like, this, this is where we are. I don't know how we move forward in a way that thinks that there is going to be

some type of repercussions or they're not going to do what it is that they say that they say that they're going to do. They are and worse. I do believe they're going to do it. Yeah. Jesse, it just struck me. You kind of sound like me last Monday talking about how. I don't believe people are going to like it when they actually see it. When we say this is what they voted for, I agree this is what they voted for. But I think yet just the same way that these assholes look at the tax cuts and they go,

I'll take the rest of it with it. Most of them, I don't think we're voting for kids and cages. Most of them I think we're voting for a better job. outcome thing and for a different economic policy. Yes, but they were okay, at least this is my opinion. They may not have been voting for kids in cages, but they were okay with their being kids in cages as long as they got their money. I think there will be buyers remorse when they see the kids in cages.

Oh, but maybe I need to believe that to sleep at night. I don't know what level of cope I'm at right now. I don't know either, but I'm also like, and on what news network do you think that they're going to be showing those kids in cages. And what access do you think that reporters are going to have to in those places? One, things leak all the time. Leaks are never going away. That's a reality.

It's also why conspiracy theories are so dumb is that leaks will always be an existing thing. And then two, news networks that were mentioned there, I think that's going to be seen as increasingly irrelevant. But what it will be is the future will not be televised. It'll be memed is the saying I have heard that I believe. Yeah, no, I believe the information. will get it. Look, they're bragging about it now. They haven't even done it yet.

Yeah. I mean, why would they, they want this information to be out there. Like, they're not ashamed of this. This is not something they want to do behind closed doors. They're bragging about doing this. Yeah, to be honest with you as somebody who's had to spend way too much time listening to Tom Holman talk, who's going to be the head of ICE. I unfortunately had to sift through hours of his interviews for a documentary I made. And he will be downright giddy and horny about it on television on a regular basis, is my guess. Yeah. All right. As I mentioned, here's some other totally weird backbencher named Rep Ben Klein talking to the Fox News businesses, Money Honey, Maria Bartaromo. I think this one is also pretty telling. Is that doable to cut $2 trillion out of the budget? It absolutely is. I'm a member of the Republican Study Committee, which is the policy arm of the Republican Conference. And we've come up with a balanced budget in seven years. The budget committee's put one out. The balances in 10 years. We can do it. and make sure that we focus funding toward the American people and not toward bureaucracies in Washington.

Two trillion. I got to say that's the one thing I don't think they're going to be able to do. You know, there's that law of politics that they say every 40 years, we forget every single reason why we did a single policy. I think this really neglects that a lot of that money is basically government subsidized employment to keep the unemployment number low. The budget deficit in Trump's first term was over a trillion dollars. How much did he add? I thought it was like $7 trillion. I think that he added to the deficit was $7 trillion.

Over the four years, I think maybe. Over the four years. Yeah. I'm not an economist, but I think that is, what is the word I'm looking for? It's on the tip of my tongue. Oh, bad. It's bad. I'm not an economist, but I can pretty much say that $9 trillion, I could add $7 and $2 and say,

that's going to be quite a difficult task there, Chief. Donald Trump has no interest in balancing the budget. I don't know why people think, like, he may say he does, but... He's never said that. He's never said it. Yeah. Look, a populist balancing the budget is pretty much a contradiction in terms. And I just don't see that being a priority for him.

Hard agree. Okay. Let's go to this lovely fellow named RFK Jr. who's expected to be a big part of the Trump administration, including possibly running the Health and Homeland Security Office. He was asked by MSNBC what his policies are going to look like, and we're going to let them tell us. In some categories of workers, their entire departments like the nutrition departments at FDA,

that are, that have to go, that are not doing their job. They're not protecting our kids. To eliminate the agencies, as long as it requires congressional approval, I wouldn't be doing that. It's hard for me to talk right now

because I'm so turned on by that voice. I always wondered what your thing was. So it's that. I really enjoyed this tweet last week that said, when RFK said, and vote for Trump is a vote to send me to Washington, and somebody tweeted, there's at least a dozen people who don't want their marriages wrecked by this. Please don't vote for him.

Oh, God. If he is given any kind of power, it's going to be bad. If he has given any kind of power over health-related stuff, it's going to be catastrophic. It seems reports are saying that Republicans are so, quote, unquote, quietly distancing themselves from him after his vaccine comments and the fluoride comments and what have you. I think that it was all bullshit. The chuminess with RFK Jr. I think was all bullshit. I don't think that you're going to see this man in charge of anything. There'll be other vile people in charge of stuff, but I don't think that you're going to see him be in charge of a damn thing. Like maybe some wing nut commission that has no power over anything for him to play in the background with his conspiracy theories and investigations into fluoride. But I don't think.

see it. Maybe I'm crazy. No, I think I agree with that. I think, I think, I think this was a marriage of convenience for Trump. And, you know, we know what he does to marriages once he decides there have no use to him. So I suspect you're probably right about this. It'll be interesting if the split happens to see if RFK just goes scorched earth. But also, I don't really care. I just don't want him anywhere near health. Yeah. Speaking of health, this whole make America healthy again thing,

and then the first thing you say, talk about is gutting nutrition. Like, who on earth is against nutrition? Republicans. Well, they were against it when Michelle Obama wanted. I was going to say, Michelle Obama wanted to take pink slime out of the meat in schools.

And if you remember, Sarah Palin and the rest of them were like, give our kids dessert. Let them eat what they want. It doesn't matter if it was on a, sidewalk covered in like bacteria for 16 days. That's our right. That's our will. She wanted fresh vegetables and fruits and they were like, she hates kids. That's what they said for eight years. I often refer back to when Governor Mike Huckabee wrote a book titled something like

killing yourself with a fork and knife about it got skiddy that decided, oh, my base doesn't want this and I just want to be popular. I'm going to start getting fat again. Throw that whole thing away and pretend I never did it. God. Yeah. I will say, though, I mean, you'd think they would want healthy kids for the factories, but, you know, I guess they haven't made that connection yet. 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.p.spub slash October surprise. Matt Pierce is a journalist formerly at the Los Angeles Times

and president of Media Guild of the West. And he wrote an excellent post-election piece at his substack titled Lessons on Media Policy at the Slaughter Bench of History, contemplating the purpose of the press after the Trump Revolution. He joins me now to talk about those lessons. Matt, thanks so much for being here. Andy, thanks so much for having me. Absolutely.

Okay, so before we get into the lessons that you write about, I want to start with the first sentence of the second paragraph in your piece, which reads, the 2024 election ended for all time any argument that Donald Trump is a political accident. Explain what you mean by that. So, you know, 2016, it was such a freak election when Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton. I feel as though, you know, we've had almost a decade of argument about what happened in that race. You know, a lot of people felt that Hillary Clinton might have been a weaker candidate. This was also after Bernie Sanders failed run for the Democratic candidacy.

There were a lot of hard feelings on the left. there was the FBI waiting in, all these factors that we talked about that led people to the conclusion that it wasn't really that Donald Trump had won the 2016 election, perhaps as much as Hillary Clinton had lost the 2016 election. So, you know, we lived through four years of the Trump administration. Everybody got a pretty good idea of what he was like as president. He was ejected from office, not without some violence in 2020 by Joe Biden with Trump. Trump supporters storming the Capitol to try to stop that from happening. The Democrats fielded what was basically a pretty standard issue candidate for this cycle. Voters turned out in droves

and created what's likely to be the first popular vote victory for a Republican candidate for president since, I think, 2004 during the Iraq war with George W. Bush as president. And I think all those factors with so many different parts of the electorate, breaking for Trump, people who know him very well out there in the public. It's led me to conclude that the public knows exactly who Donald Trump is, kind of. And the public knows that he was their guy. He is what they want in office. And, you know, you can argue that one election was an accident, but a reelection along with a red wave, a reelection with a mandate, I think confirms that Donald Trump,

Trump is a genuine shift of some kind in American politics that we don't even understand yet. And I should qualify this by saying he is part of a global trend, a lot of incumbents everywhere, of all sorts of persuasions have been getting kicked out of office, post-COVID, post-inflationary era. So this is not to say that outside factors and chance and contingency didn't lead to him being reelected. But I think there is this fundamental issue, which is that this time that his Democratic-Mexamination, mandate feels so much cleaner. You know, he didn't win the popular vote the first time around. We had all these messy counts that brought the election really close in 2020. And this, this was really definitive. Yeah, no, I think that's all absolutely right. Okay. So with that in

mind, let's jump into the first of your lessons. And this lesson is America's information economy is rotten from top to bottom. Now, a lot of people will hear that and think you're talking about things like hedge funds and private equity, destroying local news, as you mentioned in your piece. But you say it really is, it is so much deeper than that, isn't it? That is completely the case, because we are so used to talking about information and how people get information about elections as a media phenomenon where we're talking about 20th century companies. We're talking about newspapers like the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. We're talking about broadcast channels like Fox News or CNN. Those entities, and while some of them still have some

importance, it's so clear in this election, if you just look at what the candidates were doing, it's so clear that we're operating in a totally new environment now that is much more heavily mediated by the multi-trillion dollar monopolies and other platform companies that, not basically decide what kind of information that we see now. You know, you have Elon Musk turning Twitter into X and mobilizing it as a right-wing organizing platform. You have meta under Mark Zuckerberg deciding that it absolutely has nothing to do with the news anymore.

It feels like it learned a lesson from 2016 in the years after that it just doesn't want to be associated with all this negativity. Nonetheless, people are still discussing politics in the news quite. a bit on Facebook. It's just not in the form of referral traffic anymore. Google, a monopoly, probably many times over controls search results, and now YouTube, which is where a lot of people get their information. Everywhere you look, reaching the public increasingly means going through these gigantic, gigantic platforms that don't get nearly the amount of scrutiny that we give to traditional institutions like the New York Times or like Fox News or like CNN or the Washington

Post, the information environment has changed and those companies have way less accountability and way lower standards for the kind of stuff that they print. And that's in an environment where people have already been yelling at, all the legacy media companies for not doing a good enough job of covering this election. I think the problem is so much bigger. It's systemic from the way that people access information to how that information is selected for us to the individual. To the inability for, you know, professional journalists essentially to make money anymore from these types of platforms because the advertising is gone and the audience wants to go for much more sensational stuff. It's from Top of Bob. I want to come into your next lesson now because the two are

related. And that lesson is, as you write, the question of whether the leaders of legacy mainstream media outlets failed to meet the moment on a moral level, as many did, is totally separate from whether those outlets can even make much of a practical difference anymore in the electoral level. That's what you were just saying. I think that ultimately the failures of whether it's A.G. Salzberger at the New York Times, Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post, Patrick Sun Chung at the LA Times, their failures to sort of stand up for democracy or however you want to put it really don't matter from an electoral perspective, right? That's totally true. I mean, if you think about the readers of these publications,

Legacy journalism is a largely liberal phenomenon at this point, from the readership to the people generally running these institutions. It's something that the right of America has not been as interested in funding or supporting or reading. The right has retreated largely to its own ecosystem of a much different-looking kind of media for the most part. So there's not exactly a lot of persuadable voters hanging out reading the New York Times and glancing at a headline thinking, hmm, this is really going to influence my vote for president. I don't see the evidence for any of these publications really covering Donald Trump much more aggressively and having that translate into many, if any, votes shifting in one direction or the other. And that's

hard the whole issue. And I mean, what's so funny about these controversies with Patrick Sunshan and Jeff Bezos at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post, respectively, meddling with their editorial boards to block planned endorsements of Kamala Harris is that a lot of journalists in those newsrooms will really just tell you up front that they don't think that presidential endorsements at those newspapers are really moving people's minds at all. You know, in this context, it's something that's more like getting yourself morally on the record about where the institution stands at this moment in American history. But you could see what the candidates were doing, you know,

But Kamala Harris, you know, wasn't sitting for an extensive interview with the Los Angeles Times editorial board. She went on a call her daddy. You know, the Trump campaign was going on Joe Rogan for many, many hours at the very busy part of the end of election season, because that's where they thought that they could pick up votes. Those sorts of influencers, podcasts, podcasters, people outside of the legacy information ecosystem, they're the ones with the audiences, which means they're the ones with the votes. and they're the ones who are the gatekeepers, the new gatekeepers, that stand between the campaigns and what they think is victory. And one of the things that I'm slightly worried about is that, you know, the Democratic Party, having gotten a shell shock from this tremendous defeat, is going to look at the generally liberal legacy media, which sometimes and often holds its feet to the fire and start asking whether, you know, engaging with nonpartisan journalists,

who are going to ask them a lot of tough questions is really worth the trouble. And I think, you know, that was one of the winning things in the campaign when people are like, why isn't Kamala Harris sitting with, you know, more interviews with the New York Times or whoever. I think from a campaign perspective, they're probably thinking like, what's the upside here? Why are we exposing ourselves to really tough questions? And I think for a variety of reasons, not all of them straightforward, you know, candidates like Kamala Harris should subject themselves to tough questions, but purely from the transactional viewpoint of a presidential campaign, I think they see the media often better than we see ourselves. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely a good point. Along those

lines, I guess another of your lessons is support media unionization, which yes, 100%. I'm curious why you think or how you think that helps in this case for what we're talking about now. I think one of the things that we've seen from both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times is that the billionaire owners of those institutions, which have generally been pretty good about not meddling with the straight ahead news coverage, which is the real core of those operations and the public service and the value that they add. I think their willingness to essentially step in at the 11th hour and create a gigantic mess for both of those institutions really highlights the vulnerability that I think is reflected across the entire information ecosystem, which is that these public institutions that

provide a lot of the original inquiry that, you know, even commentators rely upon. I mean, maybe the public isn't reading journalism as much, but, you know, a lot of intelligent people and influencers and commentators do, like journalism is still getting in circulation in that sense. I think it's actually an indication of some rot in these institutions to see an owner like that. Both of them have a lot of exposure to the federal government in terms of being federal contractors themselves or relying on federal agencies for approvals for stuff that their other companies are doing. If these owners have signaled that they're willing to invade the editorial operations of these publications, you know, if the employees need to be organized against that stuff

and have job protections to be able to speak out as both of those newsrooms did when both of these owners started acting a little, a little erratic. I mean, I think unionization is a good thing anywhere all the time for every workplace and for all workers. I just think in this instance where we've got, you know, a class of billionaire owners and a highly concentrated media ownership that you do need countervailing force inside of these newsrooms to try to push back against radical or sudden changes that represent, in my view, a breach of trust. 100%. I'm going to jump a couple of lessons, but I want to get to this because it again, it directly has to do with the fact that all of these journalistic enterprises are

now owned by these corporate billionaires. And you say, if you want a press that will serve as a bulwark against autocracy, shove money at anything that produces high-quality investigative journalism. And this is such a key point because that shit is expensive, isn't it? Yes. Investigative journalism is incredibly expensive. You're talking about paying a really, really good journalist to not produce anything potentially for six months to a year to 18 months. I mean, how many jobs can you pay somebody for potentially 18 months to effectively not produce a final product? And sometimes when you release an investigation, it's a total dud, makes no impact whatsoever. And sometimes you investigate something and find out that there isn't really anything wrong.

That's also something that frequently happens in investigative. The bottom line is like, that kind of work, that is, to my view, like the single most important function that even like, you know, a lot of troubled legacy media institutions still provide. I mean, a lot of times it's not glamorous, but nobody else is doing it exactly because it's so expensive. And like, that's not something where AI or, you know, other technological advances are going to like somehow make that kind of journalism more affordable or more available to the public because a lot of times it means like literally going and knocking on people's doors, including like high-powered public officials. It's hounding people. It's asking

really hard questions. It's going out with drinks with sources. Like that kind of stuff, it's never going to get more efficient. People only cost more over time for like basic economic reasons. Like economics 101. That kind of work doesn't get cheaper. It only gets more expensive at the same time that the institutions that employ those people are crumbling and falling apart for bigger macroeconomic reasons. And so I think, you know, if philanthropists, if regular consumers, you know, want to reinforce some of our society's checks on authoritarianism, like, you know, we don't have to reinvent the wheel here because the thing is a lot of countries around the world have elected strong men who have sometimes corrupt tendencies. And investigative journalists

in those countries are often the biggest thorns in the sides of those administrations, exactly because authoritarian government is so associated with corruption. You know, corruption either of the leader, corruption of the leader's coterie, their supporters in the business industry, that stuff. It's just ripe for investigation. We should be doing it all the time anyway. It's not as if corruption is something that's only going to be associated with Donald Trump. Corruption is probably happening right now.

It just don't know about it. But that's the thing that's worth funding. That's the thing I think where there's value added for democracy. It's the function that the press does that social media. is not really going to replace, not something that Joe Robbins going to do, certainly. I think it's the place where there's the most plausible case for making a positive step after this crazy election where I think a lot of people are going to be asking these questions about, like, how did we get here? What kind of information are people getting? Are people even

getting good information anymore? What should we be doing? And that is like one of the top actionable items I can suggest. Yeah, it's such a great one and such an important one. As you said, anytime, regardless of who's in power, but particularly given that we are well aware that there's going to be untold numbers of shenanigans going on in this administration. I guess the question is whether enough people will care, but still, they need to be held to account. I only have like a minute left. I want to get to your last lesson, which you say is to support the Press Act. Now, this was a bill that was introduced by, I think, it was Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin and Republican Congressman Kevin Kiley, right?

And it aims to defend reporters' communications and their records from the government to prevent the government from seizing journalist records in an attempt to figure out who their confidential sources are. Yes. This bill passed the House unanimously in January. What's the hold-up here? Like, the Senate hasn't even really taken it up yet, has it? I don't exactly know what the hold-up is, but I strongly suggest the Senate take up the Press Act, if possible, pass it and let Joe Biden, sign it into law because first of all, we should have a federal shield law for journalists anyway. Every now and then, the government threatens to imprison journalists for not revealing

their confidential sources. Confidential sources obviously are critical in reporting on the doings, not just of the presidency itself, but also the national security state and all the things that it gets up to. We are heading into a new administration where Donald Trump has signaled his interest in willingness to potentially imprison journalists who won't reveal their sources. remember the last Trump administration, there are probably going to be a lot of anonymous sources who want to talk to the media about weird stuff that's going to be happening in the second Trump administration, some of which has a lot of national security implications. So I think it's good public policy anyway. I think, you know, the matter is more urgent than ever. I think lawmakers should go

for it. Yeah. My memory is that Senator Wyden introduced it in the Senate, which I guess is no surprise. He is a very good on issues of this kind. But I think it's just been in, in legislative sort of limbo or purgatory since then, and maybe they'll get off their asses and actually do it before January, but I wouldn't be holding my breath, I guess. Matt, thanks so much for being here. Check out Matt's Substack. It's Matt D.Pierce.substack.com.

I really appreciate it. You're doing good work, man, and keep it up. Andy, really appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. 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.

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