FEVER DREAMS

The Motive Behind Donald Trump’s Week of Chaos

This week’s episode of Fever Dreams looks at the reasons behind the former president’s confusing endorsement of “Eric,” along with Alex Jones’ latest “documentary.”

Donald Trump pulled more tricks out of his sleeve this week, leaving many to wonder what mental game the former president is running, notably in the Missouri Senate race.

On the latest episode of The Daily Beast’s Fever Dreams podcast, host Will Sommer and guest host Anthony Fisher, senior opinion editor at The Daily Beast, discuss Trump’s latest maneuver—which, according to Sommer, will “echo throughout the ages.”

Earlier this week, Trump announced his endorsement for the Missouri GOP Senate primary, but the problem was, he appeared to endorse two by throwing his support behind simply “Eric.” There were two contenders named Eric in the race: Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmidt and Eric Greitens, the one-time governor who resigned while under criminal investigation amid allegations of sexual assault. The news plunged Trumpworld into chaos.

“It’s classic Trump and like an onion, there are many layers to this,” Fisher says. “My first thought was that it was just a straight-up troll and just a way to cause chaos and kind of a relatively novel way for Trump to insert himself into the political news cycle. He’s trolling Republicans; really, he’s creating chaos.

“However it shakes out, somebody is probably going to be able to claim that the Trump endorsement pushed them over the edge. And Trump gets to wave that flag.”

Also on the podcast, Sommer reveals his thoughts behind the Alex Jones “documentary” Alex’s War, and the reviews are not good.

“I watched this movie and I gotta say… this movie stinks. It’s two hours. It’s bad. It’s not good,” Sommer warns.

“Alex Lee Moyer, the director, gets a ton of time with Alex Jones, but not in really enlightening ways. We don’t see Alex Jones making his breakfast or really interacting with his kids or even really running his business from behind the scenes. We just get a lot of Alex Jones talking about what a put-upon guy he is and how he just loves finding out the truth.

“It’s a stinker, folks. It’s just not good. We don’t talk to his ex-wife, who’s famously very critical of him. To me, there’s tons of details out there thanks to these Sandy Hook lawsuits about how his business runs all this money he’s made. It doesn’t get into all of his various legal maneuvers, his unprecedented level of legal whining and scheming to avoid going to trial on this.

“That was the real issue with this documentary, just that he seemed to be constantly lying. There was really no counterweight presented.”

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Elsewhere in the episode, Matthew Remski, co-host of the Conspirituality podcast, explains the meaning behind “conspirituality” and what it encompasses.

“The term comes from a really fantastic academic paper in 2011, published by a sociologist of religion named David Voas and an independent researcher named Charlotte Ward,” Remski explains.

“They coined the term as a kind of portmanteau of the union that they were seeing between what they described as a male-dominated fascination with political cynicism and conspiracism with a female-dominated fascination with New Age aspirations and the coming enlightened way of life.”

In the podcast’s “Fresh Hell” segment, the hosts discuss the self-proclaimed “Queen of Canada,” Romana Didulo, and the small but very vocal segment of the Canadian population who claim she rules the land.

“This is a woman who… she’s kind of an average person. She doesn’t really have much claim to royalty,” Sommer says.

“She issues these decrees and encourages her followers to, for example, institute the death penalty for anyone involved in giving vaccines to children.”

Listen, and subscribe, to Fever Dreams on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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Martha MercerEditor

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