In This Episode
- Check out Moira’s work – theguardian.com/profile/moira-donegan
- Call Congress – 202-224-3121
- Subscribe to the What A Day Newsletter – https://tinyurl.com/y4y2e9jy
- What A Day – YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@whatadaypodcast
Follow us on Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/crookedmedia/
TRANSCRIPT
Jane Coaston: It’s Wednesday, April 15th, I’m Jane Coaston, and this is What a Day, the show that has more questions for President Donald Trump about his fascinating theory regarding diet soda. I learned about this theory from the head of Medicare and Medicaid, Dr. Mehmet Oz. Here speaking on Donald Trump Jr.’s podcast, Triggered.
[clip of Dr. Mehmet Oz] Your dad argues that diet soda is good for him because it kills grass, it’s poured on grass.
[clip of Donald Trump Jr.] Yeah.
[clip of Dr. Mehmet Oz] So therefore it must kill cancer cells inside the body. So he’ll try it, please.
Jane Coaston: Question, does diet soda kill grass? And if it did, wouldn’t that imply that diet soda is very, very bad for you? [music break] On today’s show, a new report says the global economic outlook is not looking great. And President Trump responds to a federal emergency management agency official who claims that he teleported to a Waffle House. No surprise, he says he doesn’t know anything about it or the official. But let’s start with Congress and its ongoing epidemic of sexual misconduct. Two members of Congress stepped down on Tuesday, Texas Republican Representative Tony Gonzales, and California Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell. Here is a clerk of the House of Representatives reading their resignation statements.
[clip of clerk of the House of Representatives] Enclosed is my resignation letter to Texas Governor Greg Abbott, effective April 14th, 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, it has been my privilege to serve the residents of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District, signed sincerely, Tony Gonzales, member of Congress. I plan to resign my seat in Congress effective at 2 p.m. Eastern Time on April 14, 2026. I will work with my staff in the coming days to ensure they are able in my absence to serve the needs of the good people of the 14th congressional district. Signed sincerely, Eric Swalwell.
Jane Coaston: Gonzales and Swalwell differ in almost every single way. Gonzales was endorsed for re-election by Trump. Swalwell was one of the loudest voices opposing Trump. Gonzales dropped out of his re-election campaign weeks ago, while Swalwell was one the top candidates in the California gubernatorial primary until this past weekend. But they share one horrible commonality. Both men have been accused of sexual misconduct. Gonzales and Swalwell were accused of sexual misconduct by former staffers. Swalwell is also accused of sexual assault, and other women have come forward. He has denied the allegations. I’ve been writing about politics for more than a decade now, and that means I’ve been covering sexual misconduct in politics for more than a decade. Sexual assault by politicians seems almost endemic to me. Over and over, we see powerful people in politics, typically men, use their power to take advantage of others in dangerous and abusive ways. And, as we know, it goes all the way to the top. The President of the United States himself was found liable for sexual abuse in 2023. So why does this keep happening? And what about Congress might be making it more difficult for survivors to come forward? To find out, I spoke to Moira Donegan. She’s a columnist covering gender and politics at The Guardian. Moira, welcome to What a Day!
Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
Jane Coaston: We are almost ten years removed from me too and up until now it’s felt like not much permanently changed. We’ve seen kind of a backlash and then a backlash to the backlash. It’s been weird, but this week we saw two representatives, Tony Gonzales of Texas and Eric Swalwell of California resign over allegations of sexual misconduct and harassment that have been circling for weeks. What do you think changed?
Moira Donegan: You know, I think there is a sense that Me Too is a reflection of exasperation, right? These like sort of politicized moments of sexual violence return when people are outraged by impunity, right, and there’s been a lot of sort of simmering attention to the issue of sexual violence, particularly among elites, in the wake of the Epstein scandal. And as people, you know, confront both the extent of complicity in Epstein’s alleged crimes and the sort of pervasive impunity, I think there has been sort of a wearing down of patience. And what you saw when these allegations about Swalwell came out, really just over the past few days, is a sort of confrontation with the reality of the pervasiveness of this issue and a lack of patience, and I think this is interesting that it redounded also to Tony Gonzales, whose alleged misconduct has been public in the popular media for much longer, but who had managed to hold on to his seat in Congress until just this week.
Jane Coaston: Swalwell and Gonzales are not the only politicians in Congress with allegations against them. Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday that he will be, quote, “looking into the House investigation of Republican Representative Cory Mills,” who has been accused of sexual misconduct, a bunch of other things. But here’s my question for you. What do you think it says that serious accusations of sexual misconduct are treated like tit-for-tat political fodder? Like, well, you get rid of one of yours, we might get rid one of ours.
Moira Donegan: Yeah, you know, it’s very conspicuous that Swalwell’s resignation seems to have been what prompted the Republicans to finally cut Tony Gonzales loose, you know? And I think there is something a bit dispiriting about this kind of mutual weaponization of sexual abuse by each side of the political rivalry, right? It seems as if it’s less opposed to on principle than deployed as a tool against one’s political enemies in a kind of cynical or even opportunistic manner. And I think what the challenge will be for feminists and for those of us who are, you know, committed to a principled opposition to rape and violence, uh will be to try and make this into a principle that can be applied even when it’s not particularly politically convenient or that will be applied. That people tend to apply both to their own side and to their opponents.
Jane Coaston: What a Day spoke with two Democratic house aides, one current and one former, about the allegations against Swalwell and Gonzales. And they indicated there could be more members accused of misconduct, which does not surprise me at all. You and I have been writing about and talking about this issue for a long time. I remember I wrote a piece about the Judgment Fund, which helps to fund sexual harassment lawsuits in Congress. That was in 2017. That was a story about former Michigan representative John Conyers. That was in political terms, that was 10,000 years ago. [laughter] And this keeps happening. This is not new. If you go back to the 1970s and 1980s, Congress was in some ways worse and grosser. But what do you think it says about the culture of Congress and US politics as a whole, that this kind of toxic power dynamic is still so prevalent? Like the stories from Swalwell’s accusers sound so familiar and that familiarity horrifies me, Moira. It genuinely horrifies me.
Moira Donegan: You know, Jane, I wish it was just the culture of Congress. I wish there was something perverse about this one institution uniquely that made these abuses happen there and nowhere else. But I think what really happens is that these kinds of abuses happen everywhere where there is unchecked power, everywhere where there are, you know, men with a lot of people relying on them who have women who are proximate and vulnerable, right? I think this is something that you know we saw in Me Too, that this happens in the media, that it happens in Hollywood. We see that it happens in tech, that it happens in fast food. You know this is a sort of broad culture-wide pathology of you know abuse of power, of eroticized domination, and of exploitation, largely of women by men. And you know I think that it is interesting that these abuses are so bipartisan and that they are sort of pushing on fractures that are emerging within partisan coalitions, right? So the Swalwell allegations and his subsequent resignation have really disrupted the California governor’s race, where there is a open bipartisan primary in which the two leading contenders will advance the general election in the fall. Swalwell looked to be until, you know, just this weekend, as if he would be uh the front runner in that election. And now it’s anybody’s race. You know, Katie Porter has a much better chance. Tom Steyer has a better chance on the Republican side. You see the Epstein allegations roiling the MAGA coalition, not just because of Trump’s populist and anti-elite messaging that is you know somewhat undermined by his connections to Jeffrey Epstein, but also because of an interestingly politicized right-wing grievance against sexual exploitation from the likes of Nancy Mace, who has been very vocal on this issue, and her attempt to add some you know public disclosure and transparency to these congressional funds for distributing sexual harassment settlements. That got shot down just last month in a really broadly bipartisan vote, right? So there’s forces both in Congress and sort of across our culture that are both sort of pushing against this pervasive impunity for sexual violence and also sort of arraying to protect entrenched interests. It’s not always who you would expect that is lining up on each side of this issue.
Jane Coaston: Politics is the added element of people who are working within it believing, hoping, maybe that they are contributing to something that will make the country better. Do you think that that contributes to that culture where it’s not just a member of Congress, it’s a member of Congress who maybe is working on an issue you care a lot about? And does that change how people think about these allegations or think about how this can happen when it’s not just, oh, this person is super famous and super powerful? It’s also this person could make sure everyone gets health care or could ensure reproductive rights access in my state. They are also, apparently, a sexual predator.
Moira Donegan: Yeah, I think this is something that really influences both the way that broad audiences interpret these allegations and also the way that victims interpret their own set of responsibilities in either coming forward or in deciding not to report and disclose, right? You saw, you know, just very recently the case of Dolores Huerta, the leader of the farm workers movement who recounted her own rape by Cesar Chavez and said that she did not want to come forward at the time because she thought it would endanger the cause to which she had devoted her life, right? I think this is a pervasive feature of sexual abuse in sort of mission-oriented workplaces. And in the case of somebody like Eric Swalwell, I think that this also impacts the way that you know party insiders and voters and those who are really invested uh in the Democratic Party or in the struggle against Trumpism are understanding this, you know, there really is something that we lose when somebody like Eric Swalwell, who was for all his faults, you know, a talented anti-Trump surrogate on cable news, right, a very ambitious, public facing, active guy uh who was useful in some ways to the anti-Trump political movement in the US. But I think it would be incomplete to talk about that loss without also considering the loss of these women who are degraded or humiliated or hurt or abused or otherwise not allowed to thrive in their own talents because of these kinds of abuses that they encounter in their fields.
Jane Coaston: Somehow at the same time. Harvey Weinstein is back in court this week. He’s being retried for a rape case in New York City for the third time. So I have to ask, there have been a lot of criticisms of MeToo and some of those I think have been pretty not helpful. The idea of it going too far, going after the wrong people. Whatever. But it does say something to me that we’re in a moment in which Harvey Weinstein, this is the third time people have been trying to get justice for what he allegedly did. And it’s been nearly 10 years. What do you think that says about what Me Too could not get done?
Moira Donegan: Yeah, you know, Me Too was in many ways like sort of a speech movement, right? It was about making speakable realities and experiences that had been excluded from official reality, right, from the official public reckoning of what people did and what our histories contain. What they could not do was undo a millennia of patriarchal conditioning around sexual violence. What they could not do is rewrite these institutional habits that give a lot of deference to sexual abusers in particular and to wealthy sexual abusers, especially. You know what they could not do is erase the ability of the likes of Harvey Weinstein or you kow Bill Cosby whose conviction was also overturned uh to purchase their way out of accountability, right? There’s much broader structures of corruption, of institutional complicity. And of, you know, societal misogyny that have entrenched these outcomes. And to get rid of those, I think is a much, much bigger project.
Jane Coaston: Moira, thank you so much for taking the time to join me.
Moira Donegan: Thank you for having me, Jane. It was a pleasure.
Jane Coaston: That was my conversation with Moira Donegan, columnist for The Guardian. This is a show that thinks sexual misconduct is bad, no matter who’s doing it. I know, wild! If you agree, make sure you subscribe, leave a five-star review on Spotify and Apple podcasts, watch us on YouTube, and share the show with your friends. We’ll be back after some ads. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: Here is what else we’re following today.
[sung] Headlines.
Jane Coaston: Joining me is Crooked’s Washington correspondent, Matt Berg, to talk about the big stories. Hey Matt.
Matt Berg: Hey Jane.
Jane Coaston: Matt, the world’s economic outlook is looking, um, grim, thanks to Trump’s war in Iran. Here’s Kevin Hassett, one of his top economic advisors, telling Americans on CNBC Tuesday that hey, it could be worse.
[clip of Kevin Hassett] While it’s very frustrating to go with the pump and see what the price of gasoline looks like, that the benefit for oil producers and workers in those industries is significant enough that the GDP effect in the U.S. is much smaller than anything that you would see if you look at say an Asian economy or even in the UK where because of their Green New Deal type policies they’ve more or less stopped producing oil.
Jane Coaston: Two things, um, is he saying, well, oil companies are doing well, so it’s fine? Also, apparently it’s bad to rely on green energy when the world is going through an oil crisis? We’re learning new things all the time, Matt. But the bottom line is Donald Trump’s war with Iran is hurting countries around the world. And yes, that includes the United States.
Matt Berg: Right. The global economy could even slide into recession if the war continues, according to a report released by the International Monetary Fund on Tuesday. The report also says that the global economic outlook was actually looking steady before Trump bombed Iran.
Jane Coaston: Which is wild given the tariffs and everything else. Yet now even the best case scenario looks grim. The IMF predicts that global growth could fall to 3.1% this year, down from 3.4% in 2025.
Matt Berg: And Hassett’s not the only Trump official who is downplaying the toll that the war is taking on the US economy. Speaking at an event hosted by Semafor on Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said quote, “the conflict will end, prices will come down, and then headline inflation will come down.”
Jane Coaston: Matt. You know, I have this rule, whatever Scott Bessent says, I assume the exact opposite. But you know what’s making me feel better? Schadenfreude, through MAGA International mourning the loss of Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian rule in Hungary. The American far right has long admired Orbán’s strongman rule in Hungary, as he crushed the free press and villainized immigrants and LGBT people, while the economy suffered and the birth rate, a major MAGA obsession, declined despite massive state investment in the issue. Here’s Hungary’s then foreign minister telling Tucker Carlson in 2022 why Hungary was so great for conservatives.
[clip of Viktor Orbán] We are conducting a patriotic, Christian-based policy. The target of ours is to reach the um to fulfill the national interest. We are conservative. And in the meantime, we are successful.
Jane Coaston: Apparently not, and Vice President J.D. Vance even traveled to Hungary last week to boost Orbán’s odds. But um he failed miserably.
Matt Berg: And MAGA may have had a much bigger stake in this than we even knew before Vance’s trip. In a speech on Monday, Hungary’s newly elected leader, Péter Majar, said that Hungary will no longer fund the Hungarian branch of the Conservative Political Action Conference, better known as CPAC. But, you know, most people these days might know it just as the crazy right-wing conference where Elon Musk swung a chainsaw over his head last year.
Jane Coaston: To be clear, Majar said Orbán’s government gave them money, but CPAC told Politico that it has never received funding from the Hungarian state. Quote, “any decisions on the use of government money in Hungary will have zero impact on our organization, as it has never received any of these funds.” But CPAC definitely did take their tour to Budapest for several years, highlighting such stars as one of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s sons and Maryland Republican Congressman Andy Harris and a far-right Hungarian journalist who is super racist. It’s not the first time the right has fallen in love with a right-wing government, Matt, but Hungary? The country with major ties to China and Russia? Really, but Matt, now the relationship makes more sense, because it looks like the draw wasn’t just ideology, it was also money.
Matt Berg: Yeah. Hungary’s politics are pretty intense, and America’s are too, but America’s these days are just downright strange. Take for example the case of Greg Phillips. He’s a federal emergency management agency official in charge of disaster response. He’s also apparently totally delusional. You might be familiar with him after CNN uncovered a podcast from last year in which he said that he teleported to a Waffle House in Georgia dozens of miles away. Here’s a clip from that podcast.
[clip of Greg Phillips] It was scary in a way. I mean, you know, you don’t really know, okay, is this evil? Is this good? What is this? Is, you know, what do I do with this? How do I, how do I deal with it? I was on the phone. Oh my God, what’s happening?
Matt Berg: CNN got Trump on the phone to talk about that on Thursday, and he did not seem sold on the possibilities of teleportation.
Jane Coaston: That’s an amazing sentence. And no, he did not. Quote, “was he kidding?” Trump asked CNN when told about Philip’s claim, he added, quote, “it just sounds a little strange, but I know nothing about teleporting or him, but I’ll find out about it right now.” One of my favorite Trump things is that if you do something he doesn’t like, he will completely Mariah Carey you. He doesn’t know him. He has no idea who he is. Who is this guy anyway? And hilariously, the New York Times did the legwork. And went to the Waffle House, where this man claimed to have teleported to. And no employees or regulars at that location, remember anyone teleporting there. Though, stumbling into Waffle House after a long night does feel a lot like teleportation.
Matt Berg: That is objectively true. But Phillips has said some even weirder things on podcasts, according to CNN. Do you want to hear them, Jane?
Jane Coaston: I don’t, but I do, so go ahead.
Matt Berg: Alright. Yeah, well, here we go. He claimed that God sat on his bed and diagnosed him with cancer. He said that he’s on earth to do God’s work but that he is quote, “actually dead.” And he said that his deceased girlfriend lifted his car off the road to help him avoid a car crash. How sweet, I guess.
Jane Coaston: Well I sure hope that when a natural disaster hits, this guy can find a way to teleport to my house. Or actually, I would really prefer someone more qualified than him. Thanks, Matt.
Matt Berg: Thanks for having me.
Jane Coaston: And that’s the news. [music break]
[AD BREAK]
Jane Coaston: That’s all for today. If you like the show, make sure you subscribe, leave a review, celebrate winners, not losers, and tell your friends to listen. And if you’re into reading, and not just about Virginia Democratic Governor Abigail Spanberger finally ending tax exemptions for organizations that celebrate and honor the Confederacy, like me, What a Day is also a nightly newsletter. Check it out and subscribe at Crooked.com/subscribe. I’m Jane Coaston. And maybe you should have thought about the tax implications of fomenting a rebellion against the Union to support the institution of slavery. [music break] What a Day is a production of Crooked Media. It’s recorded and mixed by Desmond Taylor. Our associate producer is Emily Fohr. Our producer is Caitlin Plummer. Our video editor is Joseph Dutra. Our video producer is Johanna Case. We had production help today from Greg Walters, Matt Berg and Ethan Oberman. Our senior producer is Erica Morrison and our senior vice president of news and politics is Adriene Hill. Our theme music is by Kyle Murdock and Jordan Cantor. We had help today from the Associated Press. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. [music break]
