In a moment of frightening uncertainty, one thing remains the same: Donald Trump will not, under any circumstances, stop bragging about his “hot” Secret Service detail.
This week on Fever Dreams, host Asawin Suebsaeng brings new reporting about Trump’s post-presidential lifestyle. He’s living large, racking up huge bills for Secret Service stays at his hotels, and hassling those bodyguards about how they look.
“If you are assigned to make a bullet for this guy, and this is what you have to do, this is what you’re paid to spend your days and nights doing, Lord help you,” Suebsaeng concludes.
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Mar-a-Lago isn’t Florida’s only hotspot for aspiring demagogues last week. The America First Political Action Conference last weekend saw the nation’s preeminent racists converge on Orlando, where AFPAC’s leader, Nick Fuentes, spoke favorably of Adolf Hitler. Although AFPAC courts far-right internet personalities, this year’s conference had an increased presence from elected Republican officials. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene gave a speech at the event, and was introduced by Fuentes onstage. Later, when confronted about the event’s open racism, Greene denied knowing Fuente’s (extremely public) views.
But going to AFPAC “and saying that you don’t know that it’s a racist institution is like going on American Idol and saying, ‘I didn’t know I needed to sing a song for this,’” Fever Dreams co-host Kelly Weill says. “That is all it is known for.”
Will the right censure Greene for her appearance at the racist conference? Not if they’re too busy hyping Vladimir Putin for being “unwoke” as he invades Ukraine. Suebsaeng and Weill examine a trend of conservatives turning the Ukraine invasion into a nonsensical wedge issue about LGBT rights (which are under fire in Russia). Those talking points reveal ”what so many partisans in this country mean when they say they are ‘not woke’ and they are ‘anti-wokist,’” Suebsaeng notes. “A lot of it is code, just saying, ‘I would like to be an out and out bigot right now.’”
As Russia’s troops advance on Ukraine, we check in with Daily Beast reporter Adam Rawnsley, who has been monitoring suspicious Russian military buildup for months.
“It was incredibly frustrating because we had been hearing from sources in Western governments for a while that, ‘hey, you should really pay attention to this,’” Rawnsley recalls. “There was sort of a divergence of two camps of people who were watching what was going on around Ukraine: there were the people who were paying attention to the statements and the communications. And then there were the people who were paying attention to where the military equipment was.”
In the internet era, a military mobilization of this size can’t stay secret for long, Rawnsley notes. He tells us how researchers were able to trace troop movements for months through a combination of satellite imagery, Google traffic maps, and even TikTok videos that revealed tanks on roads near the Russia-Ukraine border. Some researchers have even used facial recognition to tie one group of Russian ballistic missile operators to a frat that routinely poses for pictures with a bag of dildos on social media.
“This is the sort of dystopia of modern life: here’s these guys on a beach somewhere throwing big dreadnought dildos at each other’s faces,” Rawnsley says of their social media pictures. “And then three pictures later, these guys messing around with the dildos, here they are manning a nuclear installation.”
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