Transcript: Mehdi Hasan on the Media, Democrats & The Crisis In Gaza

Today is going to be really a potpourri with just, I think one of the best communicators that I see in the – was in the cable world now in the independent media world. And I’m just going to get to him because we’ve got so much to get to within the world from him. So I’m just going to jump in on that. We’ll get right into it.

Very excited to have our guest today. You’ve seen him from his work on MSNBC. But also now the founder and editor in chief of ZETEO, Mehdi Hasan is here. Mehdi.

MEHDI HASAN: Jon, thanks for having me.

JON STEWART: Oh, my goodness, it’s so nice to see you. How are things at ZETEO?

Thriving in Independent Media

MEHDI HASAN: Things are very well in this horrific media climate that we’re in.

JON STEWART: Yes.

MEHDI HASAN: Where the media is falling apart. Those of us who are taking a stab at independent journalism, I’m glad to report, are thriving. We just crossed a million subscribers on YouTube, which was a landmark for us. A year in.

JON STEWART: Yeah. I think this might officially make you an influencer, if that’s possible.

The Jubilee Debate Experience

I have to tell you, I was so, like everyone else in the universe, was incredibly struck by your Jubilee episode. Now, I’m not so familiar with Jubilee, but I am familiar with Mehdi. So I tuned in, obviously, because I always love a good Mehdi debate. Mehdi goes hard and he goes fast.

It was you in the center of what appeared to be a circular firing squad of the cast of Footloose. Like, they all appeared to be these lovely Midwestern – and when they began to open their mouths, I understood it’s going to be Mehdi Hasan and it’s going to be against conservatives.

I did not in any way expect what I saw and heard, which seemed to be very focused on the fact that you don’t belong in this country and are not a citizen. And it was – was there a moment when you were in that environment where you thought, “Oh, this is not what I had expected?”

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, I think that moment was minute one. I think it was all the way through. I mean, I went thinking as well, it would be some MAGA folks, some Trump cheerleaders. Some people are like, “Tariffs are great and Donald Trump’s a wonderful leader and we hate Joe Biden.”

I didn’t expect the second or third guy saying, “Well, where were you born?” in discussion about crime. And I’m like, “What does that got to do with the crime rate?” I didn’t expect the guy just saying, “I’m a fascist and I love General Franco and I don’t believe in democracy.” I didn’t expect the woman who said, “Well, immigrants can’t be Americans. Except my parents, who are immigrants, they are Americans. Just, you’re not.” I didn’t expect the guy saying, “Get the hell out of my country. You’ll be the first to go.”

No, I didn’t expect any of that. And maybe I should have done. Maybe when they pitched it as 20 far right conservatives, that should have been a giveaway. Who self describes as far right, Jon?

JON STEWART: And it was – and there couldn’t have been more pleasant looking sounding folks. But when they started to get into that sort of “I’m not so worried about fascism because I don’t think they’re going to kill me.”

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, “I thought, I’m a good Catholic boy.”

JON STEWART: “I’m a good Catholic boy.”

MEHDI HASAN: “I don’t like the Nazis because they were mean to Catholics.” I was like, “What about the Jews?”

Surviving the Debate Gang Beat Down

JON STEWART: Listen, of course you can find some justifications in there for those types of actions. But I thought in the middle of it, there was a switch flipped in your mind which says, “Oh, this is not a debate. This is a gang beat down. And I’m just going to have to survive the nature of – how do you debate somebody who just says, ‘Oh, no, I think fascism. I think that might be the way to go, because the people will vote it in and then from then on, we’ll be fine’?”

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, very much was they were trying to do a beat down. As someone who loves action movies and comedy action movies, it did feel a little Jackie Chan-esque, where you’re kind of running up an alleyway, running up the wall, and they’re all coming at you at the same time. Although they did come one by one. So it was one of those classic fight scenes where you wonder, “Why do they go one by one?” But in this, the rules meant that they had to come one by one. Twenty to one it was.

JON STEWART: It was. You were Van Damme. You were Van Damme. You got in position.

MEHDI HASAN: I’ll take Van Damme. I’ll take Van Damme. I can’t do the splits like Van Damme. Rhetorical splits. But 20 to 1 was the – look, Jon, I like a good argument. I literally wrote a book about arguing.

JON STEWART: Yes. “How to Win Every Argument.”

MEHDI HASAN: So when Jubilee said, “Hey, do you want to come and take on 20 people?” I’m like, “I like those odds. Twenty to 1, bring it.” What I didn’t expect was that they weren’t interested in debating at all. I’d watched some of the other Jubilees with Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk and my friend Sam Seder on the left. And in those debates, some of the folks did want to debate, and a few of them were crazy. In mine, it was the other way around. Like, two of them wanted to debate and 18 were crazy.

And that’s what I didn’t see coming, the ratcheting up. I went with, like, one of my claims, Jon, was Donald Trump is defying the Constitution. That was one of my four claims. And I went prepped with the First Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Fifth Amendment, 14th Amendment, had it all. 22nd Amendment. I’m good to go. I’ve got every Amendment right. The first guy’s like, “I don’t care about the Constitution. Who cares?” Where do you go with that? What do you do next? I’m like, “I don’t have a chapter in my book for that.”

The Right’s Constitutional Hypocrisy

JON STEWART: How wonderful, though, Mehdi, that that is what this has become, that it’s such an interesting metastasizing of the movement on the right, which is – it’s always steeped in kind of the fetishizing of the Constitution. “We, the people,” they’ve got all the buses are wrapped with that Constitution picture, and it’s the flags, and it’s steeped in kind of the rhetoric of “we are the Minutemen and the revolutionaries.” And it’s morphed into, “Actually, now that I think about it, now that we are in charge, fuck the Constitution.”

MEHDI HASAN: “Fuck the Constitution.” With a little asterisk, Jon, that says, “But we love the Second Amendment.”

JON STEWART: The Second Amendment is sacrosanct. As a matter of fact, that might be the only amendment that was even put in there, if you really look at it. But it’s such a shocking change. Have you seen in your experience in debating the right that this has shifted? Was any of that constitutional fetishization good faith? Is this just a subtle shift now that Donald Trump has exposed how much authoritarianism appeals to them?

MEHDI HASAN: Look, I think it was good faith amongst a minority of them, but that’s the minority that have since become never Trumpers or mild Trump critics. So you’ve got a kind of a Rand Paul in the Senate who will make some noises about, “Oh, you can’t bomb countries without congressional authorization.” But he really got offended recently when Trump didn’t invite him to a party at the White House. So even for him, Rand Paul, it was like the Constitution –

JON STEWART: That is a step too far.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, the party invite and then the Constitution. But you’ve got Justin Amashes, who was a congressman from Michigan, libertarian. He’s been very outspoken, but he’s no longer in the party or in Congress.

The people who were in Congress and talked endlessly about the Constitution, they were clearly in bad faith. Mike Lee from Utah, the senator from Utah. This guy was the Constitutional – he never stopped talking about the Constitution and liberty, and then turns out he was involved, allegedly in the attempt to rig the – to overturn the 2020 election with the fake electors. We know now that he defends anything Trump says online. These people clearly were in bad faith.

They just confirmed this week, Jon, a manifestly unqualified, unfit judge to the federal judiciary.

JON STEWART: You’re talking about Emile Beauvais, who was the president’s personal lawyer.

The Erosion of Constitutional Principles

MEHDI HASAN: President allegedly told staff, according to whistleblowers, to “fuck the judges, tell the judges to fuck off” when they get rulings they don’t like. He’s now been confirmed to the bench. And there are some like – I think there’s a guy called Gregg Nunziata, I think his name is former Marco Rubio staffer who has been very principled on this and spoken out. And he said on Twitter this week, “If you’re a conservative who claims to care about the Constitution, this is it, it’s over. By confirming this guy, never pretend again that you care about the Constitution or about due process.”

So I don’t think it was in good faith. And even this shtick about “we don’t care about the Constitution.” The guy who said “I’m a fascist” to me on Jubilee, he was very explicit that he loves the Second Amendment. It’s just the other amendments he doesn’t love. And then he goes on a little sympathy tour last week apparently on far right TV saying he lost his job. Apparently he didn’t lose his job, he lost his job earlier. But he tried to say he lost it because of this to get a fundraiser.

Don’t forget a key part of the modern conservative movement is GoFundMe. And he interestingly, he says, “Well, my free speech was violated by being fired.” I thought, “You don’t believe in the First Amendment. I thought it was only the Second Amendment.” Like it’s so cynical and self serving and convenient.

The Victimization Complex

JON STEWART: The victimization. I almost think that the right for all their – did you ever meet Roger Ailes? Had you ever –

MEHDI HASAN: Thankfully, I did not.

JON STEWART: Oh, Mehdi, you missed out on one of the – I had one of those bananas types meetings at Fox News. In the bowels of Fox News behind –

MEHDI HASAN: It was when you were trying to get your primetime show.

The Media Landscape and Strategic Messaging

JON STEWART: I wanted to work there so bad if he would only let me. I used to go on Bill O’Reilly’s show every now and again they would bring in the clownish liberal myself and I would go on there and one day one of the people came down and said, “Mr. Ailes would like to see you.” And I thought, why? Geez, I didn’t even know he lived in the building.

So we had to walk through the kinds of like get smart, like doors would open and you didn’t really know where you were until you got into this one part of the building that was colder than the other parts of the building. You almost felt the hair on the back of your neck and the chill and you could see everybody’s breath in this one part.

And he and I yelled at each other in the office for about an hour. He wanted me to show appreciation to him because without him, I have no career. And I wanted him to stop poisoning the atmosphere and harassing his blond host around the country.

But what struck me about Ailes was he meant all of it. He meant every word of it. Yes, but the strategy was cynical, so the good faith wasn’t what he believed. It was the methodology that he would employ. And his methodology was, “I am going to discredit all of the institutions or any of the voices that may in any way harm my movement. I’m going to make sure that editorial authority is seen as elitism. And yet I am going to exercise authoritarian control over my message machine.”

And that’s, I think, the genius of that movement. They don’t play by the rules that they ask you to play by.

MEHDI HASAN: No, not at all. And this is why, and you know, I can go on a long rant here about—

JON STEWART: Please, rant.

Playing by Different Rules

MEHDI HASAN: Why liberals and Democrats and leftists have got to understand that you are not on some ridiculous even playing field where everyone—you know, I’ve been hearing this since Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015. I’ve been hearing this since he won in 2016. I’ve been hearing this since last year. “You know, just because they don’t play by the rules doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.” And it’s like, no, that’s exactly what it means.

Right. If you are playing a football match or a soccer game, as we say here, if you’re playing on the pitch and the other team picks up the ball and just runs with it in the middle of a soccer game and you carry on just playing with the ball on the ground, you will lose. I mean, there’s no debate about that. At some point, you either have to accept that you’re going to lose honorably, or you’re going to say, “I’m going to pick up the ball as well and run with it.”

JON STEWART: Now, for those listening at home, when he said pitch, he means the field. For those—I’m going to translate this into suburban American. The pitch was—

MEHDI HASAN: I’ve already confused everyone by saying football and soccer. Of course you carry the ball.

JON STEWART: People have no idea what’s happening.

MEHDI HASAN: Now, I’ve never understood why you call it football if you carry it. I just don’t understand.

JON STEWART: Well, we don’t. There’s so many more things we have to get to in the States that don’t make that much sense before we get to the names of our games, but now I’ll be told I don’t belong here again. But you surround the people.

JON STEWART: That was when you were saying that I’m a citizen. They’re like, “No, that’s not.” My favorite was when he said, “White people are Native Americans.” And everybody starts applauding. And he’s like, “I got applause.” And you just go say to the guy, like, “Well, they’re all so fascist.” Like, that’s yes.

MEHDI HASAN: And then they voted about. And I couldn’t help but dig it out. I think the people who clapped for you have just voted you out. Which was an amusing moment, but that was the guy who was like in a green T-shirt and going. His opening remark was, “I’ve got this thing where I have to stay calm.” I’m like, where the hell am I? Like, how much security did I need to bring with me? And then it turns out, according to the Guardian, this guy allegedly was involved in all sorts of violent protests a few years back in California.

JON STEWART: So I’m like, oh, you’re kidding.

MEHDI HASAN: Okay. Makes more sense now. Makes more sense.

JON STEWART: I like that he said, you know, “My family’s native here in the 1500s.” And I was like, I think, wasn’t Jamestown 16 like the first settled? I was like—

MEHDI HASAN: He was like, did you come with the Vikings?

JON STEWART: I was going to say, how could you have been here for the 1500s? Unless maybe it was the Spanish. He came up from the West Indies. Maybe he was. His people were with Cortez, which doesn’t make him John.

MEHDI HASAN: I think you’re putting far too much effort into fact checking the white supremacists.

Media Strategy and Control

JON STEWART: Mehdi, you know, it brings up though kind of that interesting point of how does the media handle this moment? You’ve been a part of those institutions. You know, MSNBC was going to be the liberal answer to Fox, but I don’t think they had any idea what they were up against. Fox News was absolutely strategically managed and controlled, top down. They understood the assignment every day part working with every other day part to create a messaging machine that would make sure that if any Republican screwed up the way Nixon had, nothing bad would happen to them again. What was your sense of what MSNBC was or what those are?

MEHDI HASAN: When I worked there? Look, my thing is, wherever I’ve worked in my career, I’ve probably been the most lefty person at that institution. And there was no different when I joined, maybe with the exception of the Intercept. But when I joined MSNBC, that was the case. I think Chris Hayes was probably the most progressive host there until I joined and I was probably to the left of Chris. And you know, I had a great time at MSNBC and I did some great shows.

But what’s interesting is I always found that critique both from the left and the right. And by the way, it’s on the left and the right, you know, oh, this idea that MSNBC is the liberal version of Fox, it’s insane. Because to say that you have to not understand what Fox is, which you understand, which is Fox is an organized propaganda arm of the Republican Party, always has been and certainly in the Trump era of the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.

And when people say, “Oh well, you’ve got Fox on the right and MSNBC on the left and CNN in the center” and a complete misreading of our landscape. First of all, they’re all corporate owned entities which have corporate agendas. Let’s just be very clear about that. So this idea that you’re left when you’re owned by Comcast is insane, right? That’s just ridiculous. When CNN now has its major shareholder, John Malone, a big Trump Donor, right?

And then there’s the issue of like, well, hold on, Fox is not just the right. Fox is a propaganda arm. Sean Hannity used to call Donald Trump up after his show every night and chew the fat. Rachel Maddow, whatever you think, Rachel Maddow did not call up Joe Biden to chat with him after her show. MSNBC anchors, some of them are ex Biden officials. But MSNBC serving anchors did not turn up at Biden rallies and introduce Biden in the same way that Fox anchors have done.

We’ve seen 20 odd Fox hosts, reporters become members of this administration. Like there is a merger between Fox and the Republican Party and especially the Trump administration which doesn’t exist in any other part of our media. And as for MSNBC, look, it obviously has liberal bent, it had liberal hosts, you know, it was good on liberal issues like abortion, but there was no organized agenda. Nobody sat around going today, right? “How do all the shows make the case for universal health care?” Just never happened. I wish that happened. It never happened, right? We did our own thing. The host, I pushed my thing, Chris pushed his thing, Joe Scarborough pushes his thing, et cetera, et cetera.

JON STEWART: Sure. The liberal host of five hours of MSNBC programming.

MEHDI HASAN: Some of the most prominent hosts on MSNBC are ex Republicans like Nicole Wallace and Joe Scarborough. That doesn’t exist on Fox. Prominent hosts on Fox are not ex Democratic members of Congress or administration members. So I just found this equalizing so ridiculous because it A doesn’t understand what Fox is doing, which is pure propaganda. B it doesn’t understand how corporate media works which is in the interests of corporations and C, it just, it also kind of, it’s the banality of evil. It makes what Fox does seem normal.

And what Fox does is sui generis. I’ve worked in the UK, no question, around the world. There is no media outlet I know of anywhere on the planet with the exception of maybe India, where cable news is insane.

JON STEWART: Really?

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. Cable news there is like pure Modi propaganda and they incite violence openly against Muslims, Pakistan, et cetera. And it’s really jingoistic. Arundhati Roy, the award winning novelist, she said to me once, you know, “Our media makes Fox on steroids, is Fox, you know, on times 100.” But Fox in the western world that I know of, I know of nothing else like Fox that pushes the kind of conspiracy theories, hate and government propaganda in a way that I just never seen it anywhere else.

The Fox Propaganda Machine

JON STEWART: And is able to pivot so agilely whenever there is, you know, so just as you said, imagine this organization that makes its bones morning to night, every single day part with a real directionality about Barack Obama. Barack Hussein Obama. I’m sorry, I didn’t pronounce his full name. You got to have all three names is born in Kenya. You know, they make their bones on the conspiratorial nature and sort of very cynically infused QAnon into their programming and—

MEHDI HASAN: Get it all cinematic universe, the Fox.

JON STEWART: Cinematic universe and all of its tentacles. And then the minute that the bomb that they planted needs to be diffused, to watch them pivot so quickly on especially something like this Epstein case is they are really good at what they do.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

JON STEWART: In a way that I think is shocking is the idea. So here’s the question. We know it’s going to be corporate media. There is nothing right now that has the power of those cable channels to amplify and continue to spin sort of the circadian rhythms of social media. So social media is the thing that first it’s incentivized for these really hateful, really difficult conspiracy theories. Right. That’s how those things the algorithm is to that. But cable news is the thing that infuses it into the mainstream of American society.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes. And eclipse.

Beyond Left vs. Right

JON STEWART: How do you battle that? And maybe it’s not a right left issue. Maybe it’s the thing you talked about earlier. Good faith, bad faith.

MEHDI HASAN: And I think, well, not just good faith, bad faith, but you know, reality versus non reality, decency versus indecency. This is not about kind of left versus right. There is a sense of my critique of Trump MAGA. Fox is not about conservatism. I mean, I have my issues with conservatism, but like when I object to what Trump and Fox are doing, it’s not because I’m arguing about what is the best marginal rate of taxation. It’s not about what is the best crime reduction policy in major cities. Like those are old debates that are still legitimate.

JON STEWART: Conservatism abandoned that a few years ago.

The Global Authoritarian Playbook

MEHDI HASAN: All those arguments, like when I turned up at Jubilee, I didn’t think I was going to be having a debate about the Laffer curve. I’m not that naive. But it is now fundamentally about do you want a strong man or not? Do you believe in equality or not? Do you think the media should be free or not? Those are the essential questions which you’re tackling.

And that’s why it’s not just about right wing propaganda. It’s about who here actually believes in the same stuff that we all used to believe in or tried to believe in. And I think that’s what’s so dangerous in this moment.

I’m not expecting a left wing Fox for many reasons. I don’t think such a thing could exist or should exist. What I do hope for is a media that still has some kind of independence, some kind of diversity of thought, some kind of adherence to basic journalistic principles of independence, of holding power to account. That’s what we’re losing right now.

I’m not some huge defender of CBS News, right? I have my criticisms of CBS like I do of all corporate media. But do I want to see CBS News become another Fox? No, I don’t. And that’s where it’s heading to right now with the recent FCC deal with the merger deal with the Trump settlement.

When I see what’s happening to ABC and CBS and maybe soon, NBC, CNN, that is worrying because as I say, India, we’ve seen this show before, Jon. This is a global playbook that Trump is borrowing from India, Turkey, Hungary. What have all these countries done? Orban, Erdogan, Modi, they’ve all taken over the media in their respective countries.

And they didn’t take over the media by sending tanks and armed men into newsrooms. They took over the media the exact same way that Trump is doing right now. Through lawsuits, through economic harassment, through defaming and smearing journalists, through violently attacking journalists who are covering protests, through all of these methods, through hollowing out public media, NPR, PBS, defunding.

This is the playbook in India, in Hungary, in Turkey, in Russia, in Israel and here in the United States. Now, this is a very, very clear global playbook. And I think we need to wake up to that fast.

The Strategic Alliance of Populism and Authoritarianism

JON STEWART: I think you’re absolutely right, Mehdi. And I think part of it is what Trump understands and you have to give, and I have to give credit to him. And I don’t know if you’ve ever heard anything Steve Bannon, who I think is in many ways, you know, they always just call Karl Rove the architect. I think he’s the architect.

He understood this melding of populist rhetoric with kind of the more authoritarian anti woke Christian nationalists, melding those movements together strategically to gain the political advantage. There was the way that they went, you know, people always thought, oh, Russia must have something on Trump. He doesn’t have anything on Trump because they agree with each other on how to govern and what you would want to do.

You want less gay. You want more Jesus, even if you don’t believe in Jesus at all, which I don’t think Trump is a religious person, but he understands it as a really wonderful force, amplifier of power. And it’s almost as though those discussions, you know, you were just saying the Laffer Curve and all that, all those discussions, I think, are out the window. It’s no longer capitalism versus socialism or communism or any of this.

MEHDI HASAN: It’s, do you agree with Daddy or not?

JON STEWART: That’s right. And the framework of it is woke versus unwoke.

MEHDI HASAN: That’s how they framed it. Yes, that’s right. And more than Steve Bannon, of course, who’s now kind of on the outside is the guy on the inside is our de facto Vice president, Stephen Miller.

JON STEWART: Boy, that dude, that’s he’s dark.

MEHDI HASAN: He’s got his hand in every pot. I think he wants to be National Security Advisor now, too. Once Rubio stops acting as National Security advisor, he’s obviously the guy pushing the deportation agenda. He’s pushing the attacks on the media.

The irony of being Jewish and being part of a Christian nationalist, white supremacist administration. Stephen Miller’s been kind of cozying up to white supremacists for years. That is very much the agenda. And again, they didn’t hide this stuff. They said it very plainly.

Donald Trump said, “I want to be a dictator for day one,” because the dictators are only ever for 24 hours. Do you remember in his first time, he did an interview with Steve Doocy on the White House lawn? He said, “I just came back from North Korea, and the way they stand up straight for Kim, why can’t my people do that?”

You know what they say about Donald Trump, you know, he’s a liar, but occasionally he tells the truth, and that was a very truthful statement. He does wish for his people to stand up straight and salute him. He got his crappy military parade this summer. It was deeply disappointing that he got that. He was desperate for.

Military Displays and Authoritarian Aspirations

JON STEWART: He was angry about his military parade in that he didn’t realize that the tanks were all going to be lined up with safe stopping distance in case it was rainy. He wanted the I want all my weapons within two feet of each other. I was like, I want bumper to bumper.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. And he wanted the goose stepping, you know, military authoritarian displays and all that.

JON STEWART: And it turned out to be kind of a nice, maybe grade 8 to grade 10 little military history parade.

MEHDI HASAN: And you had soldiers dragging their feet and not goose stepping. Thankfully, some of them showing their own acts of resistance.

JON STEWART: They were waving.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

JON STEWART: When was the last time you saw a North Korea parade where the guys would pop out of the tanks and be like, “Hey, everybody.” I mean, it looked like Disney.

The Erosion of Democratic Norms

MEHDI HASAN: So the good news is we’re not there yet. The bad news is, as the jubilee debate showed, there’s an aspiration to be there very soon. And the authoritarianism on the right is off the charts. This desperation for a strong leader, for canceling the Constitution, for getting rid of judges.

You look at the polling now amongst Republicans, the number of Republicans who say there should be no checks on the President, Congress should not be able to block the President. The judiciary should not be able to block the President. That is a very worrying sign.

And again, there was this complacency in the United States of America. I came here 10 years ago, I became a citizen five years ago. I have a little bit of an outsider perspective, and I have to remind my fellow Americans, it can happen here. This idea that the United States of America is immune to authoritarian, global authoritarian trends, especially when you have a tribune like Trump, who is Teflon when it comes to scandal and controversy, that makes it doubly worse for the US.

The Business Model of Friction

JON STEWART: He has understood that some of the guardrails that were, you know, people always think like, oh, well, the businesses will save us, because they don’t want the trouble, they don’t want the volatility. What Trump understands is people don’t want friction. And if I can create enough friction in their world.

It’s the same way he ran his businesses, by the way, like what he would do to contractors. He would pay them about 75% to 80% of what he owed them, knowing that the hassle and the friction that they would need to go through to get that last bit. So he got himself a savings, and that’s the way he’s approaching this entire country.

MEHDI HASAN: Look, he’s calling for a settlement with Fox. You’ve seen that this week, right? Yes, he said this week, or he said Fox wants to settle with him.

JON STEWART: Which is planting the idea that that is out there.

Corporate America’s Complicity

MEHDI HASAN: He’s very good at kind of testing the waters. Rupert Murdoch is an old pal of his, so he’s obviously put him on the spot. We saw what happened in the Dominion case, where they settled immediately when they realized Tucker Carlson’s texts were going to come out in droves.

And look, this is what he’s Corporate America. This idea that corporate America is going to save us is the most insane one of all. Fascism is indeed, an alliance between the strongman and big business always has been, no question going back to Italy, Germany, et cetera.

And that’s what’s so depressing about some of these corporations bending the knee. This idea that they’re all being bullied into it isn’t actually true. A lot of them are happy to go along with the anti diversity stuff. They’re happy to go along with the crackdowns on campuses, if you’re a university leader. They’re happy to go along with kind of ending any kind of initiatives to fight racism.

And of course, he rewards them with massive tax cuts. Right. We just passed this big beautiful or ugly bill, and who’s going to benefit from that? The owners of the big tech companies and the social media giants, the owners of the corporate media outlets and the boards of those major networks. So he knows how to reward them and also how to bully them. It’s a mixture of fear and greed on their part.

The New World Order of Ethno-Nationalism

JON STEWART: You know, as we look at this and we think okay, this is a function of Donald Trump, but it’s not. There’s this ethno nationalism that is arising. You know, you mentioned Modi and you mentioned Orban and Putin. It really feels like we move from and it was never particularly stable. There was always conflagration wherever you went.

But it’s a new world order that goes back to the idea of, and to quote Thomas Shelby from Peaky Blinders, “Big fuck Small,” that this is about what you can get away with through your coercion and power and what limits. And now you’re seeing him apply it mostly to former allies, the EU.

You know, he is much more willing to, as you said, lionize North Korea and Russia and these other authoritarian governments, and much less, to him, the EU is just too gay. It’s too gay for Trump. He likes those heterosexual countries like North Korea.

MEHDI HASAN: The classic example of that was, of course, Ukraine and Zelensky in the Oval Office, where he and Vance ganged up to berate Zelensky, but they would never dare to behave in that way in Putin’s presence. Well, speak about Putin when he’s not in the room.

Trump has said more vicious things about Justin Trudeau than he’s ever said about Xi Jinping. That’s just a fact, right? It’s a demonstrable fact. And you have to ask the question, why? Why is this US President? I’m not saying previous US Presidents were great defenders of liberal democracy. All US Presidents have cozied up to authoritarians and tyrants.

But I don’t remember one that’s done so as enthusiastically, as gleefully as Donald Trump, in the belief that he, too, should have those authoritarian powers at home. “Why can’t I have what they have?” And I think Netanyahu’s cut from the same cloth. I think Orban is cut from all of these illiberal democracies, people who are notionally elected but would love to be dictators, like your Xi Jinpings and your Kim.

Constitutional Vulnerabilities

JON STEWART: Well, sure. And you see in the different ways that they go about. I mean, Netanyahu, they try and get it so that there’s no Supreme Court now, you know, they try and maneuver any of those. It reminds me of the real triumph of this is Trump has shown us where the cracks are in our democratic system.

And I think that one of the things that’s difficult, and I wonder your opinion about this for us constitutionally, is to realize a lot of these excesses and abuses are built into the system.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, 100%.

JON STEWART: He’s going out, and basically he’s got a couple of historians that sit in the back and go, “Hey, man, I just wanted to let you know, in 1803, there was an emergency power we used on immigration. You might as well just declare that, because you get to do whatever you want.”

I mean, look, the most progressive president supposedly we’d ever had in this country is FDR, and he basically suspended habeas corpus on anybody of Asian descent and interned them in camps. This darkness has always been in the system.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, and the second most progressive president, LBJ, just did a mass genocide in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.

JON STEWART: Right.

Constitutional Reform and Democratic Failures

MEHDI HASAN: So there’s precedent for all this at home and abroad. Look, I 100% agree with you, Jon. I’ve been ranting and raving about constitutional reform, political reform in this country for a long time. Again, as an outsider, you come in and you think, “This doesn’t work and no one else does it.” Like this Electoral College. What the hell is that? Like, no one else uses this stuff.

You know, the whole gerrymandering right now that Texas is doing and now Gavin Newsom says he’ll do for the Democrats. No other Western democracy allows politicians to draw their own boundaries. None. Only the US allows politicians to pick their voters rather than voters picking their politicians. That’s a problem. There are so many issues.

And the problem is the Democrats left this space open. Right. And I say this about both wings of the Democratic Party are guilty of this. The liberal, centrist wings, the whatever you want to call it, the Biden wing and the Bernie wing. Right, The Bernie Sanders, bless him. I agree with him on universal health care. I agree with him on taxing the rich and minimum wage. But I’ve never heard from that wing of the party about constitutional reform, political reform, because they’re also institutionalists.

Bernie loves the Senate. The Senate’s got to go. Right? The Senate is a huge problem. The Senate’s a huge problem. We’ve got to reform. We’ve got to reform the Senate. You cannot have a state situation going forward where Wyoming has two senators for, like, 12 people.

JON STEWART: Well, if you want to get rid of DEI, the Senate is affirmative action for old, old, white, rural dudes.

MEHDI HASAN: Affirmative action for Wyoming.

JON STEWART: Like, there’s no question.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. Like 12 people get two senators and like 50 million people in California get two senators. Like, the whole thing is insane. And I think there’s so many things at the Supreme Court. Right. What we’ve seen this week is another reminder that the Republicans game. The system rigged. The judiciary packed the courts after accusing. The Democrats are wanting to pack the courts. Every accusation is a confession.

And meanwhile, Joe Biden, he did a report in his first year. He commissioned an independent report from the Great and the Good on what to do about the Supreme Court. They came up with a bunch of milquetoast recommendations. He ignored them all and kicked it into the long grass. And here we are with a 6-3 Supreme Court, maybe 7-2. God forbid, if Trump gets another one, he’s lucky enough to get four, which would be insane. So that complete vacating of the field. The pitch on constitutional and political reform is a huge problem.

JON STEWART: Don’t go back to Europe on us now.

MEHDI HASAN: Got to go to the pitch. The pitch. The pitch. My pitch is that on the pitch of reform, we need to fix that. And the next Democratic president cannot simply say, “Oh, I will be…” You know, remember Harris, “We’re not going back” was her thing. Right. You cannot just be. “We’re going to move beyond Trump and go back to business as usual.” It has to be. “We’re going to prevent future authoritarians from trying to destroy the system from within.”

Like the idea that, for example, you know, basic conflict of interest laws don’t apply to the president. When you have a president like Trump, like the founding fathers did not anticipate the guy from Home Alone 2 becoming president of the United States. They just didn’t. It’s a fact. You want to talk about intent, Their intent was not to build a system for Donald Trump.

Power Imbalance and Democratic Representation

JON STEWART: I have to take a… If you look at Federalist Paper 37 Hamilton said there will be a sequel of a very famous. It really speaks to… I mean, think about when we talk about sort of representative democracy. And again, this gets us back to the spirit of the revolution, the people, taxation without representation.

So we live in a country that is by all measures very closely divided politically. But there is one side that has 78 million voters, a lot of people that do it, and zero power. And I’m talking about like can’t call a witness, can’t hold a committee meeting, can’t do. There is zero power invested right now in the 70 some million people that vote for Democrats. They have… And I’m talking on the federal level, obviously within state systems, it’s slightly different. I don’t recall that. Power sharing, the group. We really are in a joint custody agreement right now. And right now the country is living with dad and it really does.

MEHDI HASAN: But… But the problem is the country’s living with dad, Jon. Yeah, but dad is offering the kids all sorts of fake gifts. Maybe he’ll never give them those gifts, but he’s offering them, “Oh, sure,” pretending to be the greatest dad of all.

JON STEWART: No, they like living with dad.

MEHDI HASAN: They like, they like, they like living. He, he may beat them a little, but they like being beaten by dad. And I think the problem is, is Mum, to use a British phrase, or Mum going to offer. What is she going to offer to get the kids back?

And I think the problem is the Democrats have had power, Jon. They may not have power right now, but they had power. They controlled all three branches of government.

JON STEWART: They had it during the Obama administration.

MEHDI HASAN: They had the House, the Senate, not the Supreme Court, but the House, the Senate and the White House. And they had it during Obama. They had it to an extent under Biden, and they just didn’t use it in the way they should have used it. And the question is, can they promise the American people that next time we get those gavels, next time we’re in the Oval Office, we are going to fight A, on your behalf, but also B, against those corrupt fools.

And I think that is a fundamental problem. You know, the person I blame most for Donald Trump’s existence in the White House right now is not Stephen Miller, is not Steve Bannon is not the fascist on Jubilee. It is a man named Merrick Garland who sat on his ass for three years.

The Merrick Garland Problem

JON STEWART: Oh, thank God. I thought you were going to say me. No, I don’t blame you, Mehdi. I’m so pleased that you… I don’t so really merit by his timidity.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes, 110%.

JON STEWART: Don’t you think it’s deeper than… Doesn’t that let too many Democrats off the hook?

MEHDI HASAN: Look, of course it’s deeper than. That was a rhetorical flourish. But my point is, if I’m going to identify, if I’m going to identify a symbol of symbol, a symbol, a human symbol of the wider fecklessness, caution, cowardice of the Democratic Party than it…

JON STEWART: Is Merrick Garland, I needed wider fecklessness. That’s all I needed.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes. Merrick Garland is the tribune and symbol of that. He’s the guy who, don’t forget, they didn’t just make him Attorney general when he was manifestly not the right person in that moment, but they cheered him. They were like, “Wow, this is a fu to MAGA. They wouldn’t put him on the Supreme Court. We put him in the DOJ.” Well, maybe he wasn’t appropriate for the DOJ. Right.

They should have put in someone, an Elizabeth Warren figure, someone who would go into the DOJ and prosecute all these authoritarian. January 6th happened and he dragged his feet. Donald Trump never saw the inside of a courtroom for January 6th. That is… I will never get over that. I will never. To my dying days, I’ll be on the deathbed, I’ll say, “Damn you, Merrick Garland.” Donald Trump never saw the inside of a courtroom. That is a scandal for that they…

JON STEWART: They tried to Capone him. We can’t get you on sedition and overthrowing the government.

MEHDI HASAN: But by the way, that wasn’t Merrick Garland. Right. Even New York wasn’t Merrick Garland. It was local. It wasn’t the federal government.

JON STEWART: Exactly. No, that’s Letitia James and it’s, you know, everybody else.

MEHDI HASAN: Federal government had to be dragged kicking and screaming. The funny thing is, I heard Republicans before you say they’re weaponizing the government against us. I wish, I wish they had weaponized the government against you. They did the exact opposite. Joe Biden said, “I’ve got to stay above the fray and not say anything about these cases.” Merrick Garland wouldn’t say anything. His deputy wouldn’t say anything. And the federal cases came from Jack Smith. He outsourced that to a special counsel.

Like this is… It was just insanity to see the past. The next Democratic administration has to run on a platform of “We are going to prosecute the people who did these crimes.” You know, all those masked ICE agents committing crimes on our streets. They need to be prosecuted by the next Democratic administration, the next Democratic Congress.

JON STEWART: It’s… But that’s letting the the, the, the leaders of it off the hook. That’s going after the rank and file.

MEHDI HASAN: Of course, and the leaders. I’m taking for granted the leaders. I’m saying exact… We can’t have a Barack Obama coming in in 2008 and saying, “Hey, we tortured some folks, but I want to look forward, not back.”

Learning from Trump’s Tactics

JON STEWART: That’s a great point. But the other issue with that era of Democratic politics was they ran on the audacity of what was possible and they governed on the timidity of what they think they might be able to get through with the checks and balances. And you can’t have that dichotomy.

But isn’t there an opportunity then, Mehdi, in the way that Donald Trump showed the cracks in the democratic system and that he weaponized our own excesses against us in terms of emergency powers and all the things that were possible, hasn’t he also shown the Democrats and here are the levers of power that you can use for coercion.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

JON STEWART: That you can actually say, “Oh, do you really think Democrats are the only people that have tax exemptions that can be threatened? Are you kidding me? Do you really think there are no education, that you can’t bend the will of corporations who don’t want friction to do your bidding?”

MEHDI HASAN: So I’ll just give you a couple of quick examples. Number one, Elon Musk, right? Donald Trump and Elon Musk went to war. Most richest man in the world. Donald Trump says, “I’m going to cancel his contracts.” And immediately. Musk deleted his tweet saying he was in the Epstein files and has gone pretty quiet by Musk’s standards.

JON STEWART: That’s right.

MEHDI HASAN: Why didn’t Joe Biden do that? In fact, the opposite. Chuck Schumer hosted Elon Musk in his office in the Senate a couple of years ago.

JON STEWART: Right.

MEHDI HASAN: This guy declared war on the Democratic Party. And the Democratic Party said, “Would you like some more contracts, sir?” Right. That was an insane approach to Elon Musk. Trump showed that you can actually take on the richest man in the world if you’re president of the United States. He did it. There is a template for it.

Another example for Senate Democrats when they were trying to get the minimum wage rise through, the parliamentarian said, “You can’t put it in the bill.” I was on MSNBC at the time. We had did multiple segments about the parliamentarian. No one knows who she is. She wasn’t elected by anyone. Chuck Schumer said, “Conduit parliamentarian said, no,” this time around, the parliamentarian said, “Well, you can’t do some stuff in this big beautiful bill.” The Republicans said, “Get lost.” They wouldn’t even meet with the parliamentarians. Right.

So the template is there, if you want to get done, you can. The problem is Democrats don’t want to get done. And they hide behind institutional excuses. They say we can’t do it because of parliamentarians, but really they don’t want to.

The Real Problem with Democratic Governance

JON STEWART: No. That’s interesting though, because that says something different in, in your mind. They don’t actually want…

MEHDI HASAN: Because my feeling is let’s not make sweeping statements. Some do, right. And some are beholden to their donors.

JON STEWART: But this is where we get into the… Merrick Garland is at fault or the way that Democrats govern. I still, you know, as much as the ACA got some more people, some health insurance, it never addressed the rot at the basis of our health care system that allowed, you know, these insurance companies to make…

So basically what the Democrats said was, “We understand that one of the greatest threats to liberty and freedom in this country is poverty and not having health care. And it limits your choices and you can’t leave jobs and all these other things. But instead of dealing with that, here’s what we think we can do. Convince insurance companies that if we guarantee you billions of dollars and a fire hose of money…”

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah.

JON STEWART: That you’ll pretend to offer people a good alternative, not just insurance companies.

The Obama Healthcare Strategy and Republican Appeasement

MEHDI HASAN: The plan was to win over Republicans, right? Barack Obama was bent on winning over Republicans and that’s why he borrowed a Mitt Romney plan. Obamacare was fundamentally a version of Romneycare in Massachusetts and he thought this will win over moderate Republicans.

Instead, they spent the next 10 years obsessing over Obamacare. It became a dirty word for Republicans. They never gave him any credit for doing a very moderate, conservative style proposal for health care reform.

And this is the problem. They will never give you credit. Stop trying to appease them. I think that any Democrat who in this current moment says the word “bipartisanship” should be immediately primary. It just shows you’re not prepared for this moment we’re in.

This current, modern Republican Party will never credit you for anything. Joe Biden bent over backwards to his old friends in the Senate who he hung out in the gym with for decades. They all went against him. No one gave him any credit. All of them voted against his major legislation, which was bipartisan legislation apart from the infrastructure one. So it was a fool’s mission to do that.

By the way, you said something earlier about exposing the cracks. The fundamental thing Donald Trump has shown us is that the rules of American politics don’t have to apply if you don’t want them to apply.

JON STEWART: That’s right.

Democratic Self-Limitation vs. Republican Ambition

MEHDI HASAN: And therefore you can be ambitious over ambitious. Ro Khanna, who I know, you know, who is probably going to run for president as a lefty in 2028, he gave a speech recently, he said, “Look, our ambitions, Democrats, we always limit our ambitions,” as you just pointed out. ACA, we can’t go there. We’ll go here.

JON STEWART: They negotiate against themselves.

MEHDI HASAN: Negotiate themselves. Meanwhile, Republicans are like, “Well, we’re just going to annex Greenland.” Huh? Did you poll test that? Did you focus group it?

Democrats are sitting there getting every focus group, every policy consultant to check every policy for costings and how is it going to be received? And Donald Trump’s like, “I’m going to invade Greenland.” And that is the difference right now.

And I think the next Democratic presidential candidate, and I say this only half seriously or only half jokingly, depending on how you want to view it, the next Democratic candidate has to be able to stand up and say, “I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a $30 minimum wage.” When the press say, “Well, how are you going to pay for that?” “Oh, I fucking will. Believe me, it’s going to be amazing. I’ll do it in day one, 24 hours, you will have a $30 minimum wage.” You have to be able to say this stuff.

JON STEWART: Right. Just. You got to take that same rhetoric and flip it on its head. I think there’s no question. I think because one of the things that it exposed is that sort of the pace of democracy is not keeping up with the pace of technology, and it’s not keeping up with the pace of modern life.

And whatever we want to say about Donald Trump, even when he’s going off the rails, the people believe he’s doing shit.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes.

JON STEWART: And they want shit to be done. And almost to the point where. And now we’re stuck with the remnants of these sort of sclerotic institutions that the Democrats have built, not on principle, but on sort of what they thought might be possible.

Biden’s Record and Democratic Messaging Failures

MEHDI HASAN: And the inability to run on your record, which, of course, Joe Biden was a very poor messenger for his own record. I thought his domestic record was pretty good, relatively speaking. I thought his foreign policy was horrific.

Although even on Foreign Policy in 2021, Joe Biden ended America’s longest war, the war in Afghanistan. It was a hugely popular move. You wouldn’t have believed it from the media coverage, where it was only sold as a disastrous departure. And everything in the departure and the departure was not non chaotic. I agree.

But he ended the war in Afghanistan, something that Bush, Obama, Trump could not do. It was a hugely popular move. Isn’t it interesting the Democrats went into last year’s election looking like the warmongering party, while the Republicans sold themselves as the anti war party. Donald Trump went to Michigan and said, “I’m the peace candidate. I am peace.” I didn’t hear any Democrats say we ended America’s longest war.

JON STEWART: None of these wars would have started if I were here. But the interesting thing is when that gets exposed again, nothing damages, nothing permeates it. I’ve always said, you know, the Democrats are Wile E. Coyote and Donald Trump is roadrunner. And they keep thinking “we got him now.”

Trump’s Vulnerabilities on Immigration

MEHDI HASAN: So I want to push back, Jon. Can I push back? Mildly. I agree with you to. I agree with you to a certain extent and we’ll see how this Epstein thing pans out. But I don’t think we should fall into the trap of just giving him the inevitability of immunity.

JON STEWART: No, he’s not an X man. I don’t mean that like he’s, you know, magneto.

MEHDI HASAN: So one example I often give is immigration. That’s the issue he’s supposed to be strong on.

JON STEWART: Right.

MEHDI HASAN: Came in, “I’m going to cut the border.” And Americans apparently anti. Look at the polls he’s cratered on immigration. New York Times Siena poll a couple of months ago found that his most unpopular issue, the single most unpopular issue for Trump in his first hundred days was his handling of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and the deportation to El Salvador.

We were told by Republicans that’s an 80-20 issue. Democrats on the wrong side of it. Nobody wants to be on the side of MS-13. In fact, no, the American public said no. We don’t want people being deported who haven’t committed any crimes. We don’t want judges being ignored. We don’t want people being sent to a gulag in El Salvador. We don’t want our American Latino citizens being picked up outside of Home Depot just because they’re brown.

He’s hugely unpopular on the immigration issue. And Hakeem Jeffries, allegedly, he denies this. Allegedly told Democrats, “Stop talking about this, stop going to El Salvador.” Actually, Senator Chris Van Hollen and Congressman Maxwell Frost and Democrats who went to El Salvador, they were on the right side of the issue and they did politically hurt Trump.

JON STEWART: Yeah, I guess my point with that is, you can politically hurt him. You can drive down his numbers, but nothing changes. You can, you know, like you say, he can poll at 35% on immigration, but he doesn’t give a fuck. He just goes out there and he continues to raid Home Depots.

He’s never been a particularly popular president. Probably the peak of his popularity was during that second inauguration where there was even some level of like he might be above 50 or 51% in terms of he’s always been a low 40s, sometimes dips into 30s guy. My point is, even with all that, there’s nothing he hasn’t been able to do that he wants to ultimately do. And the Democrats have not figured out a way how to effectively manage that. And I guess that was.

MEHDI HASAN: Or replicate it, Jon.

JON STEWART: Or replicate it. That’s right.

Kamala Harris’s Campaign Mistakes

MEHDI HASAN: Democrats remain scared of their own shadows and in hock to their consultants, you know, while Trump just does what he’s got to do. And sometimes it works out for him, sometimes it doesn’t.

I mean, Kamala Harris, we know now from all the reporting of the election, she started off strong, she had a lead, she said some populist stuff, she had a great convention and then thought.

JON STEWART: What if I hold hands with Liz Cheney and we just, what if we do, we walk across the country, what.

MEHDI HASAN: If I hold hands with Liz Cheney? What if I go on the View and say nothing will change, there’ll be no difference between me and Joe Biden. What if I listen to my brother in law from Uber and stop talking about big corporations and greedflation? Yeah, that worked out well.

The Collapse of International Institutions

JON STEWART: Yeah. And I wonder too now, you know, all the talk of “I’m the peace candidate” and “I’m doing this” and as we watch the bombings in the Ukraine, the horrific tragedy that’s happening in Gaza, you know, all that stuff clearly was nonsensical.

But what institutions do we have now that have any viability to try and stop these terrible like the Israel, Gaza situation. To me, to have to have that go on and the world seemingly shrug. I mean now you’re seeing a little bit of like, “Hey, are those people starving?” Like starvation doesn’t happen in a week. This is months and years of a seed. Like what mechanisms do we have in the world now?

MEHDI HASAN: Not many. And the few that we had have been undermined by Netanyahu, Trump, Biden, Starmer. I mean for me what’s so astonishing is we spent decades building a post war quote unquote “rules based order,” which as a lefty I was far from happy with a deeply flawed system. But we had some kind of system, a UN Security Council, Geneva Conventions, International Court of Justice, an International Criminal Court, which America didn’t sign up to, but most of the world did.

And all of that has been burned down in the interest of protecting one nation, one government, one prime minister. And I think historians will look back and think, what an astonishing sight to see all of it burned down. All of those institutions, anytime they’ve spoken out, they have been accused of being Hamas, accused of being anti Semitic, accused of being anti American.

The United States government has sanctioned the International Criminal Court, judges and prosecutor. They have threatened foreign governments for doing anything to help the Palestinians. They’ve gone after South Africa for bringing that case to the International Court of Justice. It is really, really problematic.

This is much wider than Gaza. Gaza is a tragedy and a horror show, perhaps the worst of our lifetime. But going forward, this is going to have ripple effects that will affect conflicts and peoples all across the world. Good luck to any Western government ever lecturing another government about human rights or. It’s just insane.

JON STEWART: Oh, it sets a permission structure for any other bad actors to, to. Basically, that’s what I said earlier about sort of this, you know, big fuck.

MEHDI HASAN: Small, but the law of the jungle.

JON STEWART: The law of the jungle. That’s right. And, and a permission structure. I guess my, my question even in that part of the world is, you know, why hasn’t there been, you know, Erdogan will say, “Israel can’t do this, I’m going to attack.” And then like, nothing. And there’s never any sense that there is a coalition of the willing for the world to step in and at least separate the combatants.

The Death of Liberal Interventionism

MEHDI HASAN: Do you remember, you’re old enough, Jon, like I am, to remember kind of the late 90s when we all talked about the responsibility to protect liberal interventionism.

JON STEWART: Kosovo, Clinton, Blair, it was all about peacekeeping forces. It was all about the United nations peacekeeping forces.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah. And, and that was going into national sovereign countries. This is going into an occupied territory. No, the inability. Remember, remember the first couple of years of Ukraine I spent arguing on my show MSNBC with people like, “Should we have a no fly zone?” That was a big debate. Like, should the US impose a no fly zone over Ukraine to protect the people of Ukraine?

I mean, the people in Gaza have never had the benefits of a no fly zone. The people in Gaza have never had the benefits of peacekeepers, and the people.

JON STEWART: In America don’t know what’s going on. I mean, that’s the other thing you have to remember is we’re seeing a very different we don’t see the images in the same way that the rest of the world is watching a very different show than we’re watching.

The Power of Social Media and Democratic Disconnect

MEHDI HASAN: I think a lot of Americans, thankfully, are watching on social media. And as much as I loathe Mark Zuckerberg, Instagram has been invaluable for Palestinians getting their voices out. And I think people who have seen stuff on social media differ from people who haven’t. And I think that’s very clear. I think people aren’t seeing the scenes obviously that you see on Al Jazeera or anywhere else. But most people by now do recognize what’s going on.

And I think the real problem, Jon, is not ignorance. It is the inability to do anything about the knowledge that we have. And I think the real Democratic… I just talked earlier about the international repercussions of Gaza and what it’s done to international law and the Geneva Convention and human rights groups, all of whom have been discredited.

Every dictator in the world will say, “I can bomb hospitals, Israel did. I can ignore human rights groups, Israel did. I can keep foreign journalists out, Israel did.” All those precedents.

But worse than that at home democratically, it has exposed the United States Democratic dysfunction, that you have huge numbers, majorities of Americans, big majorities of Democrats saying cease fire now, restrict arms to Israel. And that is not reflected in Congress at all.

There’s polling out this week about how unpopular the war in Gaza is. I think it’s only got a 32% approval rate amongst the American public. In Congress, it’s got a 90% approval rate. So how do you explain that disconnect? That 90% of legislators support something that only 30% of Americans do? At what point does that become intolerable? At what point do people wake up and say, “We’re just not represented here by the people in power?” There’s such a massive disconnect, right?

JON STEWART: It’s a consent to the governed.

MEHDI HASAN: And that’s on the Republican side too, by the way, Jon, you’re seeing Republicans under the age of 50, rapidly turning on Israel.

The Broader Pattern of Democratic Dysfunction

JON STEWART: But the dynamic that you’re talking about, about the consent of the govern is also, though, what drove these right wing populist movements. The only difference is it’s not Gaza, it’s immigration or migration. And as you’re seeing that take over in the world, these are the competing things we keep thinking about.

I think all the time about 90% of the people in this country believe sensible gun restrictions are a necessity to keep us from every time you hear a pop running out of malls.

MEHDI HASAN: Not reflected in Congress.

JON STEWART: All of those things that people want, but it doesn’t seem to hold the power that loss of national identity seems to be holding around the world. There’s no matter what issue you want to pick on and where the public sentiment is and where the polling is, it all pales into the comparison to the feeling of “we’re going to lose our Americanness, we’re going to lose our…”

MEHDI HASAN: It is a very powerful trend and you saw it.

JON STEWART: Not to wrap it back around to Jubilee, but that’s what you faced down that day.

The Jubilee Experience and Anti-Semitic Undercurrents

MEHDI HASAN: Well, I’m glad you brought it back to Jubilee, because I was about to bring it back to Jubilee. It was interesting. Was not just the power of that identity and the obsession. They didn’t want to debate anything but immigration. They didn’t care about any of my other claims. They only came to talk about immigration.

But what was interesting is I had a claim on Gaza. I said Trump’s plan for Gaza is ethnic cleansing. A lot of those white supremacists refuse to come up and debate me on that. Why? Because they’re anti Israel and they’re not anti Israel because they care about the Palestinian people. They’re anti Israel because of the people in Israel. There’s a massive anti-Semitic street on the right.

JON STEWART: I have Twitter. I’m aware of the massive anti-Semitic strait.

MEHDI HASAN: But what’s interesting is how it’s being mainstreamed through Gaza. And this is why I say to Jewish friends of mine who are supporters of Israel, be careful of the alliances you make. The folks on the right, a lot of them are using the same MAGA America first national identity argument to actually try and disconnect from Israel.

And a lot of people left like, “Great. Isn’t it great that Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene and all these folks are on our side now?” And I’m like, “I’m not sure I want them on our side because they’re not on our side for the same reasons.”

JON STEWART: That’s right.

MEHDI HASAN: We’re on our side because we care about Palestinian human rights and dignity and self determination, not because we’re anti Jewish or anti-Semitic. Unfortunately, a lot of these younger MAGA supporters are driven by this idea of national identity, Christian national and therefore Muslims and Jews have no role in America.

And I would say this, when the pro Israel lobby is canceling people, getting people fired, pressuring members of Congress, supporting people like Randy Fine from Florida who says, “Yeah, let them starve, let’s nuke Gaza.”

JON STEWART: You know what, by the way, Randy Fine actually went too far.

MEHDI HASAN: Yes. For AIPAC.

JON STEWART: Even for AIPAC, AIPAC was like, “Hey.”

MEHDI HASAN: You can’t say that out loud.

JON STEWART: Actually, that part I think we may have to.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, that part you shouldn’t say on Twitter.

JON STEWART: That’s right.

MEHDI HASAN: But my point being is a lot of these Trump MAGA folks are like, “Well, we don’t want Israel controlling our politics. We don’t want these Jews telling us what to do.” There’s a dangerous trend there, which, I mean, there’s so many different fallouts and threads from Gaza, and I think that is one of them that a lot of people aren’t paying enough attention to.

The Need for Authentic Democratic Leadership

JON STEWART: Mehdi, where do you see the energy? What is going to be the way that this sort of idea that you’re talking about on the left, how is that going to coalesce, do you think? It’s a function of… If you look at the Democratic autopsy, they’re all like, “Oh, I think the way the Democrats can do this is that you just go on Theo Vaughn and that should take care of everything.”

MEHDI HASAN: Which Pete Buttigieg is doing.

JON STEWART: Buttigieg is doing. And you see them all sort of positioning now strategically for all this, the variety of things. What I love about what you do is there’s a tenacious moral principle to everything that you put out there, and you do it in a way that is when you argue with people, there has to be a relentlessness to it.

I don’t think that the Democrats have the foundational right now, moral and principled stance to be able to be relentless in a very directional way, because the only way to battle these is you have to match their… The one thing that I always gave Ailes was like 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That dude was the great white shark of making his political identity the ruling identity of this country.

MEHDI HASAN: I think you’re… First of all, thank you for your kind words. Second of all, I 100% agree with you on the 24/7 nature of this. The problem we have, and I mentioned Buttigieg a moment ago, is Buttigieg went on a podcast recently. I saw a clip on my social media where he said he was asked about Mamdani, Zoran Mamdani, who’s doing a fantastic job of actually doing everything Democrats need to be doing in New York right now in terms of energy, in terms of messaging, in terms of authenticity, in terms of winning over young men and all these groups.

The Democrats struggle with and he said, “Oh, well, we need to borrow… I’m paraphrasing, but Buttigieg… Something along the lines of we need to borrow his style. I don’t necessarily agree with all his policies,” which is kind of missing the wood from the trees or the forest from the trees. I’m getting my British American names mixed up.

JON STEWART: You go back to the pitch, you’ll find it.

MEHDI HASAN: The pitch. I’ll find it on the pitch. And I think the key point there is no. You need the substance and the style. You can’t just pick and choose. Mamdani is not just doing well because he has slick, savvy social videos, which he does. It’s because he’s also pushing authentic messages about affordability, about standing up for the little guy.

He’s the guy who went and screamed at Tom Homan. People forget this. He was there as an activist screaming at Tom Homan, the border chief a few months ago. That authentic rage and anger and moral outrage has to be there on the part of the Democratic Party. And you can’t switch it on and off, cynically, depending on where and when you are.

Cory Booker being a classic example from your great state of New Jersey. This is a guy who stands for 24 hours, gives this amazing speech, gets us all pumped up, and then he’s like, next day he’s voting for arms to Israel. Day after that he’s voting to confirm Jared Kushner’s dad as ambassador to France. It cannot be on off switch when it comes to… I mean, it’s not authentic by definition if there’s an on off switch.

The Republican Long-Term Strategy vs. Democratic Shortcomings

JON STEWART: That’s right. And it has to also, I think, be smartly litigated. And that maybe gets us to our… And I cognizant of your time and I really appreciate the conversation, but I think what’s been lost here is the Fox News and the Republicans, this is a 60 year plan that they have had to basically roll back the New Deal and the naturalization acts and everything that they felt changed the tenor of this country into something that they don’t want anymore as sort of a nostalgia for an America that never actually was.

And they’re trying to rebuild that into an America that they think… And I’ve always said, “Make America Great Again” is a demotion. We’re supposed to be exceptional. So if you just make us great, you’re actually giving us a demotion.

But what the Democrats have been unable to do is to prosecute their case is to litigate it and in some ways, I think the news media has to take a lesson. Where is the one place MAGA really usually falls apart? Forgetting about the Supreme Court. It’s in court where there are evidentiary standards, where there is a process by which you have to litigate the bonds of our shared reality.

That’s I think what they don’t understand, that this is about prosecuting and litigating a vision for the future that has evidentiary standards and that people can find that, find something to hold on to. And are there people that you’ve seen out there that you think… And it can’t be fiefdoms. It has to be… There has to be a unity to it and it has to work together with your think tanks and every… You have to have a Federalist Society. You have to have groups that understand that once you get into a position where you can actualize that vision, you have to do it competently and you have to do it quickly.

The Money Problem in Democratic Politics

MEHDI HASAN: I think I agree, I sign off on all of that. And especially kind of the Federalist Society and the long term vision of the Republican Party. Yeah, I mean Democrats are not playing the same game. They’re not in the same league when it comes to kind of long term planning what they did to the judiciary, over decades to get the 6-3 majority.

What I would say though the problem with, again it goes back to the whole, is the MSNBC, the left wing Fox. The same issue, the same reason why MSNBC can’t be a left wing Fox and the same reason why the Democrats can’t behave like the Republicans is money. Fundamentally it comes back to money. MSNBC and all these, CNN and all of these outlets are corporate owned and therefore they will always have a corporate agenda in terms of profit maximization, in terms of returns.

JON STEWART: But Fox is corporate owned.

MEHDI HASAN: Corporate owned, but also purposeful has a particular ideological bent that is on steroids.

JON STEWART: And it turns out their purpose is actually a money maker.

The Money Problem in Politics

MEHDI HASAN: It’s a money maker. Yeah. They get fascism with the side benefit of actually making money off of it. Profitable fascism, profitable white supremacy. That’s right, but. And the same applies to the Democrats. I could come up with a wonderful plan of action, a Project 2029, all sorts of things.

But the problem is that as long as they are beholden to corporate donors, they’re not going to take that step forward. You know, you can get rid of the Senate parliamentarian tomorrow, you can get rid of the filibuster, you can give Democrats an open playing field to do what they want to do. And they still won’t do it because they don’t want to piss off their donors. A lot of them, not all of them, but a lot of them.

And until we deal with money in politics, we’re simply not going to have a proper opposition. We are going to have, you know, Coke and Diet Coke. We are going to have kind of fascists and dare I say, in some Democrat fascists like. And I think that is a fundamental problem in our system right now.

It does all go back to money in politics. It does go back to Citizens United. It does go back to the ability of Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes and Elon Musk and Bill Ackman and all of these people to influence our politics, our media, our culture. And that fundamentally, sorry to sound all biblical, but money is the root of all American evil right now.

JON STEWART: And it is. And it has empowered this hostile takeover of we the people. And again, rolling back around to that idea of fetishizing the little guy and we the people, when in fact the opposite has occurred and the Supreme Court has empowered really this kind of much more authoritative processing of all those avenues.

And in some respects, then it comes down to is the answer. The Democratic Party’s ripe for a takeover and they just need to find the right reality host that can get in there and start lining up all of those interests.

MEHDI HASAN: Please, please, no, no reality hosts, I beg of you.

JON STEWART: Jeff Probst, maybe. Jeff Probst Survivor Unless.

MEHDI HASAN: Unless, Jon, you’re thinking of throwing your hat in the ring, which I know, which I know, I know many people want you to throw your hat in the ring. If that’s what you’re suggesting, we can talk about that. But, but please, otherwise, no, no TV show hosts, none of those.

Well, well, but look, I think New York in November will be a very, very interesting result if there are Mandani wins. It will be earth shattering on so many levels. On multiple levels.

The Zohran Mamdani Factor

JON STEWART: I think he’s got the energy is there what I would say that Zohran has, that’s really remarkable in this moment. He has an opportunity to credit the entire sort of progressive agenda. But I think the way that it has to be done is he’s got to do the boring shit.

MEHDI HASAN: Well, agreed.

JON STEWART: If he can make.

MEHDI HASAN: Agreed.

JON STEWART: His vision, I think is really smart, focusing on affordability and a much more equality of economic opportunity. All those things. If he can make the city competent, if that can be his focus, if he can bring that feeling of. And I think progressives actually forget this sometimes. Everybody deserves the kind of safety and security that the rich Manhattan neighborhoods get. Everybody deserves that. If that’s his focus. Holy shit. Could this be a rebirth of a much more, I think, fair minded society that people feel confident will not. The big fear in New York is chaos always. If he can do both, holy shit. Does that guy have an opportunity?

MEHDI HASAN: I agree. And I think it’s much bigger than New York. I think it’s going to be national and global. I think the impact of that election in November if he wins will be national and international. It will be the biggest boost the left has had. I’m trying to think in my lifetime. I’m trying to think of when was the last time something this earth shattering occurred. I mean, AOC winning that primary was big.

JON STEWART: I think people thought Obama. I mean, I think people thought Obama was the boost.

MEHDI HASAN: I think wrongly thought that. But yes, in 2008, I think what.

JON STEWART: They didn’t realize is what an institutionalist he turned out to be and how that damaged the prospects of getting to the finish line, those policies.

MEHDI HASAN: But bigger than that, it will also be, you know, to go back to your point about Wile E. Coyote, the Republican media machine is going to throw everything already is at Mamdani.

JON STEWART: By the way, so is the Democratic.

MEHDI HASAN: Exactly.

JON STEWART: We’re going after him too.

MEHDI HASAN: Let’s not give Gillibrand a pass on my horrifically Islamophobic comments about Mamdani. But my point is the right wing machine, including some right wing Democrats, are throwing everything at Mamdani. If he wins, it will also be a reminder that you don’t have to compromise. You don’t have to bend the knee. You don’t have to roll over. You don’t have to triangulate to win. You can win authentically. And I think that will be a very scary message for the right.

Wrapping Up the Interview

JON STEWART: Mehdi, just a pleasure talking to you. I really appreciate it. Mehdi Hasan, founder and editor in chief of Zeteo, now with, and I hate to throw this out there, a million YouTube subscribers, which is. I think you get some. I don’t know if they give you a platinum.

MEHDI HASAN: I want a plaque. I definitely want a plaque. Oh, you send me a plaque.

JON STEWART: All right, we’ll do. We’ll do everything we can. Mehdi, it’s great to talk to you.

MEHDI HASAN: Thank you. Jon.

Post-Interview Discussion

JON STEWART: Why do you get rid of a guy like that on MSNBC? Like what? What are they thinking?

MEHDI HASAN: He’s so good. I was saying during, like, I need whatever coffee he’s drinking. I’ve never been that awake and alert.

JON STEWART: In my life and his specificity and his ability of recall and the way that he is able to be present, you know, seeing him surrounded by that odd group of sort of right wing influencers and just like a turret just spinning and firing back at each one until he ultimately decided like, oh, this isn’t a debate. Why am I even talking to you idiots?

MEHDI HASAN: It was the one man fighting 100 gorillas debate.

JON STEWART: Yes.

MEHDI HASAN: I would love to know the process Jubilee went through to find those people. Like, what forum did they just like mass send messages? Check Twitter. Like, seriously, here’s my.

JON STEWART: My feeling is you don’t have to do much of a deep dive. Like, that’s not one of those. If you skim any pond in any of the recesses on the Internet, you will scoop up hundreds of those tadpoles because they’re everywhere. It really is like, it’s not an unusual. You know, there is. They’re feeling their alt right joy. It’s discord chats come to life.

MEHDI HASAN: Absolutely.

JON STEWART: And it’s encouraged, incentivized, algorithmically incentivized. I’m not even sure it would exist if it wasn’t. You know, at a certain point, getting attention for that on social media becomes. No, I really believe this.

MEHDI HASAN: They get podcasts. I see. Ouroboros.

JON STEWART: Yeah, that’s exactly right. But I do think that idea of tenacity and relentlessness built upon a foundation of moral principle is kind of the only way out of this.

MEHDI HASAN: And I think that the authenticity he comes in with is why his independent media is doing well is because not just with politicians, I think across the board people are looking for truth and authenticity and challenge to the establishment.

JON STEWART: And it resonates. And I do think, you know, his point about corporate media I think is certainly well taken. And I also think the point of, you know, is it even right and left anymore or is it just good faith, bad faith? And I think there is an opportunity within media to create a relentless 24/7 good faith machine that could still be entertaining.

MEHDI HASAN: God, I hope so.

JON STEWART: Yeah, but we shall see. Brittany, what do the people want as the summer is going into its last month?

Audience Questions

MEHDI HASAN: Oh, boy. Do you think the FCC will also be going after shows with a conservative bias right now?

JON STEWART: No, but. Wait, what? Who wrote that? No. Have you met the chairman of the FCC? He’s like, shit, posting Colbert. There’s no way. No, he is not going to be. He is going to. He is probably right now on a search for more right wing billionaires that can buy up some more of these properties because there’s going to be, you know, an acquisition and merger spree for these kinds of things. He wants to add more, go after conservative bias.

MEHDI HASAN: But I also noticed Fox News is getting in on the party now by counting how many conservative guests are on shows versus how many liberal guests are on shows.

JON STEWART: The entire bullshit of the, again, this is them trying to police and create rules that they would never follow. The idea that by having what may be a more left leaning or progressive bent or just bringing in. That’s how Fox is popular. That’s how any of these people, you know, they all talk about. Gutfeld’s the most popular yet. He’s not popular because he’s a both sides guy. He’s not, you know, a fair use. Like, you know, the Fairness Doctrine says, like he’s relentless.

And, you know, after a day of watching Fox News and being bathed in their very purposeful propaganda, it’s a great way to top off the night. But it’s not the Jay Leno. Like, I don’t understand why you want.

MEHDI HASAN: To offend your audience.

JON STEWART: Why not just do a show about, you know, why do you have to talk about things you believe?

MEHDI HASAN: Why would you, why do you, why.

JON STEWART: Do you have to make jokes about.

MEHDI HASAN: Things you actually think anything?

JON STEWART: I’ll just say, you know, I’m just.

MEHDI HASAN: Going to go throw myself down a.

JON STEWART: Hill and see if I can get a concussion. I mean, the whole thing is fucking ridiculous. And if you look at the social media profile of all the people that complain about the left wing bias, they’re all right wing influencers. They all make their money. Their entire economy is based on how willing they are to attack and defame and to crush liberals. The whole thing is bullshit anyway.

MEHDI HASAN: Great.

JON STEWART: What’s next?

MEHDI HASAN: Pivoting from that.

JON STEWART: Pivoting from that.

The Vindictive Prick Question

MEHDI HASAN: This one is a follow up from last week’s podcast. Oh, Jon, do you think Democrats are capable of electing a vindictive prick?

JON STEWART: I do. I absolutely think they’re capable. But when will a vindictive prick rise? A vindictive prick must rise from the East. I think for the Democrats, the vindictive prick must die. And then the new one is reincarnated and then we have to wait 35 years. This is, it’s like a Dalai Lama situation.

MEHDI HASAN: Unfortunately, the vindictive prick is just a.

JON STEWART: Little baby right now. That’s right. It’s not even about what. What they’re incapable capable of is using that idea of friction to get real concessions. I always go back to Donald Trump is like “If I catch you transferring the money you’re paying for tariffs onto customers, I’ll shut your business down.” And the Democrats are like, “Great news. We can negotiate the price of five drugs now. It’s not the five that you use, but we got five of them. And we’ve got a whole plan that over the next 25 years, we’re going to add 12 more.”

MEHDI HASAN: And then Trump said he’s going to, what, he’s going to, like, lower the cost of drugs by a thousand percent.

JON STEWART: Trump’s not even. He’s not even following the basic laws of math.

MEHDI HASAN: Yeah, they’re going to give you money when you along with your drugs. Sounds good, though. Pizza for everyone.

JON STEWART: But the Democrats are like, “What does the parliamentarian think?” And Donald Trump is like, “Drug companies are going to pay you $1,000 to take Ozempic.”

MEHDI HASAN: Congrats.

JON STEWART: What are we going to do? How do they keep sending those questions in there?

MEHDI HASAN: Twitter. We are weekly show pod. Instagram threads TikTok, blue sky. We are weekly show podcast. And you can, like, subscribe and comment on our YouTube channel. The weekly show with Jon Stewart.

Credits

JON STEWART: Boom. Thanks, guys. As always, in the dog days of summer, you guys continue to kick crazy ass.

Lead producer Loren Walker. Producer Brittany Momedovic. Video editor and engineer Rob Bitola, Audio editor and engineer to Cole Boyce, Researcher and associate producer Gillian Spear. Executive producers Chris McShane, Katie Gray.

All right, we’ll see you next week. The weekly show with Jon Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. Podcast is produced by Paramount Audio and Busboy Productions.

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