The Daily Beast Podcast - Why the Trumpy Supreme Court Will Give Him the Finger

Episode Date: November 6, 2020

“Ever since RBG died, I've basically spent the last six weeks in existential terror,” Elie Mystal, The Nation’s justice correspondent, tells Molly Jong-Fast. Trump appoints Amy Coney Barrett, so she could hand the election back to president Trump. But now, Mystal says on the latest edition of The New Abnormal, “I am no longer worried about these dumb lawsuits… Where we are now is the best possible position for Biden to be in order to fend off legal challenges to his emerging electoral college victory. I have extreme confidence that none of these wackadoodle, crazy lawsuits that Trump and Trump's campaign throws out there will have any relevance—even in front of Republican appointed judges and arch conservative of Supreme courts… The reason why I have such confidence is because Biden is winning. Remember in 2000, where Gore was trying to make up a gap, right? Well, the Republican courts are probably willing to allow Trump to get as many votes counted as he needs in order to make up any perceived gap that he has. That one thing. Throwing out votes that were received by election day, counted, tabulated, and reported to the press? Throwing those votes away because they don't like who those people voted for? It’s a really different proposition.” Plus! Molly asks how can the Democratic party can ever repay Black women. Rick Wilson imagines Trump in Cats! And famed journalism professor Jay Rosen talks about the many schisms in the Murdoch media empire. 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, best-selling 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 respective bunkers.

Hey everyone, it's New Abnormal producer Jesse Cannon here. I just want to say at the top of the show that on Friday, November 6th at noon, that The Daily Beast, Rick Wilson, Molly Jungfast, Jay Michelson, and Sam Stein are going to be doing another Zoom like we did on Election Day. We'll be answering all your election questions during. So if you want to be a part of this, sign up to be a part of Beast Inside at New Abnormal.com.com. That's new abnormal. That the dailybeast.com. As well, we may upload it to our bonus episodes later on afterwards, so stay tuned and get signed up at Beast Inside and become a member.

And without further ado, we were able to catch Rick Wilson between flights, and so we got a little bit of his commentary today so that you'll hear right now, and then the rest of the show will go on. Thanks for listening. Okay, Rick Wilson. Hi there. Tell us where you are. I'm not going to tell you where I am because it's so delicious. I'm in a pod on an airplane waiting to fly from one location to another. It's one of those locations we're not allowed to know about, right?

This one correct. Undisclosed. So tell us what is happening. What are we waiting for? What the fuck is going on? Let me cover two things first off. Apparently everyone on the internet is mad at me right now. Because they didn't capture the Senate for them.

I have 270 reasons why they should not be mad. and that's going to happen very soon now. And I got to tell you, we are very close. There's no, there's the velocity in Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, that Arizona and Nevada is inevitable. It is inexorable. This is, there's no escape path now for them. And there's no magical legal trick with a, with a rudy lawsuit against, I don't know,

the universe or the alternate dimension that's going to, to unring the bell of this American moment, whereas as one, 72 million Americans was up and said, you're fired. So you don't think that Rudy, Eric, and Pam Bondi are going to solve this for the president? Rudy, Eric, and Pam Bondi are like the lineup of a bad 70s comedy series, where one guy's the old curve, there's the hot young thing. And there's the doofus. What do we think happens?

What's your prediction? We're waiting for right now. Pennsylvania is supposed to be announced tonight, right? We should get Pennsylvania tonight. We should get Allegheny and Philly rolling in tonight in East Coast time. And at that point, we're going to see a big flip in the numbers. And Georgia is now, we've got a double runoff in Georgia, as I predicted to you yesterday. We would get there. Oh, wow.

So Asoff. So Asoff in Purdue and Kiw and Warnock. And in both those races, I just, we don't, I haven't modeled it yet or pulled it yet, but I got to tell you it's going to be ugly because the Republicans are going to be very depressed. They're going to be very down. They're going to have lost their shiny toy. And the Democrats will have a reason to unify. And it's very simple. You're not running against Donald Trump now. It's against Mitch McConnell. And I think we can turn up the Atlanta suburbs. And I think we can turn up Savannah. I think you can turn on South West Georgia in an unprecedented way and take two Senate seats. And everybody gets together on the same songbook. makes this thing look right. So it's going to be a crazy bomb. If that works, then Democrats get this will actually have the Senate by two seats. Yes. We talked about this yesterday. A lot of people bitching and moaning like, oh, oh, it's so low as me. We didn't, guys, you took out Donald Trump. And he's no longer going to be president. And he's going to go into the rest of his pissing life that's going to be spent dealing with lawsuits. And the large adult children are going

figures of clownish ridicule for the rest of their days. And their spot will be cursed and spat upon by people in the streets, yay unto the end of time. It's a damn good day. But I was told that Trump is going to run again in 2024. I welcome this with open arms and joyous heart. I'm caught in the hardest hit. Yeah, who do you, what do you think the field will look like in 2024?

Donald, Donald Jr., Eric Ivanka. all running against each other in a Porsche-style grudge match. Poor Tom Cotton. The thing to really pay attention to right now is the rapid establishment of the stab in the back myth, which all fascist regimes require a stab in the back as part of their story.

And so we're seeing now as, you know, Fox is to blame, and AP is to blame, and George Soros is to blame. And the Lincoln Project, the Lincoln Project, is to blame. I seriously. had some log in my feed. It was like,

the stinking Lincoln. I'm like, what are you for? Oh, that's bad. It's amazing that the degree to which the end of his era is not blamed on him, but on every other external factor is striking, and it's going to be one of those things that is a central part of the mythology

here. Just keep, mark my words, they're going to do everything they can. Say, oh, those people did this to him. He did everything right. He was the greatest ever, and it's not for the stab in the back. So, anyway, In related news, I'm going to be interviewing food tasters. Yeah, that sounds about right.

It sounds about right. I will say one other thing, and I just want to share this. Maybe it's just something about my mental landscape, but I did dream last night that he was insisting on being in a remake of the digital version of cats that came out this last year. Oh, my God. Can you imagine? Yeah, it was a moment I've been, I had to share with anyone, but here we are. You know, I saw it.

the digital remake of cats and it was really something. Well, the trick of this whole moment for him, he's going to obviously, Mark Burnett is being rumored to be pitching a show where Donald Trump essentially still plays the president. And he criticizes Joe Biden every day. It's kind of great. It's sort of an institutionalization of the guy. His people will have all the joy of his transgressive a wholeness

with none of the risk of nuclear annihilation. Do you think, do you think that Mitch McConnell will, tell him to stop all the shenanigans, or are you saying he'll just keep, Trump will just keep going with that? I think Mitch may want him to stop, but what's the good of that? The guy's never going to stop.

He's going to always do what he does, always be who he is, and always act the way he desires. He has no mental or moral filter, and he's going to be out there, you know, until the sun cools or he dies talking shit. And because God is a cruel person, we're probably going to end up with somebody

developing brain uploading into Android by the time Trump, Once again, it'll be in case of a titanium robot outfit to re-cavacconvon as if death came from the future, a Terminator named Donald. What do we think about the psycho Mark Levin tweet that says that where if Trump's elected in a red state that the electors in those red states should flip their votes for Trump and disobey the electoral college tethering. The faithless electors. Yeah, look, they're going to try to have everything they can to manipulate this thing until the very end. If you're a faithless elector in this environment, good luck. because there's going to be consequences to people who try to cheat to enable this guy.

And they will, don't mistake me, they will try to cheat to enable him. But they can expect both legal and social and personal and business consequences. I think that they've never imagined before this. You know, Kaylee McInanan, he's putting a resume out there to corporate, you know, PR people right now. And good luck. People who have been part of his system are going to end up being held to account in many, many ways. I mean, if you're a Fortune 100 company and you hire these people, or if you're an elector, you know, goes out and does this to make the trade to win, it's going to, this is, all eyes are upon you. You know, normally, no one knows who the electors are in any given year.

Right. It's just to see what they do, and they will. And again, if you try to cheat, good luck. Right. No, it's true. So by the time I get off this flight, I am very hopeful. We will be able to do a bit of a victory dance. That's awesome.

And my victory dances often include fire and body pains. So just beware. Ellie Mistal is the justice correspondent for the nation, as well as one of our favorite Twitter feeds at Ellie NYC. Ellie, what the fuck is happening? Yeah, like I was just saying, Molly, there's part of me that's just like, are they slow rolling the votes to be glory boys?

Does Arizona just want to be the one to put them over the top? So they're trying, like, it makes you think crazy things. Look, I think that while I had initial disappointment on election night because I really was hoping that the Democrats would take back the Senate, while I had initial disappointment because I made the mistake once again, but never again, of listening to stupid 538 in Polster, I was a little bit, you know, underwhelmed on election night. But after, you know, I went to sleep, got my head.

head right kind of step back for a second. It looks like Biden is ahead in enough states to net him the electoral college victory. This was always going to be a close election. The point of this exercise was to exorcise a desperate racist from the White House. And that mission critical goal is still on track. And I refuse, I've kind of decided, I refuse to be unhappy or underwhelmed by

that reality. Donald Trump is a uniquely dangerous person to American politics. He's specifically dangerous to people who might get sick from COVID-19, and he's an existential threat to people of color,

people in the LGBT community, and so on and so forth. So removing him, if that's all that happens in this election, removing him was the mission critical goal, and it looks like we are still on track to do that. I refuse to be sad about that. Right. No, it's true. I think that's fair. I love that Trump is like, this is going to go, I'm going to get this to Amy Comey Barrett so that I can win.

How could he even do that? I've got some Xanax for you on this. because he's like, you know, you can see the wheels turning and he's like, I installed the Supreme Court justice just for this purpose. I have a post coming up on the nation. I think everybody should read it. It should be published in about an hour. I am no longer worried about these done-ass lawsuits. Don't get me wrong. Ever since RBG died, I've basically spent the last six weeks in existential terror that the whole point was to get the election, as you say Molly, in front of Amy Coney Barrett. so she could hand the election back to President Trump. I have lived that fear. Where we are now is the best possible position for Biden to be

in order to fend off legal challenges to his emerging electoral college victory. I have extreme confidence that none of these whack-a-doodle crazy lawsuits that Trump and Trump's campaign throws out there will have any relevance, in front of Republican appointed judges and arch conservative of Supreme Courts. I can't speak for Clarence Thomas. I can't speak for Brett Kavanaugh. They might want to, you know, high five and get their revenge because Democrats ask them mean questions during the confirmation hearing.

But I don't see John Roberts. I don't see Neil Gorsuch going along with some of these arguments because they're so bad. The reason why I have such confidence is because Biden is winning. Remember, in 2000, what Gore was trying to do was to get additional votes counted so that he could make up a gap, right? Right. With the Republican courts are probably willing to do is to allow Trump to get as many votes counted as he needs in order to make up any perceived gap that he has. That's one thing. Throwing out votes, throwing out votes that have already been, that were received by Election Day, counted, tabulated, and reported to the press.

Throwing those votes away because they don't like who those people voted for is an entirely different proposition. I was very worried that they were going to be in a situation where Biden needed absentee ballots mailed before the election, but received after election day in order to pull this off. I was worried about that. It does not look like he needs those kinds of votes to win Arizona or Nevada or Wisconsin or Michigan. In fact, some news outlets, as we tape this, are already calling those states for Biden.

So Trump would have to get a court to throw away, again, votes that have already been tabulated. That's just a lot. That's just a lot. And he would have to shoot this moon in multiple states. That's the other thing. In 2000, right? It was all about Florida because Florida controlled the electoral college, right? It was, you know, whoever won Florida won the electoral college. In this situation, Trump is going to have to get them to throw out votes in Pennsylvania and at least one other state, right?

It's going to be Pennsylvania and Arizona and Wisconsin. So Trump has to shoot this moon in two or three states. That is just too much water for the Supreme Court to carry for him. It's definitely not 2000. It's more, I think, like 2018, where we all went to bed thinking we hadn't done it. And then we woke up thinking, oh, well, this isn't so bad. Yeah, I mean, look, again, you never want to put anything past Claris Thomas. You never want to put anything past Brett Kavanaugh.

And quite frankly, you never want to put anything past Samuel Lido because he just hates the world. I mean, like, Samuel Lita is the guy in the, in the Batman movie. Like, some people just want to watch the world burn. Like, that's... So wouldn't you say Alito is closer to Scalia in that way? No, because Scalia had principles. Like, principles I, you know, could spend the rest of my life disagreeing with. Right.

principles. Alito's just Alito just doesn't like things. Like, you know, Alito really, I find Alito be the most, I mean, it's hard. I don't like any of them. Let's be clear. I'm clearly on the progressive side of things. But Alito is really, like, he's mean-spirited

in ways that you don't often see from Supreme Court justices. He is radical in his willingness to use judicial power to just remake the world in the way that he sees fit. He's much more aggressive on that scale, certainly than an answer than Scalia was. And frankly, more so than I think any other justice aside from Clarence Thomas, although Clarence Thomas is mitigated by the fact that his theories

are so kind of crazy out there that he's never able to get majorities around his stuff anyway. Yeah. We don't have any Justice Amy decisions yet. But if she compares herself to Scalia, that's not going to be good. Long term? Absolutely not. I mean, long term, she's a huge, huge problem for the liberal agenda for the next 40 years. As I've written, we don't know yet the specific contours of when she will feel comfortable to let her freak flag fly or not. Right? Like, because they all have different, you know, triggers, like different stimuli will get them to go nutty. And we don't know where her lines are because she, you know, she's nude. I mean, literally, has. no opinions to her name. So, like, even when we look at this election case, like, does Amy Coney-Barrant really, as much as she, I believe, was put on the court by Trump in order to give him the election? Does Amy Coney-Barratt really want her first opinion? Because it would be her first opinion, her first vote, to be to tilt the election to Donald Trump on such

wack-a-doodle theories. I mean, because that's a situation where she would undercut her own credibility, right out of the gate, she's going to be here for 40 years. Trump's going to come and go, whether Trump has gone Friday or January 20th or 2024. Trump is going to be gone while Amy Coney-Barrant will still be there.

So she's got to think that way because we don't know, I can't predict. But it would be extreme for her to have her first opinion to be throwing out votes on these kinds of crazy legal theories. Here's just one example.

from one of the cases. I forget which state. I forget if it's, I think it's Michigan, but I don't want to, but I'm not sure it might be Pennsylvania. But one of their complaints, the basis of their complaint, the Republican complaint, is that a Republican poll watcher, I'm not making this up, guys. A Republican poll watcher saw ballots on a table and then went to the bathroom, and the ballots when he came back were not there. Where did they go? To George Soros? Who knows? Where these ballots? And it's like, you know, 15 ballots on it. Like, That is the level of desperation the Republicans are at right now. And that's not going to overturn.

He can win Pennsylvania by 50,000 votes. He's won Wisconsin by 20,000 votes. That doesn't sound like a lot. 20,000 votes in Wisconsin is a lot of votes. Yeah. Right? So when you start talking about throwing out the number of votes they would have to do to change the results in some of these states,

that's, again, that's just so much water to. carry. Does Amy Coney Barrett really want her first opinions to be carrying that water? I don't know that. I just, I don't, and I, and I wouldn't assume that, I guess is what I'm saying. Right. No, that makes sense. I mean, and I say that from the position of like, not liking Amy Coney Barrett at all and not thinking that she's a person that's going to be, that can be trusted to consistently act in good faith. But even with that kind of dim view of a Coney Barrett or a Neil Gorsuch or whatever, like this, this is a big ass from the Trump. administration. Ellie, so you were dunking on a person that needs so much dunking yesterday. Andrew Sullivan, can you tell us what brought your to him? Oh, my God. This guy. That's how I like it to start.

So Sullivan, and you know, there's a lot of this rolling out there. Sullivan was like, well, the fact that Trump once again, you know, re-reuped his appeal with the white role class voters really shows that the left's what do you say? His exact tweet was, I find Trump abhorrent. Yeah, I saw that. But the left's

embrace of identity politics is intolerant or, you know, some phraseology around there. His argument is that this election shows that the left's identity politics is what turned off potential voters

against Trump, which is A, just on a factual level, freaking ridiculous when Trump's entire base is about identity politics. This is the thing that white people do a lot. White conservatives do a lot. They do

identity politics specifically towards other white conservative people, but they don't call it identity politics because white conservatives get to control our, think they get to control our language. So when white conservatives do it, it's not identity politics. But when Democrats do it,

try to like say like, hey, black people, let's get together. Oh, that's identity politics. That's bad, right? So that's, that's, that's problem one. It's just, it's just, it's just wrong kind of factually on what identity politics is or is not. But number two, like the fact that one would take away from this election, where Joe Biden is, let's be clear, going to win the popular vote by three or four, potentially five points, where he and Kamala Harris will get more votes for president and vice president than any other ticket in the history of America

to draw from that result man, identity politics is really pushing away voters is just an insanely bad and I would say bad faith take. That's not the problem that we're seeing. The problem that we're saying, I'm not going to disagree that there's a problem here

when you see, you know, Biden's going to get 71, 72 million votes. Trump is going to get 67, 68 million, maybe up to 70 million. Trump is going to get significantly more votes this time than he got last time. I'm not saying that's not a problem. But to me, the clear problem is that Trump appeals to the very worst people in our society. And there are many of those people. Yeah. The argument that America is better than this is wrong.

Right. And so, you know, if I would criticize the Biden campaign, you know, so often Biden's response to whatever latest bit of racism, bigotry, xenophobia, sexism, jingoism that came out of the Trump campaign, Biden's most common response to that was, come on, come on, we're America. Turns out that's a crap argument. Turns out that America is better than this and we should act like it is, in fact, a crap argument because America is not better than this. America is this. And at some point you have to start, you have to combat the misinformation and lies and bigotry coming out of the Trump administration as opposed to merely holding your nose up at it or holding your head high and acting like it doesn't exist. When you want to talk about, you know, Latino voters in Florida, when you want to talk about the overperformance Trump had, especially in Florida, but also in South Texas, also in North Carolina. When you want to talk about that,

have to talk about is that Trump's campaign was in very many ways micro-targeted on local radio, local Spanish-speaking radio, to those groups. And frankly, Latino voting experts have been screaming about this all summer. Yeah. And we saw this the week before the election, too. And Biden didn't combat that. So when Trump is, you know, is in Spanish radio saying, Biden's a socialist, and he'll send you back to Venezuela. To Venezuelans, the Democrats with their immense amount of money needed to be on the radio the very next ad spot saying everything that last guy said was bull crap. Whatever the Spanish word for bull crap is, I don't know. But you know, they got to be on the radio the next day saying that. That was really a failure on the part of the Democrats.

Trump tricks people because, and I feel like we don't talk about this enough. Like, he just goes out and tells people stuff that isn't true. And Democrats don't have a really good way of combating that. And so when Tucker Carlson does it in 2024, we're going to have a big problem. Because like, as you and I both know, the best thing about Trumpism is that he's such a fucking moron. And so when you have someone smart, he's like, he's figured out the play, right? Now, when you have someone smart do it, I don't know what happens. He talks in small words and he's, he's, he's, he's, shameless with his lying. And the Democratic response is usually... More policy. And we don't want to spend all of our time just fighting back lies because that would take up all of our time and we never get to talk about policy. That's what you have to do.

I mean, right? Right. One of the things I do think that is that this is now the second election in a row where the, let's call them, uh, misinformed whites. and some low information people of color allies, where that group of people has shown themselves to be far larger and far more willing to vote

than a polite, educated society would like to believe. It's the second election in a row that's happened. Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shale on me. Like, at some point, we have to start questioning our deepest assumptions about this country and our messaging when we realize that this is the case.

And one of the assumptions that I have been questioning, you know, granted, I haven't had a lot of sleep, so maybe these aren't great questions. But one of the assumptions that I have been questioning is, does anybody actually give a damn about policy? No, it seems like no. I mean, Rick Wilson will say no, but he, you know, he's coming from his own place. But I mean, I don't know, do they? It is entirely possible to craft a narrative of the past four elections, four elections, not two, as the biggest celebrity one, that Barack Obama was a rock star. And his rockstarness is why he was able to overcome these issues of white supremacy and racism that are clearly never far away from the consciousness of these people, right? But he was a bigger star than McCain or Romney.

And Trump was a bigger star than Clinton or Biden. And that maybe the Democrats, what they really need to do to have the kind of sustainable long-term coalition that would look like a repudiation of Trump that we all wanted was to run the rock. Yeah. I've long said that you may just have to run celebrities and suck it up and then get them to do what you want.

And the Republicans sort of threaded that needle in a brilliant way. Run celebrities and have and just make sure the celebrities that you support are willing to hire good staff. Like maybe that's where we are right now. When this is all over and we don't know. But it seems like black women will have delivered for the Democratic Party yet again. What can the Democratic Party deliver for black women? Black people will just be saving just be saving people. Yeah.

I mean, but all black women, like 98%. percent of black women. So how can the Democratic Party deliver for those people? Because they have put them in office and kept them in office and Democrats fucking owe them. What can you think of legislatively that could be a way to start that? So two things. And this kind of links up nicely with our previous conversation. Maybe policy is not what you run on. It's what you govern on. Right. Right. So when you talk about repaying the debt owed to black women, I think there are two key things. things. One, you have to make it easier for black women to vote and to run for office themselves. They have done the work of supporting candidates from the sidelines. They have done the work

of being the backbone of the party. But now it is their turn to lead from the front as opposed to from the back. And that requires a Democrat party to not only to make it easier for them to vote, to make it easier for them to run, to invest money in those, in their operations when they're running, so that if Stacey Abrams wants to run for governor of Georgia again, or president of the United States, or queen of the universe, she becomes the best funded candidate ever. Yeah, if she delivers Georgia, I mean, she should be able to run for whatever she fucking wants. Even getting this close in Georgia, I think, entitles her to, you know, cash and prizes.

but she should be the most well-funded candidate ever. Democrats need to go out there and do a better job of finding black women to run in some of these states, especially on the local level. And Democrats need to do a much better job of defending the black women who are in leadership and are in power when the knucklehead attacks come from the right, from the centrist, from the media, from the pundits, You want to pay black women back? Next time one of these frickin Republican jerk faces goes after Ayana Presley,

I want the entire Democratic coalition to have her back. Because right now, they don't have her back. Right now, it's people like me, it's people on the hard left that have to go and stand behind Presley and Omar and Talib and AOC. It's us that have to do that. The establishment never does. That's how you start paying black women back. You don't, not only do you make it easier for them to vote and run, when they get attacked on bull crap, which you know is coming, you defend them.

But even Val Demings and, you know, I mean, there's Maxine Waters. I mean, these women have been targeted and have not been protected in the way they should be. You know, at all, at all. And people notice that. So like that, that's real allyship, right? It's, that's an example of real allyship. And that's, that definitely needs to happen going forward. Before we get into things, we have a fun little treat.

There are so many insane things happening in the world right now, and two episodes a week just aren't enough to cover it all. So, the new abnormal is going to release a limited run series of bonus interviews over the next few weeks for Beast Inside members only. We'll release a new one each Sunday. But listen carefully. Only Beast Inside members will have access to these. So head over to the new abnormal. dot the Daily Beast.com to become a Beast inside member now.

That's New Abnormal. dot the Daily Beast.com. Jay Rosen teaches journalism at NYU and is the author of the blog, Press Think, and has an amazing Twitter feed at Jay Rosen underscore NYU. Jay, I'm so glad you're here.

This is really helpful for me. I have many questions for you. I think the media is doing a not terrible job covering the cluster fuckery that's happening right now. Am I wrong? No, I don't think so.

Our news media tends to do a better job when it has a long time to prepare. Like, Fox doesn't really screw up the Super Bowl very often because they know when it's going to be and they know what it's going to be and, you know, they rehearse it. And this is sort of like that. A couple of months ago, if you recall Ben Smith's column in the New York Times about how the networks were looking at election night, his conclusion was they seemed to be taking this very cavalierly and don't seem to be ready at all. But in the United States, between September 1 or so and the election, they got the message that this could really get out of control very fast and it's not going to be like any previous election night. And not only do

they have to prepare, but they have to prepare the public, which is a different thing than they normally have to do. And I think they took that very seriously and they consulted with themselves. They consulted with some experts with knowledge to lend. And they were kind of ready for what happened. And then their predictions about what was likely to be the important races came true in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. They were ready for that. And they were ready for some of the tricks and disturbances that we've seen in the days since. So on the whole, I think you're right because they anticipated what was going to happen.

And I know Fox is a network that has pretty much destroyed itself, like the Wall Street Journal, in a certain kind of way. But what's happening with the Decision Desk feels like an even larger schism. Well, that was a known situation, too, at least for those of us who follow the media really closely, if you recall, it happened with Karl Rove and Megan Kelly, where the decision desk called a race that Car Rove thought was still open. And Megan Kelly took the camera crew back into the weeds of Fox News and they said, look, here's what our data shows. And the guy who runs the decision desk for Fox News is this famously independent guy. He has a really good reputation among people who do this kind of forecasting. He's known as a serious person.

And when reporters profile him, they can't find anyone in Fox News who's his boss or he seems to report to some show. shadowy executive elsewhere. So nobody can really boss them around. And that is part of the background to this. So that the decision desk at Fox, the polling operation at Fox, unlike the rest of the operation, has always had this reputation for integrity. So odd. It feels to me that we, and I say this myself as a member of the media, that we got the pre-election narrative really wrong. I mean, look, I want to blame the pollsters because I'm not a pollster. Can we blame the pollsters? I think there's some blame for the pollsters. I think there will be a re-examination of their performance in 2020.

It's not smart to jump to conclusions right now on limited data about what happened, but they will eventually figure it out. There's a number of things it could be. Could be some sort of problem involving the switch to cell phones, which are more difficult to poll, could be some sort of sampling error where certain kinds of conservatives are underrepresented in the sample. Could be something like a shift in institutional trust where certain people don't want to answer anybody's questions from the media sphere or the political sphere. And so that's kind of the nightmare scenario for the polling industry is when some people will. not participate for reasons of their own, and you don't know who they are. And it's very hard to

adjust your models when you don't know who those people are or what they believe. So that might be a factor. So there were definitely some bad performance by the polling industry and those who pay a lot of attention to it are, I think, aware of that. But there was also a great deal of anticipation that this was going to be some sort of repudiation of Donald Trump and the Republican Party. And it turned out not to be that. And that is very upsetting. It's very disappointing. It's disappointing to me. It's because I felt this would something that could equally happen with Democrats and Republicans. What's going to be hard for me over the next few years is simply accepting the fact that 45 to 49% of Americans are totally fine with Donald Trump and what he's done to American

democracy. And that's a very hard thing to understand. It's very hard to accept and has a lot of implications for the future of our country. I have a theory that what happened with Donald Trump was so outside of the mainstream democracy that a lot of institutionalists, really the ones not on the opinion side, really, the real, I mean, I say this. as an opinion journalist, like the real news journalists had a really hard time trying to figure it how to cover him. And that towards the end of it, they've gotten a little bit better. They weren't used to politicians, the autocrats. You've never had a free press in an autocracy ever. So there's no rulebook here. But I wonder if Biden wins and if Trump is no longer a

power player in American politics, this is going to have to be undone, right? Well, this is what my latest piece is about in the New York Review Books site. My hypothesis is that the Republican Party is now a minority party. And it is a more counter-majoritarian as political scientists would say it. And its actual positions and priorities are only supported by 40 or less percent of the country. There's an additional part of the country that just loves Trump and votes for it. Republicans for that reason. But as a minority party, they have to make voting more difficult in order to win. And just as they have to make it harder to vote, they have to make it harder to understand what the Republican Party is for and about. And that agenda comes into conflict with honest journalism in a way that's sort of structural. It's not dependent on shows and personalities and performances is on a particular story. And I believe this conflict between a minority party that has to lie about itself, just as it has to shrink the electorate,

is going to come into conflict with the press. And how the press handles that will determine sort of like what happens over the next 10 years in the media politics space. I don't know what's going to happen, but I know this confrontation is coming. And it's going to be tricky, too, because with Trump, it's easy to say he lies because we have. all know he lies, but with someone who's a little bit more skilled, I think it's going to be hard. That makes it harder. A veneer of normalcy makes it harder. Plus, you're going to have another dynamic return, which is the conflict between what seems likely to be a Republican-held Senate and a Democratic president, you have the perfect setup for stalemate and both sides reporting and Biden versus

McConnell, right? And you can see how political journalists would love to position themselves in between warring parties. That's where they're most comfortable. The script is there and a return to he said, she said, style symmetrical down the middle coverage is kind of set up. And that's going to be a source of tension. Accountability journalism to those who are continuing to erode American democracy. and continuing to use disinformation and misinformation, which is sort of like an unbalanced picture because the Republican Party depends much more on that than the Democratic coalition does,

versus straight down the middle, two sides, McConnell versus Biden. That's going to be the divide in the years ahead. Yeah, and I don't know how you do that without looking partisan. I mean, again, it's like with all of these things. You know what I mean? It doesn't matter if you can't prove it. And the thing that I don't struggle with this

because I'm not on the news side, But I feel like the idea that you could appear partisan and that that would negate your work, I mean, that has to be just, that's a terrible line to walk. Yes. And the only way to deal with that, and we don't know if this will ever happen, but the only way to get beyond that is to stop making the standard what you appear as. As long as the standards are based on appearances and what others, particularly people who are trying to disarmes, destroy you what you appear as in their eyes. As long as that's the standard, then NPR at its worst will remain kind of the center of practice. But if we can get beyond how things appear to how they actually are, that becomes more of the standard, then there's hope for that. An example of that would be the journalism of ProPublica. ProPublica isn't left. It's not right, but it's not psychotically

down the middle either. And the way that they've done that is that instead of making their mission to describe the world in a balanced way or to retain sources in both parties, they look at their job as accountability journalism, which is focused on who has power and who's abusing power. And by shifting their mission slightly to something that, after all, is a consensus value also, I mean, most journalists would say, yeah, accountability journalism. We do that. That's what we're about, right? By shifting a little bit towards that as the foundation of their journalism, they are able to avoid a lot of these bad habits.

So, Jay, a lot of people have made the critique that the way we got to Trump is that the media no longer explains the world to people very well like it used to. And then a lot of people are afraid that we're going to get that competent facts. I was curious what your thoughts are about that theory and about how that doesn't happen. Well, I do think there's something unique about Trump as a figure, and it's really difficult to imagine somebody else like him coming along. I don't think he is super brilliant a genius, that he's got some sort of skill. It's just that there are very few people who lack the gene for shame, for example. There's very few people who can stand that level of public embarrassment. There just aren't that many people built like him who thrive on bad publicity and kind of get energized by being hated.

It's just a rare combination of elements and the fact that he has this hold on his core supporters, which got some kind of alchemy to it, that I don't think we're just going to see, another Trump amble along and slot themselves into the space that he had. But on the other hand, the ground was prepared for Trump many years ago. And there's our big forces are creating these kinds of figures because we don't just see them in the United States. We're starting to see them all over the world, these sort of populist authoritarian who adopt a kind of propagandistic political style. And this is why I've been studying up and writing about what Steve Bannon called flooding the zone in the Russian setting is called the fire hose of falsehood. These are methods of

propaganda that are at work around the world, which kind of adapt propaganda, which is a very old art, of course, to the conditions of information, abundance, and cheap content in the age of the internet. And they work in a different way than some forms of propaganda in that they're not trying to necessarily persuade you or change your mind or get you to love Big Brother. Instead, they overwhelm you with crap. That's why Steve Bannon described Trump's method as flooding the zone with shit. The idea is you throw out so many false claims and so many boasts and promises and and just sort of bullshit premises that it becomes overwhelming for the news media. It involves

endless fact checks, endless controversy. And you don't care if you contradict yourself. Of course, it doesn't matter if any of it's true. It's probably a little better if a little bit of it is true, but most of it is totally untrue. Instead of worrying about the quality of your arguments, You just multiply the number of arguments because, and this is a part that's hard for a lot of people understand, in this zone flooding, fire hose of falsehood method, what you're trying to do is just cram as many arguments in there as you can because there will be a small number of people for whom that one claim is really, really important. And they'll sit in your coalition next to somebody for whom the important claim is something totally different. And rather than make this all cohere into like a program or a platform, you just keep multiplying the volume of claims and crap and propaganda and lies and, you know, phony walls that are never going to be built. And what I'm afraid of is not that another Trump is going to come along, but that those methods are so well known now that they will appeal to a Tom Cotton. They will appeal to other political figures who find them lying around or find those methods, you know, sort of waiting for them.

And this is really important because it's happening around the world and because neither politicians nor journalists have any answer to that. We don't know how to counter that. This was so great. Thank you so much, Jay. So we just unfortunately watched Trump's press conference on Thursday night. What the fuck did we just watch? Well, I think the Daniel Dale tweet was that he's watched every one of the Trump speeches, and this is the one with the most lies, and Jake Tapper got done airing in and said it was one of the saddest things he's ever seen.

It was so interesting because we know, we all knew he wasn't going to get up there and concede, right? but I don't think any of us were prepared for just that he was going to go like, I'm still president, and I'm going to win this thing. I mean, I think we're always all prepared for what it could be. But as usual, I think we never estimate how sad and pathetic it's going to be. Yeah, I feel like it's not pathetic in the fact that, like, he might just stay. Like, I mean, we've seen Trump do things where we've been like, well, this is not a democratic norm, so it's not going to happen. I mean, if history is any guy, we have seen situations like this where he's said, like, you know, and we've all been like, oh, but he won't do that because that's not a Democratic Norman. He's just crushed right through it.

So, yeah. Not, not excited. Not excited. But you know what is exciting? Fuck that guy. Who is your fuck that guy for today, Jesse? Well, as my second fuck that guy ever and having to fill Rick Wilson's shoes since he's on an airplay day, color me. intimidated, but I think I got a good one, which is...

I think you can do it. All right. Mark Levin is starting that choir to try to say that the electors should turn for Trump, if they're in red states. I will say this, whether it's the Supreme Court or Mark Levin, these people are always so concerned with American innovation, the stock market, our entrepreneurial spirit. You want to see that crushed fuck with democracy in that way, and you will see every smart person, every innovative person's spirits crushed to a degree that they will have

no faith in the America experiment anymore and run like fuck with all their money. So I say, to quote Rick Wilson, whose shoes I sadly have to fill, fuck around and find out, buddy. My fuck that guy is Donald Trump. We knew that he wasn't going to go gracefully, but I don't think any of us were prepared for the pot. I really do after tonight worry

that he's just going to be like, no. Like tonight we realize, we really, we really found out he's not going to go without a fight. That's not good. That's not good for tamping down the, you know, the craziness of his supporters, nor is it good for our democracy as a whole. And this thing is going to get really ugly. And I think we saw that tonight, that this is going to get really ugly.

And I think that I'm scared of how this is going to go down. And, you know, it's like we always forget that he's really just a genuinely bad person who doesn't give a fuck about democracy. or anything else. And so he's never going to take the high road. And we're going to have to, you know, get him out. And that is really just so, it's just so not what I needed right now. It's very stressful living in an autocracy.

Well, the solace I try to find is I feel like we're very lucky that we get to talk to a lot of smart people and they always tell us to not worry about that. Yeah. But then the solace I don't find is those smart pollsters that were. supposed to be smarter than us. We're quite right. You know how I feel about pollsters get the wh- Don't make me beep you again, Molly. On that note, we'll wrap up this episode of the new abnormal from The Daily Beast.

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