The Daily Beast Podcast - What’s Next for Andrew Yang — And How to Stop the Trumpy Apocalypse

Episode Date: May 1, 2020

In this episode of The New Abnormal, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast talk to Andrew Yang about whether he’d take a gig in a Biden administration, and why he’s talking to Mike Bloomberg’s team (hint: there might, might, just might be a run for mayor of New York in his future). Then the trio rap about what it’s like to try to raise $100 million for 100,000 food stamp recipients in 100 days, and how totally weird it is to meet a guy with a tattoo of your face on his calf. Plus! Rick explains how “the zombie apocalypse will be largely indistinguishable from a Trump rally.” Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, this is Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly John Fass, novelist, an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, and the person who tells Rick not to tweet the things he wants to tweet. I'm an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, best-selling author, and full-time troublemaker. The New Abnormal is about one nation under a pandemic and how it's changing all of us. We'll talk about what's happening in the country and the culture and look at good and bad people, leadership, and ideas. I come from very different political worlds. But what brings us together is that we both love America, and we realize that putting our country over party and ideas over ideology might be the only thing that gets us through this. We'll be joined by smart guests from media, politics, culture, medicine,

and science. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of curse words and try to keep our pets and other wildlife sands from invading our respective bunkers. Rick, I have a question. Are you in Gitmo right now? You know, as much as all the Trumpers and their various auxiliaries and ball washers and bootlickers have been flooding my timeline since yesterday with the great Flynn revelation and declarations that I will soon be in Gitmo, I am still in what we like to call Gitmo North in Tallahassee, Florida today. And somehow, somehow I still walk free amongst the civilized people of America. Can you explain to me what the revelation is?

Because it seems like there is no revelation. This is the most gigantic nothing burger of an entire 12-course meal of nothing burgers. You know, every few weeks, John Solomon and Sidney Powell and the boys at the Washington Examiner and Breitbart, every few weeks they try to rev up. The Trump was framed. It's a conspiracy against Trump, the deep state. They try to rev this up every couple weeks. Of course, Bill Barr is eagerly shoving what should be classified material out the door in order to help this spurious campaign.

But they can't let this go because Trump won't let it go. This latest go round, they managed to obtain a bunch of the preparation notes for the various interviews with Flynn. And these folks basically were asking back and forth the usual questions that an FBI investigatory team would ask themselves. Are we doing this? What are the framing mechanisms? How are we going to ask these questions? How are we going to prepare for this? It is from every account that I've seen of people who've actually been around these things,

this is a nothing burger. This is, you know, the kind of due diligence prep work that would go on in any investigation. And the argument, basically, that these people are saying is, Mike Flynn, the strategic genius spy master, super intellectual, national security advisor, this gigantic towering figure in espionage was somehow tricked by a couple of GS-13 FBI agents into and framed into a terrible lie. Mike Flynn lied to the FBI. He lied to the vice president. These are not disputed facts. You know who doesn't dispute them? Mike Flynn. You know why he didn't dispute them? Because he did. He lied to them. That's why he's been charged. And I have a feeling the judge is going to look at this like a lot of

the other stunts and BS that the Flynn fanatics have engaged in and say, thank you for playing. Go fuck yourself. Mike Flynn is, he has become this iconic figure on the Trump right of people who don't know Mike Flynn. I wrote about this in my first book. Both Mike Flynn's predecessor and successor thought Mike Flynn was a lunatic. Yeah. They thought Mike Flynn was off the goddamn race. Pretty much everybody thinks Mike Flynn is completely nuts. Right.

This isn't any new information. Look, he had a long career and in some ways a distinguished career. But at some point, Afghanistan broke him and he became a very different kind of community. When Flynn was fired by Obama, it wasn't inside the intelligence community, this moment of tragedy where people said, oh, my God, we've lost one of the best. Okay. Captain Cuckoo Pants is off the reservation now. So is Flynn part two really like the caravan? Flynn is in some ways like a caravan.

Because the caravan came at the midterms magically disappeared right after. The narrative that there's a deep state arrayed against Trump. The narrative that there's this deep state plot to get Flynn and thus to get Trump. It's part of the Trump greatest hits album. It's the golden oldies of Donald Trump trying to say, nothing I've ever done has been wrong. I've never engaged anything shady. By extension, neither could Mike Flynn. Mike Flynn was paid by Vladimir Putin to come and participate in events in Russia. Mike Flynn was in the pocket of Turkey and working with Turkish forces for the

Turkish government to try to kidnap a Turkish citizen on American soil and return him to Turkey, where he would be murdered. And this is not a guy who left civil service and went into the private sector and then played a lot of golf in retirement. He was into some hinky stuff. Not unlike Rudy. Oh, at some point the Rudy Flynn intersection would have happened. Right. The Flintersection, if you will.

The Flandersection. And it would have been a gigantic shit show. Yeah. None of this is really about Mike Flynn. This is about distracting the Trump's base with a shiny object. And to continue this thing from the classic fascist playbook, dark forces are arrayed against the great leader. Right.

And the dark forces of the deep state must be punished. Of course, that's why I've been. told, I'm on the enemies list. Well, it's also this strange phenomenon of if only there weren't people trying to stop him, he'd be able to accomplish great things. Yeah, I know, you know who stops him every day? That guy he wakes up with and looks at him in the mirror before he puts on his wig every morning.

First of all, I think that wig is implanted. I don't think that's something you can take off. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. Also, the other thing is I don't think that he, I think that for us, the best, thing about Donald Trump is that he's so incompetent. Aside from grift, Trump's incompetence is pretty much universal. My great-grandfather used to call people whirling son of the bitches. And that mean they were a son of a bitch no matter which angle you came at them from. Well, Trump is a whirling incompetent.

And if it's not about satisfying his ego, his incompetence is his defining characteristic. But here's the thing. And as usual with these things, when there's a big inflection point with Trump, when he's under crisis moment, All these people come out of the woodwork. And Dan Scavino, who feeds the Q&ON thing, everybody needs to know that Dan Scavino is the wellhead of sending like the weird pictures from the White House or Air Force One to these dipshits. But they come out and these people are already on the edge in a lot of ways. They are very marginalized individuals.

They're the Caesar Seych types. And the people who believe in Q&on and who believe in the deep state conspiracy theories, they have some gentry folks on the top end, like the Federalist and Byron York, who they love to write about the deep state thing. And I like Byron, by the way. He was not a radical cuck before the Trump era, but they love the deep state stories. It drives a lot of traffic for them.

But the readers of these things and the QAnon types that are underneath it all, that are the audience for these stories. They are the ones who merge them with these lurid conspiracy theories that exist in their heads. And then they do things like email me pictures of myself with bullet holes in my forehead.

Yeah, which is nice. And it's not, It sort of makes my day. It reminds me that the world is full of madness and that someday, you know, the zombie apocalypse will come and it will be largely indistinguishable from a Trump rally. I know that that page and Strzok both get those two in great number. And I get them. Last 24 might have been, might have been outstanding. Well, the Trump, the Trump retweet will always. Yeah, the fact that Trump retweeted me the day trying to like stir the pot on the Justin Amash story. And here's the thing. Trump retweets me, right? And a lot of this.

followers instantly follow me. Okay? They're like, instantly, the great leader has retweeted someone. It must be someone we love. Right. If I may quote the Jack Nicholson iteration of the Joker, why don't they get a load of me?

Is Jack Nicholson the best Joker? No, Keith Ledger's the best Joker. This is not even a debatable matter. All right. Well, I'm glad to put this up. I'm very... There's the long-running discussion inside the Wilson family about the Dark Night being the greatest movie

or the greatest movie. When I saw that, I thought to myself, Trump has really does hate you. Yes. Would you want to talk a little bit about that? He is called network news directors. Let's just put it that way. And whined and bitched and cried like a little, like a little winging coward. No, Rick's mean to me on the air.

You can't have him on your air anymore. It's awful. That's the thing about Trump that I just love. You know, this idea in their heads that this is a guy with a six-pack, like the apotheosis of masculinity. The Ben Garrison drawing. Yeah, the Ben Garrison drawings that the Seb Gorka fap spank bank of Trump muscle picks. All these people who think that he is this, like testosterone-soaked alpha male, he is a winging coward in every aspect. He doesn't like people who say bad things about him, but he won't go out people that he thinks will punch him back, ever, ever.

Right. He's so weak. That's the thing I'm always struck by. Like he wouldn't use the Defense Production Act. He's constantly sort of backing down from a challenge, which I think is, we never should have made the Monorail guy from the Simpsons president. Since you had this Trump retweet where Trump sort of said that he thought Amos should run, can we talk about Amish a little bit? Sure, we can talk about Amos. Look, I can tell you from painful experience, just how difficult it is to put together a now.

national campaign for an independent candidate that has a viable path, okay? Right. Because we did it in 2016 with Evan McMullen. And we admitted it. We said it from the start, long shot, bank shot. We got to do everything right and everything's got to fall our way. And the electoral split's got to go a certain way and this and that. I always thought the goal with Evan was just so that Trump would lose a couple of states and then Hillary would win.

Our goal was to make sure that we had a try to have a viable independent candidacy. Right. And the problem with ballot access, on both sides of the equation, by the way, is that you've got to get in a certain number of states very quickly. You've got to get in most of these states by petition. So who's going to go out and do petitioning right now in the key swing states Amash has to qualify in? No one. He's got a very high hill.

So here's the thing. I contemplated this a little bit. I did some math, and I had my nerds do some math. He's got a very difficult pathway to viability. And so my official position on it right now is a shrug. There's no 270 path for him. There's no split path for him. There's not a single state he's going to be highly competitive in. I think there was a path for the Libertarian Party to offset some Trump voters in some states. But I don't think they're going to have a competition in the way that they think for two reasons. One, the Democratic Party is more unified than I've seen it in a generation. And that even counts the still like sputtering of the Bernie brush fire people, you know, like your cousin and some other folks who are angry. And Molly, you can explain that yourself.

My first cousin is Peter Dow and our mothers or sisters. And he's gotten extremely agitated about Joe Biden. Is that fair? I would say agitated is the word. Yeah. You would? Well, you know he's so left because Max Greenfield, woke teenage son, loves him. And he's like, let's go.

I love Chairman Dow. Is Max going to be one of the, one of the people that forms the initial cadre for Chairman Dow. Well, he's part of his exploratory committee. The good news about Max Greenfield is that he's not actually old enough to vote, as much as I love him. Yeah, yeah. But talk about running Green Party candidates in tight races. One of the things here is, and this is a not-so-secret secret, campaigns on the Republican side

have from time to time gone out and found themselves a Green Party candidate. I'm sure you've never done those. I have nothing for you on that, Molly. I can either confirm nor deny, except the times that we did. And Democrats have gone out occasionally and found like an American Patriot Party or a Libertarian or whatever and put them on the ballot to drag off one, two, three percent. And I wrote about this in my new book, my new best-selling book. I think that is right now something that if this had been a standard election without COVID, both sides might have played that game a little harder. Believe me, Trump out there tweeting about Amash running is because he thinks there is a benefit to it.

And he thinks that benefit is to draw some pissed off Bernie types and libertarians and weed types into the LP line that would hurt him otherwise. I think, though, that the election is much different now, especially because Donald Trump is politically buried under a lot of bodies. I'm not trying to be too flippin about that, but it's changed the game a lot. I thought about it for a day. I was a little, I think I tweeted right when it popped out like, God damn it. But then I thought about it and it's just not that big a deal. Right. We know who the main enemy in this election is. And everybody knows who the alternative to that person is. So here we are. You know, right now in a moment where we're even conservatives are saying, holy shit, we better get our government working right because we're facing Great Depression 2.X, a crisis of organization and of mobilization. that cannot be achieved through free market forces right now. There's not going to be a free market solution to getting the PPE distributed as quickly as we could

or getting a vaccine done as quickly as we could. But I don't think what you have with Trump is free market capitalism. Oh, no, it's crony capitalism. Speaking of crony capitalism, there's a person who's sort of enabled all of this, who we don't talk about enough. Are you referring to the hero of the Trump campaign, Brad Parskow? God. Yes, I am. Grown men come up to Brad Parskow all their time, big, strapping tall men with tears in their eyes.

And they say, Brad, Brad, how does Trump do it without you? How could Trump's nothing without you, Brad? You're the greatest political mind in a generation. How does it work, Brad? Why is it you're taller and better looking and better dressed than Donald Trump, Brad? Why do you want Trump to fire Brad? Because clearly this is what's going on here. The reason Brad got his dick in a ringer this week was that Donald Trump has spent about $600 million, and his polling is in the same place it was in the worst moments of impeachment and in the worst moments of Russia Gate and in the worst moments of every other worst moment. Donald Trump is a very fixed, fixed price asset. Right. And so he went to Pascal over the weekend, apparently, and had a yelling match and threatened to sue him because his numbers aren't moving.

And Brad Parscal's role is to be the guy who shunts money around to the various Trump family members and Trump relatives and Trump girlfriends. He's sort of a fixer. He's a bit like Michael Cohen, right? In some degree. And look, he's running the Facebook digital campaign for Trump alongside a lot of actual competent people. But Brad is the money is the money flow person. But Trump's mad at him now. Right.

Because Brad is making a lot of money. You know, you don't buy houses on the waterfront in Fort Laud. and big boats and and then condos in Fort Lauderdale in Miami without having some serious Kwan coming in and Trump is angry with him. And it's not that I want him to fire Brad Parscal. It's just that I feel so bad for Donald Trump that he can't win without Brad Parscale. Brad Parscale, Brad Parskow is much more important to this campaign than Donald Trump. And, and I mean, I think Trump also shouldn't fire him because it would break Melania and Ivanka's

hearts. I mean, have you seen them look at Brad? He's a he's the apotheosis of Greek, a Greek god walking. among us. The people we know, the people we're friendly with have implied, not just implied, have said that Brad is one of the dumbest people they've ever met. No, he's much smarter than Donald Trump. Our mutual friend said he was dumber than a box of rocks and had no idea how to run a campaign. Yes, folks, just so you're aware, the proceeding has been trolling by Rick Wilson. Yeah, I was going to say, I think it's important to. Well, look, I mean, they could fire Brad,

But the problem is you're going to have to find another patsy to, you know, open an LLC and make the same side deals that Brad has made before. At the moment, fortunately for Brad, both Roger Stone and Paul Manafort are unavailable. If things go true to pattern, Brad should think really hard about being fit on his first day in the big house. Just be ready. Today on the new abnormal, Molly and I are delighted to welcome Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang was one of the most interesting candidates in the 2020 presidential nomination fight on the Democratic side of the ticket. and he managed to do something quite unique in politics. He took an obscure idea called Universal Basic Income

and managed to get it into the middle of the political discussion. Now that COVID is ravaging the country and unemployment is spiking, this discussion seems more relevant than ever. We had a great talk with Andrew today. We hope you'll enjoy it. So, Andrew, thank you so much for being with us on the show today. And it's great to have somebody who was in the race for the purpose of ideas more than just the sort of base political ambition that drives most people.

I followed your campaign with great interest, and I think the centerpiece of what you accomplish in some ways was getting people to talk about an extraordinarily complex subject that I think is looming even larger now with COVID, and that's UBI Universal Basic. And it's funny as a conservative, I sort of started looking at it a while back that the old market force thing only is not going to suffice when a world that's going to wrenchingly change due to automation, technology, artificial intelligence hits us faster than we can think of. I wanted to talk you a little bit about that and how you think that played in the campaign and how it's entered the public dialogue and where you think it stands today,

and just get your thoughts on that to start. Well, thank you, Rick, for having me on and for seeing that universal basic income is increasingly necessary. And I believed it was necessary even before this crisis brought us to record levels of unemployment, shut down millions of businesses, large and small. We need to think differently about how our economy is working for us, because the truth is it has not been working for more and more of us over the last number of years. And I've run companies.

run organizations. The truth is that many of these organizations can function more and more efficiently with fewer and fewer people. It's just a case that we can get more done with fewer workers over time. And during this crisis, I've been in touch with major company CEOs who just tell me off the record, they're like, hey, we're not going to ever hire back a lot of these people. We're going to be recognizing, and that's going to mean fewer jobs for many, many Americans. So we need to think bigger and differently, very, very fast. I think that's a good point. is that in some ways, the COVID crisis for corporate America is a reason, but in other ways, it's an excuse for them to make the warm body cuts that they know are coming. Because, you know,

anything that can be digitized, anything that can be commodified electronically is eventually going to fall to AI. Yeah, one of the examples I use, Rick, is that Macy's furloughed the vast majority of its 130,000 employees. How many of those employees do think they're going to rehire? Fewer than 100%. So you're 100% right that many of these firms don't like to make painful adjustments until there's a recession. and now the things they've been biting their time on are all going to be implemented full force. I think one of the big objections you end up getting from the right side is, oh, people are going to disincentivize work. It's going to disincentivize people being out there doing productive things.

This is going to allow them to sit on the couch and eat bonbons, basically, and play Xbox. It's a superficial accusation, but how do you push back on that? The reality is that some of our programs have been very poorly designed over the past, where when I was running for president, I talked to this mom in Iowa, who said that she wanted to work part-time at the local restaurant, but she did the math and that if she worked part-time, she would actually be losing money. Right. Benefits trap.

Yeah, because our current programs say, well, if you're making this money, then you get less. So the big key to universal basic income is that you get it no matter what. If you decide to work part-time, then you get that too. The incentives can be dramatically improved for people. If they get it unconditionally, they get anything else they make, obviously. And the studies have shown that only two groups work. less if they're getting cash in this fashion. Number one is new moms and number two is teenagers

who spend more time in school. And I don't think anyone's particularly mad at either of those. My question for you is, would you see yourself having a cabinet position in the Biden White House if it was offered to you? I ran and I appreciate Rick characterizing my motivations as non-base. I ran to solve these problems. These problems are enormous. They're bigger than ever right now. And if Joe asked me to serve in a role that I thought could help solve some of these problems, I'd of course do it. And that leads to another question. Are you thinking about running for mayor? I'd like to try and solve problems. New York obviously has its huge share of problems. I did run for president on issues that I think affect the entire country. And so right now my focus is on helping Joe win and trying to

move the country forward. But it's certainly very flattering to be thought of for such an important role. I do love New York and I do love executive positions that allow you to roll your sleeves up and get things done. It's interesting. One of our editors from The Beast were very into New York politics. We were all talking about you running for mayor because I don't know if you saw the de Blasio Jewish tweet. He heard about it. I didn't see it. I have been a longtime critic of the mayor as almost everyone else. He had this tweet the other day about that was beyond the pale. And part of the problem was that he doesn't know how to thread tweets.

Part of it was it did feel anti-Semitic. And it was my message to the Jewish community, and it was about this funeral. And I just was wondering, as someone who is really all about solving problems, how is it to watch this de Blasio mayoral shift? It's a tough time. Certainly you don't want to add to how challenging it is for many people. I'm very, very sensitive to the fact that anti-Semitism has risen over this period. Anti-Asian racism is obviously spiked. Yeah.

That this virus is turning us against each. other in very insidious ways. Our leaders and public officials have to do everything they can to combat that certainly not do anything that might fan it. I had a question for you. I know this is a little in the weeds, but remember, we're very into New York politics in this house. Are you talking to Bloomberg's people? Bloomberg's people have offered guidance and assistance if we were to consider the mayoral race, and they want to help us consider it. They would reach out to us on that level. We have a lot of work to do ahead of us. I just want to try and add as much value as I can. The stories I'm getting through my organization, Humanity Forward are heartbreaking nationwide, where there's just so much misery,

so much pain, so much desperation, so much uncertainty and anxiety about the future. So we all just have to do everything we can. So, Andrew, the future of politics, I think, has also been affected by COVID and affected by this sudden, you know, reset of how this election is going to be waged on both sides to the political fence. Do you see your campaign as having a sort of a preview effect for what's coming forward? I mean, you seem to be much more digitally oriented than a lot of the folks. Even though you didn't make the cut here in the end, you seem like you had at least a sort of mindset to organize less traditionally and more organically online than the Republicans and the Democrats. Both Biden and Trump are having to rapidly reset to all digital. And I was just curious about

your thoughts on that. Well, certainly this crisis has sent us all indoors. And so having a giant rally is highly inadvisable. In my case, necessities the mother. of invention where I didn't start out with a whole lot of name ID. So I went on podcasts like this one and just tried to make my case. My campaign's ideas actually lend themselves better to long-form conversations than a five-minute cable news hit. For me, growing through the internet and podcasts and YouTube was very, very natural. I do think that right now it's forcing certainly some campaigns like Joe's to try and adapt because it's less native. But what's interesting, Rick, is that demographics really do govern here where let's say that my internet presence was very, very strong going into Iowa and New Hampshire.

The fact is the average voting age in those primaries was... It's the Rick Wilson rule, old people vote. And all you had to do is really show up to a polling place. I went to this auditorium in West Des Moines caucus night, and I was like, oh boy, I'm in trouble. It's a guy who grew up in Florida politics, where the median voting age is like 64. It really is a lesson that gets driven home early and often. Hey, so, Andrew, you famously kind of reached that younger demographic. What's your advice to Biden on that front? Because, you know, both Biden and Trump are not the springiest of spring chickens. The way I reached young people was,

one, by telling them I get it. Like, I get that we've shafted you all. We've left you a total house of cards and then somehow blamed you for it, said it was like an attitude problem. So that was one thing, is just substance. Two is seeming like a human being, which frankly is easier if you're someone new to politics than if you've been in the public eye for a long, long time. And then the third is to try and get people that speak to young people excited about you. So I feel like Joe can go down certainly roads one and three. I'm not trying to encourage him to try and do number two and like be something. Hello, kids. Yeah, right? It's like just trying to like get down. And I like the fact that his campaign is actually leaning into who Joe is. Like the Here's a Deal podcast is trying to do things

that makes sense for Joe. But I certainly think he can make progress on one and three, which is just talk about how deeply in the whole young people are and say that we need structural changes to help put them on the path towards any kind of success. And then number three is trying to empower folks that young people will get excited about. Can you talk a little bit about the work you're doing fighting this? There has been a real rise in anti-Acean American discrimination. And can you talk a little bit about what you're doing with that because that is really scary to me. I have a lot of friends who are really worried about that right now, too. If you're Asian American, you have likely experienced at these dirty looks as I have over the last

number of days and hundreds, even thousands of Asian Americans have experienced much worse. Spitting assaults, being berated in public, people just blame you for the virus. Trump is feeding into that because one of the narratives that will allow him to succeed is by framing the virus as a China virus and a foreign incursion. He's tough on China and Joe Soft on China. as opposed to a natural phenomenon that experts have been warning about for years, saying, hey, we should really worry about this pandemic. And then obviously Trump's inattention to that contributed to the gravity of the crisis in the situation. This to me is going to be a really big deal going into the fall.

But it's also like a huge deal day to day for millions of Asian Americans who feel like they can't go out. Or if they do go out, they're subject to glares and people shying away and worse. And so I started a campaign or helped start a campaign called We Are All-American. We launched with PSA this week that's been seen by millions of people happily. But now we're working with the NBA on a sequel because we have to say very clearly, like, we're all in this together. Asian Americans have absolutely nothing to do with putting this virus. Having this virus turn us against each other is absolutely un-American.

What did you think, Andrew, when you saw this week that McConnell's Senate consultants have sent on a memo to all of the Republican senators that said, you know, blame China. It's the yellow peril. It's the insidious Chinese government. That it's all that, you know, that's where we've got to cast all the blame on the corona crisis. That's exactly what I suggested that they're trying to distract from gaps in the administration's response. And the easiest way to do that is to say this is a nefarious Chinese plot. The people who will be thrown under the bust in that scenario are Asian Americans,

because it's difficult to distinguish for many people between Chinese government, Chinese people, Chinese Americans and Asian Americans. But it also happens to be wrong where this virus did spread from China, but it spread to all sorts of countries, not just the United States of America. We actually had more of a window of opportunity than other countries to respond to it. Right. I do think that's the important point here is that that entire long memo that mentions China 70,000 times or whatever, is not about China. It's about defending Trump and always pivot to racism if you can't do anything else in Trump world. It seems to work like a charm.

So, Andrew, tell us a little bit about humanity first. So I think some of our audience will know what it is, but might as well always pitch when you can. We're working on a few things here. I did just launch my new podcast, Yang Speaks, which is number 11 on Apple today. Very exciting. Yay. All right. Humanity Forward is a nonprofit.

I started to push the ideas of my campaign, specifically universal basic income. So we're supporting local candidates. We've already dispensed $1.4 million in direct economic relief to hundreds, even thousands of people. We gave a million dollars to people in the Bronx immediately. A thousand people got $1,000. Then we distributed another $400,000 in microgrants of between $20 and $500. dollars. Every dollar you donate to humanity forward, we just pass to someone else who

needs it. Unfortunately, we have a queue or waiting list, tens of thousands deep now. We're doing everything we can on that front. I'm also part of Project 100, which is raising 100 million for 100,000 food stamp recipients in the next 100 days. We're at 60 million thus far,

and I think we're going to hit 100 million. The great thing about that program is that give directly, we can essentially parachute money into people's hands in a geo-targeted way. So if you want to help, let's say, the public health crisis in Louisiana, you can actually drop money into people's accounts, in particular zip codes. That's very cool. With all these things, I've talked to some other folks who are doing similar assistance programs, both to individuals and small businesses. And they tell

me that the demand scales so quickly right now as the sort of economic damage rolls on, you know, that's going to have to get bigger and bigger and bigger to the point where there will be an upper limit, I think, on how charitable organizations can handle it. Oh, we're well past the limit of charitable organizations right now, right? Like, as a numbers guy, about to 30 million people unemployed at this point. Let's let's say hypothetically a thousand dollars for each of those people would be 30 billion a month. You know, there's no philanthropy out there that's putting 30 billion to work. You mean Steve Mnuchin was wrong when he said 1,200 bucks would last people for a couple of months? We're in a deep, dark hole. The economy is not going to snap back like a rubber band. That's

not the way the economy or organizations or human nature work. The government, I tell people this, the government is going to have to be the main source of resources to get us out of this mess. And I'm happy to say, at least like right now, our legislators seem to have some understanding of what's at stake. What would be your best case scenario? How the economy emerges from this crisis? What's your wish list? What's your best case scenario? What would you like to see the economy look like after, you know, we get through the damage phase of COVID? I was talking to Anthony Scaramucci about like the scale of the rebuild. And he was talking about post-World War II what the scale was. Yeah, sure. Marshall Plan. We need Marshall Plan for the United States of America in the multiple trillions of dollars, easily four, five. $6 trillion, which would be about what the scale was post-war if you fast-forward to 2020 the size of the

economy. And so you'd be looking at universal basic income, put money into everyone's hands. You'd be looking at shoring up the funds available to nonprofits, small businesses, states, hospitals, schools, but you'd also be investing hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure, hundreds of billions of dollars in public works and a sustainable development program, trying to move us towards renewable sources of energy. Pretty much anything you can imagine that's going to employ people we should be doing at a very, very high level. We need to hire hundreds of thousands of health care workers because the pandemic is going to roll on. The government is going to have to be this massive fountain of jobs because, again, 30 million have filed for

unemployment. And that even understates the depth of the damage to the labor market because the reality is that we were at record low levels of labor force participation pre-crisis. Post-pricers now, fewer Americans are working than at any point in our nation's recorded history. And the vast majority of the jobs that were created over the last number of jobs were temp gig or contract jobs anyway. So you're looking at something generational once in a century in terms of the scale or the rebuild that's necessary. And our leaders need to essentially approach this like we have a $21 trillion fire and you just need to spray as much water on it as possible. I'm very angry at the fact that even the programs that have been implemented thus far, going through state unemployment offices is stupid.

They just got completely saturated in demand. The small business program ran out of money in a matter of days, and it was people who had banking relationships that could get that money. The approach right now is ham-handed in my mind. You just need to flood the abundance. You have to think of it as just a giant fire and just spray water all over the place because every passing day is wreaking havoc on lives, businesses, communities. People are dying.

And I don't mean death of the virus. I mean like that there are many, many other people that are losing their lives over this in different ways. But this administration is so famously corrupt. I mean, doesn't this seem like it's a disaster waiting to happen? This is the problem. So, Molly, what I'd said to someone, I was like, look, we have like two major variables. Number one is who wins in November. And then number two is whether legislators can be united enough to implement something along the line of what I'm describing.

Those are two major, major variables. It's so important. I don't care at all. who passes it. If Republicans were to lead this effort that I'm describing, I would be just there clapping because our way of life is at stake right now. But I agree with you that right now, am I optimistic that this administration is going to do everything I'm suggesting? Not as optimistic as I would be if there was someone else in charge, that's for sure. How dare you doubt Jared's abilities? Well, on that truthful note, Andrew, I want to ask you one thing. I always ask

candidates this when I talk to them. What's your weirdest campaign story? Well, I have a bunch, But for me, it was definitely when someone tattooed my face on their calf. Yes. Oh, no. That's A-plus work right there. Did they show it to you? Yeah, that's the thing. So I saw it online.

I was like, wow. And then I met him. And then I posed with my face next to his cap. And I was like, wow. So there was that. That's A-plus. That is probably very stressful. That's a lot of pressure.

Certainly, I think my response at the time, Molly, was like, well, now I'd better win for this guy. Well, Andrew, thank you so much for being on with us today. We really appreciate it. I appreciate you both so much. It's so good to meet you both. And hopefully we'll get together and they're happy. Likewise. Likewise.

Love that. Thanks, Andrew. Bye, Rick. Thank you so much. If you appreciate knowing the good, the bad, and the bat shit, become a beast inside member. Your support gives voice to podcast just like this one. Visit new abnormal. The Daily Beast.com to sign up today.

As you know, folks on every pod, we have a candidate for, fuck this guy. Today's fuck this guy for me is Jared Kushner, who made an absolutely ridiculous media appearance this week. Trying to spend that the administration's work on coronavirus and COVID-19 has been a huge success. Now look, I get it. If you're a failed son like Jared, whose father went to prison and you had to get yourself bailed out by the Saudi Arabians and various other Gulf allies, when you bought a building for a billion dollars the day before the real estate market crash, you're probably pretty fucking stupid. And Jared going out and declaring that they're doing a great job, It makes the mission accomplished moment during the first part of the Iraq war look like Churchillian statesmanship.

Fuck that guy. All right. My fuck this guy is Mike Pence. Mike Pence went to the Mayo Clinic and did not wear a mask. This is so typical in this administration. They couldn't get their story straight about why Mike Pence didn't wear a mask. So he said he didn't know. And then we found out that a journalist who was traveling with the pool said they actually had been

told before that they need to wear a mask. And then Karen went on Fox and Friends, or as we think of it, the propaganda arm of the Trump administration, and told Ainsley Earhart that they didn't know that someone who worked on the task force, no one ever told him about the rules. And if he had known, he never would have not worn a mask. And I think that that is, it's just such a Trumpy example of how they can't even do a visit to the Mayo Clinic, right? It's a layup. And they fuck it up. Right, and they fuck it up. And also the other thing is, and I think this is a larger, more important point, is that Trump does not really want to wear a mask, and he said he won't wear one, and he doesn't want Pence to wear one, because he has this sort of, like, part of this

Trumpian thing is this denial that it's really happening. And this denial is the thing that's just going to end up killing a lot of Trump supporters. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking with smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics, and science who will help us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. We're just getting started and don't want you to miss an episode. If you'd like to follow us on Twitter, I'm Molly Jong Fast and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on Tuesday. Want more great

check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studded The Daily Beast podcast at the Daily Beast.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.