The Daily Beast Podcast

It’s been a weird year--some might even say an abnormal year--but we’ve had a consistent bright spot: the loyal listeners of The New Abnormal podcast. Thanks to you, we’re celebrating our one-year anniversary with a major milestone: twenty million listens. Producer and host duo Jesse and Molly sat down for a speed-round of twenty questions to celebrate in style. Check out Molly’s hilarious and ins...

Andrew Yang will do whatever it takes to get the New York City economy going again if he’s elected mayor. And by anything, we mean he will shit-talk Florida to get as many rich New Yorkers as he can to come home from the Sunshine State, he tells Molly Jong-Fast in this episode of The New Abnormal. Plus, Toure, host of the podcasts Democracy-ish and Toure Show, tells Molly why the current police sy...

Mika Brzezinski’s firing from CBS in 2006 was a total surprise. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, she tells host Molly Jong-Fast about how it all went down, why there should be a '70 Over 70' list for women, and her biggest regret from her first “Morning Joe” contract with MSNBC—especially after finding out what Joe Scarborough did with his. If you haven't heard, every single week The New...

Mika Brzezinski’s firing from CBS in 2006 was a total surprise. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, she tells host Molly Jong-Fast about how it all went down, why there should be a '70 Over 70' list for women, and her biggest regret from her first “Morning Joe” contract with MSNBC—especially after finding out what Joe Scarborough did with his. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more...

On a special edition of our hit podcast The New Abnormal, the president’s son opens up to Molly Jong-Fast about … well, about a lot. Why the Trumps continue to go after him so hard. Why his wife won’t let him have a laptop. How easy it is to cook crack cocaine. How hard it is to live in fear of a relapse.  But Hunter Biden also gave some hard-to-swallow answers about the emails he traded with the...

Trump’s tweet about Mika Brzezinski “bleeding badly from a face-lift” originated from a conversation between her and the former first couple in their bedroom. Really. In this episode of The New Abnormal, the Morning Joe co-host gives her hilarious retelling of the events that led up to this infamous tweet, and exactly how she responded when she found out about it: “I'm talking to Melania about it,...

Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY)’s tearful rebuke against Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) during a House hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian Americans was semi-unplanned. She had a speech ready to go, but when Roy went on an anti-China and lynchings rant instead, she just lost it. “I had to cut out excerpts of my prepared speech, which I'm sure my staff got upset about, but I just had to say it. I had...

Rep. Grace Meng (D-NY)’s tearful rebuke against Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) during a House hearing on violence and discrimination against Asian Americans was semi-unplanned. She had a speech ready to go, but when Roy went on an anti-China and lynchings rant instead, she just lost it. “I had to cut out excerpts of my prepared speech, which I'm sure my staff got upset about, but I just had to say it. I had...

Every day, sometimes multiple times a day, come eye-popping new details in the Matt Gaetz scandal. But perhaps the worst thing of all for the Florida Republican, who is accused of underage sex trafficking, may be that Donald Trump thinks he’s useless. Yes, the congressman spent years sucking up to the former president—and even said he’d give up his job to defend him. But Trump has only managed to...

That new documentary on QAnon ended with something of a bang, with one likely suspect seeming to half-confess that he was ‘Q,’ the oracle of the violent conspiracy movement. But there may not be even a single ‘Q,’ explains Will Sommer, one of the people featured throughout the documentary and the co-host of The Daily Beast’s new hit podcast, FEVER DREAMS.   “There was kind of like this group surro...

Democrats are in control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives for the first time in a decade. But to the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, it’s clear that the party’s brand is broken in a large swath of America. “I think what we have to do as a party is battle the damage to the Democratic brand,” Harrison, the former senate candidate, tells Molly Jong-Fast...

The New Abnormal’s least favorite Florida congressman, Matt Gaetz, is in hot water over mounting allegations that he’s been involved with underage women and taking them across state lines. To discuss the burgeoning scandal, co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon brought on The Nation’s national affairs correspondent, Jeet Heer, who says he isn’t the least bit surprised.  “It’s the ones you alwa...

Did you know that everyone’s favorite Suez-Canal-blocking ship is now the subject of a QAnon conspiracy? The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng and Will Sommer lay out why the adrenochrome set is convinced that the stuck ship’s cargo is full of trafficked children on the latest episode of our Fever Dreams podcast (Hint: it has to do with Hillary Clinton’s secret service code name—you guessed it, EVERG...

Goldie Taylor has been working in and around Georgia politics for decades. So she knows first-hand the kind of stunt Republicans are trying to pull with this new voter-suppression law.  “What [Gov.] Brian Kemp will tell you, what other state GOP office holders will tell you, is that they've done this to restore confidence in the ballot. Poppycock. They have done it to keep people who don't look li...

Take one self-proclaimed satanism expert. Add in a pinch of dumpster-diving. Throw in a chicken-coop fire, and (of course) pillow magnate and Donald Trump pal Mike Lindell. And you’ve got the recipe that Trump 2020 deadenders are currently leading in the great state of Arizona to try to, somehow, overturn the election there. “It could be like a Coen brothers movie. It has that atmosphere,” Daily B...

GOP Senators Ted Cruz and John Cornyn led a tour for themselves and others in their party at the border on Friday, but according to Congresswoman Veronica Escobar, who took over Beto O’Rourke’s former 16th district in Texas, it’s all “political theater.” They want to “use the border as a prop, do a whole lot of complaining and finger pointing. But these are the same people who've been in the Senat...

What’s our wildly divisive political climate doing to today’s 20-year-olds, who will be our political leaders of the future? That’s what Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) asks co-hosts Molly Jong-Fast and Jesse Cannon on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. In the past, Kinzinger says, Americans could look to Ronald Reagan and Democratic leader Tip O’Neill having a beer together, despite their differe...

When we think of presidential pets, we think of their cute moments and endless photo-ops on the White House lawn—but the reality is you sometimes need to acquire a pet to distract from a scandal.  So it was in the 1990s, CBS Sunday Morning correspondent Mo Rocca explains on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, when the Clintons adopted Buddy the dog.  “The Clintons had Socks,” Rocca tells co-ho...

Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West—mainly the United States and Europe—than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to tempur the spread, the U.S....

Since the spread of COVID-19 launched a global pandemic in 2020, over half a million Americans have been killed by the virus. And experts agree that the death and infection rates have been much worse in the West—mainly the United States and Europe—than many other places in the East. In other words, while other countries like China, Cambodia and New Zealand were able to temper the spread, the U.S....

It didn’t have to be this way.  The coronavirus pandemic didn’t have to become politicized—or racialized. But last March, President Donald Trump “decided to call coronavirus, which has no ethnicity or zip code or nationality, the China virus,” says Daily Beast columnist Wajahat Ali on the 100th episode of The New Abnormal. “There was no reason to make coronavirus a racist thing,” co-host Molly Jon...

It’s bad enough Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, the Arizona Democrat, turned down the minimum wage hike with that oh-so-cute thumbs down. Now she’s threatening to derail the whole Democratic agenda, insisting on archaic Senate rules that give Mitch McConnell and the Republicans outsized power. “I think is a lot of people feel that this groovy, bisexual Senator should be voting in a groovy way and not like a...

It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripl...

It’s not hard to see that the Republican party was the Party of Trump during the four years he was president. But what kind of party are they now? Honestly, it’s hard to tell. “When you looked at the platform for the 2020 election, they didn't create one,” says New Yorker writer and professor Jelani Cobb. There is one thing about today’s GOP, however, that is very clear: “They've doubled and tripl...

Republicans are terrified—with good reason.  Utah Sen. Mike Lee went viral this week when he sputtered earlier that one of the new voting rights bills making its way through the House was “written in hell by the devil himself.” And Lee’s GOP colleagues didn’t exactly knock the notion down.  “They should be scared of it,” Rep. Eric Swawell, the California Democrat, tells Molly Jong-Fast on the late...