The tale of The Daily Beast is an object lesson in why you should be careful who or what you compare yourself to.
For those of you who don’t know how the lefty outlet got its name, the moniker comes from Evelyn Waugh’s 1938 novel “Scoop,” a satirical take on Waugh’s own time as a rather luckless foreign correspondent in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s invasion of the African nation.
The paper Waugh was writing for — the U.K. Daily Mail, whose standards were far lower in those days — was fictionalized as “The Daily Beast,” a morals-deprived tabloid owned by a feckless aristocrat and run by drunks and vulgarians.
When media moguless Tina Brown launched the site in 2008, the name was supposed to be a pun on the fact that it would be anything but: “What’s been lacking for the overwhelmed but smart reader is an intelligent guide” in the internet age, said Brown, some 17 years ago. “The time is right to do a site which cuts through the noise and cuts through the clutter.”
TL;DR: Whatever the best attentions of Brown and Co. were back in 2008, The Daily Beast has become the clutter and the noise. It has become, in other words, a real version of the fictionalized The Daily Beast.
If you needed evidence of this, you need to look no further than the fact that the real Beast is trying to make a scandal out of the fact that President Donald Trump gave his bed on his private plane to a pregnant GOP representative who was suffering from pre-eclampsia but didn’t know it and was traveling with her husband. Good work.
If Waugh were alive today — a neat trick that would be, considering he’d be 121 years old now and died a very unhealthy 62-year-old man in 1966 — one could imagine this Monday headline showing up in a “Scoop” reboot: ” ‘Don’t Tell Melania’: Trump Once Offered Rising MAGA Star His Bed; The alleged, joking, comments cast new light on the president’s eyebrow-raising marriage to Melania Trump.”
Yes, you may have noticed the “joking” part sticking out of that subheadline like a sore thumb, but that subheadline was in much smaller font than the all-caps “stamp” that the Daily Beast puts on all of its articles — which, in this case, read “OUR LITTLE SECRET.” This sounds like quite a bit more than a joke, in other words.
“Donald Trump once offered a MAGA newcomer his bed while she was feeling unwell, but told her to keep it a secret from Melania, according to a new bombshell book,” the outlet reported.
Do you trust the media?
“The president made the offer aboard his personal jet in 2023, when Florida Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, 35, was pregnant.”
The book — “Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power,” a surely evenhanded account of the Trump interregnum and 2024 campaign by Axios’ Alex Isenstadt — quotes Trump as saying to Luna, who was first elected to Congress in 2022, “If you need a bed to lay down in, there’s one here on the plane. If you feel sick and you need to lay there, you can lay on it.”
“Just don’t tell Melania. She doesn’t like other women on my bed.”
To prove that this is a “bombshell,” the article jumps to another book by an even less reliable author: Michael Wolff, the vulture of “Fire and Fury” fame. In case you haven’t been keeping up with his dubiously sourced works, he has another book on Trump out called “All or Nothing” in which an unnamed “source close to Trump and his family” (The Daily Beast’s words, not Wolff’s), which said this about Melania: “She f***ing hates him.”
The White House responded to virtually everything in the book by calling Wolff “a lying sack of s***.” Not that I endorse profanity, but given this is one of the nicer things said about Wolff’s work by anyone in a position of power, he might put that quote on the paperback edition cover.
Anyhow, Luna took to X to point out the reality of the inappropriate behavior innuendos thrown out there by the Daily Beast.
” I seldom respond to nasty headlines because I don’t like giving trash credibility, however, being that there is allegedly a book coming out with me named and attacking @POTUS, his marriage, our first lady, and frankly implying something distasteful about me, I am responding,” she wrote on X Monday.
WARNING: The following post contains graphic language that some viewers will find offensive.
I seldom respond to nasty headlines because I don’t like giving trash credibility, however, being that there is allegedly a book coming out with me named and attacking @POTUS , his marriage, our first lady, and frankly implying something distasteful about me, I am responding.… https://t.co/D1QyG0eYde
— Anna Paulina Luna (@realannapaulina) March 17, 2025
“I was very pregnant and at the time experiencing pre-eclampsia symptoms, but was not diagnosed. As soon as @realDonaldTrump boarded the plane, being the gentleman and good person that he is, said if I did not feel well, I could use the back room.
“He did this in a respectful way and in front of my husband, of which we thanked him. He also assured me that they had a medical team on board in case anything happened and they were aware of how pregnant I was.”
“This was the most compassionate thing that could’ve been done at the time. I find it disgusting that the author fails to recognize that. A few weeks later, I was induced because I did have pre-eclampsia,” Luna continued.
“The author of this book never reached out to me for comment. Which means that this book is likely going to be a s*** hit piece. If people in POTUS orbit are talking to this author, they need to be cut off immediately. This is gross.”
To be fair, Luna wasn’t the only one disowning the Beast’s piece, with Axios — which had published a few quotes allegedly attributed to Trump that would be in the book, one of which was the basis of this story but which was actually put in the proper context — also effectively saying the Beast’s report was trying to make a scandal out of a joke.
“In our report, Axios correctly portrayed and contextualized comments made by President Trump during an interaction that he had with Rep. Luna, an interaction she confirmed in her statement did in fact happen,” Axios said in a statement.
And, to be fair, the quote is part of a series of supposed Trump statements which — surprise! — show him to be a guy with a functioning sense of humor.
(For instance, on the rather drafty kangaroo courtroom where he was tried on campaign finance violation accusations in early 2024: “Convict me and send me to Rikers [Island] already. At least they probably have the heat turned on.” Or, on his CT scans after surviving an assassination attempt in July 2024: “Can you give me a copy of these? Because I want to make sure I can show reporters that my cognitive function is 100 percent. You can’t say the same about Joe Biden.”)
I doubt the book is exactly an evenhanded account — but at least it’s not underhanded. The same can’t be said for the Daily Beast, which managed to take a joke quote made in front of a GOP representative and her husband, I repeat, her husband, and tried to make it look like inappropriately sexual behavior.
Disgusting, but hardly surprising, especially from an outlet that comes to resemble its fictitious namesake more and more as the years go on.
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