The Daily Beast Podcast - What Trump Hates the Most About Mitch McConnell

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Trump can hold a grudge, Daily Beast reporter Corbin Bolies tells Andy Levy on this episode of The New Abnormal podcast, and he’s not wrong. “Donald Trump knows how to hold a grudge and he will, and we've seen that continue throughout the last year and a half, because Donald Trump has consistently attacked Mitch McConnell,” Bolies says, discussing the most recent verbal harassment levied at the former Majority Leader’s wife, Elaine Chao, in the form of blatantly racist name-calling on his Truth Social platform. Also on this episode: Hannah Gais, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center, joins this episode to co-host with Andy, touching upon the intense violent threats against Dems and Marjorie Taylor Green’s try-hard effort to get Republicans to think the threats are for them. Plus! Daily Beast far-right reporter and Fever Dreams podcast co-host Kelly Weill breaks down a huge schism happening within the libertarian party, including how the old Libertarians totally over these new Libertarians’ toxicity. Like, beyond Trumpy toxic. 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. And I'm producer Jesse Kennett, 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 great guest co-hosts, as well as some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try to make some sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh, through the tears. What an excellent show we have today. First, we're going to be joined by Kelly Wow, who's a reporter at the Daily Beast and co-host of the Daily Beast Fever Dreams podcast. And she's going to talk to us about all the civil war happening in the Libertarian Party right now and how it's

affecting voting. Then we'll talk to Corbyn Bullies, who's a media reporter at the Daily Beast, and he's going to talk to us all about Trump's strange truth over the weekend. But first, we have Hannah Gase, who's a senior research analyst at the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Hannah Gaze. Andy Levy. So welcome and thank you for guest co-hosting today. I really appreciate you coming on.

Happy to be here. Happy to be here. Let's talk about, I would say it's a fun story, but it's not because what we're looking at here is what seems to be an escalation of sort of violent rhetoric coming from the right, which at a certain point you'd think, can they keep escalating this? And the answer seems to be yes. So we had a couple things happen over the week. weekend, Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, though in his mind, I guess the current president of the United States, he put out a message on his social networking platform, Truth Social, talking about Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell.

And as part of it, he said that he ripped into McConnell and said McConnell was killing the Republican Party and all these things. And then he said he has a death wish. And he put that in capital letters. And obviously his Trump's people are now saying, well, what we met is he has a death wish. It's a political death wish. But Hannah, don't we know that Trump supporters don't always take things in those ways? Yeah, I mean, especially after January 6th, it's absolutely fucking absurd to consider this solely symbolic, I think. I mean, yeah, you can pretend it's a political death wish, I guess. But that's definitely not how some of his supporters, I'm sure, see it.

You know, he says these things and you look at it and you're like, oh, my God, this is, not good and someone's going to end up getting hurt from this, but they always sort of leave this wiggle room where they can say, you know, no, obviously we're just talking political. And it's absurd to even bring up the possibility that anything else was meant by this. But at the same time, they know what they're doing, don't they? Yeah, I think Trump knows precisely what he's doing. And the coalition of supporters around him that are helping him continue his political life knows what they're doing too. And this really, I mean, this really does parallel a lot of what we see

on the extreme right, too. It's just, it's a way of sort of evading responsibility for any kind of violence that happens. Right. Because if something bad happens, you can say, well, I didn't necessarily I mean that, or it was in Minecraft, to put it another way. I have no doubt that that's precisely what Trump is trying to achieve. Yeah, no, I think that's exactly right. This is not obviously the first time they've done something like this and they do it all the time and they always there's always a little bit of an out for them to either say oh well he meant that you know in a different sense in politically or they they go with the oh he was just joking right that's the other thing we see is oh no there's that that's the same kind of thing we see from the people that you deal with at the southern poverty law center people like the proud boys and those people on the right they've sort of adopted this stance of semi-irony i guess you might call it so that they always have wiggle room. Yeah, exactly. And I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily work in the legal context, but they can try and run circles around the media by claiming that, oh, yeah, it's a joke. It was irony. I'm just doing irony. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And it's the past, I mean, God, especially after

Charlottesville in 2017 and so many of these other instances of political violence, it's so clear that it's not a joke. Yeah. So, of course, we've seen a whole bunch of Republicans have come out and repudiated what Trump said here. I'm kidding, of course, not a single one has. Do you think there's any chance any of them will? They won't, though, right? They just, they won't touch it. They'll, they'll say, oh, I didn't see it or something like that. Yeah, I think that's precisely what they're going to do. I mean, I guess they could claim, oh, well, I'm not on truth social, so I didn't see it, which is perhaps a fair argument since no one really else seems to be on truth social. Right. I am. It's a great website. I think it's just too toxic also for them to come out,

even if they wanted to say something negative about this or condemn it, it's just such a toxic party at this point that it's, it would be difficult, I think, to stand up to it. Yeah. No, I think that's absolutely right that they all feel like if they stand up to it, it's, it's going to, it's actually going to hurt them with Republican voters. Yeah, exactly. Which is like, how did we get here? It boggles my mind, but we know we're here. And then we've got like, so Marjorie Taylor Green, she was speaking at a rally for Trump. in Michigan on Saturday night, I think it was. And she went out there and said, quote, I am not going to mince words with you all. Democrats want Republicans dead,

and they have already started the killings. What do you make of that? There's this concept called accusations in a mirror. That's basically, I mean, that's what she's doing here, accusing your enemies of basically engaging in the same kind of violence that you intend your, or want your party to do. I'm just thinking back to Green's own sort of sort of. social media history. Remember when she liked that post advocating for putting a quote unquote

bullet into the head of Nancy Pelosi in 2019? Yeah. And there's also just both of these cases that she's talking about. There's no, from what I can tell, there's no evidence that this was the Democrats. No one was motivated by the allegiance to the Democratic Party to carry out these tragedies. It really is, I think, ultimately, goal in some of these cases. is can't definitively say that's what she's doing here, per se. But it's a rhetorical way to lower the bar to violence and present this sort of existential threat that then makes the sole response violence. Right. Think of the grumer rhetoric that we hear coming from segments of the right. It's very similar to me. Couldn't agree more. I think that, you know, the only reason to say

something like this to claim that violence and killing is already being done by Democrats against Republicans, then obviously what you're saying is if Republicans do any of that, all they're doing is fighting back, defending themselves, et cetera. Yeah, exactly. It's interesting, too, given some of Green's collaboration with certain figures on the far right, thinking of Nick Fuentes, who, a white nationalist live streamer, who right before the capital insurrection, basically raised the specter of killing Republican lawmakers. So these attacks on Republicans that she's talking about her. I mean, the rhetoric of attacks

and Republicans are coming from her own side of the political spectrum, too. Yeah, and didn't she speak at a conference that he was the keynote address? Yeah, she was one of the speakers at Nick Fuentes' AFPAC conference, which takes place basically alongside CPAC, and it's sort of meant to be

a kind of replacement CPAC, mostly for a lot of people who aren't allowed to go to CPAC, like Fuentes. Right. I mean, we've seen some cross-war, over Marjorie Taylor Green being an example, Polkosar, etc. Yeah.

So there are a couple other things that Marjorie Taylor Green talked about in this speech, and one of them was that she was trying to make it clear that she thinks the person that must be held accountable for January 6th is Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi.

Now, again, we have, thanks to the January 6th committee, we have text messages from Marjorie Taylor Green that showed that when the January 6th, when the Capitol was first stormed, She was scared. She knew exactly what was going on. She was sending messages to the Trump administration saying, hey, you've got to call these people off. And then somehow later in that day, I guess once she got to safety, she decided that the whole thing was an Antifa thing. And now she's blaming it all on Nancy Pelosi. Yeah. I mean, is Nancy Pelosi Antifa, I guess is the real question. Is that what she's saying? Like, is Nancy Pelosi now the de facto leader of Antifa? President and CEO.

Yes. And executive director. In your research, Hannah, have you come across any references to this? Nancy Pelosi is actually my boss. No. No, it's pretty fascinating because on the one hand, it seems like the GOP really wants to embrace this image of, we wouldn't let this election be stolen and we took actions to try to stop it. But on the other hand, any time like something like consequences,

comes up. They just don't want to have any of it anymore. It's really that same situation as that Josh Hawley video that came out during one of the committee hearings where he's like running away from protesters. Right. Yeah. I mean, I think maybe on maybe on some level they're scared of their own constituents. I don't know. Who knows? I think that's probably true. But to cover for that, what they do is claim it wasn't their constituents, obviously, right? Yeah. Yeah. It was, of course, Antifa. that Marjorie Taylor Green went off on the speech. And I just want to say there are people that always tell me,

I've brought this up on the show before. Like I have friends who were like, why do you talk about Marjorie Taylor Green? She's just this cuckoo congresswoman with no power. My feeling is that this is her party. And all of these people who are saying this to me are going to, you know, have to take it all back when Trump names her

as his vice presidential candidate in 2024. And I'm only like sort of half joking about that. But we had, Back in 2020, there was a plot to kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer. And we've already got people who have pleaded guilty, got people who were found guilty. But one of the things Madreuxela Green said in her speech was that this whole thing is a conspiracy theory. Can you talk to that, Hannah? Yeah.

I mean, one thing you definitely see among some of the groups I look at is, I guess, what could be basically described as fed paranoia. so concerned about federal infiltrators, etc. And a lot of this fear sort of then ties into some of these false flag claims, say, claiming that an event was orchestrated by the federal government to entrap, quote, unquote, patriots, or entrap just kind of young extremists of some stripe. It's just a line of conspiracy theory that you see all throughout the movement, whether it's from neo-Nazis to Alex Jones, of course, we all know is obsessed with false flags,

to, I guess, what Marjorie Taylor Green is saying about Whitmer. Right. And, of course, I mean, this case is complicated by the fact that there were federal informants involved. Right. So you have to, that when I think talking about it and navigating or reporting it, then have to basically reckon with the fact that, yes, the feds do use informants. That's just kind of a fact of life. But no, it really does seem like all of the people who were involved in this were doing it by their own volition. They're not orchestrating this campaign.

The feds. Yeah, the feds. Yeah. So this is just, I mean, again, she's just, she's out there with her crackpot conspiracy theories. And I've long said that I actually pay Marjorie Taylor Green a compliment. And the compliment is that I believe she is so dumb that she actually believes all this stuff that, like, I actually don't think she is too much of a grifter. I think she's a true believer. Am I wrong about that?

I think I can still kind of be both. Okay. Because I think even when they do really believe it, there's a certain element of, well, they might play up a certain aspect because of this right wing drift. I think they know their audiences really well and sort of know what their audiences want to hear. So yeah, I think she can definitely both be stupid and also basically still trying to please her supporters to a certain extent. Yeah.

And to be clear, I'm not saying otherwise. Yeah. While I do think she's generally stupid, she seems to not be stupid when it comes to raising money and she knows what works. It's just that there are plenty of them out there who also know that it works and that it raises money who will basically just say anything whether they believe it or not. And I do actually think she believes all this stuff. Yeah, I think she does too.

And I really have not heard a conclusive argument to believe otherwise, honestly. Right. Yeah, no, exactly. So we've got these sort of like Trump talking about death wishes. We've got Marjorie Taylor Green saying that the killings have already started and the Democrats are literally killing Republicans. Also, there have been legitimate attacks already we've seen on sitting members of Congress, senators and House members. Susan Collins got a window smashed at her house. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been confronted at her office.

A lot of this stuff has been going on. This is not going to get any better, is it? It's just going to continue to escalate. Yeah, I think it's definitely going to continue to escalate. I think in that sense, an event like January 6th was really only a beginning of something rather than an end. We recently just did a poll at the SPLC, and one of the aspects that we looked at was the approval of political violence. And one thing that we found that's honestly pretty distressing is when asked whether they believed that some violence might be necessary to protect the country from radical extremists, 41% of Republicans agreed with that statement. That's compared to 34% of Democrats and 29% of independence. I mean, that's, it's a sizable part of the party. And when the party is framing opposition to Trump or anyone who's vaguely left of Senate, as some kind of communist extremist. I mean, it's scary. And especially with midterms coming up,

the 2024 election, not good. Yeah, no, not good at all. And it's a little frightening, actually, also that it's like a third of Democrats feel the same way. Yeah, I mean, it really does seem just sort of across the board that there seems to be a lowering of the sort of threshold for just reckoning with political violence, I guess. But it would be interesting to kind of get more of a breakdown. I don't think we got got the chance to do it this time around, but to get more of a breakdown on what extremist means to some of the people who said yes. Right. I'm curious. I mean, I imagine the definitions could be all over the place in people's heads. No, that's a good point. But, you know, we've now got, I mean, Susan Collins is someone, obviously we and everyone

always makes fun of Susan Collins because, you know, she's always got concerns about something or other. And, you know, she's like a centrist right up to the end. end. Like she'll always, it's just, she annoys pretty much everybody. But she actually told the New York Times in talking about this violence, she said she wouldn't be surprised if a senator or a house member were killed. And she said what started with abusive phone calls is now translating into active threats of violence and real violence. And I do think that for once, she's not wrong to have these concerns. Yeah. I mean, I don't, I don't think she's wrong either. There is a fundamental jump between engaging in threats of violence online. and then translate that to the real world. The conditions for carrying out grotesque acts of violence, I mean, there's a lot of reasons why it happens, and it's not necessarily being ingratiated in violent communities

or being ingratiated in online communities that are advocating for violence is not necessarily going to lead to acts of violence, but I think just the amount of noise about violence and I mean, the things we've seen already, the things that were in the New York Times article about what AOC and Collins and others are dealing with. I mean, I think that's just kind of indicative that it's a numbers game to a certain extent. Right. And it's, I mean, the saddest part of that New York Times article was that AOC said basically,

like, one of the first things her office does every morning is put together a list of various potential threats of, you know, from various different people, which is just unbelievable that they have to do that every morning. Let's jump to another subject completely here. Not that long ago, there was some sabotage of these two natural gas pipelines that run between Russia and Germany, known as Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2, the second of which isn't completed yet. And there were explosions. It appears to be sabotaged.

It appears to be espionage. And what we're seeing is a lot of the people on the right from Tucker Carlson on down are doing something that the right used to hate. They're blaming America first. Yep. It's something. No, it really is something. And it's like they are instantly jumping to this was done by the, this is an escalation being done by the American government, by the Biden administration. I think Charlie Kirk nitwit that he is was instantly blaming the CIA. And as Media Matters reported, it was a whole bunch Glenn Greenwald doesn't think it was Russia.

A lot of people don't think that Russia did this to themselves, which, okay, maybe they didn't, although it does seem to be certainly a possibility. But what do you make of sort of this, like there's now this, like there's like two pipelines. There's the natural gas pipelines, and then there's sort of the Tucker Carlson to Russia's state media pipeline. And we're seeing this a lot since the invasion of Ukraine that Tucker will say something. And then within 24 hours, it's all over Russian state media. In some ways, you could say it's a much more effective pipeline than North Stream. Because it doesn't require any extraordinary under ocean infrastructure to create.

It really exists at the whims of the Internet. Yeah, I mean, it's honestly been fascinating to watch because some of it feels just like this relentless contrarianism that they basically just will not take what could possibly be a more reasonable explanation as an answer. I mean, no one knows who did this. We don't know anything. We can speculate. That's all you can really do at this point. But saying, I'm just thinking of Tim Poole, noted investigative reporter. declaring that we will not know who did this. I will not lean toward it being Russia. It just seems like quite a bold statement to take at the point from no one knows anything. Yeah, no. But then again, I know, but that's the thing. Like, I couldn't agree more. Like, if you want to go out there and say, I don't think Russia did this and give reasons why, okay, that's reasonable. Like, you may turn out to be wrong, but that's at least reasonable. But at the same time, like, you can't be out.

out there saying, we will not know who did this. And then instantly jumping to, obviously, it was the Biden administration. Yeah. Like, I mean, yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that just feels weird. Also, I'm not, you know, you referred to Tim Poole as an investigative journalist. I think he's an investigative journalist slash musician these days.

Oh, yes. I just want to make that clear. I know you're more into the MAGA rap side of right wing music. But Tim Poole is out there bringing back. Lincoln Park and groups like that. So I don't want to, you know, I don't want to get sued here by not calling it. Andy, put some disrespect on traps name, please. Right. It is much more traps than Lincoln Park. I know. That might have been a cheap shot at Lincoln Park, actually. I'm going to actually defend Lincoln Park here. Yeah. And they don't deserve to be compared to Tim Pool. I mean, no, I think that's right. And I actually will, I will hear on air, I will apologize to Lincoln Park for that.

They were the band that jumped into my head, but you're absolutely right. They do not deserve that. Thank you. As the apparent now unofficial spokesperson of Lincoln Park, I appreciate that. Kelly Weil is a reporter at the Daily Beast, host of the Daily Beast's Fever Dream podcast, and author of Off the Edge, Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Anything. Kelly, thanks so much for joining us. I really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me. Absolutely. I want to talk about the piece you wrote for The Daily Beast about what you referred to as a civil war within the Libertarian Party. So describe what we're talking about here. What kicked off this war and why was it something called the Meeses Caucus? Right. So libertarian parties, you know, third largest party in the U.S., but still pretty small compared to Democrats and Republicans. In 2016, the Libertarian Party actually had a pretty decent showing in the presidential race. Gary Johnson did not well, but, you know, well-relative.

to pass the libertarian candidates. Right. What he did there was sort of making a play for more mainstream Democrat and Republican voter. He wasn't really running on like the Ron Paul line, right? And for some libertarians, that was great, that was a play for greater relevance. And for others, they saw that a stepping away from their core values. So after 2016, there was really this reckoning, you know, what is the libertarian party going to be? how are we going to run?

And there emerged a group that it's hard to describe as anything, but sort of alt-right adjacent, right? They took this identity crisis, and they used it to push them in a really hard right direction saying, we're going to step away from all these identity issues. And while that sounded appealing to some libertarians, what they really kind of used that as a vehicle floor was saying, we're going to step away from, you know, backing LGBT interest at all,

and backing racial equality, really just driving right into racial grievance and things like that. So what emerged was this group called the Mises Caucus. They're pretty hard right. And for the past two years or so, actually starting in 2017, really, they have been making pretty aggressive inroads at state and local libertarian parties. And just this May, they officially took the leading stake in the National Libertarian Party. As you said, this all went down in May was the National Convention for the Libertarian Party. And so the Mises caucus pretty much took control of the National Party at that point. What's been sort of the fallout of that?

Oh, it's been a train wreck. So, you know, there's just saying that, you know, the party belongs to who shows up. And that's really the case here because a lot of libertarians are like, you know, they're kind of freewheeling. They're part of the party, but they're not going to show up at the convention and getting to the nitty-gritty internal politics. Mises really counted on that. And they showed up in force. They were organized. They had manuals for how they were going to present motions and things like that on the floor of this caucus.

And so what emerged was a really strong Mises block in, you know, elected party positions. But that didn't necessarily represent how libertarians in the ground who were maybe more, you know, involved in their state party, that sort of thing. It didn't really represent how a lot of them felt. So there's been this schism, right, of more old school libertarians who are, you know, a lot of them are there for, you know, legalized. legalized sex work, all that. So there's them and there's this new guard that's quite hard, right, very organized. And they've been trying very hard to flip state parties so that they are run by Mises activists. And this has caused a real falling out between people who used to hold state parties who are now leaving or trying really weird parliamentary moves to keep control

of their parties and Mises people who are quite successfully taking over a lot of these parties. So you talked about the rift between the states and everything. In your article, you mentioned that a bunch of states have sort of, have they broken free from the National Party? Yeah, it's really interesting. It's tough when you're a small group and you divide ever further. It's like this kaleidoscopic effect. But in a few states, they have voted to either dissolve completely or disaffiliate from the

National Party. So New Mexico says they are still the Libertarian Party of New Mexico, but they are not affiliated with Libertarian Party national because of this Baroque argument they have. add over bylaws. The New Mexico group is not predominantly Mises. And there's some other libertarians who have just dropped the name altogether. There's folks in Pennsylvania who said, you know what, screw this. This party is too much baggage. We are now the Keystone Party of Pennsylvania. And they're actually doing activism. You know, they're running candidates on this fairly unknown party line, but they're just stepping away from this party altogether because they think the brand is toxic. You know,

now that the Mises caucus has taken over, I've seen tweets from the Libertarian National accounts and from various state accounts. And they're basically, to me, they're indistinguishable from the kinds of things Republicans have been saying since 2016. And what I mean by that is that they're nasty and stupid. I mean, this is the comparison to me, but let me know if I'm being fair or not, that the Mises wing is the libertarian equivalent of the Trumpist taking over the GOP. Oh, absolutely.

That's a great analogy to draw. I know a lot of them will object to that, but I think it's totally true in sentiment. And with these tweets, it's sort of transparent what they're doing, right? because everyone can do the Marjorie Taylor Green style of tweeting. We tweet something just absurdly inflammatory. Everyone talks about it. Everyone's mad at you. But you get a little bit of attention.

And I think a lot of old guard libertarians were not really, they didn't want to do that thing. They thought it was kind of gross. A lot of these new misis affiliates, especially some individual chapters like New Hampshire is a big one. They're just out there swinging. They're like, come on, give me some outrage. You know, they'll just tweet like, it's a good day to repeal the civil rights after something like that. And it's like, Andy, you and I kind of live in the salt minds of Twitter. And at a certain point, you're like, I don't want to get into this today.

But they do understand that that kind of outrage drives attention. And I think they're betting on it, driving maybe some membership. But the thing is, and look, I'm, you know, I have to be upfront about this. I am, you know, as I say at the top of the show here, I'm very comfortable on the left now. But I was a libertarian for a long time. And I have some knowledge of this. I mean, I was never a huge libertarian party member or anything. anything like that. But what they're doing now is, like, it really is. Like, I look at it and I'm like,

why would anyone vote for you when you're out there tweeting about, you know, critical race theory and stuff like that, just pulling shit out of the Republican playbook? It's like, what are you offering that the Republican Party, circa 2022, doesn't? That is a phenomenal question, because, again, they really do seem to be adopting a lot of the emotional grievance based issues that, you know, the Bannon wing of the Republican Party already drives. You know, if you dig into their platform, which is honestly a head trip in itself, you will find some places where the, uh, the Mises wing of the Libertarian Party does distinguish from the Republican Party. But those are more bad shit than anything else. Like, they're advocating for something called

national divorce, basically the idea that the U.S. can no longer hold itself together and it should break off into smaller factions that can theoretically manage themselves better. in greater harmony. That, of course, won't work. You know, you want to say break off New York. Well, okay, cool. I'm in a red part of New York. It makes no goddamn sense. But they do advocate for that sort of thing. And, you know, it is interesting because these are not electoral winners. A lot of these parties, frankly, are not even pro-democracy. They're openly anti-democracy. They call democracy mob rule. So it is a very interesting question. What their end game is here. Is it to win elected candidates?

Is it to shit post the Overton window in a certain direction? Is it, as I've heard, you know, I will call it conspiracy theorizing because I can't back it up, but you know, is it just to kind of pull libertarians toward the Republican Party? It's not totally clear to me, but you are right to say that their posts are pretty indistinguishable from a Trumpist party line at this point. Yeah. And so you, you know, you pointed out that in 2016, you talked about Gary Johnson. I knew Johnson a little bit, super nice guy, genuinely like goofy, but like in a good way.

He was a guest on Red Eye, the show I used to work on a bunch of times. And one time he showed up and he brought us all little, you know, pot candies. Because I think that was a company he was thinking about starting up at the time or something like that. And he was just genuinely a nice guy. I feel like the 2024 candidate coming out of this music caucus, it's not going to really be like that, is it? Oh, no. I mean, we don't know who the 2024 candidate is. There is theorizing that it's going to be this comedian who is hosted, yep, who's hosted like, you know, Charlottesville Marchers on his podcast distensibly for debate,

but, you know, comes out saying, well, I agree with the alt-right uncertain tennis. It's just, you know, okay. You know, the Republicans nominated in won Donald Trump, so it can't be ultra-critical there. Right. But you're right that, you know, it does seem to be this kind of shift away. from a Johnson who, no, he's never going to win the presidency, but he was a governor. He did have, you know, mainstream cred. People liked him. He was serious. And it just doesn't really seem like

that kind of electoral focus right now. Yeah. And also in full disclosure, I should say that I know Dave Smith. You know, we both were part of a S.E. Cup show, unfiltered. And I did not have him going in this alt-rightish kind of direction, and it's super, super disappointing. And I actually, like, can't believe it. But nevertheless, it is true. So going back to this presidential stuff, and you mentioned Gary Johnson did really well in 2016, he got like 4.5 million votes, which is over 3% of the ballots cast, which, again, zero, he got the same number of electoral votes that I did or you did. So whatever. But that, you know, that was leaps and bounds above.

of anything the LP had achieved in the past. And I think we can mostly attribute that to Trump versus Hillary Clinton. But, you know, in 2020, they ran Joe Jorgensen. She got about two million votes. And a lot of times the libertarians get yelled at as being a spoiler, the way that sort of the Ralph Nader is kind of due. I know it's way too early to speculate on what we could be looking at in 2024. But can you speculate on what we could be looking at in 2024?

You know, I don't see how this particular Libertarian Party pulls more votes than they did, even in 2020, which was a bit of an underperformance for them. Right. I only know one person who has actually switched from Republican to libertarian registration right now as a fallout of Trump, actually. And, you know, this is someone who is leaning, you know, more liberal than the standard Republican Party, where they've always been a member. So I really don't see how a hard right tack is really going to speak to people who are maybe eyeing a third party. And, you know, again, if you do dig into their platform, which they're, you know, I think at least ideologically serious about, those propositions don't appeal to many people. Not many people are going for national divorce. I mean, that's, that is rough to sell. And so maybe you can, you know, be sort of edge lority. You can get some, uh, Nick Fuway. America First fans who are, you know, 18 registering for the first time to throw a protest vote your way. But really, as a serious movement building tactic, I don't see it. Yeah. And also, again, I just feel like those people are so comfortable in the Republican

Party right now. It would be one thing if the Republican Party were the Republican Party of like 2012. But given where the Republican Party is now, like a big thing for libertarians has always been this sort of isolationism or neo-isolationism or however you want to term it. And that always set them apart from the Republicans who always had a very hawkish foreign policy. Obviously, that ain't the case now. And, you know, so to me, that's a huge loss for the Libertarian Party in terms of voters because that was a thing they used to always use to set themselves apart. Absolutely.

Yeah, it is very interesting. It's interesting to see this guard of libertarians lose some talking points as they become adopted by the mainstream. You know, when I was reporting this story, I talked to someone in Idaho. Unfortunately, this bit didn't make the cut. But she said that this caucus really got a lot of ground in doing opposition to COVID guidelines, you know, anti-masking, anti-vaxing. And, you know, that's already such a mainstream Republican view.

And frankly, even Democrats now aren't, you know, supporting masking in any respect. So she said, I don't really know what they pivot to after that. What's their next movement building thing? And to the extent that you already have, you know, a lot of mainstream Republicans tweeting a lot of against funding the war in Ukraine, things like that. I think a lot of what seemed like the low-hanging talking points that a libertarian party could latch on to here, they're already spoken for by a larger, better-funded party. Yeah, that's the thing. So I just feel like, obviously, at best, the libertarian party plays like a very minor, spoilerly role in a presidential election. And even that is debatable,

even though you'll get like both sides yelling at the libertarian party for costing them the election. But it seems to me that they're not even going to have that. I mean, if you're out there tweeting about, again, I just have this one in my head, because I couldn't believe it. Critical race theory and stuff like that. It's like, who do you think you're appealing to here that isn't already in complete lockstep with the GOP? Absolutely. And like, you know, you mentioned your libertarian credits.

I've got them as well, you know, like high school iron essay contest winner. I'll cop to that on this podcast. So why I bring that up is like I do feel like I actually have some framework. to discuss like libertarian ideology. And the tweets I see coming out of even the Libertarian National Party account now are just completely in just stark contradiction to them. They're tweeting about firing and prosecuting teachers who teach gender theory. And it's like, well, hang on.

The libertarians I know are frankly quite skeptical of the courts. And, you know, one thing that I keep coming back to here is there actually is a place to kind of wild out on Twitter. And you do that if you're trying to pull. an established party in one direction. That's what the TPPUSAs and the America First people do to the Republican Party, right? They say just wild stuff for attention, but they have actual inroads and an actual party that can make actual change. You can't do that with the Libertarian Party, you know? You're throwing all this effort at the wall to maybe sway 0.05% of the vote. Again, it's just

take up another hobby. Right. Well, okay, so let me shift gears a little bit. Is it not the presidential election that they've really got their eye on? Is it more local stuff? Is it sort of mirroring what a lot of what like the GOP and other groups on the right have been doing with school boards and local elections? Is that what they're thinking about? So I have heard that argument about trying to get more local seats, statewide elected officials. I've heard arguments on both sides here. I did talk to some Mises folks who said, you know, we're laser focused getting people elected and statewide roles.

And I've also spoken to Old Guard libertarians who say, now hang on, our candidates are dropping out because they don't want to deal with these Mises folks. So it is interesting. What is being speculated or kind of salivated as a libertarian 2024 ticket is a very online celebrity-driven thing. So I can kind of see them trying to make a play for a younger crowd, people who are into meme lords, basically.

Right. But, you know, if you take Mises people at the word, they're saying, yeah, they are trying to build state level power. Again, talk to people who have more organizing experience to say, not a chance. Yeah, so basically what we're looking for is we need to find out who the libertarian Benny Johnson is. Oh, man. Well, unfortunately, send them my way.

I've got questions if you find them. Okay, I will. Before I let you go, I want to switch to a different topic. You wrote another Daily Beast a couple days ago, and the headline was, man behind sketchy audit of Pennsylvania's voting machines has tied to failed Arizona recount. I saw that and I was like, four years ago, I would have been like, what? And now, of course, I was like, oh, I know exactly what this about. But what's the story?

Just quickly, what is the story there? Sure thing. So you know how the election was two years ago now and it's settled and been settled for two years? Well, not in Pennsylvania where they are still running these goddamn audits where they're trying to find any issue at all with voting machines there that they can use. to say the election needs to be overturned. The latest effort involves getting this, he's like a forensic ink dater to go through

and say this machine is blurry. Therefore, you know, the whole thing is suspect. Good on, you know, local officials for calling this out. Councilman, Republican councilmen and the Pennsylvania counties where this is being tried are saying, you know, no way in hell. We've checked their machines ourselves. They're fine.

Nevertheless, you know, they're trying to roll this out ahead of the midterms. And it's the same place. players every time. So this guy, he was in Arizona doing that absolutely just a dumpster fire audit that they tried last year. Previously in these Pennsylvania counties, we had folks like Sidney Powell trying to fund a search of the election machine. So, you know, it's this small, rotating cast to characters. You see them again. It's like, it reminds me of 21 Jump Street when they couldn't fund a full cast of characters.

So they, like, recast the guy and the next thing is a different person. That's a, that may be a reach of a reference. But it does remind me of that because it's like, didn't I just see you last month, sir? Right. And, but, you know, you point this out of the article, and it's so depressing because you point out, like, they've done all these audits in all these different counties in, in Arizona, in Pennsylvania, whatever. Not a single one of them has found.

any evidence of voter fraud. But if you talk to, like, the true believers, they all believe that these audits did find evidence of voter fraud. It's wild because, you know, so this latest effort in Pennsylvania is very new. So I've been able to kind of track its growth, right? And the day it came out, he said a blurry issue on one scanning machine might have affected 10,000 ballots.

From there, the next day, conspiracy sites were saying 10,000 fake ballots found in Pennsylvania. Right. From there, it was 16,000. Right. two days later, it's showing up in a county meeting where people are saying, what about the 16,000 fake ballots? So it's fascinating. And, you know, we've learned nothing. Yeah, we've learned only that I'm running out of walls to bang my head against because there's just holes everywhere. Oh, my God. Kelly, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate it. It's fascinating stuff

about the Libertarian Party. And as I said, as someone who used to be sort of part of that, I'm not happy with the way they're going, but I'm also kind of curious to see how it plays out. Thanks again, Kelly. Thanks for having me. Corbin Bollies is a media reporter at The Daily Beast. So Corbyn, first of all, thanks for joining us. So glad to have you. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Absolutely. We talked earlier on the show about Trump's truth social post over the weekend in which he said that Mitch McConnell had a death wish. But I want to focus now on something else that he said in that same post. He referred to Senator McConnell's wife, Elaine Chow, that's spelled C-H-A-O, as his, quote, China-loving wife, Coco Chow, spelled C-H-O-W. First of all, yikes. But then Senator Rick Scott, who's the head of the National Republican Senator editorial committee, he was on a bunch of shows on Sunday, and he was asked about this. How did that go? Rick Scott, he came on to speak a hurricane-in recovery efforts, and toward the end of the interview, Dana Bash asked Tim.

him as a member of Senate leadership, how can he stand by or what comments do you have on Trump pretty much calling for violence against the head of the Senate Republicans and for attacking his wife and using a pretty obviously racist term for her name. And Rick Scott's first defense in this segment in this answer was the president, like, see if people nicknames. And you can ask him how he came up with the nickname on. I'm sure he has a nickname for me, which, sure, the former president does have a tendency to call upon a name for nearly everybody, but to associate that history with an obviously racist term was a bit of a shock coming from somebody in Senate leadership.

To her credit, Dana Bash kind of pushed him on this a little bit. He never came out and outright said that, yeah, this is, you know, this is racist and Trump shouldn't have done it. But he, he kind of went there a little bit? Yeah, he started his approach with it's never, ever okay to be a racist. Brave statement. I mean, it is a general truth. It's not okay to be a racist. How this is brought up in this context where this is somebody in Senate leadership, talking about the former president, who's supposedly running again in 2024. That's not generally something that you want to associate with. And Scott Jennings, a former McConnell advisor, said that if you heard somebody say this on the street, you wouldn't think, let's hand this person the presidency or the Republican nomination for it.

just shows how people are still rallying to Trump's events, even when he can say the next thing that comes to top of mind. Yeah, and even when they won't straight up defend him, they also won't attack him. They won't call him out for anything. Like, the most that they'll do is try to sort of brush it off. Correct. And you saw this example here where Rick Scott still doesn't want to be associated with attacking Donald Trump, because everybody knows that Trump remembers these things. Trump watches us, even if he doesn't say that he does. you could see how we tried to pivot back to the reason he was brought on the show, which is that he was talking about hurricane and recovery efforts. He was talking about his role as a senator. And he tried to pivot that before ending it with, I hope no one is racist, which I think is a general truth that we also hope no one is racist.

Exactly. Thank you. It is. And instead of just going, okay, you know, this guy's nuts. Like, stop trying to make it any more than that. As of us talking right now, which is Monday afternoon, There's been no response from Senator McConnell or from Chow herself. Do you think we're going to get one? I don't see McConnell responding to this because McConnell has shown that he doesn't want to respond to everything that Trump says. He's pretty much set his piece on Donald Trump. Elaine Chow has never been once publicly comment on all of Trump's past statements.

So I don't think we're going to get anything soon. But if Trump continues on his barrage, then something may change, especially as we get past the election, then closer to 2024, we may see Mitch McConnell recognize a bit more where Trump's place in the party is. Yeah, that's a good point. I just, I sit here and I'm like, will anyone in this party of sort of self-described alpha males ever stick up for their wives? You know, we had the Ted Cruz thing, we have McConnell thing, and I'm fairly certain there are other examples that I'm just sort of blanking on. But all these guys do this big, tough guy. I mean, not so much Mitch McConnell.

He doesn't get involved in that stuff. But in general, they've like set themselves up as this party of the, you know, the alpha males. And yet none of them will jump in to defend their wives. People accept a lot when it comes to Donald Trump. I mean, Ted Cruz asked him to stay away from his family when he was running against Donald Trump. And then has spoken highly of him since. Trump gives out Lindsey Graham's phone number at a press conference years ago and they go golfing together now. Right.

Nobody can manage to hold a grudge against Donald Trump for long when they want to gain his favor. Yeah, it is absolutely amazing just how craven they are. And, you know, talking about responses to what Trump said, there has been some in conservative media have called him out for this. I know the bulwark did, which is not surprising at all because they're generally decent people there. National Review also did, which I guess National Review is a weird mix of decent people and horrible people. I haven't seen a word from any Republican elected officials at all about either the Elaine Chow stuff or the death wish part. And again, I guess I'm sort of repeating the same question over and over because it just boggles my mind. Even at this stage that even after what we've seen for the last six years, that no elected officials will step up and say, you know, yeah, he shouldn't have said that that was wrong.

Like even something like that anodyne. I mean, we also saw the Wall Street Journal's editorial board comment and say that this is all the more reckless. So you'll have no pun intended, but these bulwarks of conservative media that are generally respected come out and say this is wrong, but Trump's allies aren't there. Trump's allies are in power, are in our holding elected office, and are going to call him and ask him for help. And he knows that and he knows that we're going to come out against him. Is he going to provide that help? Right. I'm a star-eyed optimist, I guess here, Corbyn. And I just, I like to think that at some point someone's going to say enough, and they're going to be like, none of this is worth it, and this guy is horrible, and he keeps saying these things. And again, we talked earlier on the show about the death wish part. And as they always do, they leave themselves wiggle room. You know, Trump says this. And then they say, oh, well, we don't, we don't, you know, when they say that McConnell has a death

wish, we don't mean that someone, you know, we're not calling for violence. We're saying he has a political death wish. but I'm glad that the bulwarks of the world and that the Washington Times is calling him out. But at some point, the fucking actual Republican, you know, party members have to be calling him out, don't they? We've seen Republican Party members do that, but every person that does do that is generally somebody that is considered an enemy of Donald Trump. Or when they do, they're booted out of office. Look at Liz Cheney. Look at Trump's attacks on Lisa Murkowski and Susan Colin.

The people who do, nobody listens to them. And he knows that. He knows that even if they do come at him, the people who do aren't people that are going to be voting for him anyway. As much as, I guess, for the hope of the country, you want to see a little bit more pushback against such violent rhetoric. I don't think, especially in the run up to the midterm elections, that's something that elected Republicans hoping to secure their seats are going to want to engage with right now. Yeah, no, and look, I know you're right. And I know that. I hate to be a downer. I hate to be a downer. But you're absolutely right. And it has to be said, and I'm an idiot. It's not that I think they're ever going to do it. And I'm, you know, obviously, or I think hopefully, obviously I'm joking about being a stare-eyed optimist. But it's just every time this happens, I sit there and I don't expect them to, but I'm like, how can you not?

Like, how can you not say at long last have you no shame, you know? And I know there's no point in doing that because you can only say that only works if people have shame and Trump has no shame. But at a certain point, I don't know. I just, I don't get how you don't do that and then you go home at night and you think, oh, I had a good day today. Like, I just don't get it. And that's the thing.

It's, this isn't Trump's first, like, reference to violence. No. You look at his statements in 2020 during the civil rights protest where he's saying when the looting starts, the shooting starts. January 6th is the most obvious example. Right. All of these examples just point to the fact that senior Republicans, elected Republicans, if they say something against Trump, there's one path for them.

out of office and if they don't, then they're comfortable in their positions. And they know that, and they know that their hands are tied. They've just shown time and time again that they're comfortable with that rhetoric, even when it does blow up in their faces, such as January 6th. Right. Yeah, look, you're absolutely right. I mean, Trump out there saying that, you know, Mike Pence deserve to be hanged. And you still can't get Mike Pence to say really a bad word about Trump. So I guess if they're not going to say it, then, they're never going to say it. I think what's going to be really interesting is if If there are, like, top candidates primary in Trump next year, what they have to say, especially when, you know, debate moderators are going to ask them, why didn't you say any of this before?

Why didn't you make these statements about Donald Trump when you could arguably say it mattered in 2020, after January 6th, before January 6th even? Why say it now when you're trying to bolster yourself versus helping the country? And it's going to be really interesting to see what Mike Pence has to say then, what a Mike Pompeo has to say then, what Irwanda Santis has to say then. So I guess we'll have to wait and see as frustrating as that is to say. No, I think you're right. And the other thing is, you know, in addition to having to wait to see if there's a primary,

if there's an actual act of violence committed against any of these people, whether it's Mitch McConnell or whoever, and obviously I'm not hoping there is. But if there is, will there be Republicans who will stand up and say that this can be traced back right to the desk of Donald Trump or to the brain of Donald Trump and to the things that he says? or will they, and my guess is they won't do that because they'll just continue to be craven. And again, as we've seen even with the January 6th stuff with Mike Pence, he hasn't done it. But you just wonder if at a certain point, if an act of violence is committed, will they be willing to publicly make that association with Donald Trump or will they still act like the two are not related at all?

God forbid that does happen. I think if it does happen, what will be interesting to see is what the conference is, what the conversation turns into. Will it be, is this the final straw now that somebody's attacked a member of Congress? Or will it shift into the political realm and people asking what the equivalence is to January 6th, where all of Congress came under attack because of the weather that started from Donald Trump's mouth? So will people even remember the fact that somebody attacked a member of Congress versus debating whether this is as serious as January 6th?

Does this draw that line? Why didn't it do it then? and as all conversations tend to become nowadays, what's the political stakes of this? And then after all those conversations, people tend to forget them. So I think, God forbid, something happens, but I'm curious to see if it did what that conversation will look like.

Yeah, and look, I guess maybe the conversation will even look like what the January 6th conversation turned into, where we had like, you know, like the Marjorie Taylor Greens of the world, who when they were fearing for their lives, they were, you know, they were sending text to the Trump administration people saying you got to call these people off and then, you know, a bunch of hours later, they're like, oh, this was clearly Antifa.

Exactly. The FBI was involved. Who was putting them up to this? Right. And even then, with their lives at stake, they're still voting to decertify the election. They're still holding true to their party line. So I wish I could say what would be that like ultimate point where people say enough is enough. But even Lindsey Graham said enough is enough. And look where Lindsey Graham has now in regards to his association. I don't know if enough can really ever be enough for some senior officials. Yeah, no, that's a good point. And just lastly, before we go, this is, obviously, this is far from the first time that Trump has gone after Mitch McConnell. What's the main animus behind this? Like, what is it that Trump hates the most about Mitch McConnell,

do you think? I think Trump's sustained from Mitch McConnell truly came when Mitch McConnell, like, stepped aside and condemned Donald Trump on, they've always butted heads, but Mitch McConnell knew that from a functional standpoint he had to work with Donald Trump. Right. And then after January 6th from Mitch McConnell said that, like, this pretty much just cannot continue, didn't do anything to stop the impeachment trial from going through. He didn't vote for impeachment. He didn't vote to potentially block Trump from holding office again. But he pretty much washed his hands clean. And I think after that, Mitch McConnell is doing enough to support. Donald Trump and Donald Trump's view since then, Donald Trump knows how to hold a grudge,

and he will. And that, we've seen that continue throughout the last year and a half, because Donald Trump has consistently attacked Mitch McConnell, not in the violent term, but we've seen it happen. So I think that at this point, Mr. McConnell has just said, well, we know this is going to happen. That's why they haven't really commented, because this is more of the same. And I know what to expect at this point. Yeah, I guess ultimately you are correct. Corbyn, thanks so much for coming on and talking about this with us. I really, really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Andy. I appreciate it. Hannah Gaze. Andy Levy. So now it's time for our audience. It's their, probably their most favorite segment, which could also be because it's our only segment. It's known as fuck that guy. Hanna,

who is your fuck that guy for today? I think I'm going to have to choose Matt Gates. A fine choice. Yes. I mean, he published this tweet asking Congress for additional aid to handle Hurricane Ian after he and basically all of his House Republican colleagues in Florida voted against aid to deal with Hurricane Ian. Basically like, hello Congress, will you Venmo me money?

I understand Venmo might be a touchy subject from that case. But, wow. Yes. So what is the deal with that? Like, how do you, I don't understand how this even works. Like, first of all, it's very odd to vote against money for your own state, but, I mean, I would like to pretend that there's some kind of principle going on here. But then why the tweet? Who knows?

I mean, if it's, if the argument is that they couldn't give aid because of big government interfering, big government in, say, Venowing Florida seems a little strange. What is the logic for those? I have no idea. Shooting down aid. Yeah, I can't rationalize it outside of, well, I guess they just don't like big government. But that doesn't really seem to be the case here. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Very weird. And an excellent fuck that guy. Do you want to know who my fuck that guy is? Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So my fuck that guy is, it's not a particular person, I guess. Well, maybe it is. But it's basically the Democratic leadership because we on the new abnormal have been pretty hard on the Democrats for refusing to pass legislation that would prevent members of Congress from trading stock. And then it looked like they were maybe going to pass legislation doing that. And we were like, yay, finally, you know, we'll give you credit now.

it should have been done years ago, decades ago, but at least you're doing it now. Well, now no vote is being allowed on the bill that was supposed to come up. And we've even got Democratic members of Congress saying that this is a failure of House leadership. And apparently the bill itself was, which was crafted largely in secret, according to the project on government oversight and the national taxpayer. union, which is maybe not what you want in a bill that's about transparency and about preventing lawmakers from profiting from insider knowledge. And the bill apparently had it, according to these groups, had a significant loophole that would have allowed them to evade meaningful oversight, according to the New York Times. So already, first of all, the bill seems horrible,

and then they wouldn't even bring the horrible bill to the floor for a vote. So you've got Abigail Spanberger from Virginia, a Democrat, blaming this on the House, leadership and other Democrats and other progressive groups, watchdog groups, also saying that this is the fault of the Democratic leadership. So unfortunately, you know, I would much prefer to be going after Republicans on this, but this seems to be a Democratic failure. And it's just, it's absolutely unconscionable. It's such an easy win. It's a layup. It's a fucking layup. Just say you're not allowed to trade stock because everyone knows you're doing it based off inside information and it looks horrible. It's such a simple thing to do to say, you know what, we shouldn't be doing that.

It'll make the American people have a little more confidence in us. And they can't even do it. It's like the bare minimum and they can't even do it. So my fuck that guy is, I guess, the House leadership, whether it's Nancy Pelosi or Nancy Pelosi plus. That is my fuck that guy for today. I think that's fair. I mean, it seems to be a trend that we see a little bit with Democrats sometimes is they just can't take a win and sometimes want to make it a little bit more complicated. Yeah. I am definitely not thinking of student loan cancellation right now. No. Yeah. Yeah. Hope you enjoyed 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. See you

next time. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studed The Daily Beast podcast at the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts. If you enjoyed this episode, consider becoming a Daily Beast subscriber. Subscribing is the best way to feed the beast and support all of your podcasts as we cover what might become the darkest timeline. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash membership slash podcast and sign up today.