A new book by New York Times journalists Jonathan Martin and Alex Burns has gotten lots of attention for its revelations about Donald Trump and the Republican Party. But as the authors tell Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, there are also some juicy nuggets about Democratic dysfunction.
Martin recalls one anecdote from last year when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was addressing nine “renegade House Democrats” during a House caucus meeting.
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“We have the text traffic from those House Democrats as she confronts them and they’re talking to one another via text, and they can’t believe what’s happening. They’re piling on Pelosi and one of them says she’s ‘truly a terrible person,’” he says.
According to Martin and Burns, the book contains new details of the struggle between President Joe Biden and Democrats in the Senate, too, particularly “the degree of difficulty that Biden was having” with Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin on his Build Back Better legislation.
“I think it’s a pretty mainstream perception that things are not going super great for Joe Biden, [but] a lot of the detail on how Biden got to that place is quite revelatory,” says Burns.
Also on this bonus episode: Molly and co-host Andy Levy listen to some hilarious Republican clips, including one in which Senator Ron Johnson seriously considers a completely false conspiracy theory that claims COVID-19 vaccines have the AIDS virus in them.
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