Should We Replace the Trump Administration With Chimpanzees?
In this episode of The New Abnormal, Rick muses about a chimp White House takeover, and a Yale professor hypothesizes with Molly how long Trump has really been sick.
Illustration by The Daily Beast/Photo by Peter Serling
No, seriously. After turning the Rose Garden into a superspreader party, after lying 143 ways to Sunday about the virus and 17 more about the president’s health, maybe it’s time to let some other mammals have a shot.
“I could release 50 chimpanzees in the White House and they would behave with more care,” says Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal.
Molly Jong-Fast replies, “My favorite moment was when they”—the White House staff, not the monkeys—"said, ‘you know, he's totally fine, but we've given him this experimental drug that has only a compassionate-use approval... Being lied to about the president's health is a time-honored tradition. But this group has really done it with a kind of zeal and flare and incompetence that we have never seen before.”
Speaking of those experimental drugs, Yale’s Dr. Howard Foreman breaks down all the different therapeutics the president is taking—and lays out why he thinks Trump has been sicker for longer than anyone realizes. Maybe as long as two weeks.
Then! The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser and The New York Times’ Peter Baker compare covering Trump’s D.C. to covering Putin’s Moscow.
“This era of sustained politicized attack on journalists, I think it does two things for Trump, right? Number one is... to undermine the credibility of those who seek to hold you accountable,” says Glasser.
“The other thing, of course, is to assault a rival center of power. I mean, there's a reason authoritarian leaders tend to launch sustained attacks very first in their playbooks on independent journalism,” she adds.
Plus! Matthew McConaughey’s Camaro! Hugh Hewitt’s dumbest moment yet! White House moles emerge! Bill Barr gets even sneakier! And Rick shares his thoughts about Biden’s decision to take down his negative ads while Trump was in the hospital.
“Joe Biden is falling victim to this asymmetric bullshit, civility, fuck that noise,” he says. “Get on it. Get back on the negatives, do it. Now he's attacking you. He's attacked your family. He's attacked your campaign over and over again. Do not hesitate.”