Hi, welcome to Fever Dreams. My name's Will Summer. I'm a political reporter at The Daily Beast and the author of an upcoming book on QAnon for Harper Collins.

And I'm Aswin-Sub-Tang, but please call me Swin. I'm a senior political reporter at the Daily Beast and co-author of the book Sinking in the Swamp.

All right, here on Fevered Dreams, we're going to take you on plunges into the sometimes hilarious and sometimes scary world of the American right as they continue to influence our politics. Even in the aftermath of the Trump administration,

the energy of these conspiracy theorists, these grifters, and these influencers is still pushing

our mainstream political landscape closer and closer to a breaking point. Kelly Wilde,

quickly before we start covering topics like Ukraine and foreign war,

which we're going to dive into pretty heavily on this episode, I'm just going to start with

something a little bit more lighthearted, shall we say? And are you as aware or anywhere

close to obsess as I am about former President Donald Trump's habit. And this has been going on for decades

of him referring to men who he really admires and really likes his hot. Um, not really. You know,

that's something that I like to keep just firmly sequestered away from my brain, but I think I'm

about to learn more. This is something he's done for ages, and it really took a special turn for the weird when he was leader of the free world and now in his post-presidency.

But for the uninitiated, Donald J. Trump has this obsession with complementing the masculine physical attributes of men who he wants to keep within his good graces. I mean, he is,

out of all the authoritarians on the face of the planet who talk like stage moms, he probably

ranks number one on that list. Like, this is a longstanding thing. And I just want to give our

readers a taste of what I'm talking about in the event that they have absolutely no fucking idea what I'm talking about.

Okay. So earlier this week, our colleague Jose Pallieri and I put up a story that was about the following.

We are our hands on some documents that hadn't been reported before.

So the gist was in the year since former President Donald Trump has been out of office.

He has cost the

U.S. Secret Service more than 1.3 million on hotel and transportation bills, according to documents

obtained by the Daily Beast.

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