08-03-2025
MeidasTouch's Ben Meiselas to Republicans: How Do You Even Live With Yourselves?
On The Daily Beast Podcast this week, progressive media mogul and sports lawyer Ben Meiselas let it rip when discussing President Donald Trump's 'embarrassing, shameful, made-up' congressional address. Speaking with co-hosts Sam Bee and Joanna Coles, Meiselas highlighted the celebratory reactions from Republican lawmakers in attendance as a particular point of contention. 'He's talking about taking over Greenland and Panama, cutting off aid to desperate nations, and everybody's just laughing,' Meiselas noted. 'This is not normal!'
'I'm thinking, how do you go about living like that?' he continued of the laudatory cheers Trump received from his party faithful. 'I don't know how you wake up in the morning and say, 'Yeah, I'll just humiliate myself all over again today.'' And speaking of humiliation, he highlighted the 'defeated man' Marco Rubio—this week the subject of reaction memes and Elon Musk's wrath, a real rock-and-hard-place place to find yourself—as a particularly sad example of the consequences of Trump's stranglehold on the GOP.
(Coles, meanwhile, argued that Trump's speech constituted 'magnificent television'—for fans of gameshows like The Price is Right, in particular.)
Meiselas also offered criticism, however, for legacy media brands as failing to meet the moment—or meet their readers. 'They took their audience for granted,' he said. 'People aren't dumb. They know when they're being fed nonsense.'
Trump's speeches, he warned, are only getting darker. 'The rhetoric escalates, and the party follows,' he said. 'But at the end of the day, someone still has to say: This is not normal.'
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