Donald Trump Actually Did Us All One Big Favor

Kurt Andersen has been tooling on Donald Trump for decades—the Spy magazine co-founder once even tricked the Donald into cashing a check for 17 cents. But, Andersen tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson, Trump did us all a favor.

We don’t want to give it away, but let’s just say it exposed how the super-rich profit from our current system. “His final ad [of the 2016 campaign] was all ‘Wall Street has taken all of your wealth and ruined the working class. And we must defeat these people of whom my opponent is a puppet,’” Anderson recounts on the latest episode of The New Abnormal.

“Well, yeah, you had a point,” he adds. “But you didn't actually govern at all on that basis. So maybe, maybe he's sort of put that critique of the system on the table”—especially for Republicans who couldn’t take in that kind of message from someone left-of-center.

Rick, the GOP consultant, says it’s time for Republicans to realize that “the party of free markets is full of shit because it [isn’t] about free markets. It’s about gaining enough power to use the regulatory state and legislative process to advantage your individual companies or markets. That's not capitalism, that's crony capitalism on a good day and something much worse on a bad one.”

Then! Molly and Rick answer listener questions, revealing how they met (not on a chain gang, they swear) and what their surprising super powers are (“I can hit my head on almost anything,” says Molly).

Plus! Will our dynamic duo actually open a dogfighting pit, or will they go straight to selling meth? And what does Rick enjoy more than “getting rip shit on cheap gin and watching the Teletubbies?”

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher.