As the House’s Jan. 6 committee unearths new revelations, the heat is on in Trumpworld to protect Donald Trump by finding a patsy or two to blame for the riot.
On the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Asawin Suebsaeng—returning to the podcast he helped launch—talk about the MAGA hunt to set someone up to take the fall for Trump.
“The more you talk to people who are advising Donald Trump daily on what they hope to be his every political or legal maneuver, the more you get the sense straight from the horse’s mouth that they think, ‘OK, there’s gonna be a fall guy here,’” said Suebsaeng, now a senior political reporter for Rolling Stone.
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One potential candidate is former Trump lawyer John Eastman, now known for his “Eastman strategy” meant to convince then-Vice President Mike Pence to effectively steal the election for Trump on Jan. 6. Former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, whose actions in the lead-up to the riot were recently exposed by testimony from former aide Cassidy Hutchinson, could make another appealing scapegoat for Republicans.
“I think Mark Meadows has really opened himself up to a lot of criminal exposure here,” Suebsaeng said. “I’m not going to mince words while I’m talking about John Eastman and the ‘coup memo’ author.”
“Look around Mar-a-Lago,” Sommer said. “If you don’t see the fall guy, you are the fall guy.”
Also on the podcast, Sommer explains how a new movement on the right, led by inventor and would-be voter-fraud hunter Jovan Pulitzer, is hoping to rebrand the quixotic effort to “decertify” the 2020 election and, they hope, reinstall Trump in the White House by overturning the results and holding a rerun of the now 2-year-old election. Pulitzer has decided that “decertification” is too unwieldy for branding and is now urging MAGA supporters to endorse a new acronym: “LAVA,” or “Let America Vote Again.”
Elsewhere in this week’s episode, Sommer talks about a resurgence of the “NESARA” conspiracy theory, which has grown from a 1980s scam into becoming a pillar of the QAnon movement by promising its deluded followers that their debts will be abolished.
In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the recent bombing of the Georgia Guidestones, a now-demolished stack of granite once known as “America’s Stonehenge.” After the bombing, the perpetrators of which still haven’t been apprehended, the fate of the mysterious monument is up in the air.
“The serious news is that there is a group of domestic terrorists on the loose in Georgia or elsewhere that has not been apprehended and basically had a victory because it’s not clear if the Guidestones will be rebuilt,” Sommer said.
Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.
