This Is Not Kyrsten Sinema Just Pissing Off the Left

What the fuck is wrong with Kyrsten Sinema?

That’s what Molly Jong-Fast wants to know. On the latest episode of The New Abnormal, Molly sits down with Adam Jentleson to talk about the wayward Arizona senator.

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Jentleson, former deputy chief of staff to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and author of Kill Switch: The Rise of the Modern Senate and the Crippling of American Democracy, says Sinema gallivanting off to Europe for fundraising and Boston for the marathon instead of legislating isn’t just her “pissing off the left.”

“This is her just absolutely failing to do Politics 101,” he tells Molly. “Her constituents say they can’t reach her. There’s another story out saying all of her allies, people who supported her in her election, haven’t spoken to her in a year, and here she is popping up in Europe doing fundraising. This is not good politics, not just from a lefty perspective. This is just basic Politics 101 stuff that she is just completely failing at.”

All Sinema has to do is back President Biden’s agenda like her fellow Arizona Sen. Mark Kelly, Jentleson says: “Nobody’s asking her to support Medicare for all.”

Instead, “nothing she’s doing really makes much sense. There are new polls out showing that her numbers are just absolutely abysmal. She’s begging for a primary challenge… I don’t think I’ve seen numbers like this for an incoming senator. I don’t think even Joe Lieberman, who drove Democrats crazy, had numbers that bad. It’s astounding.”

Elsewhere in the conversation, Jentleson argues that Democrats are not actually in disarray, and if Build Back Better and the infrastructure package end up passing, we’ll look at this period quite differently. The party’s messaging, however, is another matter—especially on the child tax credit, which they have failed to explain to Americans and take proper credit for.

Also on the episode, Ryan Busse, a former firearms executive and author of Gunfight: My Battle Against the Industry That Radicalized America, talks to Molly and co-host Jesse Cannon about how the NRA and the firearms industry developed the kind of modern radicalization that we now see in our politics.

“The parallels are just frightening,” Busse says. “All the things that you see in Trumpism were first developed by the firearms industry. A first and important one is this embrace of the conspiracy theory… QAnon, really, I think, has its roots and Wayne Lapierre’s NRA speeches of 15 or 18 years ago.”

Finally, Molly welcomes on HuffPost senior justice reporter Ryan J. Reilly, who talks about how he got started in his extensive reporting on the foot soldiers of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and where the investigations are headed.

“The people most morally responsible for what happened at the Capitol are the ones who are facing the least real world legal consequences for it,” Reilly says. “And these people who just sort of were following the leader to a certain extent are the ones who are really having their lives torn apart.”

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