The Daily Beast Podcast - Why Uncle Don Is ‘Incapable’ of Convincing the Unvaxxed w/ Mary Trump

Episode Date: August 20, 2021

The coronavirus pandemic, a fraught election, an attempted insurrection, more of the coronavirus pandemic...the United States is suffering from the mental version of long COVID, says Mary Trump. The psychologist and niece of former president Donald Trump joins The New Abnormal this week. Margaret Sullivan, media critic for The Washington Post, joins to discuss shortcomings in coverage of U.S. military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and the ensuing Taliban takeover. Jong-Fast also interviews Jason Kander, the former Missouri Secretary of State and a former U.S. Army intelligence officer deployed to Afghanistan. They talk about the disaster unfolding in Kabul and beyond. If you haven't heard, every single week The New Abnormal does a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast’s membership program. where Sometimes we interview Senators like Cory Booker or the folks who explain our world in media like Jim Acosta or Soledad O’Brien. Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes its just discussing the fuckery. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a Beast Inside member where you’ll support The Beast’s fearless journalism. Plus! You’ll also get full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member head to newabnormal.thedailybeast.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Molly Jong-Fast and welcome to The Daily Beast, The New Abnormal. I'm a left-wing pundit and an editor-at-large at The Daily Beast. We're here to have fun, sharp conversations with some of the smartest people in media, politics, and science that help make what's happening in the country and the world clearer. Our world has been turned up day down. On the new abnormal, we'll talk about the people who got us into this mess and figure out how to get ourselves out of it. And I'm producer Jesse Cannon. I'm here to make sure things don't go too far off the rails. We have an excellent show today. Former Secretary of State of Missouri and Afghanistan war veteran Jason Kander is going to talk to us about how to see the pullout from Afghanistan.

Then we'll talk to Washington Post Media columnist Margaret Sullivan about the way the media talks about the war and Joe Biden's presidency. But first, we have the return of one of our favorite guests, the author of The Reckoning, Our Nation's Trauma and Finding a Way to heal, Mary Trump. Welcome back to the new abnormal, Mary Trump. I am so ecstatic to be here again. How are you guys? The feeling is mutual. You're one of our favorite guests. Thank you. It's one of my favorite podcasts. So talk to me about your new book. It's called The Reckoning. And I started thinking about writing another book because there's something deeply wrong with me last September.

You know, which was, what, three months after the first book came out. It was a very scary time. I think we were in our second wave of COVID. It was very, very clear by then that not simply that Donald was incompetent, which we've known for 74 years, but that he had decided to make COVID a political issue and it would benefit his election chances more if he sided with strengthening the economy as opposed to saving people's lives. There was no way to know when and if we were. were going to emerge, especially if the worst scenario happened in November. So because in addition to the COVID crisis and the economic crisis, we were facing a pretty serious political crisis too, which unfortunately we're still in. And, you know, I was thinking about something you and I talked about, Molly, was what will happen to this nation's mental health after months more of chaos and fear. Plus, of course, that it was worsened by Donald's need to keep people at each other's throats, essentially. I explore that. And then I realized that I

couldn't really do that effectively. You know, I can't rate 330 million different individual implants. I didn't think there was a useful way to talk about the kinds of psychological disorders people were going to be facing. So I thought it would be more useful to try to figure out how we got to this point where we were susceptible to corrupt cruel people like Donald and are as divided as we've been since the Civil War. And in order to do that, I needed to step back and take a look back. And the two through lines that kept popping up were that, one, we've never held powerful white men accountable, starting Robert Ely on down. And two, white supremacy, this country was founded on white supremacy. We've never acknowledged our white supremacy. We've never atoned for it. And it is now currently

one of the platforms of one of our two major political parties. Yes. Glad to hear someone say it. How did that happen? It's written into our foundational document. Slavery is not mentioned. Races aren't mentioned. But, you know, the Constitution of the Constitution of the this country is a compromise with people who owned, tortured, and murdered other human being. And then on top of that, throughout history, one of the most anti-democratic forces has been the Supreme Court. So even when legislators have had the wherewithal to amend the Constitution, to make it more inclusive, more democratic, the Supreme Court very early, from very early on, starting with Dred Scott in 1850, kept making it harder.

harder for people, especially people of color, women to either get their franchise or have any semblance of equality in this country? I mean, I come from a very crazy family. In some ways, I feel like I really relate to you because my family, I feel like, was politically on the right side, but ethically and morally sometimes a little bit dodgy. I think a lot about this idea of, like, being the kind of designated sane in a family of crazy. And so I'm just curious, like, how did that role affect you while working on this book? It's interesting. And I actually think your family is more interesting because there's more complexity there. The Anne who ended up with the tax evasion stuff wasn't bad, per se.

No, she was. She was. You know, she, for various reasons, we were able to establish a relationship in the barely recent past, but I'd never had a relationship with her before. And, you know, we can't forget that, you know, she was a sitting judge while she was committing all sorts of, allegedly, committing all sorts of tax fraud. And very holier than that as well. But anyway, I think one of the reasons it's been easy for me in some ways to do this is that I've always been on the outside. I had nothing in common with these people. Like, for example, I like to read. Right. Education was important to me. Culture is important to me. Diversity is important to me. I think because of that, you know, they never really accepted me. It made it very straightforward in a way. Also because when you're telling the truth, it's not really hard. You know, you don't have to keep track of too much if you're just speaking truth to power, right? What's been harder because I have PTSD, like I'm already susceptible, more susceptible than, you're just speaking truth to power, right? What's been harder because I have PTSD, I'm already susceptible, more susceptible than,

people who don't have two additional traumas. Do you feel like you know things about Trump that need to be told still, or do you feel like you've been able to sort of tell people? It's not that I have anything new, but that the things that I've already revealed about him need to be reinforced in people's minds because, unfortunately, the Republican Party is keeping him relevant. It's keeping him empowered. You know, it's not because he's some strong, brilliant guy. He's weak and not very intelligent. And he will take all of us down with him if he feels like he's going down. There's no bottom here. And I mean, that seems pretty obvious. But people think that just because he's, you know, he's not on Twitter, that we don't have to worry about it anymore.

Unfortunately, that isn't the case. So, Mary, with our normalization of our mental health decline, Is there anything that you talk about in the book that kind of steers us back at a better direction? Because I'm really hoping for this for myself personally. Me too. It's a really good thing to be worried about, right? Because we are all in trouble, even those of us who think that everything's fine, which is fascinating. But they're going to have their own reckoning when they realize how betrayed they've been down the road or when their children die. People used to ask me, you know, you angry at these people who won't wear masks.

But at the same time, you can't exactly fault them. If they've voted for people, if they've placed their trust in people with their vote, why wouldn't they listen to them? Like, you know, if Joe Biden told me something that I needed to do something in order to address a certain issue, I would do it because I trust him to the extent that one can trust somebody of what doesn't know, right? So why wouldn't somebody in Alabama who voted for Tommy Tubervow, the dumbest? Right, who voted for him, who voted for Donald.

And they're saying, you don't need to wear masks. That makes you a liberal idiot. You don't need to social distance. That makes you weak. You need to prove your loyalty to me by putting your life at risk and coming to my rally where nobody's allowed to wear masks and nobody's allowed to be vaccinated. So if they ever get to that point where they realize what's happened and how they've been deceived, I do think that that's going to create a crisis of one kind or another.

The problem is people hate being wrong. So they may just double down and continue to make the rest of us sick. But as for those of us who are living in reality, because again, I hate it when people say there are two realities. No, there's one. some of us are simply choosing not to live in it. What I found really interesting was kind of my in was that countries are like individuals in the sense that if you're traumatized,

the only way through it is to face what happened to you. You have to be as brutally honest as possible and you have to feel the feelings. That's why PTSD is so frigging horrible because the treatment, you know, the way through it feels like torture because you're putting yourself back at the moment of trauma. And reliving it often feels worse than dealing with the symptoms because you feel like

you're going to die. It's just so difficult. Like, how do you feel those feelings again? You know, there's a reason we turn them off, right? Because it feels unbearable. And the same is true as historically as a country. We need to face up to it. Because if we fail to recognize that we're a racist country, we will always be a racist country.

and we will always be divided and we will never get better and people will suffer. So I think as hard as it is, we just, we need to be clear-eyed, we need to be honest, we need to remember that we are all in this together and we do have each other to rely on. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. Were you able to bring in your mental house experience, your experience dealing with mental house in this book? Yeah, I did a little bit simply because we need to destigmatize mental. illness. I mean, it's better than it used to be, certainly. But there's still the sense that mental health is a luxury and mental illness is still like a moral failing somehow. So I felt it was

important that I be honest and that I not pull punches. I don't go on about it too much because it's not the fact that, you know, I have complex PTSD. I don't know that it's relevant. I don't know that my story in that regard is relevant to the larger project. But I did want people to feel understood and that it's nothing to be ashamed of. Yeah. No, I think that's really, really, really important. Your uncle said the other day that he thinks that the third booster shot from Pfizer is just for Pfizer's profits. Do you have any thoughts on where that comes from?

Oh. Not good. Not good. Not good. Listen, he will do anything to feel that he's still the center of. attention. Unfortunately, he has nothing good to offer us. He's incapable of, you know, doing a PSA to have people get vaccinated. First of all, he's totally undermined his credibility by calling the thing a hoax or it's not a big deal. He got it. Everybody can get it because everybody's going to get

the world-class healthcare he got, you know, as he's shown. Since, I don't know, the phone call with Zelensny, oh, if I got in his name right, the President of Ukraine, he will do anything to undermine Joe Biden, even if it's at everybody else's expense. Yeah. Thank you so much, Mary. This was so great. I really appreciate having you.

I hope you'll come back soon. Of course, anytime. I love hanging out with you guys. Hey, folks. If you haven't heard, every single week, we do a special bonus episode for Beast Inside, the Daily Beast membership program. Sometimes we interview senators like Corey Booker or the folks who explain what's happening behind the scenes in media like Jim Acosta or Soladad O'Brien.

Sometimes we just have fun and talk to our favorite comedians and actors like Busy Phillips or Billy Eichner and sometimes we just have friends around to analyze what's happening in the news. You can get all of our episodes in your favorite podcast app of choice by becoming a beast inside member where you'll support the beast fearless journalism as well as getting full access to podcasts and articles. To become a member, head to newabnormal. Dot the Dailybeast.com.

That's new abnormal. Thedailybeast.com. Jason Kander is a former Missouri Secretary of State as well as Congressman. He also hosts the podcast Majority 54. Welcome back to the new abnormal, my friend Jason Kander. Thanks for having me. Back. I'm very excited. You have a lot of bona fides when it comes to this topic.

How long were you in Afghanistan? I was only there for a few months. I was deployed, 06, got home, beginning of 0.7. I was a military intelligence officer for the U.S. Army. My job was anti-corruption and anti-espionage investigations, mostly within the Afghan government and military. My boss referred to it as there's several different kinds of ints. Ent is short for intelligence.

You have like Sigint, which is signals intelligence and that kind of thing. He kind of invented a term for us. He said what we did was thugint, which is to say, we built relationships with thugs in order to gain information about other thugs. So that was the work I did. What did you find while you were there? I mean, there was no shortage of corruption. And there was narco-trafficking within the government, plenty of it.

There was also no shortage, unfortunately, of what I would fail to call anything other than espionage. Just infiltration of the government by Taliban. Taliban, Hig, which is lesser known to Americans, but is a big deal there. He has been Islamic-Gubaldeen. It's a terrorist network allied with the Taliban. It's also become, in the years, sense, more of a political movement that's less violent, but then there was also the Hacconi network. I mean, basically, yes, Taliban, terrorists, that kind of thing.

I mean, there's been a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking. It's been about a week of Monday morning quarterbacking by people who got us into the war, people who didn't get us into the war. Lots of, you know, theories have abounded. What do you think went wrong? One of the problems that we're having right now as a country is we're really used to having somebody to blame. And this is a 20-year war. I mean, Republicans are used to having a Democrat to blame and Democrats are used to having a Republican to blame. And what we've become deeply unfamiliar with

in a time when there's almost no bipartisan sentiment of any kind is the concept of a bipartisan lack of success. That's what this is. I mean, if you want to pick an original sin, an original place where this went wrong, I mean, obviously it's when we diverted our attention away from Afghanistan and decided to invade a country that had not attacked us, Iraq, and we left a far too small force in Afghanistan to nation build, which was another mistake. For those who may not even remember at this point, our mission was to defeat al-Qaeda, to kill the people who killed our people, and then to make sure that there could not be international terrorist attacks trained for and launched from Afghanistan. And we did that. Now, it's been portrayed as we did that right away,

And I've had to be reminded over the last couple of days that sometimes we forget that, for instance, in 2014, ISIS started to rise up in the place of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. So those two missions, we did those, and we completed that part of the mission sometime in the last decade. Then there was this whole other nation-building effort that took hold that was a mistake, and that failed. But to say that we lost this war, a friend of mine said to me this week that really there were two. two wars in Afghanistan, and we won one of them, and we didn't win the other one. Point is, this has gone across four presidents, and there's plenty of blame to go around. These have been incredibly hard choices. It really goes back to Reagan.

I mean, we've been there for 40 years in some respect. Yeah. It strikes me as some of what has happened over the last 40 years, is that America has gone from, you know, a country that considers itself to be freedom. Team America World Police. Right. Team America World Police. To that public sentiment is just against America, you know, is very anti-interventionist now. I'm not saying it's good or it's bad, though I actually think it ultimately probably is good,

but that the American public sentiment has shifted so far in those last 40 years that politicians almost couldn't keep up. A little bit. I think it's more like politicians have not been able to keep up with the fact that Americans, unfortunately, don't give a shit. about foreign policy or about who's fighting our wars. That's why I'm so angry this week. I think I'm angry for a few reasons.

If I had to pick a couple that are the top reasons, which, by the way, I'd like to say, none of them are because we withdrew our forces from Afghanistan. I've thought we needed to do that for a long time, and we have a thing going on right now where we seem to think that when people are mad, they must think that we should have stayed in Afghanistan. That's not what I think. I am mad that the American public seems to have figured out this week,

that we've been fighting a war in Afghanistan for 20 years and they're not happy about it. And the reason that makes me mad is because my friends and I were there. And literally before I joined you all, I was texting with one of my bunkmates from my safe house in Afghanistan from when I was there 14 years ago. And he's telling me how much trouble he's having getting out some of his guys, some of his Afghans he worked with and their families and how they are moving from one house. to another of family members they trust every single night. I'm frustrated because some of us have known about this. I'm also frustrated to hear people act like this. These are all simple choices. I'm frustrated when people say, why didn't the Afghan military fight? 2,500 Americans were killed in this war. 66,000 Afghan soldiers or police officers were killed in this war. To say they didn't fight,

President Trump negotiated with the Taliban without the democratically elected government of Afghanistan at the table and gave, you know, gave them everything. And then our intelligence publicly announced that we think that the Taliban's going to win, but it's going to take 18 months. And they know that. The Afghans know that. You want like a, as my friend Ben Rhodes said on my podcast this week, he said, and you expect a 24-year-old Afghan soldier who knows that the Americans have left and said he's going to lose. You want him to fight when fighting means not only that he gets killed, but that they go find his sisters and his dad and kill them too. That's insane. It doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean, it strikes me as there was a lot that America really did a lot wrong here.

Are we going to be able to get those people who have risked their lives to help Americans out? I am more optimistic today than I was three or four days ago that we will get a lot of people out helped us. Tell me what has changed. Two things. One, we have secured the airport and there doesn't seem to be a significant right now. There is, but a significant operation by the Taliban to impede people from getting to the airport to try to get out and to go through the process. Now, I suspect that that's because the Taliban is a force that just took over the capital of a nation and they've got a lot going on. They're too busy to kill all the people. I don't want to give them a lot of credit for that, right?

They are, at the same time, we know they are going door to door. They are mapping. So we should not be naive about this. So I do think that there will be a fair amount of people. And also, I just, between the soldiers and Marines who have cordoned off the airport and the Air Force who is running the air still, like, I think they're going to do a great job because that's what they do. But we should be realistic. There are going to be thousands upon thousands of people who bet their lives.

on the faith that we asked them to put in us who will be executed and probably a lot of family members of theirs as well in Afghanistan in the coming year. That's going to happen even, even though we are going to get, I think, a lot more people out than I thought we were. I've watched a number of pressers from the military higher-ups, and it struck me that there's been a lot of things they've said that I've been kind of shocked by. Like there was that question from that journalist from the, I think he was the Washington Post, where he said, you know, why didn't we take the, why didn't we use the, the, um, Bagram Air Force Base, which has two runways instead of the one that they've sort of, like, you know, that they seem to have not

behaved so strategically. I'm not sure what the answer they gave to that was, but I can tell you what I would guess. They said I'm not going to talk about sources. I mean, you know, something to that about. Yeah, I can speculate, which is I commanded several convoys on that route from Kabul to Barger many times. Other than commanding them, I was there for force protection plenty of times. I've been on that on route bottle plenty of times. I don't know what they call it now. That's what we called it back then. It's a good 45 minute to an hour drive if you're hauling like we were. And what that means is, in order to do that, you got, I mean, Pogrom's not a big population center. So if it were me, I wouldn't do it out of Bargram because I want to be where the majority of the people who are

trying to get out are, you know, getting them into Bargham. Right. It's just too far. It doesn't make any sense. Well, you're just asking them to run the gauntlet. There's going to be Taliban checkpoints all the way through. And if you're trying to keep a limited force in there, you want to secure a single place. You don't want to have to secure a several mile long route between Kabul because now you do that. And now you're in firefights and you're right back to trying to clear the route for IEDs for our people. As a military expert, I feel satisfied with that answer. There was some talk about how, you know, should America have said, did they have the right intelligence? Like Biden had said, Afghanistan's not going to fall, that we can keep the Taliban at bay for 18 months.

And then, and you hit on this a little earlier. But, and then we had General Millie come up and say, actually, you know, we had intelligence that said, this could have been a civil war, this could have been a this, this could have been a that. Do you think that was the way to deal with us? These are hard choices. And I can walk through all the ways that, and I will here in a second, I'll walk through the chief way that I think this was made very difficult for the Biden administration that people aren't seeing. But before I do that, I just want to say, having worked with the Afghan military, and most of all, in my case, having worked with the Afghan government, you didn't need intelligence to know this was going to happen. You needed logic. That doesn't necessarily mean that this could have been avoided. Now, what could have been avoided is what I'm about to talk about, which is, or at least not avoided,

what could have been mitigated was the rush to evacuate people at the last minute. I'm trying not to second guess because I don't know that I would have gotten the choice I'm about to lay out correct. What happened was, according to the president's speech the other day, he said he had two reasons for why they didn't start the evacuation earlier. The first reason I'm not sure about, which was that there were a lot of Afghans who didn't want to leave. I'm sure that that's the case. They wanted to give it a chance. They put in, they've invested time there and they wanted to see if it could work. I actually do believe that, but it's anecdotal and it's harder to quantify, and I don't think it was a major driver in the decision. The second thing he said was that the government of Afghanistan had, had asked them not to start major evacuations and mass evacuations because it would cause a crisis of confidence in the country. I 100% believe that. Here's why. When I got to Afghanistan and I took on the role I took on way back in 06, I was told that the center of gravity in the war was the government of Afghanistan. We referred to it as Goa, G-O-A. Here's why that's unique. Typically, that term, center of gravity is a tactical term that is used to refer to things like terrain or a supply chain,

like in war, like that would be your center of gravity. If you hold that, you're going to hold or you're going to prevail, right? So it's very unique to say that the center of gravity is the government of Afghanistan. And here's what it means for the center of gravity to be Goa. It means that Iraq and Afghanistan are not the same. And people need to be reminded of that this week and always. And that Iraq was a place where our Our forces were trying to win hearts and minds. Afghanistan is not like that. The average Afghan wanted the coalition.

They wanted Goa to succeed. What we were trying to win was faith. Because if people believed that Goa could prevail, and if they believed the coalition could prevail, then they would invest themselves in it, and they would fight in the military. They would join. They would do those things.

They would build their country. That's why people like me were running around trying to figure out who was the most corrupt, who was infiltrating the government, and having to like sit in rooms with people who might want to kidnap us so we could figure that out and tell our bosses who might need to be moved to a new province, that kind of thing. So that's the center of gravity, has been the whole time. But what it means is that Goa has constantly been necessarily focused on optics more than on achievement. Because if they could make people feel like it was working, then it could start working. So the question that was, that confronted the Biden administration,

that's a very hard question, I think, in that moment was, do we decide, okay, if we start landing planes in every hour, we're packing Afghans into C-17s and taking them out of here? Then people know it's failing. Are we going to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy? Exactly. And then if Kabul falls, which we knew it was going to anyway now, but when it falls, you never know whether you caused it to fall or not. And that's a very hard choice. I'd like to think that with my experience on the ground, I would have said, look, this is the endgame, and we're done trying to work on the optics of Goa. It hasn't worked. We're getting all the people who helped us out of here. But I would only like to believe that I would have done that. I don't know for sure. Right. I wish, I do wish that was the

choice we had made, but I can't sit in judgment and say that was the obvious choice. It was not. Right. That's such a good point. And I think also, Also, that there's not enough talk about how the Trump administration and great genius Mike Pompeo did cut the Afghan government out when he was negotiating with the Taliban. Completely cut them out. Here's how that mattered that people are not realizing, which is people keep saying, as we talked about a minute ago, they keep saying, why did the Afghans not fight? Which we don't have to go back over because I'll just get more angry. Right, because 67,000 of them tied. They did fight. And also, like, they were in a position where it would have been an unwise choice to fight in this situation they were in. And one of the many reasons was when Trump made that deal, well, then provincial governors and warlords, the people who the Afghan military functionally reports to at a local level, they're not dumb. They started making their own deals. They got cut out of the top deal of the real deal. So they go, okay, well, we're going to, I mean, the contractors are leaving. Everybody's leaving from the United States that supports us. We're going to get overrun.

And by the way, like, they started negotiating with the Taliban, which, you know, we can sit in judgment all we want. But how do people think it is the case that people are getting to the airport right now? I'll tell you how, because we're negotiating with the Taliban. That's how. There's no dishonor. I mean, when the war ends, that's what you do. And that's what these provincial governors and others were doing.

And so when the military was laying down their arms, I believe that it was in many cases because that's what their civilian leadership had already done. you. Thank you so much. Margaret Sullivan is a media columnist at the Washington Post. Welcome back to the new abnormal Margaret Sullivan. Thank you very much. I'm glad to be making my, I think, second appearance here. And so it's always fun. And it's your birthday, Molly. So we have to celebrate. Yes. It's so fun for me when I get to have a guest on who is actually my friend. And let alone someone who's actually like my really good. friend slash I hope mentor, if you don't mind. No, no, no. I would be honored. I'd be honored. That's very kind. And I mean, thank you so much. That's nice to hear. But it strikes me that what has hurt American journalism in the 2020 election continues to hurt American journalism when covering the Afghan war slash fall of Kabul. Yeah. I mean, I think that what we're seeing right now is in terms of media coverage, press coverage, and I'm talking not about the,

you know, right wing press, but the sort of mainstream traditional press, is something kind of puzzling, which is the coverage seems to be quite hawkish and very disapproving, although, you know, of course, cloaked in the language somewhat, the language of usual traditional neutrality. But, you know, in terms of who's being quoted, the kinds of nouns and adjectives and verbs that are being applied, it's very negative toward the withdrawal. And it's kind of devoid, or not devoid, but it's weak on the historical context, which is extremely important in this situation. So are those the same problems that we saw coming up to the 2020 election? Not exactly. But I think they're kind of related in the. that, you know, the traditional press, which is the best thing we have, and thank goodness we have it, is nevertheless constantly disappointing. Yeah, you know, it is, it strikes me that when you're, I mean, a person on Twitter mentioned this idea, like quoting Carl Rove is a choice. Exactly. I mean, so much of this stuff comes down to framing. You know, we always say, oh,

well, we just, you know, I have people say this to me all the time about journalism and about press coverage. Just give me the facts. It's impossible to just give me the facts because everything is framed, you know, everything is a choice. Quoting Carl Rove is a choice. Quoting Leon Panetta is a choice. You know, headlines, tweets, news alerts, the way they're phrased, the way a story is put together, the kind of story you do. All of those things, you know, add up to an impression and a sort of a narrative. And I think that it's been not great at all. I feel like when you have John Bolton on, you may have lost some of your credibility. I mean, exactly. And I mean, you know, you can quote people like that. And when you do, I think you owe it to the audience. Now, I'm being very serious here. But you owe it to your readership or your audience to say what their role was, you know, when the decisions were being made. And, you know, we know from our great Craig Whitlock at the Washington Post and his investigation. the Afghanistan papers, that the government has lied to the American people for 20 years about this. And so, you know, let's not forget that, as we're quoting the exact same people who lied. You know, it's, you know, and we know this not from somebody saying, oh, I think those guys were lying. We know it from, you know, documents that were gotten through freedom of information and lawsuits,

2,000 pages of notes and documents. So, I mean, this stuff is, this is the background. this is the real stuff. And if you ignore all of that and everything that's happened, you're really pretty much doing a disservice. And you're absolutely right. Yeah, John Bolton, you know, you've made a choice there for sure. But it is true and it is serious. And the reality is if you turn on cable news right now, it's almost, I mean, I want, I don't, you know, I watch more than most people, I think, or not more than most people, but more than most people my age, for sure. For sure. And, You are definitely bringing the demographic down every time you turn that on.

Exactly. I'm like, Previson, should we get that bad? My husband's from jellyfish. But, you know, if you watch it, as I did last night, it's wall to wall. Afghanistan was a disaster. And not much like Ronald Reagan engaged the Mujahideem. This does strike me as a time when historical context is so important. It is. It's really important. And it's not as a. if it happened at the time of the Civil War. This is, you know, this is a 20-year time span that many of us, certainly I, have been around for and can remember, I mean, the, you know, the extreme patriotism that was required of everyone, including journalists, it seemed, right after 9-11, and the Patriot Act and everything that followed is a part of this story. And the drive to the war in Iraq, particularly,

which was based on very, you know, not based on flawed reporting, but the way the American public felt about it was in part based on very flawed reporting from almost everybody. And, you know, it's like, well, this sort of amnesia that comes over everybody. And I guess maybe the sociological phrase for it is recency bias that we seem to deal most with what just happened and kind of forget about what happened, you know, that formed all this and what's the foundation for it. And that's, you know, really, really is a disservice. But you're so right that that is the fair and the fodder, even on the so-called, you know, liberal or left-leaning TV, you know, the cable news. And if you, you know, if you should go over to Fox, well, that's like a whole other, as always, as always,

that's a whole other world. Yeah, that's like living in the bizarro. But I'm just curious. Do you think that there's a way for American media to put more historical context into reporting? You know, I think it's got to happen at the sort of, you know, ground level of editors sitting in meetings with other editors saying such things as, you know, when we quote these people, we need to say what their role was during the formation of this situation. And how do you, how do you make that happen? And I mean, I think part of the way you make it happen is through no holds barred media criticism. Right. And hope that, you know, that penetrates to some extent. But I think the other piece of it is we like people, citizens, as I like to sometimes idealistically call them,

need to get more savvy about their media intake, you know, their media consumption. They need to be able to say, yeah, you know, I think I'm going to just look around here and broaden my sources and not just believe this one thing and, you know, get to be. more media literate and that that would also help because then they start to push back and scream and say, hey, you know what, we deserve better than this or just be smarter about what they're taking in. You know, it's interesting to me because you wrote a piece this week that I thought was really, really, I mean, I read all your pieces, but I thought this piece was so smart and also very brave in a certain way. Yeah, I was calling people out by name and by and by new. organization about just how immediate people were like, this is the end of this will permanently

stain Biden's legacy. This is a catastrophe. You know, this is going to live in infamy, as one headline in the Atlantic put it. I mean, wow, the sort of immediate decision making by pundits about what this would mean was stunning. And so, yeah, that's what I wrote about is sort of the quick take mentality of, okay, we're going to actually decide history right now. This is not the this is not the first rough draft of history. This is the actual one that's going to press. So yeah, it was it was it was really notable and very, very negative. And you know, I am absolutely not a Biden cheerleader. I'm not a Democrat or or in anything. I don't do that. But I still thought that it was extraordinary in the like just the sort of immediate quick take negativity.

of it. Well, what was interesting to me was those articles all came out on Sunday. Cabell fell on Saturday. And, you know, some of the authors of those pieces had actually spent time in Afghanistan and who, so you have to wonder, I mean, they weren't, you know, a few of those pieces. I mean, I'm talking, like, you only brought up a few pieces, but since that piece, your piece came out, which was a couple days ago, there have been about a hundred million zillion pieces about people Monday morning quarterbacking about how they could have fixed Afghanistan. But some of the people, you know, had spent time on the ground in Afghanistan, and it strikes me that one of the biggest disservices that you noted,

and your piece was, were the titles. Yeah, exactly. And that's always, you know, that is always the problem, I think, is that you can have a very nuanced art that, you know, talks all about how, you know, you totally understand the situation, and you've got deep sources and you've written books about it and all that. And then whether you or some editor or some audience and engagement person comes along and, you know, puts the headline on it that's actually pretty doesn't even represent the piece,

but is intended, of course, to drive clicks. That is something that's happening in media these days. And, you know, a lot of times people don't get beyond the headline. And if they do get beyond the headline, they get to the first paragraph. And that's about it. Or the tweet or the news. alert, you know, and that's it. So I think when we're pushing this stuff out, it would be nice to be a little bit more representative of what the actual piece says or of what you're, what you're

communicating to the audience. Yeah, it does strike me that there really is a place here for nuance. It would be nice. There's a place for it, but it's an empty place at the table right now. No one's sitting at the place. Do you think there's a way to stop and slow down and inject nuance into the current media atmosphere now? I mean, it's really hard because there's so much competition. You know, in the post-Trump, if we can call it that era, you know, everybody is sort of like recalibrating. Like, who am I? What am I? How am I going to hold onto my audience and what is my new thing? And so I think that that's another factor that drives this kind of overblown, overheated language that isn't very nuanced rich. So, you know, I mean, again, I think that the things that

can help it are smarter consumers slash citizens. You know, I think that media criticism can be helpful and just, you know, broadening your viewpoint so that you're not like only going to this one source or honestly holding people's feet to the fire. Even, you know, regular folks can do this by, you know, I get letters from regular readers and I do pay attention when they push back against something I've said, and I do consider it. So I think that, you know, maybe it's like writing a letter to Facebook or something. You're not going to get anywhere, but I still think it's worth trying to say, I don't approve of this and it needs to change. But, you know, to your overall question, Molly, it does feel a little bit like a lost cause. I'm sorry to say. Yeah. That makes me depressed.

But I do think it's really, I mean, we still have, we have to try, right? We always have to try. Absolutely. And, you know, I think this even like a conversation like this is helpful because it, you know, hopefully, and I'm sure your pod always does, it makes people think it brings a viewpoint that maybe they haven't considered before. And then when they go to cable news or they go to, you know, the web or whatever their news sources, they may, you know, they go to CNN's website or something. And they say, oh, wow, you know, yeah, I see now that this headline, this. whatever it is I'm looking at is exactly what they were talking about it. It is really, really negative. It's quoting John Bolton, Carl Rowe, and Leon Panetta, without ever mentioning that, you know, they were the architects of this thing. This was so incredibly helpful and also important to talk about. Thank you so much for joining us, Margaret. You are very, very welcome. It's a little teeny birthday present. More to come. What's crazier than QAnon, more outlandish than Pizagate, and scarier than a Mexican getaway with Ted Cruz?

The answer is what the American right wing has planned next. Be one of the first to listen to Fever Dreams, new podcasts from The Daily Beast, tracking the conspiracy slingers, orange acolytes, and straight-up grifters pushing to retake power. Every Wednesday hosts Swin Tsubisang and Will Summer, checking in on the movement of the radical right. Head to the DailyBeast.com slash podcasts or your favorite podcast. podcast player to catch the first episode and get subscribed. That's fever dreams, which you can subscribe to wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Jesse Cannon. Hi, Molly JongFest. I hear it's someone's birthday. It's my birthday. 23 again every year. Love to hear that since that means

as being eight months older than you, that I too am 23. It's been a good run being 23. So let's talk about what a fucking asshole Ron DeSantis is. He is today's, and maybe every day is fuck that guy. Really, it does go for it. He is literally like a what not to do during a pandemic guidebook. Like everything he does, you're like, oh, this is what not to do during a pandemic. Oh, don't do that during a pandemic. And one of the things that I've really been impressed with Ron DeSantis is that, you know,

Yesterday he came up and he said that people were actually, that politicians were covering their asses by having people wear masks and that it was a craven attempt to keep themselves from getting in trouble, which I have to say like, yeah. Yeah. Politicians want you to wear a lot of Democratic politicians want you to wear masks because they know that's a way to prevent COVID, right? Like, hello, it's smart. It's not craven. And in fact, it's interesting because DeSantis is actually doing the exact opposite by suggesting people don't need to wear masks. And more recently, or the last couple days, he also suggested that people should go and have monoclomo antibodies and that they were easily available. And I have to say monocomal antibodies are great. And I'm really glad we have them for people who get COVID. I think it's really great. but I'm telling you, we have a vaccine, which is cheaper and works better than monocomals, and then you don't have to get sick and sit there and have an infusion.

And it is just completely perverse that DeSantis is advertising this, and it's a continual Republican Party grift of trying to dissuade vaccines but encourage monocomals, which are much more expensive. and, you know, it's better to avoid getting it than to get it and need life-saving technology. And so for that, I say, Ron DeSantis, you have a spike, you could, you know, you're killing people that could be saved. This is preposterous. And, you know, at some point, Republicans are going to get sick of dying. And when they do, I do hope they remember the role in which Ron DeSantis played.

And for that, you are today's fuck that guy. Molly, tell me if I'm out of line with this comparison, but I want to say that supporting the modicobles, except instead of the vaccine, is kind of like supporting the abortion of COVID instead of supporting the birth control. Birth control. Oh, I think that's a very good point. I don't know how much I'm going to spread that one, but, uh, my fuck that guy is a joint one. Funny enough, Rand Paul got it last week before we knew that he also didn't disclose

that his wife bought stock in a company that would profit from the virus. And now we know that Lauren Bobert, who gets the vote on energy, did not disclose when she was supposed to that her husband was getting a half a million dollars from a Texas energy company. And while I think it's disgusting, they did this, they're kind of playing within the rules of what we allow it. And I really want to ask, when the fuck are we going to stop allowing sitting members of Congress

from buying stocks and things they have interest in? there should be such stricter laws. And in this era of transparency, I mean, Molly, era of transparency, Fox News is making their employees disclose whether they've been vaccinated or not. I'm pretty sure that's against hippo laws. Oh, yes, yes, yes, hippo laws. Yeah, hippos. I'm worried that this violates my hippo laws.

I was told by a massage therapist in Denver that it's illegal to ask your vaccination status. It really is something that it really does spell law. Rough times for a certain frozen fistic air. Yes, he's going to have to answer to his HIPAA laws. So, but I want to direct my fuck that guy at that Congress because we really need to strike the these laws because this is just disgusting in why we get nothing done in this Congress and why it's so broken.

On that note, we'll wrap this episode of the new abnormal from the Daily Beast. In future episodes, we'll be talking to smart folks from the Daily Beast and beyond from media, culture, politics and science. us understand what's happening to our country and the world. We hope you'll subscribe to us on your favorite podcast app and share the show on social media. Thanks so much for listening and we'll see you again on the next episode. Want more great listens? Check out our comedy podcast, The Last Laugh, and our star-studied the Daily Beast podcast at

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