Twenty-four-year-old Madelyn Corwin’s social media feeds feature a few selfies, videos of her insulin pump, and almost always a link to a GoFundMe page. The most current fundraiser is to raise money for a woman named Nicole who lost her diabetic son in 2018 because they couldn’t afford insulin. In other words, Corwin’s pages are not just young people fodder. Her activism is literally saving lives. “I just make a statement and I'll have people message me on Twitter or Instagram and be like, ‘than...
Dec 27, 2020•19 min
Rudy Giuliani tried really hard this year soil himself: the hair-in-the-can, the Russian agent pal , the presser by the sex shop , the buckets of conspiracy drool. But it wasn’t until he got caught red handed with Borat’s daughter that his reputation was smeared fully, finally, and forever. The hand-down-Rudy’s-pants incident was one of a whole bunch of different ways that political comedians rammed into Trumpworld in 2020. Matt Wilstein , The Daily Beast’s resident comedy guru, breaks down the ...
Dec 24, 2020•29 min
“I begged her to just come out and say that I was her friend, I was loyal. Nope, nothing,” says Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, author of Melania and Me . Stephanie Winston Wolkoff considered Melania Trump a friend—more than a friend, really. Wolkoff even followed Melania to Washington, helping produce the 2017 inauguration and advise the incoming First Lady. But when the stories started coming out about the insane overspending during the Inauguration, Wolkoff says Melania threw her to the wolves—all...
Dec 22, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 78
Political pundit and author Zerlina Maxwell was booed and hissed at during a Politicon a few years ago (which is “a Comic Con for political nerds”) because she said that if Bernie Sanders ran in 2020, which he did, he’d have to improve his messaging toward communities of color. Fast forward to this year and Maxwell has a book out on the subject and stands by her statement. “It seems like I was psychic or something, but really I was just saying a thing that seemed to be an obvious point that some...
Dec 21, 2020•6 min
Political pundit and author Zerlina Maxwell was booed and hissed at during a Politicon a few years ago (which is “a Comic Con for political nerds”) because she said that if Bernie Sanders ran in 2020, which he did, he’d have to improve his messaging toward communities of color. Fast forward to this year and Maxwell has a book out on the subject and stands by her statement. “It seems like I was psychic or something, but really I was just saying a thing that seemed to be an obvious point that some...
Dec 20, 2020•25 min
They’re the two most important women in Donald Trump’s life. And they absolutely loathe one another. Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, the former Melania Trump confidant and author of Melania and Me: The Rise and Fall of My Friendship with the First Lady , spills the tea on the latest episode of The New Abnormal , starting with the very first days of the administration. “Melania didn't come to D.C. that week, but Ivanka stayed and Donald stayed there. And all of a sudden, that's the weekend, Donald sig...
Dec 18, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 77
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Dec 16, 2020•9 min
It’s getting near closing time for the Trumps at the White House—Monday’s electoral college vote made that official. Which means folks like Ivanka Trump have to GTFO and find themselves new careers. It might be a bit tricky, Daily Beast contributor and Hysteria host Erin Gloria Ryan explains. Just about everybody hates Ivanka these days —well, except for a handful of Fox-addled octogenarian creepers. That corporate feminism she used to try to embody? That “Hallmark feminism where there's absolut...
Dec 15, 2020•50 min•Season 1Ep. 76
COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. That’s what the movies and TV shows have us all believe anyway. But she says when the Florida state police raided her home and held a gun inches from her face after she told them her two children were present, she felt “nothing.” She even let them enter peacefully, she says. “I was prepared to be arrested,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this special members-only episode of The New Abnormal....
Dec 14, 2020•6 min
COVID whistleblower Rebekah Jones always thought that having a gun pointed in her face would be terrifying. That’s what the movies and TV shows have us all believe anyway. But she says when the Florida state police raided her home and held a gun inches from her face after she told them her two children were present, she felt “nothing.” She even let them enter peacefully, she says. “I was prepared to be arrested,” she tells Molly Jong-Fast on this special members-only episode of The New Abnormal....
Dec 13, 2020•27 min
Ivanka and Jared have big plans...to move to Florida, and maybe start the tropical version of the Met Ball. “If you had $30 million to spend on 1.6 acres of empty space, where would you buy it?” Molly asks Rick. “Miami,” of course, to be somewhat near Trump’s favorite kid and son-in-law and witness when Ivanka primaries against Marco Rubio, he answers. Rick can see Trump turn against Rubio now: “I await the day that little Marco after applying his lip so firmly to Trump's, his entire critique of...
Dec 11, 2020•52 min•Season 1Ep. 75
You’d think they’d have learned by now, just a few weeks from the end of the Trump presidency. But people are still falling for the same head fakes and tricks. Take, Molly Jong-Fast says, Trump’s recent trip down to Georgia. “It was one of those many Trump's speeches where you saw on Twitter for the first 15 minutes people were like, ‘sometimes Trump can stick to the teleprompter’; ‘teleprompter Trump, bravo for just, like, reading the words.” And then, of course, things went off the rails. Like...
Dec 08, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 74
Donald Trump has a long list of titles he’s accused of being: a liar, scammer, and sore loser to name a few. But racist is a title he earned long before becoming a soon-to-be one-term MAGA president. Former Trump Organization employee Barbara Res says saw it at play multiple times years ago while working as a vice president for the construction arm of the company. Res has a book coming out detailing her work with Trump before he became president, but shares sobering anecdotes with co-host Molly ...
Dec 07, 2020•6 min
Donald Trump has a long list of titles he’s accused of being: a liar, scammer, and sore loser to name a few. But racist is a title he earned long before becoming a soon-to-be one-term MAGA president. Former Trump Organization employee Barbara Res says saw it at play multiple times years ago while working as a vice president for the construction arm of the company. Res has a book coming out detailing her work with Trump before he became president, but shares sobering anecdotes with co-host Molly ...
Dec 06, 2020•17 min
The gods of comedy have heard your prayers—and just might make them come true. “Veep,” the greatest political comedy of all time, could return, somehow, some way, in some form, if only for a short while. “We've certainly discussed it,” star Julia-Louis Dreyfus tells Molly Jong-Fast on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. “Everybody's sort of gone off now and everybody's doing other projects and so on. But I don't rule it out entirely, doing some sort of ‘Veep’-related thing. I mean, there's a...
Dec 04, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 73
Trump is headed to Georgia this week, where there’s about to be a pair of special elections to decide the balance of the senate. But don’t expect the president to really talk up his Republican, MAGA AF buds, George Conway says. “It's better for him and better for his ego if they lose.” Trump has a problem, George explains to Molly-Jong Fast and Rick Wilson on the latest episode of The New Abnormal. Well, two. First, “Republicans did better than he did” in the general election. Not only does “tha...
Dec 01, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 72
Alec Baldwin has given serious thought about running for office. He already knows what it’s like for people to hate his guts (Like for things like playing the president on Saturday Night Live—“They say things like, ‘I don't know who we want to get rid of first Alec Baldwin or Trump.’”) But seriously, he has considered diving head-first into the political world, and there is a chance he still might, but there’s a few things he’d need to take care of first—and someone he’d have to convince. In thi...
Nov 29, 2020•26 min
The end of the Trump administration is like the end of a season finale of the most batshit Netflix show. Everyone has questions of how it will finally end, including one big one: Will Trump pardon himself before leaving office? Some theories predict VP Mike Pence could assume the presidency for just enough time to pardon Trump. But, Rick Wilson doesn’t see that happening. In this members-only bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Rick and co-host Molly Jong-Fast do a Q&A with producer Jesse Can...
Nov 27, 2020•6 min
The end of the Trump administration is like the end of a season finale of the most batshit Netflix show. Everyone has questions of how it will finally end, including one big one: Will Trump pardon himself before leaving office? Some theories predict VP Mike Pence could assume the presidency for just enough time to pardon Trump. But, Rick Wilson doesn’t see that happening. In this members-only bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Rick and co-host Molly Jong-Fast do a Q&A with producer Jesse Can...
Nov 27, 2020•21 min
If you thought Ivanka Trump’s childhood best friend, Lysandra Ohrstrom, had enough to say about the First Daughter in her scathing Vanity Fair article, you’d be mistaken. Oh no, Lysandra isn’t finished yet. She came on the latest episode of The New Abnormal to talk about the president’s favorite kid and the offensive and crude things Ivanka and her dad would say or do when the two were growing up—and what finally made Lysandra become the “class traitor” many have been quick to call her on Twitte...
Nov 24, 2020•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 71
Team Biden has made his incoming style of presidency very clear: Keep the peace. Or in his aides’ words, “move the country forward.” Unfortunately, moving forward doesn’t include prosecuting Trump and his band of thieves, er, White House staffers and campaign confidants. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal , which happened LIVE on Zoom, The Daily Beast’s DC Bureau Chief Jackie Kucinich confirms this to co-hosts Rick WIlson and Molly Jong-Fast : “Where we’re at in the process, it doesn’t se...
Nov 23, 2020•9 min
Team Biden has made his incoming style of presidency very clear: Keep the peace. Or in his aides’ words, “move the country forward.” Unfortunately, moving forward doesn’t include prosecuting Trump and his band of thieves, er, White House staffers and campaign confidants. In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal , which happened LIVE on Zoom, The Daily Beast’s DC Bureau Chief Jackie Kucinich confirms this to co-hosts Rick WIlson and Molly Jong-Fast : “Where we’re at in the process, it doesn’t se...
Nov 20, 2020•1 hr 8 min
“It's so funny,” Molly Jong-Fast tells Sen. Amy Klobuchar. “There's been so much sexist talk about women [in politics] being too emotional and being too sensitive. And then we have an entire party held hostage by the president's moods.” Klobuchar laughs in response: “Exactly. I think it was John Bolton that said that we just don't have time to live through seven stages of the president's grief. That is exactly what's happening.” “Even when presidents have lost elections,” the senator adds, “they...
Nov 20, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 70
Molly Jong-Fast explains to Rick Wilson why she got into a brouhaha with the Congresswoman from the First District of QAnon in the latest episode of The New Abnormal, which features presidential transition veteran Neera Tanden of The Center For American Progress and Carl Zimmer of The New York Times, who gets us up to speed on the latest vaccine breakthroughs. Molly and Congresswoman-elect Marjorie Taylor Greene, an avowed QAnon supporter, fell out on Twitter over different interpretations of go...
Nov 17, 2020•1 hr 3 min•Season 1Ep. 69
President Donald Trump may be following Vladimir Putin’s Autocratic playbook closer than we all realize—and the Russian interference was just the tip of the iceberg. In this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal, the New Yorker staff writer and Surviving Autocracy author Masha Gessen joins co-host Molly Jong-Fast to talk about this phenomenon. They explain that leaders like Trump and Putin put a system in place to hold power, and if you’re wondering how a man like Trump could do somethi...
Nov 16, 2020•7 min
President Donald Trump may be following Vladimir Putin’s Autocratic playbook closer than we all realize—and the Russian interference was just the tip of the iceberg. In this bonus members-only episode of The New Abnormal, the New Yorker staff writer and Surviving Autocracy author Masha Gessen joins co-host Molly Jong-Fast to talk about this phenomenon. They explain that leaders like Trump and Putin put a system in place to hold power, and if you’re wondering how a man like Trump could do somethi...
Nov 15, 2020•28 min
Does Donald Trump even know what a coup is? Doubtful, which is one of the reasons, in this episode of The New Abnormal, that co-hosts Rick Wilson and Molly Jong-Fast don’t believe whatever nonsense the president is pulling counts as one. That, and the fact that the military needs to support said coup and they won’t. “They may be telling him that [they are], but it is the fake orgasm of coups. They're making noises that sound real, but it's not real,” says Rick. Still, the scammer-in-chief and hi...
Nov 13, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Season 1Ep. 68
She may have been hoping to spend her days jet-setting between Davos and Aspen—when she wasn’t mingling with Manhattan’s gentry. But only the super rich get those kinds of second chances. And that ain’t Ivanka. “They get forgiven because they have billions of dollars—they can float a charity. Someone like [New York Jets owner and ambassador to the UK] Woody Johnson, who's given millions and millions of dollars to Trump and who has been a real Republican piece of shit, will get forgiven because h...
Nov 10, 2020•1 hr 6 min•Ep. 67
Joe Biden is asking Americans to turn down the heat. Some of his strongest supporters are busy lighting one another on fire. Biden and Kamala Harris hadn’t even been declared the winners of the election when members of their far-flung coalition began attacking one another: Blue Dog versus Democratic Socialist, the Squad versus Abigail Spanberger and other purple-district Dems. “You would think that they would want to enjoy their victory for, like, 30 seconds. You would think that after toppling ...
Nov 09, 2020•38 min•Season 1Ep. 67
“It’s all over but the crying,” says Rick Wilson in the second-ever The New Abnormal LIVE, alongside co-host Molly Jong-Fast, The Beast’s legal columnist Jay Michaelson and Daily Beast Politics Director Sam Stein. While the official results won’t be verified for a few days, especially given these extremely close swing state races and runoffs happening in Georgia, there is strong reason to believe that Joe Biden will be the next president of the United States. One thing we all know for sure: Trum...
Nov 06, 2020•1 hr 8 min
