The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Are These Crazy People at The RNC Saying What They’re Saying?

Episode Date: August 26, 2020

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum joined Molly-Jong Fast and Rick Wilson on a special edition of The New Abnormal for the second night of the Republican National Convention and he just couldn’t work out what the Hell the GOP thought they were doing? Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada, used to have a sign up on all four walls of his campaign war room, Frum explains: “And the sign said, ‘Why are you saying this?’” While the Democrats realized they needed to create lots of short video segments that would be shared online, Frum compares the RNC disaster as a low-rent version of the Tucker Carlson show on Fox News. “He's a professionally competent white supremacist with a volume controls on the input device that matches the volume output,” he says.   Molly was also unimpressed by Melania’s “dictator chic” and her very long speech. “In the end she was just like this weird alien trying to mimic a human,” she says. Amid the cavalcade of nepotism, Molly also thought Tiffany Trump’s performance was instructive. “There's always been a liberal fantasy that Tiffany is not as evil as the rest of the adult children. I think tonight, that fantasy has been put to bed,” she says. The sight of former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi prompted Rick to issue a warning that Bondi has been working with Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon on concocting “Hillary's emails 2.0”—some kind of opposition research attack on the Bidens. “Tonight was a preview of the October surprise,” he says. Want more? Become a Beast Inside member to enjoy a limited-run series of bonus interviews from The New Abnormal. Guests include Cory Booker, Jim Acosta, and more. Head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com to join now. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi folks, it's Rick Wilson, and welcome to The Daily Beast's The New Abnormal. Hi, I'm Molly Jongfast, a left-wing pundit, and editor at large at The Daily Beast. I'm also an editor at The Daily Beast, a former Republican political strategist, bestselling author, and full-time troublemaker. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, business, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. I'll try to keep Rick to the minimum number of F-bombs and try to keep our... kids, pets, and other wildlife sounds from invading our respect.

Good evening, America. It's 1204 a.m. on Wednesday morning. This is Rick Wilson from the new abnormal home of all your quality Fuck That Guy product. This week is a special Fuck That Guy week, and Molly Jong Fast is very tired, so we're going to get on with the show. I'm irritated with you because I waited for you for so long. I had television to do. I know. It's fuck that guy week at the new of normal. Fuck that guy, Palooza, if you will. Right, in honor of the Republican National Convention. And we have a lot of, there was quite a lot of fuckery tonight.

There was a hell of a lot of fuckery. And I mean, let's just start where the fuckery should start at the end of the fuckery with Melania Trump reading a speech that was so obviously focused grouped to the point where it was about to squeak and that she was so deliberately and carefully reading words that are going to send the Washington. in DC media into writing long think pieces about a complete, about 2,000 words of complete horseshit that she uttered while sitting in front of a man who does not represent any single one of the value she articulated in that speech. I thought it was interesting that it just was so long.

I mean, I didn't know she could read that many words. And also, it's like she has this weird thing. I actually was watching it fast forward. Her and Tiffany, too, both have this problem, which is they have this, like, very strange, like, hello, all friends. affect, which is so distracting that it doesn't even matter what they say. Like, people will be happy that Melania said that people don't deserve to dive COVID, which everyone else in the Republican Party has now decided is the new platform. But in the end, she was just like this weird alien trying to mimic human. I liked it when she said, those who are eel.

All I can think of us, what, those who are slippery amphibians? What? Well, she also was wearing this sort of moon over Peridore kind of Central American flight jacket. First off, you just referenced Moon Over Peridore, and I could not be more charmed. I'm still... I love that movie. Right. Right.

Well, it's definitely, there's a sort of Banana Republic thing going on with Melania's outfits. She's a little heavy on the epaulence, don't you think? Yes. She's got a sort of dictator-sheek thing going. I think she needs more things with sashes. But they're all so weird. I mean, Tiffany, I keep coming back to this Tiffany speech because Tiffany is like the one Florida Attorney General and Rick's favorite. Scam Bondi.

Yes. Pam Bondi, who received money. So Pam Bondi had the audacity to go out there tonight. And she's almost my fuck that guy for tonight. But you know what? She's going to get a mini fuck that guy right now. She had the fucking audacity to go out there and start saying, the Biden family has made billions and da-da-da, they're so corrupt. While under the screen, it's saying up next, Tiffany Trump.

After that, Eric Trump, after that, Melania Trump. So the nepotism argument, a little hollow. Then she's saying, oh, the Bidens are so deeply in bed with China, except maybe you should talk to Ivanka before you get all China, young lady. And finally, the fact that she's bringing up public corruption at all when she was a part of the Ukraine cover-up defense squad. And while she sold so fucking cheap to Donald Trump in Florida, the Trump University investigation that was going on in Florida,

Trump gives her a $25,000 donation. She immediately kills it. I'm sorry. Add some fucking zeros. Have some pride. If you're going to be corrupt, at least do it right. $25,000 is chump change. I thought it was interesting.

Pam Bondi really, really, really went after the Biden's big time and was very offended by Hunter. and then immediately proceeded by Tiffany. Well, the thing about Pam Bondi, you should understand, is her performance tonight was a preview of the October surprise. She's working with Giuliani, and she's working, at least until he went to prison, working with Steve Bannon and these other hoodlums that are all trying,

who are over in Ukraine, while they're not being drunk and behaving badly, a story which may come out sooner than later, they are building this package of Russian material to try to screw over Biden. They're trying to do Hillary's eating, emails 2.0. It is the October surprise. Everybody needs to mentally prepare for it. Biden needs to prepare for it. Hunter needs to prepare for it. Everybody who's opposed to Trump needs to get ready that they're going to whip out something and it's going to look superficially damning as hell. You know, it will be Hunter ran for the border with a bag of cash in his lap and a dead girl in the

truck. They're going to go over the top. But you know what's interesting to me about this whole Hunter Biden thing is that Trump's kids still seem so much more corrupt. They don't seem more corrupt, Molly. They are more corrupt. Yeah. I mean, look, I grant you, Jared doesn't count as one of Trump's children, but close enough, because look, this is not a government. It is a crime family. All of them have directly profited from Donald Trump's gigantic national presidential grift. All of them.

I mean, somehow, those struggling civil servants, Jared Navanka, made $113 million last year. And that's a miracle. They just managed to, those coupons just do miracles. Exactly. Good for them. You don't see that enough. But, you know, Tiffany was so dull. Well, Tiffany is such an interesting character because, so she is not from that first marriage, and she's not from the third marriage.

She's from a brief marriage to the girl he cheated on his first wife with. And there has always been a certain kind of mystique and, I would say a liberal fantasy, that Milan, Tiffany's mom, who is called Marla Maples. Marla, that Marla is a secret liberal, and that that one page of the tax returns that was leaked was actually Marla Maples. Now, I don't think it was. I don't think it was. Yeah. But there's always been a liberal fantasy that Tiffany is not as evil as the rest of the adult children.

I think tonight that fantasy has been put to bed. You know, the weird thing about tonight was the tonality of tonight was much more restrained. Yeah. Much less screaming. I think either Mark Burnett or whoever's running their focus groups said, we might want to dial back on the cuckoo pants yelling and spitting at the camera. We might want to just ease that back a notch. Mark Burnett really should be sent to the hague. I think Mark Burnett needs to just be forced to give over the notorious outtake tapes.

By the time he doesn't, no one will care. You know, by the time he does it, Trump will be in jail for some petty larceny, you know, 50 years or half. I just have to say I am still so traumatized from what Miles told us last night. You mean that the president is a sadistic torture? I thought he was an evil guy. I thought he was a bad guy. I thought he was dumb. But the sadistic stuff about the flesh, the flesh ripping the flesh.

Yeah, that really struck me. You and I were on that thing earlier tonight with Mary Trump. And when it was brought up, she was just like, oh, yeah, of course that's him. Yeah, that wasn't great. It's kind of chilling just how crazy the level of sadistic, like, abusive nature of Trump, how quickly it comes out to the surface when you poke it just a little bit. Like poke it with a sharpened spike on the top of a fence. So The Daily Beast had a great story today about Marianne Mendoza,

who was a member of the Donald Trump Campaign Advisory Board, who tweeted out it could have been a fairly innocuous-looking thing until you click the link. Do yourself a favor and read this thread. Well, if you clicked on read this thread, it jumped into a entire set of tweets about the Rothschilds and the protocols of the elders of Zion and the Jewish conspiracy. And of course it did. And the thing about this is you scratch these conspiracies just underneath the level of Q&on.

Peel away the bullshity kind of national security veneer on Q&ON. You will get right down to anti-Semitism and crazy-ass, you know, alien lizard people. Queen Elizabeth is a heroin dealer. Oh, really? It's science. Stop. It's Scientology. I like her better now.

It's Scientology for the Red Hat crowd. Yeah. No, I mean, they're clearly, and that woman, the abortion activist, who is just, Abby Johnson, it's just horrendous. And I actually have, I have suffered and seen the movie of her life story that was funded by the My Pillow guy called Unplanned, which is. At best, it is actually one of the goriest movies I've ever seen my life. I mean, it's just absolute propaganda.

It's like North Korean propaganda. But there was an element of that tonight, too. Oh, look, the constant praising of only he, the dear leader, you know, my daddy, all these things. You are a Trump supporter. That was the weirdest thing about why. I keep going back to Tiffany. You're a Trump supporter. You don't know it.

You're a Trump supporter. You're a Trump supporter. No, you're a Trump supporter. No, you're a Trump supporter. There's a lot of North Korea there. In fact, I think the North Koreans would probably be like, hey, guys, I want to dial this back just a little bit, just a little bit. Just a little bit. But I do think that there was a certain degree tonight of the Jushé, North Korean style, or Jush, I can't remember how to pronounce it, North Korean style, you know, dear leaderism.

But it was a much more dialed back night. And it was the culture war notes are through this whole thing, which kind of tells me a lot. It tells me that they're not really trying to get outside the base. But it also, they also gave away their electoral college strategy. I don't know if you noticed that. No, I didn't know that. Guy from Wisconsin. Right.

Guy from Maine. Yeah. Jeanette Nunez, Lieutenant Governor of Florida. Pam Bondi, former AG of Florida. Right. Cuban American guy last night from Florida. So you're looking at Wisconsin, Maine, and Florida. They're going to try to win the Maine two, which is a split congressional seat.

Maine, too. It's a lift. Yeah. Especially because people hate Susan Collins. Yeah. Susan Collins is going to do. drag that ticket down into the dirt, and especially after I go back and visit her again very soon now. Hi, Susan.

Do you think Susan hates you? I would hope so. And I basically shit in her weedies for the last six months, so, you know. It is a design feature of the Lincoln Project to make her not happy with being held to account. The new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks. Starting in August, we'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these.

So head over to New Abnormal. Dot the Daily Beast.com to join now. Your Beast Inside membership helps support the great reporting at The Beast and podcasts like The New Abnormal. Thanks. David Frum is a staff writer at The Atlantic, the author of many books, including Trumpocalypse, restoring American democracy and a former speechwriter for George W. Bush in the early 2000s. What is your feeling now watching this? I mean, what's your thinking? I'm a registered Republican still, and I attended every Republican convention from

1988 in New Orleans through 2016 in Cleveland. When you watch this, it must just be, I can't even imagine what I would feel if this had been my party. It's like, you know, a vampiric possession. And it's not like this is all came out of nowhere. These are elements. They're elements I recognize that were in the past, but there are things that are missing. The emphasis, the attempt to be inclusive, the emphasis on meaningful patriotism, not just chest thumping. And the connection to the parties passed in history, the sense that this is a big organization with a lot of people and you're trying to talk, not just to the people in the room and not just to people who watch four hours a day of Fox TV,

but to the less politically connected people who will decide the election. Yes. Tell me about the 2016 convention. I'm so, fascinated because you must have already been pretty disturbed by this. So 2016 in Cleveland was a very strange convention. I think for me the most telling moment was on the way out of the big convention center. They had varied these tight pathways with high fencing on either side. It was maybe four feet across. So two people could not very comfortably pass and got jammed up. And I get sort of jammed up against somebody who was a person my own age and dressed the same way as me. And there was something sympathetic in his face. And we got to talking.

And it turned out we had very similar backgrounds and very similar lives. And he was as upset about what he was seeing as I was. And I said, so what are you going to do? I said, I'm going to vote for the son of a bitch. I always vote for the Republican. Of course, I mean to vote for the son of the bitch. I said, oh, what's your wife going to do? Oh, she can't stand them.

And your kids? Oh, they've re-registered as Democrats. And I thought that was such a telling. That was a predictor of what was going to happen. Like, you know, the heart and soul, the Republican Party sort of, bit its lip and kept soldiering on, hoping things would be better, but the party has been bleeding. And that's what you're seeing at this convention. This is, if you cut out of a party, everyone except, like, its most belligerent, militant, blind supporters who are even unaware that anybody disagrees with them.

You've got a convention like this. Can you talk to us a little bit about, like, Pompeo and what you're concerned with besides everything? I've got so many concerns about it, the illegality, the shock. Here's the thing that I, so you're talking about Pompeo delivering a speech during the RNC on a trip to Israel. Pompeo personally sent out an order to everyone else at the State Department, take no political positions because he knows that every other American diplomat thinks Trump is a disaster. So he is, so he's expending governmental resources to get him to Israel, to get him up to the top of the King David Hotel to make a broadcast back. So this is a violation of the Hatch Act. It's a violation of all kinds of important traditions.

It's hypocritical on his part because he won't let anybody else do what he's doing. But there's another thing that really worries me, which is I'm a pro-Israel voter. And Israel's most important anchor in American politics is that it have friends in both parties. This pact that is emerging between the Netanyahu on the one hand and the Trump people on the other, to make Israel a partisan issue, a pro-Republican partisan issue, it could not be more ominous for people believe in a strong U.S.-Israel relationship and an enduring U.S.-Israel friendship, bigger than politics. Part of the thing with Pompeo also, I think, David, the Secretary of State ought to be somebody whose word is seen as uncompromised in the world, who can deliver on a serious thing.

And I think maybe even before this, Pompeo's reputation was more of, you know, political toady and Donald Trump fanboy than as, you know, sort of an objective and reliable voice of American values and diplomas. That's so true. I mean, they're just, and he's just this petty and squalid person. I mean, like, you know, calling, summoning in NPR anchors to berate them with his coloring map of Eastern Europe. Like, what he apparently keeps this in his office, like, like something you get with a happy meal. Ukraine is not Slovenia. It's kind of hard to miss on the map of Europe. You know, you just point, you just jab your finger at random and you're probably going to put your finger on top of Ukraine. It's that big. One of the things that the Trump people really profoundly do not understand.

understand about the world is America needs friends. And just to let you drive this point out, if you believe that China is a problem, back when I was working the Bush administration, and that was not even 20 years ago, the American economy, depending on how you're counting, was somewhere maybe three, maybe as much as six times bigger than the Chinese economy. Today, depending on how you're counting, the Chinese economy is about 80 percent the size of the U.S. economy. And on our current trajectory, sometime in the 2020s, China will overtake the United States as the biggest economy. of them. Now, the United States is still richer, but China will be bigger. If the United States is going to impose its will on China in any way, it is going to need to mobilize coalitions of like-minded,

associated powers and not just traditional easy friends like Britain and the European Union, although the Trump people don't like the European Union either, but more challenging partners, like Vietnam, like India. And if you're just going to go around the world being a jerk to everybody all the time, and giving orders that you actually don't have the clout. And this is the thing, Donald Trump is not, he's actually not a realistic power player. He's a bully who doesn't work out. He doesn't know how weak he is. And Pompeo doesn't.

We can't do this anymore. If we're going to check China, we need friends. And they are alienating. David, did you have any feelings on the contrast between the two conventions? When COVID messed up the conventions, whoever organized the Democratic convention or whatever group people said, okay, we can't do conventions the way we used to do. What should we do instead? And they really thought about it.

And they produced something that was, which probably should have happened 10 years ago. We're just going to stop pretending that this convention is an event that is going to be watched by tens of millions of people in prime time. Let's accept that what we're doing here is producing dozens of little videos to feed into people's social media streams. And let's understand that our target, is made up of many different people. And we'll have people like Bernie Sanders and people who don't. people who love Michelle Obama and people who don't resonate to her so much, people who will be surprised to see that Cindy McCain and John Kasich are at our at our art conventions.

And maybe the people who like Bernie Sanders don't want to see Kasich. And maybe the people who like Kasich don't want to see Bernie Sanders. And that's fine. That's how we're going to do. They had a plan for what the convention was supposed to do. What is striking what this Republican convention is. Look, Tucker Carlson is on TV every night. If you want to get people revved up about their racial fears,

he's doing, and he's doing it with pretty high production values and kind of a, you know, competent acting and a voice that is modulated that is in a way that's appropriate for television. He's not shrieking at people. I mean, he's also a white supremacist. We just have to. But he's a quality. He's a professionally competent white supremacist where the volume controls on the input device match the volume output on the air. Right. Right. He's not like going to be screaming at you the way they can really go foil us. And remember, that was tape. That was the best take of the tape. My favorite moment, but you know what? Nobody knows about that Kimberly Gilfell speeches, or at least nobody listened or nobody heard, was that Kimberly said that she was an immigrant because her parents were from Puerto Rico. Stephen Harper, who is Prime Minister of Canada and a very sort of cerebral politician in his war rooms, used to have a sign on all four walls of the war room. So everyone, wherever you were in the room, could see it. The sign said, why are you saying this? And that was the thing he wanted you to think about all the time. Why are you saying this?

And if you don't know, stop saying it. Wisdom of the ages, my friend. And since it is fuck that guy week, we must talk about fuck that guy. Rick Wilson, who's your fuck that guy? I have two fuck that guys. I have double fucked that guy because I didn't really do one last night because we were two busy talking about Jerry Cuckwell. You have two? I feel like that's cheating. All right, well, let, I'll allow it this time. Yeah, this time. My first, it, it still relates to Jerry Cuckwell.

My first is the Board of Liberty University, because they're giving Jerry Cuckwell 10.5 fucking million dollars to go away. That buys a lot of pool boys. I thought it was interesting that Falwell said, the board said he's, he's stepping down and Falwell was like, no, I'm not. Right. And then he was like, I have a really good contract. And then they came back and he's like, I'm stepping down. So clearly there was some negotiation there. Clearly.

My other fact, that guy is American Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who used taxpayer resources to fly to Israel to stand on the top of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem and give a campaign speech for Donald Trump's convention. He did use a phrase at the beginning of his speech. This is, I'm Mike Pompeo. and I have a big job. You know, I have to agree with Mike, because Trump's ass isn't going to kiss itself. And Mike Pompeo has politicized the office of the Secretary of State in a way that is dangerous for this country. That is another one of these unprecedented abuses of power and abuses of the Hatch Act.

So you know what, Mike Pompeo, fuck that guy. I snuck in a double. That's right. My, fuck that guy, it always has to be whenever he speaks, but the guy who wants to end government but makes money from the government, Rand Paul. Your second favorite man on the internet.

I mean, I don't understand. Every time I hear him, he had gotten my eye up during that post office hearing. Well, you, on that Friday post office hearing, he was like, the post office doesn't make any money. And I was like, fuck you, Rand Paul.

Like, you so clearly just wants to dismantle the government, then why are you working in it? But today, he was just so sycophantic and the idea that Trump is going to end foreign wars and when we know that he just has ended the transparency so we don't know how many soldiers are in these complex zones and you know I'm very you know I have like a real soft part of my heart for the fact for the Kurds who have been these like amazing I know the Kurds yeah and they and Trump left them to die And I mean, I just feel like anyone who defends Trump's foreign policy is kind of insane.

And, you know, he's a doctor and he fucking was waiting for his COVID test to come back. And he swam in the Senate pool. And this is the guy who's a, you know, whose whole thing is personal responsibility. You know, Molly, you seem to be more angry at Rand Paul than almost anyone, except perhaps his next door neighbor. We have to go to sleep now because it's 12, 27. Actually, I'm going to go to sleep. and Rick is going to go do 10 other things. But tomorrow night, we have an incredible guest for tomorrow night.

So definitely tune in. Do indeed. Thank you, everybody. Thanks. 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 JongFest, and he's the Rick Wilson. Thanks so much for listening, and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? 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.