The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Trump’s Niece Is Even More Afraid for His Second Term

Episode Date: December 17, 2024

Donald Trump is more powerful than ever, warns Mary Trump on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Then, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik joins the program to discuss the Voice of America and what Trump’s selection of Kari Lake to head up the organization could mean for the media network. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Andy Levy, former Fox News and CNN-HLN guy, and current cable news conscientious objector. I'm a former libertarian who now sits pretty comfortably on the left. 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 Cannon, 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. goal is to try and make sense of our current crazy world, our new abnormal, and hopefully even make you laugh through the tears.

What an excellent show we have today. Mary Trump, author and founder of Mary Trump Media, is here to discuss the dangers of a second Trump turn, the failures of corporate media, and the urgent need for independent pro-democracy journalism. Then we'll talk to NPR media correspondent David Fulkenfoot. We'll tell us about Voice of America and what Trump's suggestion of Carrie Lake to head up the organization could mean for the media network. But first, let's have some fun.

So Danielle, on Saturday, ABC News became the sort of latest journalistic outfit to, what do we say, obey in advance. When it agreed to pay a $15 million, or I guess a $16 million overall dollar settlement to Donald Trump to pay off a defamation lawsuit from Trump. Trump had sued them over comments that George Stephanopoulos made while he was interviewing Nancy Mace. He asked Mace about supporting someone who had been found liable for rape in the civil case that was brought against him by E. Jean Carroll. And that is not technically accurate. He was found liable for sexual abuse and for defamation of E.

Carol and then gets into a very legalistic thing where the judge in that case basically said that, yeah, the jury decided that E. Jean Carroll had failed to prove that Trump raped her, as many people commonly understand the word rape. But he said a lot of it hinged on the definitions used in New York law. Anyway, before we go down a rabbit hole there even further, the bottom line is ABC News caved. This was not something that pleased a lot of media folks. It was something that surprised a lot of media lawyers who thought ABC News actually had a very strong case here. And again, Danielle, it just gets to this whole obeying in advance and setting up a chilling effect for news organizations going forward. And of course, it comes on top of what we've seen, the behavior that we've seen from the owners of places like,

the LA Times and the Washington Post. Yeah, I think that what this goes to show to the American public is that corporate mainstream media, much like they had done over the last nine years to get us into the place where Donald Trump would be weeks away from a second regime, is that they are more than complicit in the destruction of our democracy. They are more than complicit in ensuring that the American public doesn't actually receive factual information. They are complicit in the sanewashing of Donald Trump and making him seem as if he is a normal candidate while attacking Joe Biden for minor infractions that he had throughout his four years.

Whether you're looking at meta, giving Donald Trump a million dollars for his inauguration slush fund, you're looking at Bezos doing the same. You're looking at the LA Times hiring conservatives to be on their editorial board and then refusing, obviously, before the election to endorse a candidate for the first time. time as well as the Washington Post following suit with that. You're looking at Joe and Mika of MSNBC going down to Mara Lago to quote unquote open up discussions with Donald Trump after saying that he was a danger to democracy. You're looking at now ABC. All this states is that if you are looking to be informed over what is happening, what is going to happen with this upcoming administration, look elsewhere. Because corporate mainstream media is not going to be it. You are going to see headlines that softball and soft play, any of the things that are happening

because they have decided to obey in advance. And I know that it's a term now, it's a phrase that kind of falls, you know, flat for people when you repeat it over and over again. But this is what this looks like. The media is supposed to hold power accountable. It is supposed to be the place where you are questioning those in power about how they are utilizing that power or whether it's being weaponized against the very people that they're set to serve. And what everyone from meta to ABC and onward, what they are saying is that that's not their job. Their job is to cover their own asses and make sure that they don't get sued because, God forbid, they actually stand up for what's right. And to your point, Andy, many a lawyer said that

ABC actually had a leg to stand on and they decided to sit down instead. So, you know, I think that it all of the things, all of the critique that we have had on this show over the last several years about corporate mainstream media, they have proven us right from November's election on forward, that they are not built for this moment. They are not interested in participating in this moment as a fourth estate. And I'm just disgusted at this point. Yeah, I want to read a quote. from a professor of law at the University of Utah named Ronnell Anderson Jones. This was as cited in the New York Times. Ronnell said, major news organizations have often been very leery of settlements and defamation suits brought by public officials and public figures, both because they fear

the dangerous pattern of doing so and because they have the full weight of the First Amendment on their side. What we might be seeing here is an attitudinal shift. Compared to the mainstream American press of a decade ago, today's press is far less financially. robust, far more politically threatened, and exponentially less confident that a given jury will value press freedom rather than embrace a vilification of it. What we're talking about here and what Professor Jones is saying is, you know, the general pattern used to be news organizations get sued all the time, particularly for defamation. And they almost always win those suits because the bar is so high for a public figure

in America to prove defamation. It involves proving not only that false information was disseminated, but that it was disseminated knowingly or with substantial doubts as to its accuracy. And so the bar is intentionally set so high because we want to have a robustly free press that a news organization almost always wins these suits. And what we're seeing now is, again, it's call it what you want, obeying in advance, bending the knee. As Professor Jones says, it seems to be.

be an attitudinal shift. And the shift, unfortunately, seems to be that there are elements of the media that consider themselves almost subservient to Donald Trump, which is the exact opposite way that the press is supposed to function. The press is supposed to be adversarial. I've said for a long, and I'm not the only one, but I've said for a long time that I'm happy if pretty much every person in power is mad at the press. Because that's the press's job. And, you know, unless they're mad at them because the press is, you know, outright lying or whatever. But in general, the media and the people in power should have an adversarial relationship. And this is where, you know, Danielle, we talk about this so much with access journalism and everything

like that. And, and, you know, I have no doubt that part of what played into ABC News's decision is they were like, well, if we settle with Trump and we give him $15 million for some type of presidential library type thing, which by the way, ain't never happening. Nope. But, you know, that will preserve our access to him. And that means he'll speak to us and his people will speak to us. And that's what we need to happen here. So the whole thing, it's fairly abhorrent.

And it is scary because, again, as Professor Jones said, one of the reasons that news organizations don't generally settle these suits is because they fear the dangerous pattern of doing so. That just cannot be over-emphasized enough, I think. I guess my question is, when we're talking about access to journalism, what does Donald Trump offer? Like, in all honesty, we know that he lies on a regular basis. Look at what was just said with regard the entire campaign. He's talking about the fact that he's going to bring grocery, those things called groceries,

he's going to bring them down, bring down grocery prices, all of these things. What did he say in his time magazine interview? It's very hard to be. bring things down. The whole campaign was around attacks on transgender American. All of a sudden now, trans, not really a big deal. Is it that they just want to be in the room? Like they just want to have those one-on-one like picture stills and videos and interviews that they put up that then they don't dissect afterwards? What is the value? I feel like not only has mainstream media lost its way, I don't even think that they understand what their job is and what the value is to the listener or the reader that

they're trying to extract information for. Like I thought the goal was to create an informed public, but if the person that you're readily trying to get information from is a habitual liar, then what value are you actually providing with this quote unquote access? Yeah, along those lines, I think it's also instructive to think about who owns ABC, and that is Disney. And Disney is a very, very, very large corporation with a lot of vested interests throughout America and the world. And what is, you know, worrisome here is we don't know where the pressure came from for this to be settled. And it may well have come from echelons above ABC News. It may have come from echelons above ABC. It may have come from Disney itself. Unfortunately, this is where we are now

with the way a lot of news organizations are owned, particularly broadcast news organizations. So in terms of access, I think we have to think of it even beyond access journalism and we have to think of it as corporate access is what is being protected here. Yep. Okay. Fair point. I don't even know where we are, to be honest. But over the past couple of weeks, we have had conversations about RFK and his absolute crazy. And I think that, you know, again, these are things that the media should be covering with like deft, like concern, kind of creating a sense of outrage with the public, that a vaccine that has helped millions of people live polio, which before we even started recording, all of us were asking, how does one get polio?

because that's how effective, folks, the vaccine has been is that in our generations, we don't know anybody that has had polio. So now you have RFK Jr. and his attorney saying that they are going to, if he becomes and is affirmed as HHS secretary, is going to ask the FDA to revoke a decades old critical vaccine. And lo and behold that, you know, a broken clock is right twice a day. Here enters Mitch McConnell, who reminds all of us, apparently, that he is a polio survivor, that he contracted polio in childhood and talks about how life-saving this vaccine was and that he does not, he didn't mention RFK Jr. by name. But he said that anyone who is seeking confirmation from the Senate should back away from conversations about revoking any vaccines. And I'm like, well, we all know who the one pick is

that is talking about any of this. So can we just decide that RFK Jr. is dangerous? And we're not even going to bother with hearings for him? Because the man is trying to make polio grading. again, as well as make waterborne disease great again by getting rid of fluoride, as well as make, you know, I don't know, mad cow disease great again because of his conspiracy theories that are leading him to believe that vaccines cause autism and all things that have been readily debunked. But according to Donald Trump, there are very smart people still looking into shit we already know. Yeah, it's heinous. And it is, it is, as much as we have sort of, have become used to weird shit like this and horrible shit like this popping up on our radar.

It is still like when you hear in the year 2024 that the lawyer for someone who may well be our next health and human services secretary wants to withdraw the polio vaccine from the market. There is no way RFK Jr. should be confirmed. I know that's obvious. But it also, I think, bears saying because I have, you know, we've seen some Democrats seem to warm to the idea. Yep. That's an absolute dereliction of duty, in my opinion. It's bad enough. We have to deal with MAGA and, you know, the Republican Party becoming pretty much 100% magified.

We don't need Democrats joining in on any of this nonsense. And the fact that there are some is just, I, yeah, I just, they, I just, they, they, someone needs to sit them down and, and have a conversation is what I'm saying there. But this whole idea that, you know, they try to say that they are for, I don't know, what do they call it? Like, like medical freedom. What the fuck does that even mean? They try to say, we're not saying you can't get the vaccine if you want to. It's just, you know, you shouldn't have to.

And it's like, that's not how vaccines work. Correct. That's not how anything works. And the fact of the matter is, look, there is a segment of the population that, for any given vaccine literally cannot take that vaccine because it would do something bad to them. And as long as everyone else around them, around this small percentage of people is vaccinated, we're fine. If you start playing these games where, you know, particularly with kids, where, oh, maybe some of the kids are vaccinated, but others aren't. And then you have someone

there who is unvaccinated, not by choice, but a child who literally cannot take a vaccine because they're, you know, they have some horrible reaction to it, you are increasing the chances of that child getting polio or measles or, you know, mumps, whatever the disease in question is. This whole notion of, quote unquote, medical freedom, all it is, is it's a complete repudiation of the notion of public health. And public health is a very real thing. And, you know, we saw this sort of climb to prominence during COVID when a lot of people, including libertarians who, you you would think are smart enough to know better, but apparently aren't started whining about vaccine mandates as if they didn't understand how this shit works when they very well do.

It's absolutely grotesque. And the idea that these are going to be the people leading our health organizations is truly, truly frightening. We never had these problems before Donald Trump was president during a global health pandemic. Largely, I would assume over 90% of the population trusted our public health system, trusted doctors and scientists to be our guides. And of course, there was always, like you said, a small fraction of the population who, you know, and I remember because I was getting my master's in education at the time when there were

all of these books that were coming out about vaccines and trying to figure out or make a tie to autism. and they were struck down. Right. Because if you do the math, then a majority of people would be autistic. So that was just illogical. I find myself in this place where they want this like, I guess it's a libertarian, like live and let live kind of thing. But if you're telling or suggesting to the FDA to revoke vaccines,

then you're robbing those that actually. actually believe in science and doctors from the ability to get the care that they want. Because now where must I go? If I have a child and I want to go get the polio vaccine and RFK Jr. has revoked it in 2025, where am I going? And to your point, Andy, no, this is not how vaccines work. The point is to make the public safe from diseases and issues that are readily fit. and that other countries in the world would literally kill for access to. And these idiots are coming in and saying, oh, these systems that have been put in place to keep us all safe, let's get rid of all of them. Because I think at the end of the day, the goal of this incoming administration is to keep people broke, is to keep people sick and to keep people oppressed.

Because that is how autocrats work. I want to close with a quote from a guy named Dr. Stanley Plotkin in the 1960s. He invented the vaccine that eliminated Rubella. Rubela was a disease that killed thousands of newborns every year. And he developed a vaccine and pretty much 100% eliminated Rubella. He is quoted in the New York Times, a saying of Aaron Siri, who is the lawyer for RFK Jr. He said that, quote, I find him laughable in many ways, except, of course, that he's a danger to public health. And I think that sums it up. Folks, I am very happy to welcome back to the new abnormal.

My friend, Mary Trump, who is the author of the New York Times bestselling book, Who Could Ever Love You? She's also the founder of Mary Trump Media on YouTube and the host of a bazillion things, including Nerd Avengers, on that very network, which I am. am a proud member of Mary. Janelle. We are just weeks away from Donald Trump entering into his second term, or as I prefer to call it, the second Trump regime, this time signaling to be more dangerous than the last. And I just want to get your thoughts on this moment that we find ourselves in and how you are feeling as we're inching closer to that inauguration day. Well, there's a lot there. First of all, I would agree with you.

Regime is the right word to use. It feels like we're already there, doesn't it? Yes. Right? The inauguration is just a formality. It's just another grift. It's another way for Donald to get millions of dollars from people who want to be beholden to him for various reasons. And the thing that I guess is most depressing is that, as you said, this second administration, which, by the way, unless things go even.

more wrong than they already have gone. It's a lame duck administration. You know, he doesn't have to appease anybody. He's not running for reelection. He doesn't have to play any games. He doesn't have to stay within the lines. It already is more dangerous than the first one, as we see by his appointments and his nominations to key positions in the executive branch and then cabinet positions. So the depressing part is everybody in corporate media, everybody in the Republican Party and a significant percentage of Donald's voters knew it was going to be more dangerous. And yet, here we are. I'm not really sure, actually, how to approach this critical period in American history. I mean, I think we can say that the American experiment has failed. I think if you pretend to be a democracy

and put in place a fascist regime, then you've kind of failed the assignment. That's one way of looking at it. Yeah, to that point for I don't even know how long, we've been told that Donald Trump is dangerous. He is a threat to democracy. Joe Biden ran in 2020 on saving the soul of this nation. Democrats all down the line were echoing this same term, the same thought. Now you have a handful of Democrats, Mary, who are saying that Donald Trump needs to be pardoned for. for the betterment of the country. You have people like Representative Clyburn, you have people like Senator Federman,

and others who are saying this. And these are some of the same people who were standing at lecterns, standing on rally stages, talking about how dangerous he is. Make it make sense for us. I cannot. But what I can say,

first of all, that Clyburn shocked me to my core. I think Federman is not somebody I take seriously. I think he's auditioning for the role of the next Kirsten Cinema. As if anybody wanted a Kirsten Cinema. But you're absolutely right that it is logically inconsistent, and that's the politest way I can put it, to say to the American people, this man is a danger to everything we hold dear.

He is a threat to American democracy. He is a fascist. And then turn around and say, well, you know, why should we make his life more difficult? And I'm going to include President Biden in that list of hypocrites because, I mean, he hasn't called, thank God, he's the guy who can pardon Donald. He hasn't gone that far, but he has said to Donald's face after inviting him to defile the Oval Office prematurely. He said, whatever we can do to accommodate you during the transition. How do you say that to somebody you were warning us against for years. And I think you have located the most

troubling aspect of what we face now. We expect the Republicans to be horrible. We expect Donald to install the most egregious people possible to demoralize us, to dismantle our institutions, to grift, to rob the treasury, to help our enemies, whatever. Do we seriously think that there would be a whole scale abdication of the Democratic Party. It just seems gratuitous. I did not. It seems gratuitous and inexplicable. You know, and that's my thing right now is that, you know, for, as the campaign was going on,

before we had the switch between Biden and the vice president, you know, I had been lamenting on your show, on this show about Democrats and saying, what are we doing here? If this man is dangerous, which we know that he is, why are you now that he's been elected doing what everyone from ABC to Meta to the Washington Post obeying in advance? And just saying like, oh, to the,

because what differentiates now the Democrats from the Republicans? If Democrats who had warned people for an entire year plus about how dangerous this man is. Now our leadership is saying, eh, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And worse, how can we work with you? Yeah. And this is them saying, oh, I can, you know,

Rokon, I can work with the Doge committee, this made up committee that Elon Musk and Vivek are going to be running. Like, I see opportunities here. So how are the, in your mind, if the role here is not only for the media to be educating the public, but for those that we elect to be educating the public on what their goal in response, like what their goals for this democracy should be, what their responsibility

is in upholding this democracy is. And now the people that you have in charge of disseminating that information and speaking on your behalf are complicit, where do you think that that leaves the American public right now? Oh, in a very difficult bind, because trust has eroded in information sources over the years because of things like Fox, because of media siloing, et cetera. And I think the only way for the Democrats to have helped us through this was to present a united front and become without question the party of opposition. And then you have Chuck Schumer, the very first time he spoke out the election, he's talked about bipartisanship. You know, you, as you mentioned, have all these people, Democrats talking about pardoning Donald, like, for what exactly and why? Who knows? I don't know that anybody's asking for that.

I think it would satisfy some people, but it would totally demoralize the Democratic base, which seems like what the Democratic leadership has been bent on doing for years now at the expense of other people. So I think it sends a message that, yeah, the system is broken. And the problem is the Democratic Party, right? So we could have been the party of opposition. We could have continued to speak truth to power by calling out the dangers that await us, by calling out the dangers of a Trump regime. We could have kept people informed and kept them engaged because when your leaders are

fighting for you, it's easier to stay energized and feel like it's worth staying in the fight. And instead, you know, you've got people like Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut just talking about how Democrats suck and that, you know, losing this election the way they did was a cataclysm and completely undermining the narrative they had during the election, which is we're the good guys, they're the bad guys. We need to stand up to them and to make matters worse. Democrats are throwing progressives, liberals, and the marginalized under the bus for what I do not have. So given all of this, given this dark picture that honestly the Democratic Party has painted, like this is the thing to me is that we've always known who Republicans are. But to your point, we had expected that Democrats would continue to be the party of opposition and resistant and figure out that, guess what? Donald Trump did not win by a landslide. He won by the slimmest margin in modern history.

He won because 7 million Americans stayed home. He did not win because his ideas were popular. He won because people can't differentiate or frankly don't give a damn to differentiate between either of these parties. And then as a result of that, Democrats are doing exactly what it is that people have been complaining about. Yes. To add one thing to that, Democrats, I think they absolutely need to find out why people

stayed home. That's very important. but to suggest as many Democrats have that the whole party needs to be dismantled and start from scratch, it's just absurd because, as you pointed out, the margin was ridiculously small. And the truth of the matter is Donald did not increase the number of people who voted for him. It pretty much stagnated from 2020 to 2024. That's data, right? I mean, that tells us something.

We need to look at why people disengage. And I think part of it, yeah, is because everything's, terrible. Part of it is absolutely the information system is so broken that it is hard to get the word out about, for example, what the Biden administration did. But the most salient point, I think, is the one you just made. It's when Democrats are demoralizing their own side and not looking at the structural disadvantages that Democrats have always faced and increasingly face and aren't looking into, like instead of beating up the base, why don't they say, hey, let's figure out how to create our own media system so we can compete and undo some of the damage.

But they don't do that. It's fascinating. And I have to say, sometimes it's active stupidity, like calling for Biden to deported Donald. And sometimes it feels like complicity, like wanting to join these ridiculous new government. Fake programs. Thank you. Fake programs. And sometimes it's just silence. The people we're not hearing from.

It's deafening and thunderous and that's also demoralizing. I want to say this. We had over the last couple of weeks, we've had Mark Zuckerberg give a million dollars to Donald Trump's inauguration slush fund. Jeff Bezos followed suit with a million dollars. The LA Times has hired right-wingers to be on their editorial board. Joe and Mika went down to Mar-Lago to open up conversations. ABC has just settled for $15 million a defamation suit that was brought.

Talk to us about the state of corporate media and frankly, why you have decided to start your own network, given what we are seeing with these outlets. And Donald Trump again, folks, not president yet. Exactly. Yes, the anticipatory obedience is kind of stunning. But I think the simplest way to understand it is, in a way there kind of is no such thing as corporate media. There are companies, entertainment companies, companies that have significant business with the federal government that happen to own news outlets. And the news outlets themselves are not the money making operations.

are sort of the most expendable limbs. I don't think Disney is counting on whatever they get from ABC News. Revenue. I don't think ABC News is keeping Disney afloat. So ABC News didn't settle with Donald. The umbrella company settled with Donald. Disney does not want to go into this next administration dealing with the nuisance of this lawsuit,

knowing that the Trump regime can make decisions that impact not ABC News, but Disney Corp. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Same thing with Amazon and the Washington Post and on and on and on. Yeah, and that's a fair point. That is a fair distinction to make with regard to who owns these media outlets now. Where do you see the role of independent media like Mary Trump media and the work that you're doing?

Well, you know, the work we're doing, it's not just that it's more important than ever. it is essentially important, or it is essential, I should say, because a massive void has been left by cable, by legacy and traditional media, and either because they're beholden to other corporations that really have much larger concerns, which is not larger as more important, but are more concerned about their bottom line than they are about journalistic integrity. Or you have, you know, outlets like the New York Times that actually is, the New York Times is legitimately, you know, what we used to think of as a media company. They owe the paper owns itself. You know what I'm saying? Like they don't, they are not the subsidiary of some huge conglomerate. But what we've seen with

the New York Times is that their editorial bent has become almost completely aligned with the right. So there aren't many places to turn. And I think by doing what, we do. We give people an alternative and we can say with absolute honesty that we are not beholden to anybody, but the facts and the truth as we see it because we don't have investors, we don't have backers. We are coming at this from a place of being absolutely objective as to the facts, but from a place of being pro-democracy. You know, we don't have to be. answer to anybody. That to me, that is the beauty. And so I will do a plug that folks, if you are not subscribed to Mary Trump Media on YouTube, where incredible, thoughtful content is being created,

and analysis is happening, information that you need to know, go there and subscribe now. Mary, as always, my friend, thank you so much for making time for the new abnormal. And Much more to come in the new year and new regime. Thanks, Danes. I was great to be with you as always. Last week, Donald Trump announced that he had selected Carrie Lake to head up the organization known as Voice of America. Here to explain what this all means is NPR media correspondent David Fulkenflick. David, welcome back to the show.

Hey, pleasure. Can you first walk us through what exactly Voice of America is and what it does? Because I feel like it's one of those things where a lot of folks have heard of it, but they don't really know much about it? You know, I got to say I didn't know much about it until I started covering media 20-some years ago during our invasion of Afghanistan. And it turned out that the voice of America

was the way in which, over time, as people were liberated from the Taliban at that point, like women had certain public health things explained to them and they developed literacy programs and the idea of citizenship. What the voice of America was, was it was founded in the 1940s during the heart of World War II.

And we were broadcasting reports to lands that were essentially held hostage by Hitler that had been captured and were being repressed. But the unique in some ways promise of the Voice of America was that they were going to tell the news unvarnished. If the Allies were advancing and won a battle, the Voice of America would broadcast that to all across Europe, right? All across, no doubt, other lands as well. If the Allies lost a battle, if things went south, they would report that too. And the idea was they were doing two things. They were saying, listen, we are intending to have a lot of important news to broadcast and share with repressed peoples and occupied lands.

And we want you to trust us when we do. So we're going to give you the good, the bad, and the ugly. But also that we are modeling what American and Western pluralistic values look like to remind you that having a dictator over you that censors everything that determines conduct without public debate or public votes, it doesn't have to be the way life has lived. And that is the dual promise of what is a form of soft diplomacy established at the heart of World War II. And it's done that ever since. Right now it reaches, I think, over 350 million people each week through video and radio and online reports. It doesn't beam its broadcast to the U.S. There's great

concern and fear that somehow it could be turned into propaganda. After all, the network is owned by the United States government. It runs in, I think, nearly 50 languages across the world. But it's not directed at American audiences. The whole point is to reach people, particularly to reach people in countries where there isn't a robust free press and there isn't maybe the infrastructure to build one. And so a little bit like the BBC, that's its function. It has some sister networks people may have heard of, Radio Free Liberty, Radio Europe. There's a radio and TV Marti. You know, for Cuba, there's Radio Free Asia. And, you know, like, Radio Free Asia did these really important stories among the first in the world about the Chinese Communist Party government's repression of the U.S. in Western China, right, these ethnic minority Muslims.

Like, these are people grappling with some important stuff. And there's one more element I'll offer you, particularly during the Cold War. You saw the U.S. Voice of America and its other broadcasters, but Voice of America in particular, play jazz. play rock music, talk about cultural things that made people wistful in a different kind of repressed authoritarian regime, you know, under the Soviet and Eastern bloc rules about what a more liberal and consumer society might look like. And that won a lot of people's hearts as well. So basically, I think some people think of VOA as, oh, it's a propaganda arm of whatever administration is in power. But what you're saying basically is, and I think you wrote in a piece at NPR about

this. You said that it's supposed to, you know, show political debate and dissent in the U.S. even when that reflects critically on the administration and power. And now, if I know my Donald Trump, and I like to think that I do, David, that doesn't sound like something he'd be a big fan of. No. And in fact, he accused the voice of America in spring of 2020. When he was president of the United States, the White House posted this statement at direction, I think, of Steve Bannon, but certainly, you know, who was no longer in office, but certainly at the urging of people around Trump and reflecting the way Trump himself was thinking, accused Voice America doing propaganda for the Chinese by not more explicitly blaming the Chinese government for the, you know, escape of the

virus and the pandemic ensuing. And so, you know, that is when there had been this languishing nomination of this guy named Michael Pack, a conservative documentary maker, to oversee Voice of America's parent agency. And suddenly this thing that had been essentially stalled in the Republican-led Senate for two years came back to life and got rammed through by reluctant Republicans on the relevant committees later that spring. And he took office for this unbelievably rocky, call it seven and a half, eight months. So now we're at a stage where Trump wants Carrie Lake to be the head of VOA. So what's the problem here? She was a longtime anchor at the Phoenix Fox affiliate. Is all of this just jealousy on your part, David Falkin Flick? Yes, right. It's that I, you know,

not only should there be a voice of America, but it should be mine. Yes, the voice of David. You know, the way I would say about it is this. She was a longtime local TV anchor before leaving the Fox affiliate there. And she had, interestingly, enigmatically been an Obama supporter before she swung over to Trump as severely as she did. You know, look, in her emergence as this MAGA warrior, this two-time candidate for statewide office as a Republican under the Trump banner, both I should add unsuccessfully, she cuddled the press. I mean, she, you know, attacked them as illegitimate, as not credible, you know, not occasionally mistaken, not as approaching stories differently than she would like or would want, or having different epaices or its editorial, maybe this outlet or that outlet being too liberal,

but really questioning their validity, their credibility, and, you know, what right they had to operate in a way that slices against the outlook of the hundreds of journalists who work for Voice of America and its sister networks that are owned by the federal government ultimately, but supposedly insulated from presidential decree. You know, they do have protections. The Voice of America is, you know, both as journalists and as non-political public servants, you know, government employees. is there are supposed to be protections of their professionalism. She seems to have no interest in that. And the reason that this isn't just sort of hyperventilating is that the past is more than just prologue, right? So in those eight months where Trump got his last director of the parent agency and this guy,

Michael Pack, one judge found that this guy behaved illegally. Another found that he had behaved unconstitutionally in violating First Amendment safeguards. And, you know, there were a series of investigative reports by special counsel and by inspectors general about unbelievable levels of waste. For example, he spent more than $1.6 million to hire outside attorneys with ties to Clarence Thomas in order to investigate senior executives there, all of whom were ultimately exonerated. And they were found to have done a witch hunt of reporters that decreed that they were ideologically biased simply because they had reposted articles from such outlets as the Associated Press that didn't reflect well on various Trump

administration officials, not with any comment, not with any topspin, not with any snark, just simply links to the stories themselves. And so this is, you know, if you think of Trump 2.0 is seemingly trying to be more effective and efficient at doing what Trump 1.0 aspired to do. When you have somebody like Carrie Lake in there, it has struck a chill among those I've talked to with Invoice of America and its parent agency. There's one thing I want to be clear about here, because I'm not sure everybody understands this. Trump doesn't have blanket appointment, appointment power here, right? His pick, Carrie Lake in this case, has to be approved by a board, doesn't it? Yeah, I've been careful to say that what Trump has said, he wants her to lead the voice of America.

Right. But not that he will be her nominee. This pick is not one he gets to select that way. What happens is he gets to select someone from the parent organization. It's a federal agency called the U.S. Agency for Global Media. And then that person with the consultation and approval of a bipartisan oversight board that's supposed to have three members of the president's party and three members of the oppositional party on it. Currently, there's one vacancy, and that vacancy is actually a Republican because he left to take a position within one of the sister networks. But there's six people on that board, and they are not all from the president's party. So you usually have to get some sort of consensus around the person. And the position of the voice of America director is supposed to be

nonpartisan. The person holding it now is a journalist of incredibly high standing, named Michael Abramowitz, who was for many years, a very distinguished reporter and editor for the Washington Post. He ultimately worked at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum. And then at Freedom House, you know, an advocacy group on behalf of, you know, civil rights and civil liberties across the nation and the world, but is seen widely as credible and nonpartisan. That's the stature of person they have in there now, not somebody that most Republicans would have found, you know, hostile to running an organization like this in years past. Let me say it's not unusual for new administrations to come in and, you know, within a certain amount of time, get somebody of their own liking on board.

You know, we can't overlook the fact that over the decades, there have been certain kinds of ideological wars over how much you can pull the voice of America towards administration policy. At one point, there was arguments over whether you could have, you know, one minute sort of editorials, either at the top of the hour or within broadcasts that are clearly designated and marked to people understand what the U.S. State Department's position is on a given issue. issue or could they post those online? But those were always, you know, very carefully sliced and argued. Sometimes there was a discomfort about where there were things resolved. This is an order of magnitude far outweighs anything I've seen in decades. So is there any chance this board says, yeah, nice try, but no, or do you suspect it will be more of a rubber stamp situation? Or do we just not know? Let me be candid. I don't yet no. But what I can say is it seems to me less likely to be a rubber stamp, than some circumstances in that you do have a bipartisan board.

The Senate Republicans in terms of what nominations they approve are ultimately going to have to pick and choose which ones they turn down. They can't say no to Trump on everything and expect him to be, you know, raising money and supporting them against primary challengers and the like, some of which, you know, a significant number of them will be up for reelection in just two years, right? So they're going to have to be selective about what they turn down. Matt Gates has already been kicked to the curb as a potential attorney general. there are questions about Pete Hedgeseth.

There are questions about Cash Patel? You know, are you really going to want somebody down in the bowels of international broadcasting to be where you draw the line? But they can slow walk this and blame it on the Democratic appointees. They certainly did that with Trump's initial pick to run the U.S. Agency for Global Media. But it's going to be very interesting to see who Trump names for that because that is a Senate confirmation process. I've heard within Voice America, they're concerned it could be somebody as brash as Steve

Bannon, you know, newly released from jail. Oh, my God. killing is old oats cited down in Marlago. I'm not saying that's going to happen. I'm not saying anybody on the Trump team is telling me that. But I'm just saying you could imagine somebody who has a very muscular idea of the degree to which the administration should be able to shape how America is presented in news reports from a network that is run under the aegis of the U.S. government. And, you know, I did a ton of reporting on this in 2020 when this first happened. and the degree to which they were going deep into the weeds at Voice of America from political appointees up high in the parent agency was extraordinary to witness.

We documented it and ultimately, you know, whistleblower suits came out there. Judges made findings, the, you know, Inspector General reports and the like. But what was instructed to me was the dual effort. It was an effort to compromise the professionalism of the civil service and of non-political employees. and whatever people, listeners might think, or Americans more broadly might think of government bureaucrats as they're often assailed, so many of them, dominant number, are civil servants just trying to do their jobs and keep their heads out of partisan fights from the left or the right. The second thing, so this was attempt to corrupt that and to strip it bare as Trump is trying to do more broadly

in how he handles civil service cat organizations and protections for the administration more broadly when he comes in. The second level is this is an incredibly hungent distillation of how Trump and his circle looks at the press more broadly. It is an instrument of political will. If it's not saying the propaganda I want, then it's propaganda against me. The idea of an independent press, performing accountability, or even just reflecting reality, Voice America is not known for investigative reporting on the

U.S. government. It is much more measured than that. But it does provide use for and about distant lands that don't have, you know, robust or independently operating press. And it does reflect debates and schisms here at home, even as you mentioned, when it doesn't reflect well in the United States government's efficiency or intentions because that is part of the American Democratic project. And because the thinking has been that that ensures that there is that connection and trust. So you disrupt that and, you know, you kind of lose the point. You know, the BBC and the Voice of America are these really two great international government-owned broadcaster. that seek to provide some degree of credible news around the globe. They sort of complement each other rather than operating always in the same countries. You know, we'll see the degree to which Carrie Lake, if she is able somehow to slip through this bipartisan commission, commits herself to a journalistic mandate or commits herself to,

you know, make media great again, I guess. Yeah. I suspect we know the answer to that already. But look, maybe we'll be pleasantly surprised. But I want to pivot to a big media happening, you know, over the last. last few days, and that is Donald Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos for defaming him. And rather than letting it go to trial, ABC News has settled, paid $15 million to a Trump library, which a future presidential Trump library or similar foundation, I guess it's called. A lot of people are upset

about this. Your colleague, I think Eric Deggans is it? He referred to it as one more mainstream news organization bending the knee. And there's been a lot of similar sentiment that I've seen among a lot of journalists. What's your take on this? So I talked to six media lawyers over the weekend, and all but one said that they were pretty astonished. Look, what Stephanopoulos did was in pressing Congresswoman Nancy Mace of South Carolina on her support for Trump. He said, listen, you've talked poignantly about having been raped yourself as a young woman. So why would you then support Donald Trump? This was back in March toward the tail end of the Republican primaries. Why would you support Donald Trump, who himself has been a found liable in a civil trial for rape. That's not

actually what he was found liable of. The jury had the ability they were presented with that count and did not find him liable of that. They did find him liable of sexual abuse. Now here's the thing where it gets interesting and blurry. The judge, very respected judge there in New York City, said, look, this would be commonly described by almost all Americans in normal conversation as rape, this sexual violation, but it's not rape as defined under the narrow technical definition in New York state law. So right there, what you have is a couple of things going on. First off, I don't understand really why ABC didn't clarify that and just say, listen, we misspoke slightly. And he was found liable for this, which is damning enough. He was found liable for sexually

abusing a woman, E. Jean Carroll. That is serious and consequential in a civil matter, not a criminal proceeding, but nonetheless. ABC easily could have cleaned that up pretty quickly. It did not do so. On the hand, they've got a couple of protections here, one of which is there's a protection law called substantial truth, you know, where what Stephanopoulos said was closely adjacent to the truth and not only that the judge went out of his way to say so. So it's not as though he's saying, well, I think it's close to it. It's he's saying this is, he's really relying on the judge's assessment there. Shouldn't have done it quite that way. The second thing is, you know, under a 60-year-old Supreme Court protection called New York Times v. Sullivan, There are great protections for what the press reports and says about public officials. And there's no public official more publicly higher up in the pyramid than a former and soon to be future president. Right. So there's an enormous latitude given because under our first amendment ideals and principles as interpreted by the Supreme Court, you've got to give running room. You can't just say things that are negative about public officials that are perfectly precise. If we're going to have sort of this robust debate that the

founders envisioned. We need to have some running room for things to be slightly askew. And in that case, the New York Times had published an ad that didn't get everything right about a public official who was a segregationist, a city official down in Alabama. So they had significant leeway and protections on that as well. And the idea that this was not defendable in court to almost all of the media lawyers that was staggering. And the figure involved, $50 million is a ton of money to preemptively pay, along with $1.5 million for legal costs, which means, you know, essentially you'd imagine this emboldens Trumps and his legal team say, well, who else are we going to sue? They already have a lawsuit against CBS for how they edited and handled an interview on 60 minutes with Vice President Kamala Harris and for not releasing a transcript, which is fundamentally not a, what can I say, it's not grounds to sue somebody over, right?

You know, that's not a defamation suit, but there's there's all these other things in play. his prior suits against CNN against the Washington Post and others, as I recall it some years ago, were knocked back pretty readily. So the idea that you sort of preemptively pay $16.5 million and you don't take this court to sustain the principle, you know, maybe there are some exceptionally embarrassing emails that they just don't want out. But it sure looks like ABC is effectively suing for peace in one of its top executives over the ABC network and ABC News was seen at Marlago. recent days, gnaishing with Susie Willis, who's going to be the next chief of staff for Trump. It is a moment at which many media organizations, as we saw with the killing of the endorsements, the L.A. Times, Washington Post seemed to be trying to find ways to accommodate Trump before he comes back into office. Given that there's likely to be need for a lot of very intensive

accountability journalism, it's a pretty staggering thing to watch play out in real time. Yeah, it doesn't feel good. And it feels like Ben the Knee might be one of those things where at the end of the year, you know, in Miriam Webster or whatever does their word or phrase of the year. I am very much afraid that that's going to be high on the list. David, thank you so much for being here. It is always a pleasure to talk to you. And hopefully you'll come back on soon if this wasn't too painful for you. Not too painful, Andy.

I look forward to talking again. Andy Levy. Daniel Moody. How are you kicking off this week in the United States of Dystopia with your Fuck that guy. Oh, God. I'm kicking it off with a rare Democrat in this segment, I feel like. But it is a senator from Pennsylvania.

His name is John Federman. You may know him from his hoodies and long shorts. And when he was elected, he was sort of a progressive darling and seemed like, you know, I don't know, borderline Democratic Socialist, if not full-on Democratic Socialist. And everyone loved him. He's undergone a transformation. And he now is out there. First of all, last week he praised Elise Stefanik, who is the New York Congresswoman, who Donald Trump is picking to be his UN ambassador.

She is a thoroughly horrid person who went from being sort of a moderate GOP year to a full-on MAGA acolyte, seemingly overnight, and very clearly not. having anything to do with the courage of her convictions because she clearly has neither courage nor convictions, but she is A-OK with John Federman. And then last week, Fetterman also decided to, A, post on Truth Social for the first time. Truth Social is, of course, as Danielle has famously described it, it's Donald Trump's busted-ass Twitter, I think, was the way you described it. Broke down, but I like busted. I like, yeah. Okay, all right. And he decided to post on there that he believed that Joe Biden should pardon Donald Trump. And he sort of both sidesed it by also saying, well, here's what he wrote. He wrote, the Trump hush money and Hunter Biden cases were both bullshit and pardons are appropriate.

Weaponizing the judiciary for blatant partisan gain diminishes the collective faith in our institution and so's further division. To repeat this fiction that the Trump hush money case involved weaponized. the judiciary is, A, it's not true. And B, it of course, just plays into the complete maga fantasy that this is what happened, that any time charges are brought against Donald Trump, it is for political purposes only and not because the motherfucker broke the law. So I, it's just, you know, I'm not going to speculate on what happened to John Federman. Not my place to do that. All I know is He has gone from progressive darling to, I'm not saying he's MAGA now, but the way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised if by 2025, 2026, he switches his registration to Republican and just goes full MAGA. So he gets the rare Democrat, fuck that guy.

The only other ones I could think of, Danielle, were Kirsten Sinema and Joe Manchin, both of whom left the Democratic Party. So I think that plays into my theory that Federman may be next there. Fuck that guy. Yeah, fuck him. Because to be honest, like, I feel like his constituents were bamboozled. And when you say, like, I don't know what happened to him, I'm like, I don't know. Maybe follow the money. Because something does not seem right.

And usually when something doesn't seem right, it ain't right. I just think that this whole idea that somehow pardoning Donald Trump makes America great again, like makes us all like everything go back to normal, is on some. just uninformed bullshit. Like that is just what you say when you really don't have your finger on the pulse of how Americans actually feel. Donald Trump did not win by a landslide and half of the country believes that the man is a criminal. And the fact is, is that all we've done is ensure that people continue to lose faith in institutions and politicians that are supposed to represent them, which will just have more people with each election cycle sitting home.

Fuck that guy. Yeah, for sure. I just quickly, I want to say one last thing about this pardoning thing because I keep seeing people saying, you know, well, Ford pardon Nixon and it let the nation heal. Heal so that it found Donald Trump. Right. But even if you believe that, Ford pardon Nixon, after Nixon resigned from office and left Washington, D.C. in disgrace, Donald Trump did neither of those things.

Well, he left Washington, D.C. in disgrace, but he returned. And he's about to be president. It is not even remotely the same situation. So people need to stop making that analogy. If we hadn't pardoned Nixon and allowed him to go to jail, we wouldn't be in this situation. All right, Daniel, finish off this rainy-ass Monday. Who's your fuck that guy? You know, I'm clear, really about who it is.

And I will say this. A Florida woman was arrested. And this is according to People magazine and obviously other outlets. She was arrested after threatening a Blue Cross Blue Shield, insurer or what they are saying was a threat. After she was on a call with the insurance company Blue Cross Blue Shield and near the end of the call, I'm assuming, did not go well. She stated delay, deny, depose, you people are next. And for folks who, and the only way you don't know this is if you have been living under a rock, This is, these are the words that were found on the shell casings of the bullets that killed the United

Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson. And, you know, since this killing, we have been having a lot of conversations in the public on social media about insurance companies and about who is considered a murderer. And I will just say this, so this woman was picked up, right, because all of these phone calls are recorded. So I'm not quite sure what she was thinking at all. You've given, you're on the phone with an insurer, which you have to give your information to your name, your last name, your membership number, blah, blah, blah, which then has all of your other information, like your home address, what you do for a living, X, Y, and Z. So I'm not quite sure what she was

thinking in saying that delay, deny, depose, you people are next. And so, and so, So she was picked up. And I got to say, like, people need to not be stupid, right? In thinking that they're going to copycat language in a way that is going to potentially get them arrested. Like, do we think that this woman was going to end up going to these offices and harming anyone? Probably not. But I think that what we have to understand is that words have power, particularly after this very high-profile killing. So for that reason, this woman who just was not thinking all the way through is my fuck that guy.

And frankly, a warning to others. Y'all got to be real careful with the language that you're using, that you're posting. Let her be a warning to you. Yeah. I think in particular, don't say you people are next. Yeah, maybe not that. Like, I feel like that's where, you know, if she hadn't said that, if she had just said delay, denied, depose. And hung up the phone.

Yeah. I think that's two out of the three words that Amangione inscribed on the bullets, but it was clearly that's what she was intending. And, but don't say you people are next on a recorded phone call. I mean, don't say it in general, but certainly don't say it on a recorded phone call. Good rule in general is just don't say you people. Real, real good rule. Yes.

Yeah, that's good, Jesse. Yeah, that's fair. Maybe that never goes over well. Rare thing like this for me. Mm-hmm. Yes, exactly. Even if she had said you're next, I think that would have been problematic, you know, in the wake of the slaying of a health care executive. So I don't know.

I can't fully make her a fuck that guy. Oh, so now you're just making me look bad? Well, you know, I just, yeah, I guess I am making you look bad. That wasn't my intention, Danielle. It's more just like an added benefit. It's an added bonus. Exactly. Exactly.

Thank you for understanding. Danielle, I guess before we go. I think we all, me you and Jesse and Seamus and everyone else involved in the new abnormal, want to wish a very happy birthday to our fearless editor, Deanna Chapman. Yes. She is the wizard who cleans us up and makes us look, I would say, easily 15 to 20 times smarter than we are. We love her for that.

Yes. We cannot overstate how much work she does on this podcast. And she doesn't obviously get any public recognition for. it usually. So we wanted to make sure to give her a shout out and hope she had a very, very happy birthday and that she never leaves us because I don't know what we do if she did. Truth. Yes. Thank you, Deanna. Thank you. And happy, happy birthday. 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

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