This Is Exactly How Trump Broke Our America

The Daily Beast Podcast

Anand Giridharadas discusses his book 'Man in the Mirror', using the fatal subway encounter between Daniel Penny and Jordan Neely as a lens

Key takeaways

The Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely case acts as a Rorschach test for race, mental illness, and public safety in America.
Giridharadas argues that Jordan Neely did not 'slip through the cracks' but was actually known to authorities and discussed weekly by officials.

Main topics

The Daniel Penny/Jordan Neely subway incident
Mental health and homelessness in New York City

Notable quotes

This idea of taking matters into your own hands because no one's coming has sortof become the thread that connects Americans when so little does.

Conclusion

The episode highlights how individual tragedies are symptomatic of a d

Transcript preview

Speaker 3 (0:00) This is a journey to the heart of America through this story. This is about fear and disorder and safety and in some ways the kind of inner life of an authoritarian age, the kind of political emotions of the Trump era that we've been living in. This idea of taking matters into your own hands because no one's coming has sort of become the thread that connects Americans when so little does. And that's not what you want as your common culture. Speaker 1 (0:30) I'm Joanna Coles. This is the Daily Beast podcast. Before I forget, please don't forget to smash your subscription button wherever you are, wherever you get your podcasts, Spotify, Apple, YouTube. We are independent media. We appreciate your support by subscribing because it allows us to have the sort of freewheeling conversations that we have today with the author of a book, which is about. an incident that happened in New York City, which is really a metaphor for what's happening across America. Then, rather brilliantly, he ties it to the Epstein files and the Jeffrey Epstein of it all. I'm talking about the author Anand Gurdadas and his book Man in the Mirror, which is about the incident where a man gets on a subway car, is threatening and yelling. People are frightened. And a Marine takes him down and ends up choking him to death. You will know the people involved as Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. And Anand spends three years talking to everybody involved in that story to try and understand how it happened, how we can avoid it happening again. But really, what does it say? about the America we are living in right now. So no time to waste. Let's get into it with Anand Gerdadas and his fantastic hair. If you like the support of a sports bra but hate wearing one all day, I know exactly what you mean. Most of them feel great for a workout, but after a few hours, the straps dig in, the band gets uncomfortable, there's a uniboob and you're ready to take it off. 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Please support our show and tell them we sent you. Experience the new standard. in comfort and support with Honey Love. Speaker 1 (3:26) Welcome, Anand Gurdadas, back to the podcast. I'm so Speaker 3 (3:30) happy to be here with you. Speaker 1 (3:32) Well, very pleased to have you back. We have talked endlessly about Jeffrey Epstein on this podcast, and I'm going to bring you back to talk about Epstein at the end of this conversation and whether or not a question I am really curious about, did the Epstein class get away with it? Did the Epstein files in the end turn out to be nothing but a whimper? and has Trump won the Epstein files? But leading up to that, we want to discuss your book, Man in the Mirror, which I'm particularly interested in because as you know, this involves an incident which happened at my local subway station, so I have much more sense of it happening. It happened at 2.30 in the afternoon, and it's of course the case between Jordan Neely and Daniel Penny. Jordan Neely was a mentally ill man having an episode on the subway, and Daniel Penny was a former Marine who put him in a chokehold, and sadly, Jordan Neely died. You talk to almost everybody who was involved in this case, from the prosecutor to those who knew exactly who Jordan Neely was, because he was well known to the New York City authorities. And he represented a problem and still represents a problem that no one can figure out what to do with, which is how do you help the mentally ill who are in a state of deep distress? And this was not, as you said, someone who fell through the cracks. He was very much known to the authorities. The issue was how do you handle it? So what made you start to write this book? And what did it... tell you about the country we're living in right now, the city we're living in right now? Speaker 3 (5:23) I have a very dear friend of mine named Sam who actually called me several days after this tragic case happened in May 2023. And he said, I have your next book for you. He had felt that I had gone, felt that I was a great reporter who could tell everybody's story once. And then I'd gone in the direction more of advocacy and kind of championing a particular. way of looking at things. These people good, these people bad. I mean, we're in the Trump era. It's been a tempting era to think these people good, these people bad. And I had succumbed Speaker 2 (5:56) to Speaker 3 (5:56) it in many ways myself. And he said, look, there's a place for it. We need some people yelling Trump bad, because Trump is bad. We need people doing resistance work. We need all kinds of things. But what Sam said to me over a period of years is a lot of people can yell. a slogan or advocate or say these people go these people out. He said, what you can do, and I've seen you do, and I saw you do going back to India, but I saw you do when you did a book about a white supremacist in Texas. And he felt he'd seen me do throughout was go into a complicated story and humanize everybody. He's like, that's your superpower. And you've sort of gotten waylaid into this other thing that feels important to a lot of people right now, which is to like, be righteous. We don't need another righteous person. Speaker 3 (6:44) And Sam then called me and he said, I got your next book for you. And he said, you know, that whole argument we've been having, this is the kind of thing you should be doing. And I looked at it and I'd heard about the story over those few days, but hadn't quite registered it. And he said, look, this is a story, although it is a story about a small incident that happened between two men, one subway car, one train in New York. This is really a story about everything in America right now. This is a journey to the heart of America through this story. This is about media and sensationalism and narrative making. This is about fear and disorder and safety and in some ways the kind of inner life of an authoritarian age, the kind of political emotions of the Trump era that we've been living in. This is a story about race. This is a story about mental illness and homelessness and people on the edge of the edge of the edge of our compassion. Speaker 1 (7:42) And it's also about a split second, isn't it, where everything can change and everything did change for Jordan Neely, for Daniel Penny, for everybody who was sitting on that carriage too. At every point, there is something unexpected in this book and not everybody behaves in the way that you expect them to behave. I think that's Speaker 3 (8:02) exactly right. And what I found... was a story of profound moral complexity. The moral complexity of this incident, this was a very complicated incident in and of itself. And the complications are all around. And we don't live in a morally complicated era. We don't want to, right? We live in an era of simple slogans. And I'm speaking of myself as much as anybody else. When I do this, we live in an age in which it's very easy to identify good and bad, good and evil, nice guy, not nice guy. And this story forced me to reckon with the difficulty of looking at So to give you some examples, Jordan Neely, the black mentally ill homeless man who was killed on that train, his family afterward came out and said he should have been institutionalized. He should have been forcibly kept in hospitals. He should have been made to get well instead of kicked out. The activists who were allied with the family and standing with them at press conferences believe the opposite of that. Speaker 1 (9:04) Some of them believe Speaker 3 (9:06) that that's complete miscarriage of justice and you have no right. to do that and you have to respect the autonomy of every person. If they don't want care, they don't want care. Just within that camp, that's a fundamental schism. In the case of Daniel, Penny comes from this town in Long Island called West Islip. That's a kind of white bread, vanilla suburb in which I heard so many people talk about New York City is dangerous. Never go to that hell hole. It's fentanyl everywhere. And Daniel Penny comes out of that environment where in the evening news, the evening news is not about the town. The evening news is about how dangerous New York is 50 miles away. And Daniel Penny comes from that town and you can imagine how that might've shaped him. And yet he was the kid who didn't want to live in that town. He wanted to leave that town. He wanted to prove himself in New York and then maybe couldn't quite handle a level of disorder and ambiguity that, you know, is maybe more common in New York than West Iceland. There are complications in this larger question of how we tend to people in crisis, in psychiatric crisis. And everybody watching this, I'm sure if you live in a city or visit cities, San Francisco, Seattle, New York, Washington, Chicago, you know your version of this, LA for sure. There are people who are not doing well. actively and flagrantly in our public space. Speaker 2 (10:37) Now, Speaker 3 (10:38) there's many stories we tell and clashing stories, right? There's one story that this is the fault of systems and this is a result of a callous, uncaring society and systemic injustices. There's another story that this is like anarchy in cities and this is because of bail reform and decriminalizing. Drugs and everybody has their story. But the basic issue that we can all agree on is there's a lot of people in distress in our public space. And what I found... Speaker 1 (11:11) Are there a lot or is it that there are a few, but they have an outsized impact on people? And I think the other thing that is a connective tissue in the book that everybody experiences is a level of fear. So Jordan Neely is frightened. He's on the subway losing his mind. Daniel Penny is kind of nervous because he's been in the services and he's kind of jittery. Everybody on the subway, you know, you have that hyper alert thing going on when you're on the subway because you're expecting something maybe to happen. And we're used to people trolling up and down the carriages asking for things and you get down. And I've lived here 30 years. I've never seen a violent incident on the subway. I take the subway all the time. Every single time I get into a carriage, I think, is this the moment there's going to be some kind of incident? You know, one Speaker 3 (12:03) of the things that I found in Speaker 1 (12:04) the reporting Speaker 3 (12:04) is that for many people who work on this issue, they have found that the fear of violence is sort of the only way to get a lot of people interested in this issue. This is an issue people don't care about. Right. Except when they think of their own danger. Speaker 3 (12:27) of like, there's many more dangerous things in American life. Well, there's guns apart from anything else, right? So this is not an actual... Right, Speaker 1 (12:37) it's not a real fear. But I Speaker 3 (12:40) do think, you know, and it is exploited and overblown by the right, but I do think there is a problem from the left in... Speaker 3 (12:49) oppositely kind of minimizing the way in which this is a problem. I think it is not to say that those people are a problem. That's the wrong way to view this. And that's the dehumanizing way to view this. But I think it alters all of us to... Speaker 3 (13:09) walk past people who are suffering so much Speaker 2 (13:12) and Speaker 3 (13:13) make up whatever story we need to make up that, well, that's just how it is. It corrodes your soul to do that again and again, right? I think about, and this is something that I think becomes clear to you in some other societies. Like I think about India where my family comes from and where I lived for a long time and reported for the New York Times. A lot of living in India as a middle-class or privileged person A lot of what you are doing all day long is training yourself to not see pain and suffering because you couldn't survive in India if every person living an awful existence, if you saw it and felt it, you would melt into the street. So to survive in a place like that, you have to not see a lot of things. Not really, like literally not see. Speaker 3 (14:07) And it's not good for you. It may be what allows you to survive, but it alters all of us. And so it's a small number of people in New York. You know, there's 100,000 people in the homeless system, homeless care system.