Melora Hardin built a career playing women who command a room—Jan Levinson on The Office, Tammy Cashman on Transparent and Jacqueline Carlyle on The Bold Type—but even she wasn’t prepared for the real-life drama of the Los Angeles wildfires. “It’s surreal,” she said on The Daily Beast Podcast, recounting how her home was miraculously spared while dozens of her friends lost everything. “If you have something to give, then give it. And if you don’t, just be compassionate.”
Tuning in from Washington, The Daily Beast’s Chief National Correspondent David Gardner took a break from wading through The Swamp—the “Page Six of politics,” he explained, which is already drowning in tips. (Sign up for the newsletter here.) “Things are changing every day, every moment,” he said of the scene in D.C., whether that’s the now rapid-fire confirmations of even President Trump’s most controversial Cabinet nominations or the apparent confirmation that Elon Musk is serving as the real adult in the room.
And what about the—literal—children in the room? Gardner discussed Musk and Trump’s viral press conference, upstaged as it was by Musk’s four-year-old son, X. “Can you imagine if a female politician brought her toddler to a major press event?” Coles remarked, while Bee was less focused on Musk’s parenting and more on Trump’s body language: “He was in agony watching a little child pick his nose and smear snot everywhere.”
Gardner summed it up: “Elon Musk is running the show, Trump is getting sent to the kids’ table, and the world has turned in the 20 minutes we’ve been talking.”
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