The Daily Beast Podcast - Why J.D. Vance Is Giving Serious Jeb Bush Vibes

Episode Date: July 28, 2024

The New Abnormal team believes that J.D. Vance is proving to be the Republicans’ new Jeb Bush.  Plus! Journalist Joe Conason joins the podcast to talk about his new book, The Longest Con: How Grifters, Swindlers and Frauds Hijacked American Conservatism. 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 comfortably on the left. Hi, I'm Danielle Moody, former educator and recovering lobbyist. But today, I'm an unapologetic, woke commentator on America's threats to democracy. And I'm producer Jesse Kedden, and I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We're here to have fun, smart conversations with some of the most knowledgeable and entertaining people in politics, media, and beyond. Our goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears. Hello and welcome to another Sunday bonus edition of the new abnormal.

We thank you so much for being here. Author and political journalist Joe Connison enjoys us to talk about his new book, The Longest Con, Con, how grifters, swindlers, and frauds hijacked American conservatism. But first, let's have some fun. Are you guys ready to listen to some clips? Clips. Clips. All right. That's what I like to hear it.

So the Wall Street Journal reported that Elon Musk was donating $45 million a month to Trump. Other donors to this America pack included Palantir, you know, Peter Thiel's scary surveillance company, and the Winklevoss twins. But here's what Elon had to say to that. Are you still going to donate to Trump? Do you still donate $45 million? It was fiction made up by the Wall Street Journal, he said? Mm-hmm. That's what he says.

There's that leftist media again. and the Wall Street Journal. The Wall Street Journal. What? I think they've gone woke guys. Is that what the W stands for? The Woke Street Journal. That's what we know the left really one.

The Woke Street Journal. I wonder if that dot com's taken. I might have to register that before this goes on. I feel like I can have a lot of fun with that one. Have that it, Jesse. I'm curious on the more substantive thing here. Like David Sacks was posted this, come on in, the water's warm, everybody. Look at all us tech billionaires post donating to Trump.

And it seems that that was what they were all high on their supply post, getting J.D. Vance as their man on the inside before he, well, we'll hear what he's been doing in a few minutes. But what do you guys see in there. They do what they do best. They're loud. They're blustering. They throw their money around. Then they realize, oops. Actually, there's momentum here.

People are excited about Vice President Kamala Harris and maybe we spoke too soon. And so they're going to do what they always do, which is backpedal. Yeah, I just thought it was funny when he put out his denial or whatever. He said something like, I don't do cults of personality. It's like, yeah, you mean you don't want any other cults of personality besides the one that you have basically based your whole life off of. I am so tired of the media printing anything. any of these guys say as truth. And it's just the latest one is, I guess, that Elon is going to have robotaxies next month or in September. And it's like, how are you printing that and not looking at

him over five years ago saying we would be on Mars in five years? And just so many things. And it's just so, I don't think I ever believe the Wall Street Journal story, not because I thought they were printing fiction, but because I assumed if Elon said he was going to do it, it probably was a lie. Well, speaking of, here we have J.D. Vance, Trump's vice presidential pick. And it's baby's first Trump rally post-nomination. And ladies and gentlemen, he does not have the sauce. It is the weirdest thing to me. Democrats say that it is racist to believe, well, they say it's racist to do anything. I had a dive mountain dew yesterday. And one today. I wanted to down. I'm sure they're going to call that racist too, but it's good.

I love you guys. He's so lame. Please clap. Yeah. Yes, exactly. Yeah. It was giving Jeb vibes exclamation point because what a crazy guy. He's so sad and pathetic.

And unless you called the Mountain Dew Can colored, I'm pretty sure no one would think it was racist. But they do think you're a fucking idiot. Look, every generation gets the please clap it deserves. And I think whatever soda he's drinking, the slogan could be the please clap of a new generation. I'm also just thinking like, Diet Mountain Dew. I'm going to admit that was the thing I didn't know existed until we heard this. But does he think that's virtue signaling to everybody? Because I feel like the code red is really the signal.

You should be sending since that seems. to be the drink for the two online, which he definitely is. Yeah, and for the tech bros. Yes. I mean, good for him that you drinks diet Mountain Dew, I guess. I cannot imagine anyone gives a shit. Yeah, I went to a Williamsburg TechBrowy bar recently, and they had the Mountain Dew Code Red pre-made frozen cocktail, and I was horrified. Jesus.

What is that drink? It's as much caffeine as you can put in soda, basically. So they're trying to kill you. You know, the tech pros, they got a code and stay up and get their grind set on. Yeah, and I'm sure it's with Mountain Dew. All right. Let's keep having a little fun before we get to hell. It's Brat Summer, y'all.

And Foxes the Five has found out that it is Brat Summer and that Kamala Harris is being memed into the Brat Summer meme that my Queen Charlie XEX started. Let's see what they're saying here. I mean, I don't know how these memes actually help her because they speak to the truth. that she's an unserious person. The laughter is the thing that people will immediately go, please make this end. So, sorry to pee on your coconut parade, Jessica. Wow, all right, that's what I expect from you.

So, Dana, one of the great things about the Internet is a place, anyone can get it. And awkward. Unless you're in rural America. Thanks go by it. No, because, no, they have expanded braband. I don't need to do it. But you're not crap bands kind of there. The awkwardness.

is an asset on the internet and you are seeing that. All right, well, I'm just saying that like if I was going to be the first woman president, I would really want to be taken seriously. I'm for memes, I think that the whatever, but if you're too online and if you're just focused on the two online audience on both sides, you're going to lose a whole bunch of people are saying, can we just have somebody normal? Do you really want brats to run this country? They already do enough damage.

You don't understand the essence of brats on my. I stand correct. Katie. Millennial enough. I think the white boy summer memes are going to take over. Like the Hulk Hogan memes beat out these memes. Sorry. I don't know.

It's hard to out meme the Hulk Hogan. So she's already up 25, 30 points with Jenzies. I'm going to color myself uncool. Brat means. They say it means you're just like a girl who's a little messy and likes to party. And maybe some dumb things sometimes. I'm just trying to catch up to this. How does this help her?

Well, that's embarrassing, actually. That's what they're putting on her. Okay. Well, it's because Charlie X-E-X said that about her. It isn't embarrassing. You're not the target demo. Yeah. So attack me.

I'm not attacking me. Oh, my God. I did not think that Jake Tapper's take on the Brat Summer could get worse. Oh, yeah. I would like to point out that I was like, oh, I saw this video. And then I realized it's because my niece sent it to me at four in the morning last night. So, yeah, I mean, that was just sad. And as always, I feel for Jessica Tarloff, who is a very, very, very nice person.

And I don't know how she puts up with that every day. Money. That's how she puts up with that. I know, but trust me, after a while, that ain't enough. Well, I'm just going to get in here and say that I think everybody's getting the brat thing wrong. And as the only person who discusses politics with the Charlie X, X, X, X, X, Ttoo on a regular basis. Allow me to just say that the record Brat contains many deep dark truths, including she has a song about how she's pondering having a baby. And it's actually a record about how nuanced it is to be a woman in the world this day that you contain so many complexities.

She talks about being vulnerable. She talks about being insecure and navigating her professional life. And she contains multitudes. And I think Kamala does too. So that's why Charlie tweeted Kamala is brat. I'm just curious when you have political discussions with the Charlie XX tattooed. Does the tattoo talk back to you? Andy, I was thinking it's saying it.

I sometimes look at it and get inspired. That's what's happening. That's what I think. That's what I think. Thank you for the explanation. Mansplaining female singers to the world. This actually was the mansplaining that provided real information. So I appreciate it.

Okay. Now we're going to get to the very bad. Here's Fox and Friends discussing Kamala's decision to not attend Netanyahu's addressed to Congress. Obviously you compare him to President Biden, who is muddling the way through speeches. People know couldn't go more than... Yeah, anyone's going to be better, right? Yep, couldn't go more than 15 minutes. She's very good on the prompt and no one even doubted that. She had 3,000 people there. Why are they there? A lot of them has to do with, hey, I'm a Democrat. I thought we were going to go down in flames. Now we have a shot.

The problem with Kamala Harris, number one, she has not had a record exploited heavily because people thought and marginalized her. Even in the Democratic Party, they said, wow, what a bad choice Joe Biden made. Number two is she hasn't sat down for an interview. When she sits down an interview and says, do you want to to fund ICE? Where do you stand on Medicare for all? Why didn't you show up? The most recent decision already you got a question. She will not show up for the prime minister's joint session of Congress today. She'd rather address in the summer a sorority, a college sorority, like she can't get out of that. So that's her decision. And that's decision to back up the protesters. And how about the border? So funny thing is that right now, Fox News is

trying to backtrack and say that he messed up college and colored. Now, I want us all to do a little round robin and see what the difference is between the word college sorority and colored sorority. Did you guys hear college sorority, which is what they're trying to say he bungled up? There's 100% an R. There's no R. culture. There's a hundred percent in R. First of all, Netanyahu was not invited by the president of the United States. He was invited by the Republicans. So the president isn't going and had no intention of going. And the vice president is not going to attend either. She's having a separate meeting with him, apparently, while he has decided to step foot in our country. But why would you go to this joint

session that Republicans pulled together as a fucking stunt to divide Democrat. It's stupid for them to even think that that would happen. But of course, they don't follow up and say, but she's having a meeting with him separately. Because the president also has decided not to meet with him, which I think is the right move, 100%. Because I don't know how many times Netanyahu would have had to embarrass the president on the national stage for him to then be invited into the White House to sit down for a conversation. Fuck him.

Yeah, I agree with all of that. Yeah, colleagues are definitely rushing to try to cover for a workshop. I'm kind of shocked because usually they just kind of roll with these things and say, oh, well. So it's interesting that they're trying to pretend that this is a different word. It's a hard R. In his new book, my next guest writes, The Transformation of the Republican Party into a fetid sum of extremism, conspiracy, gaslighting, and outright grifting didn't occur in a single election cycle. The book is The Longest Khan, How Grifters, Swindlers, and.

frauds, hijacked American conservatism. And the author is the longtime political journalist, Joe Connison. He joins me now. Joe, thank you so much for being here. Great to be with you. The book couldn't be more timely, but I really loved the way it traced everything back, basically to the 1950s and to Roy Cohen, who is, of course, infamous for his work with Joseph McCarthy. And as you write, he pioneered what would become a chronic syndrome on the American right, the political victimization of gays by closeted conservatives like himself. But it went much further than that, didn't it? You say he had discovered the secret of diverting attention from his own conduct by stirring

up paranoia and stoking hatred, which of course over the decades has become pretty much the standard operating procedure for conservative con artists, right? Yeah, and I wouldn't even call them conservative anymore. I think they've lost a lot of the virtue that once had accrued to conservatism. But Roy was an early example of this. you know, of course, that he eventually became Donald Trump's sort of moral mentor and not in a good way. But back in the day, what he used and others like him used was paranoia around communism and the fear of communism, the fear of communist subversion in our country.

And there was some reason at some points to be concerned about that, but they turned it into a weird conspiracy that they could use then to fleece people out of their money, their political loyalties. And Roy was an early example of this as a grifter when he was on Senator McCarthy's committee staff in the Senate and used the specter of communism in Europe, haunting the libraries that the United States Information Service had set up in Europe with supposed subversive propaganda. And what he really did was take his friend David Schein over there and gallivant around from one luxury hotel to another in Europe's biggest cities, pretending to be. to conduct an investigation, and they spent many tens of thousands of dollars on this scam,

and nothing came of it except to get some people unjustly in trouble, and for him to have fun. This is what they were doing with the committee the whole time. David Schein was drafted, and Roy and Senator McCarthy used their power over the army to try to first stop him from being drafted, and then to get him easy duty and special meals and all kinds of privileges. And this is what eventually blew up Senator McCarthy at his committee. But Roy got away with it, largely because he came back to New York and became an important lawyer. He had lots of social and political connections in the city. And that is how he got connected to Donald Trump. Yeah. And what you write is, you say, what the awestruck younger Trump saw in Cohn was an all-powerful public figure who had lived

until then, at least, a life of lying, bribing, cheating, stealing, swindling, and never apologizing without any lasting consequences. And you say, you know, which I think is not in the least bit debatable, that the lesson Trump learned was that he could get away with anything. That's right. And, you know, he famously said when he was in the White House, he was angry with his own lawyers who he felt had not protected him sufficiently from the consequences of his acts. Where's my Roy Cohn? Because Roy had showed him that if you never explain, never apologize, always act as if you're in the right, lie as much as you need to repeatedly, then you can get away with it. And Roy did get away with it up until the last months of his life when he was finally disbarred and, you know, the IRS finally closed

in on him. But up until then, you know, he had succeeded for a good 30, 40 years in getting away with everything. And that's the lesson that Trump learned. The extent to which he got away with it in everything except, I guess the history books, if we still have those in a couple of decades, is really remarkable. You know, you talked about the anti-communism, which is where Roy Cohn got his start, and that sort of that grifting crusade. And so much of we see today flows perfectly from that, in particular, or at least among other things, the beginnings of the Christian evangelical communities partnership in the grift with people like Frederick Schwartz from the Christian anti-communism crusade, Reverend Billy James Hargis from the Christian Crusade, and the John

Birch Society. And you note that pretty much all the smears that we see now from MAGA, and really that we've seen from Republicans since the 50s, are basically recycling Birch Society rhetoric. It's quite true. The MAGA types will try to tell you that this is all something new and different, but in fact, insults like globalist and communist and you're a socialist, you're an elite globalist, communist, socialist, is that's all ancient. history, John Birch Society rhetoric, and that they've recycled into what they claim is something new, and it's all old nonsense. And yet, it still works. It still works on the rubs. You know, you can fool lots of people with this stuff and get them to send you money, which is a large part what the

longest con is about. It's about how these unscrupulous right-wing figures use these tropes and these scams not to own the libs, which is what they like to talk about. But to own their own people, it's their donors, their constituents, their followers who are being ripped off over and over again. And of course, Trump is the ringmaster of it all and insists on always getting his cut. And this really is, I think, the perfect segue to go into the 1960s. Barry Goldwater gets clobbered in the 64 election. But as you write, a lot of the far right types actually looked at it as a victory. And in terms of the money aspect of the Griff, talk about the rise of Richard Vigory coming out of this election, because it was really

his direct mail operation that really was so instrumental to this story and to what we see today. Well, so the reason they saw it as a victory in 64, in spite of the fact that they only carried the states of the Confederacy in the election and got crushed in the popular vote, is that it was a gathering of millions of conservatives around their cause. The far right had never seen anything like it since before World War II, and they felt at last, you know, we're building a movement. And this is, we can make this defeat into an eventual victory. And they did. But in the meantime, Richard Vigree, who was a young entrepreneur, very right-wing, hated civil rights and loved Joe McCarthy, realized that there was an enormous mailing list that could be gleaned from the list,

of Goldwater's contributors, which in those days was held by the clerk of the House. This was before the creation of the Federal Election Commission and the kind of contributor lists that we know now. In those days, anybody who gave more than $50 had their name taken down and was filed with the clerk of the House. And Richard Vigory sent some young women over there, of course, to write down the names longhand on pads, which he then had put on magnetic tapes. And then all of a sudden, he had millions of names that he could send direct mail to, asking for money for this right-wing cause, for that right-wing cause, and he became an incredibly powerful figure. And he, of course, goes on to found the moral majority with Paul Weyrick and Jerry

Falwell, which itself, as you point out, was at least for Falwell, a fundraising grift. Weiric, we sort of acknowledge was a true believer, and of course the things he truly believed in were horrible. But Falwell, for a lot of this, was a money-raising grift, right? Well, it's, you know, I always have trouble figuring out what they truly believe and what is just for show. But Jerry Falwell certainly was susceptible to the argument that Vigory and Wyrick made that this would be a great way to raise money, that if you could organize evangelical Christians into a political block, that you would be able to raise a ton of money from them. And they even did a poll to make sure that that was true. Because up until then, the evangelical community had kind of stayed out of politics. didn't really want to see religion mixed with politics. But Falwell and Vigory found that indeed, there was a market out there for this. It was not based on abortion, by the way, which is what they would like you to believe. At fact, the year before the moral majority was founded, the Southern Baptist Convention had endorsed the right to abortion.

So what it was really about was segregation. They wanted to keep their schools segregated. They wanted to be able to run private academies that were segregated. and they were very angry, but the Justice Department under Jimmy Carter, President Jimmy Carter, had started to take a hard look at how they were using their tax exemptions to further segregation. And Falwell was a leading figure in this. He had a segregation academy, as they were known, in Lynchburg, Virginia. So he knew that you could corral quite a few evangelical congregations into a right-wing political movement. And that's what they did. And eventually, this helped

to lead to the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. So it was only a, you know, a decade of and a half before what Vigory had seen came to fruition politically. And in the meantime, they had taken in millions and millions of dollars. Yeah, two names enter the story that we're all sadly familiar with these days because of their ties to Trump. Those names are Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. Talk about BMSK, the firm led by Charlie Black, Manafort, Stone, and Peter Kelly. It's unreal how long these guys, and particularly Manafort and Stone, have been part of this amazing. long con? Well, Stone began even earlier than that in the Nixon campaign when he was investigated as a very young man by the Senate Watergate Committee and sort of skated past that. They didn't

find anything they could indict him for. But that story of Black Manifort, Stone and Kelly, the lobbying firm actually has its origins in something called Nick Pack, the National Conservative Political Action Committee that I discussed in the Longest Con as well, which was a, of course, another vigory creation that was designed to mobilize people's anger and hate against Democrats running for Congress in the Senate. And it was successful in that, but it was even more successful as a fundraising operation. Roger Stone was in on the ground floor of that, along with a guy named Terry Dolan, was the executive director, and Paul Manafort. And they then, having helped to elect Reagan and a number of senators, they took over the Senate in 1980, they formed a lobbying firm. So they

could lobby the same elected officials who they had helped to elect, which many people saw as a kind of a conflict of interest, but it didn't bother them. And they went on and made a ton of money, lobbying on behalf of who. Well, often some of the worst dictators in the world who needed to have their images improved in Washington. And there was Roger Stone and his partner, Paul Manafort, with their hands out, ready to do whatever needed to be done. And they got very wealthy. And they pracked about this. Oh, yes. Well, so again, anti-communism was the sort of scrim behind which they hid these horrendous dictators like Mobutu Sei Sei Seiko and Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines who were stealing from their own people just the way these guys were. And the idea was, well, they're really anti-communists. And actually, you look at that kind of dictatorial regime and all it does is create fertile ground for, you know, revolution because people don't like it. They don't like living under that kind of the boot heel of a, of a, of a dictator. Let's jump ahead a little bit. Talk about Sarah Palin and the Tea Party and how those two

sort of elements really led almost directly to what we're seeing today. So people may or may not recall how the Tea Party started, but it started with a TV correspondent on the business channel, CNBC, ranting about the measures that the Obama administration and previously the Bush administration had taken to try to stop us from falling into a depression in the wake of the financial. financial collapse in 2008. And he said, well, we need to have a Tea Party. And lo and behold, it turned out that some organizations on the right had already sort of started to use that phraseology or preparing to. And what ensued very quickly was a sort of free-for-all among right-wing groups and entrepreneurs who saw that the Tea Party was a very marketable

idea and commodity and set up one group after another to send direct mail, send email solicitations, fleece people out of money for groups that were supposed to, you know, restore America to what it had once been. And Sarah Palin was very much a part of this movement. She had run, as you know, for vice president with Senator McCain, proved to be kind of an embarrassing candidate, but that didn't mean that her fans didn't love her. They thought she was wonderful and wanted her to run for president. And she spent a couple of years pretending that she was going to run for president and made a lot of money.

She became known in the political press. as a shameless grifter and eventually faded away in favor of who? Donald J. Trump, who had latched onto the Tea Party movement because it was connected to the birther conspiracy, which claimed that President Obama had really been born in Kenya and had hidden his birth certificate. Trump rushed to the forefront of that conspiracy claim, as he loves to do with so many others, and said he had detectives investigating this and got a lot of notoriety and credit among the the Tea Party adherence for doing that. Of course, it turned out he eventually had to withdraw that. It was a lie like so much else that springs from his lips. But it didn't matter as so often happens

with these kinds of conspiracy cults. The fact that it's proved wrong or even that the charges withdrawn by those who made it, really, they just move on to the next thing. And the next thing turned out to be eventually Trump running for president. Well, and the thing about Trump is, you know, and you refer to him as the king of the con men, in reading the book, you lay out such a clear path from Roy Cohn's stirring up hatred and paranoia and his, what you call his will to dominate, to Richard Vigory's direct mailgrifts, to the prosperity gospel evangelist's way of faith that you talk about in the book. And then on to Sarah Palin, and then on to the Tea Party, and then on to Trump.

And what struck me was that Trump is really sort of the perfect synthesis of all this, almost like the chimera of Greek mythology or, you know, more in a more modern sense, when like a comic book introduces a villain that has powers taken from a bunch of other supervillains. Like, that to me is, in reading this book, is like, oh, that's Trump. He put all of this together. Well, you're exactly right about that. I mean, Trump not only is a con and a fraud from the very beginning when he becomes famous because of his TV show, The Apprentice, which was completely a fabricated idea of him. You know, in the book, I call him, quote, Trump, unquote, because that's the character that the TV show created and who had existed before in the form of his book,

The Art of the Deal, which of course he didn't write a word of. Again, both presenting him as this genius billionaire businessman who was always right and everyone should admire. And in fact, he was a bankrupt and a faker. And the people making the TV show and the writer of that book, Tony Schwartz, all knew that it was a fraud. And yet, if you saw the effect that these things had on the general public, it was incredible what they had come to believe about him, millions of people. And only later did a lot of political analysts, including me, realize that it was these, you know, fake ideas about Trump that had been sort of injected into the bloodstream of America that made it possible for him to run for president and win. That was the original con. Then,

after the apprentice, but before he ran for president, Trump realized that he could no longer be in the real estate business because all the banks had were refusing to lend them money to build anything, but he could go into these various grifts. And so he started, you know, Trump University, which became an enormous grift, claiming that he was going to teach people how to make millions off of real estate the way he had. And he was going to tell them his secrets. And he would supposedly show up at these seminars. Of course, he never showed up. The nearest they got to meeting Trump was a cardboard cutout. They could pose next to for a picture. And it was all a huge rip-off. But that wasn't the only one. He was eventually forced to give back $25 million for that. But he had multi-level

marketing businesses that he got involved in, which are a particular kind of American scam where you put up money to start a business that's part of a multi-level marketing network. And then you never make the money back unless you get other people to buy into it. These are enormous cons and scams, and Trump did two of them and got paid up front millions of dollars for doing that. He participated in or fronted lots of different grifts like this. And of course, when he became president, and since then, he's continued in that same mode. After the 2020 election, he was going to fight and overturn the election result, and he tried to do that with even encouraging violence.

But the other thing that they did was to continue the fundraising from the 2020 election, claiming that it was going to go to an election defense fund. But that fund never existed. And in fact, they sent the money almost a quarter of a billion dollars into a super pack in the first couple of months after that election that Trump has controlled ever since. And it was one of the biggest grifts ever. Yeah. It's like he put all the pieces together to become the final form of the right-wing grifter.

Well, I like supervill. And I think there's something to that for sure. The book is the longest con, how grifter, swindlers, and frauds hijacked American in conservatism. The author is Joe Connison. The book is out now. It's a fantastic read. Joe, thank you so much for being here. Thank you. I really appreciate it. Hope you enjoy checking out this episode of The New Abnormal. We're back every Tuesday, Friday, and Sunday. If you enjoyed it, please share it with a friend and keep the conversation going. This podcast is a Daily Beast production with production by Jesse Cannon and Seamus Calder.

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