The Daily Beast Podcast

Former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum joined Molly-Jong Fast and Rick Wilson on a special edition of The New Abnormal for the second night of the Republican National Convention and he just couldn’t work out what the Hell the GOP thought they were doing? Stephen Harper, the former prime minister of Canada, used to have a sign up on all four walls of his campaign war room, Frum explains: “An...

It’s the first night of the Republican National Convention and Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast are joined by Miles Taylor, the former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, who shares eye-watering tales of what Trump is really like when the cameras are switched off. You thought what happened on screen on night one of the convention was crazy? It’s nothing compared to Trump behind t...

What you're about to hear is a teaser for our new bonus episodes we are doing for subscribers to Beast Inside, the Daily Beast's membership program. Actor, comedian and activist Billy Eichner totally gets why Taylor Swift took so long to get publicly political. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, the “Billy on the Street” star explains why celebrities may take a long time to speak up—and ho...

On the final night of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson team up with The Daily Beast’s senior White House correspondent Asawin Suebsaeng, who thinks this week’s online convention felt like the best PBS telethon since they threatened to publicly execute Elmo. Joe Biden gives his big headline speech and sounds suspiciously like a U.S. president. “It blew up the...

It’s night three of the Democratic National Convention and The New Abnormal team are getting a little punchy. Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson are joined by Hillary Clinton’s former senior advisor Phillipe Reines and it’s a barnburner. There were always going to be two gigantic rockstar performances from Barack Obama and Kamala Harris tonight that were going to trigger President Trump—"and sure as...

Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson were up late to fight crime after a “seamless” night two of the Democratic National Convention. Former Democratic presidential candidate Rep. Eric Swalwell joined a special edition of The New Abnormal which asked—after the publication of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s final report on Russian electoral interference—what the Hell happened with Robert Mueller?   M...

What you're about to hear is a teaser for our new bonus episodes we are doing for subscribers to Beast Inside, the Daily Beast's membership program. We have a very special guest with Gary Peters Sr. who is the junior United States Senator from Michigan and hes going to talk to us about the fuckery with the postal service as well as why Mitch McConnel is holding up the COVID aid. And the other voic...

It’s the “secret sauce” of Fox News: “tell people who feel socially inferior that you're really the smart one. You're really informed, you know the real secrets about what's really going on,” explains Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. For 20 years, Fox has been force-feeding this sauce to its listeners, saying “that your life would be perfect if it wasn't for that George Soros...

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. He showed America just how rigged our system is in favor of the ultra-rich. “His final ad [of the 2016 campaign] was all ‘Wall Street has taken all of your wealth and rui...

What you're about to hear is a teaser for our new bonus episodes we are doing for subscribers to Beast Inside, the Daily Beast's membership program. We have a very special guest with CNN Chief WH Correspondent Jim Acosta who tells us about Trump’s inner circle—and the dangers of calling out this president. Again, this is for Beast Inside members only. To hear this along with the rest of our upcomi...

National Rifle Association boss Wayne LaPierre rails against the elites trying to take real Americans’ guns Meanwhile, the NRA is taking gun-owners donations—to fund LaPierre’s ultra-lux lifestyle. That’s the crux of New York Attorney General Tish James’ landmark lawsuit against the NRA. “And it looks like they're in a ton of trouble,” The Beast’s Harry Siegel tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson...

What you're about to hear is a teaser for our new bonus episodes we are doing for subscribers to Beast Inside, the Daily Beast's membership program. To start things off we have a very special guest with the one and only Sen. Corey Booker, who talks about everything from his relationship to Rosario Dawson to whether he'd punch Donald Trump in the face. Again, this is for Beast Inside members only. ...

There’s two things that Rick Wilson loves the most in this world and that’s food and politics. On this episode of The New Abnormal, Taste the Nation host Padma Lakshmi joins Rick and co-host Molly Jong-Fast to chat about her experiences foraging onions in the desert, hanging out with Thai women in Las Vegas and gaining 20 pounds, on purpose. Oh, and how immigrants and Native Americans have way mor...

Sen. Tammy Duckworth may be on Biden’s VP shortlist. But when it comes to childcare during the pandemic, she’s just as confused as the rest of us. “So my choice is five hours of homeschooling every day for my daughter and failing her, because I'm not a trained educator, or sending her to a school where she could very likely get this virus or bring it home and get her two year old sister sick or my...

Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald reporter who helped expose Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes, joins The New Abnormal to talk about what’s next now that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s right hand, is behind bars. “There's a lot of women right now that are coming forward a lot and they're talking to prosecutors,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson. “There's pretty close to a hundred, from what I hear.”...

Feeling comfy? Secure? Relatively unbothered by the state of the world? Then consider this: The President of the United States, who holds at his fingertips a devastating nuclear arsenal, also is bragging on television about acing a dementia test that involves remembering five whole words and counting backwards by seven. It’s one of a number of pleasant scenarios contemplated by Rick Wilson and Mol...

Mary Trump joins The New Abnormal with a giant barrel of tea to spill about her family. Her uncle Donald? “He was protected at every turn from his incompetence, from his total inability to handle money. The media, the banks kept propping him up and protecting him and letting him fail up consistently and constantly—until the Republican party started doing the same thing.” Her grandfather Fred, the...

Legendary filmmaker Judd Apatow really liked Donald Trump—when he was on TV. “I watched [the Apprentice] all the time because I found it so hilarious that all of his opinions were so wrong and everyone he would fire was always for the wrong reason. It was so terrible and crazy that it was fun to watch,” Apatow tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. These d...

Joe Biden is so far ahead of Trump, James Carville jokes on the latest episode of The New Abnormal, that the former Vice President could win, even with Gov. Youbetcha by his side. The strategy is simple, Carville tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson: “Attack, attack, attack. Attack from the right, attack from the left, attack from the center, attack everywhere. People say, ‘Well, you know, you go...

Recode co-founder Kara Swisher has this thing she likes to call the “prick to productivity ratio”—how big of a jerk a particular executive is, verus how much he gets done. And these days, both in Silicon Valley and in Washington, that ratio has gone all wrong. “Taking advantage, just not caring about the consequences—that's being played out in Silicon Valley over and over again. So don't be surpri...

Mary Trump legal battles against her uncle might seem like a fun little political soap opera. It’s way more than that, Mary’s lawyer Ted Boutrous explains on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. The attempt to stop her tell-all book before publication—“I think it's really an effort to intimidate people from speaking, to intimidate the press. But also it's a political tool. It's a fundraising to...

Ben Stiller had no idea he was casting a future president when he grabbed Donald Trump and Melania for a quick cameo in Zoolander. But Trump apparently never forgot about it, Stiller tells Molly Jong-Fast, Rick Wilson, and Matt Wilstein in the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Stiller recalls how Trump even derailed an interview during the last campaign to talk about Zoolander 2. Trump “started...

Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast have some thoughts on the matter in the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “It's not just treason. It's historic treason,” Rick says about the revelation that the Russians offered bounties on U.S. soldiers—and Trump kissed up to the Kremlin anyway. “This is a guy who was already going down into the dustbin of history. And now there's going to be a line at his grave...

Digital soldiers. Agenta Margaritaville. Laura Ingraham. What do all these things have in common? They’re all part of the world of QAnon, where up is down, down is right and the end goal is seeing anyone who Tweets negatively about Trump get shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. In Episode 20 of The New Abnormal, Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast talk to Daily Beast reporter Will Sommer about the craziest...

The Henry Winkler Antifa rumors can finally be put to rest. In episode 19 of The New Abnormal, the Barry actor—who went viral this weekend for proving that he, too, can drink a glass of water with one hand—addresses whether or not he is a card-carrying Antifa member. He also tells hosts Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast his thoughts on the president’s rally (“We are so not in control of the country...