Mehdi Hasan On Leaving MSNBC, Starting His Own Media Company, How to Cover War and 2024

When Mehdi Hasan had his show canceled by MSNBC, the network tried to keep the pugnacious British-American broadcaster on as an analyst and guest host. Hasan declined, exiting the network he worked at for four years and launching his own digital media company — a risky move at a time when the digital media industry is in a tailspin.

Yet Hasan’s company, Zeteo, is off to an auspicious start. After raising $4 million from family and friends, Hasan launched the outlet on Substack. Zeteo now boasts more than 100,000 subscribers. Hasan won’t share how many of those are paid, but said the ratio of paid to unpaid exceeded his expectations fivefold. The new company will be built around Hasan, whose unabashedly progressive commentary commands a large following, and will offer a streaming show, a podcast, newsletters, op-eds, video essays, and potentially public events and documentaries.

By the end of his time at MSNBC, relations between the network and Hasan, an outspoken critic of Israel, were strained. Soon after Oct. 7, Semafor reported that Hasan and two other Muslim hosts at MSNBC, Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin, had been taken out of their hosting chairs. By December, Hasan’s show was canceled. He chose to leave the network because he wanted to play a bigger role in the media landscape, particularly in light of the upcoming election. He promises that Zeteo will speak more bluntly about issues like war and politics than the traditional media environment where he’s worked throughout his whole career.

Hasan sat down with Mediaite this week for a wide-ranging interview on our new show Press Club. He discussed why he left MSNBC, how to start a digital media outlet during the digital media apocalypse, how the press is covering the Israel-Hamas war, Biden’s performance as president, and Trump’s resilience among the electorate.

Read a transcript of the conversation below, edited for length and clarity.

Aidan McLaughlin: You have defected from cable news. How does it feel to be out and independent?

Mehdi Hasan: Feels good. Don’t get me wrong. I enjoyed my stint in cable news. It was much longer than I thought it would last. When Phil Griffin first called me up and offered me a job at Peacock and MSNBC, I thought I’d last 12 months max on my two year contract. And they extended it. And I had a great time, and I had a great platform, and we did wonderful segments, and we had great guests, and it was nice to have that impact.

But it’s great to be free also, it’s great to be your own boss, it’s great to be creating your own media venture. There’s lots of pros to doing your own thing. I’ve worked, Aidan, for the BBC, for Sky, for Al-Jazeera, for HuffPost, Intercept, NBC News. It’s time to do my own thing.

I want to get to your time at MSNBC in a little bit. But first, I want to ask about your new digital media company, Zeteo. What’s the pitch?

It’s a very simple pitch. I could pitch in multiple ways, but the most simple pitch, in 2024, with a brutal war going on in Gaza and a crazy election about to happen in the US, is that we will provide a platform, where not just me, but some of our high profile contributors that we’re going to roll out in a few weeks, we can say things as they are. Say it as it is, stop hiding behind euphemisms. Stop doing the lazy both side stuff. Stop pretending that you have to appease some faction or another. Just say the truth.

People want the truth. I said in my announcement essay for Zeteo, look, we’re not going to run away from the R-word. When people say racist stuff, we’re gonna say, “that’s racism.” We’re not going to say racially-tinged, racially-tainted, racially divisive. When Israel is accused of committing a genocide in Gaza, we’re going to use the G-word. The International Court of Justice says it’s a plausible genocide. Let’s not run from that. When Trump is saying, “I’m going to be dictator for a day” — because dictators are only ever dictators for a day, of course — we’re going to say that’s fascism. We’re not going to run away from the F-word.

So we want to speak about the world in a truthful, honest, direct, blunt way. We’re not hiding our biases. We have our biases. But we want to speak without all those fake conventions, and a little bit of cowardice that we see from some in the media industry.

What I find interesting about this is that it’s not just a media company that you’re building around yourself. You have pitched it as something that’s going to offer other voices, and even going beyond just news and politics. I read an interview where you spoke about how it’s going to have commentary on entertainment and potentially voices from Hollywood. What’s the broader company going to be offering?

We’re going to be offering a streaming show, podcast, newsletters, op-eds, video essays, maybe some public events. We’re still thinking about that. We are, possibly, thinking about maybe dipping our toe in the documentary world. It’s early days. We’re small, scrappy, we’re a startup, but we’re very ambitious. We have big plans. Anyone who’s followed my career knows, it doesn’t matter what budget you give me, what platform you give me, I’ll make some noise.

Now I want to get into a little bit of the ins and outs of starting a media business at this time, because it’s basically the apocalypse for digital media right now. On the other hand, that means that there are a lot of layoffs, there’s a ton of talent available. There are some gaps in the market. What has the process been like for you starting a digital media outlet at a time when digital media is really on the ropes?

So a couple of things related to your question. You raised two issues. One is gap in the market, right, why am I doing this? I’m doing it because I want to do it, I believe in the mission. I think it’ll be fun. But I’m also not stupid. I’m trying to run a for profit business. I have investors. I need to have a business plan. I need to have a model. I need to have goals.

And the gap in the market that I see is on the progressive side, in the left space. There isn’t anyone doing what I’m about to do. We have the Ben Shapiros and the Bari Weisses and the Tucker Carlsons doing this subscriber, independent, alternative model and doing very well. I mean, Bari Weiss, according to Wall Street Journal, has about 77,000 paid subscribers they said recently. Ben Shapiro has a million paid subscribers almost a decade into his Daily Wire venture. And no one’s really doing this on the left. So there’s clearly a gap in the market there in terms of can it be done.

And then in terms of your question about the digital media apocalypse, clearly it’s been a bloodbath, especially in the month of January. But again, a lot of those models were built on ads and clicks. And this model is built on subscribers. If we get advertising money, great. But that’s not what the model is built on. It’s built on getting that direct relationship between people who follow me, will follow some of our contributors and say, we want that direct relationship. We want Mehdi’s opinions or angles or takes in our inboxes in the morning. We want to tune in and watch the interviews he does that we used to watch on MSNBC or Al-Jazeera English or whatever it was. But we’re going to watch you on his platform. So that relationship, I think, is so important right now.

People are very distrustful of quote unquote mainstream media, sometimes for good reasons, sometimes for bad. And I want to take advantage of the fact that I do have a global following. I do have people who have encouraged me to do this. I wouldn’t have done this if I couldn’t have raised the money and the money, touch wood, we raised very quickly because people are upset about the coverage of Gaza, about the coverage of Trump, about the coverage of minorities.

Typically, the cable news hosts that have struck out on their own and found success with their own independent digital media operations, are on the right. Conservative media figures tend to have more loyal audiences than the mainstream hosts on networks like CNN, who are a little bit more tied to the institutions they work for. You’re a rare exception. Is that what you see as the difference between what you’re doing and what some other progressive media outlets might be doing that are trying to do the same things you’re talking about, but do not have a singular voice attached to them?

I don’t know how to answer that question without sounding like a megalomaniac, but, yes, I do think I have a — I’m a super modest person as my friends and family will tell you so it’s very hard for me to talk about myself in this way — but I do have a following. I do have a brand. I do have a global following, not just an American following. And that was part of the calculations. If you build it, will they come?

And so far they are coming in their droves. We’ve exceeded our expectations. We’ve exceeded any targets that we had set for ourselves in the first few days. We right now, when I’m speaking to you, were at something like 115,000 subscribers, a big chunk of that are paid. If you look at the Substack ratios, you can imagine what the paid number is. We’re not releasing it yet, but it’s a good amount, five times more than we thought it would be. So we built it. People are coming. And I think part of that is not just right wing cable hosts with followings.

I also think a lot of the conservatives hate the mainstream media. So when there’s an alternative, when Tucker Carlson says, ‘We’re going to burn it all down, corporate media is dead, follow us.’ That resonates in a way that it hasn’t traditionally resonated with liberals because liberals, see quote unquote, mainstream media as fair, as in their reality universe. They don’t hate it in the same way that conservatives have been taught to hate it. So there’s less of a reason to defect.

I think right now, what we’re seeing with Gaza, certainly on the progressive left, is people are very frustrated with media coverage of Gaza. And I think a lot of my subscribers are people who are saying, well, okay, hopefully we can get from Mehdi some more pointed coverage of an ongoing genocide, of war crimes, of ethnic cleansing, of a global shit-show geopolitical catastrophe than we’re getting on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or on prime time cable.

You make a great point there that this issue is one of the main ones where the progressive left is not satisfied with what they’re getting from mainstream media in the United States.

But also, before we jump into that, one add on it. And it’s not just the left, it’s actually a lot of liberals who are fine with the media, don’t think it’s all fake news, but are frustrated with even the liberal media’s inability to hold Donald Trump to account, to do tougher interviews with Republican guests, to say the L-word lie or the F-word fascist. I think there’s a group of those people as well who are very, very upset with the mainstream media.

You’ve worked in American media for years now. I think there are big differences in the way American media and international media cover Israel, and certainly the current war. What do you think about the way American media covers Israel and particularly this current conflict?

There’s a lot to say. It’s a big question. I think we can simplify and say that the US media has an institutional bias towards Israel. Structural biases in favor of Israel. And unfortunately, just as it lets itself down structurally, institutionally on issues related to minorities, people of color, non-mainstream voices, the same applies in Palestine.

I was on CNN recently, Aidan, with Abby Phillip, and I tried to make the point there, to try and really drive home the point to the audience of American domestic viewers, which is: take, for example, the way in which we’ve covered police shootings of unarmed black men at traffic stops. For years, we dehumanized those black people. We treated them like criminals. And we believed the police blindly. After George Floyd, after Breonna Taylor, we tried to kind of recalibrate a bit, not enough, but now we’re a bit more skeptical of police statements, and we try and humanize black people a little bit more and not treat them all as automatic criminals on the run. Rightly so.

I try and apply that to the Palestine issue, which is where Palestinians have been dehumanized for so long, and we’ve just blindly taken Israel’s word on everything, both at a political level in Congress and the White House and at the media level, where you have Israeli spokespersons flooding our airwaves, dozens of them. Mark Regev and Eylon Levy and Colonel [Peter] Lerner, and Tal Heinrich. There’s lots of them. They’re very good at it. And they and they find very welcome homes on cable, on radio, in the op-ed pages of the Post and the Times.

You know, there was a study done a few years ago, I think, between 1970 and 2000 and something, I have to remember the date. But there was an academic study which found that only 2 percent of all the op-eds, over decades and decades, about Israel-Palestine were written by Palestinians in the New York Times. 2 percent! In the Washington Post I think it was even worse. I think it was 1 percent. So a tiny percentage of the op-eds in our mainstream papers about Palestinians are written by Palestinians. That’s a problem. That leads to dehumanization, right?

When we talk about, for example, Palestinians as numbers in our media, but Israelis get names and lives and biographies. Israelis are always “defending” themselves, Palestinians are always “attacking.” Israelis are killed. Palestinians just die. They just drop dead of a heart attack apparently. If you look at our headline writing, it’s an atrocious headline writing industry. So there are multiple failures when it comes to our media coverage. And I think at the root cause of it is the inability to see Palestinians as real people with real hopes and dreams, who should be treated equally to everyone else in the region.

Some of the most acute criticism that MSNBC faced came right after October 7, when some hosts on the network came under fire for providing context about the attack by speaking of the history of the conflict. Did you think that there was any validity to the argument that when there is an atrocity like what happened on October 7, providing context is tantamount to excusing the attack?

No I don’t. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be sensitive on a day like October the 7th. And my colleagues, Ali Velshi and Ayman Mohyeldin were on air that day, and they provided brilliant context. And a lot of people did appreciate it. Other people complained about it.

I would say this: let’s just first be clear, on October the 7th, not everyone knew what was going on. A lot of this stuff was rolling and in real time, nobody knew how brutal what had gone down was. So let’s just be clear about that. And no, you always have to give context. The idea that there should be context-free days — if any journalist says that with a straight face, they should probably just hang up their hat, go be an accountant. Not that there’s anything wrong with being an accountant, but go do something else. The idea that you shouldn’t give political or historical or social or cultural context to a story because you’re worried about offending people is just absurd. And the people who claim to be offended half the time, they’re not offended. It’s faux outrage. It’s a political move. Let’s just be clear. It’s working the refs.

I don’t believe we should be gratuitously offensive either. Of course, people are dying, you should be sensitive about that. But, for example, I am not a subscriber to the school that says on the day of a mass shooting, you shouldn’t bring up — you know, on the day of Uvalde, I called out Ted Cruz. People were upset about that. Both in the industry and viewers and people on social media. I’m not of that view. I think on the day of a shooting, no, we don’t pause politics. Politics is the root cause of all of this. So no, on the day of the Uvalde shooting, I think it’s perfectly justifiable for a journalist to raise Ted Cruz’s pro-gun record as he calls for thoughts and prayers. I think on the day of a terrorist attack in Israel, I think it’s perfectly justifiable to talk about where these people come from, why they’re so angry, why they’re engaging acts of violence and what’s been going on in Gaza. What’s frustrating for me when it comes to the entire US media coverage of Gaza, is this implication that the world began, time began on October the 7th. Nothing happened before October the 7th. That’s when we started paying attention as journalists. That I think is dereliction of journalistic duty.

Some of that criticism got pretty nasty. The New York Post recently called your coverage ‘pro-Hamas’.

I wonder who wrote that editorial. I wonder which New York Post writer wrote that unsigned editorial. It probably wasn’t the guy who’s also made racist remarks about me, Ali and Ayman on Twitter. John, what’s his name?

I think I know who you’re referring to.

Podhoretz. Who has engaged in nakedly anti-Muslim, anti-Arab racism since October the 7th against me, against Akbar Shahid Ahmed, against Ali Velshi.

There were some voices who actually came onto MSNBC. I’m thinking of Jonathan Greenblatt of the ADL, who went on Morning Joe and asked if Hamas was writing the scripts on the network. What did you think about that at the time? Were you worried about your job?

Well, first of all, I’ve never worried about my job simply because my job is just a job, right? I say what I want to say, and if it has consequences, I’ll go do something else. Like I said, if I cared about my job, I would have gone on to become an investment banker or an accountant or whatever it is. Whatever the various financial professions my peers at university went and did.

No, it’s never been about the job or the money or whatever it is. It’s always been about, can I say my piece? Am I making a difference? So no, I don’t worry in that sense. I think Jonathan Greenblatt is very lucky that he was able to go on a cable news show, on a cable news channel, and call out that channel in pretty blunt and direct and some would say very unfair, vicious ways, and then get invited back multiple times. I’m pretty sure there are a lot of voices from different communities who would go on a cable channel, call out the cable channel, and would never be invited back.

I know you can’t talk much about what happened at MSNBC. When they canceled your show they faced a ton of backlash, but they never really explained why the show was canceled. So I have to ask, do you have any idea why your show was canceled by MSNBC?

No.

Did you ever hear from anyone about your commentary when you were there? Did you ever have people come down and say you need to to tone it down or anything like that?

I’ve had many conversations with management at all the places I’ve worked with about my commentary, about my tweets, about my views. I’m not going to pretend that hasn’t happened. But no one ever said that my shows being canceled had anything to do with my commentary. You’d have to ask MSNBC why they made that decision.

There was reporting soon after October 7th that three Muslim broadcasters, yourself, Ali Velshi, Ayman Mohyeldin, were benched at MSNBC. The network vehemently denied it. There were some complexities there — Ali Velshi went to Jerusalem, I believe, to report there.

To be fair to Max Tani, who wrote the piece, he pointed out that none of us were hosting our shows.

Do you think that was a deliberate effort, to bench you guys?

I mean, look, what I think or what I can speculate about is probably irrelevant at the end of the day, you’d have to ask MSNBC, because there was a backlash and they have their position. Clearly the three of us were off air. Clearly it wasn’t a good look.

And not a coincidence, in your view?

Aidan, that’s a great question. Was it a coincidence… Was it a coincidence… [Extended pause]. You’d have to ask MSNBC, Aidan.

I’m going to let that speak for itself. Do you think there are any U.S. media outlets that are covering the conflict well? Do you see CNN, for example, as covering the conflict well.

I wouldn’t make the generic outlook point because as I said at the start, I’d rather make a big picture industry, which is, structurally, everyone has problems. And it’s not one particular outlet. I mean, put Fox and its racism and Islamophobia to one side. Within quote unquote MSM, from the Times to the Post to NBC and ABC, they all have similar problems, right? Lack of representation, lack of diversity, giving a platform to Israelis more than they do to Palestinians, etc., etc. Those are all generic points which are which I would put forward.

But I think within outlets there are journalists doing great work. Within my old outlet MSNBC, I would point to someone like Joy Reid, who conducted a beautifully poignant, personal interview with Dr. Irfan Galaria, who went out to Gaza, American doctor went out to work in the hospital in Gaza, volunteered. She did very powerful interview with him in prime time. I thought that was really powerful. Chris Hayes has done some great monologues. My colleague Ayman Mohyeldin is probably America’s expert on Gaza. He’s probably the only anchor in the United States of American who’s lived in Gaza, and has brought his expertise to the fore. Ali Velshi, great interviewer. So there are people at MSNBC doing great stuff.

You look at CNN, Brianna Keilar just did a fantastic segment that has rightly gone viral that I shared as well, where she really did a deep dive into the number of kids that have been killed. And they did this powerful thing where they put little figures on the walls of the CNN studio to try and represent just how many kids have been killed. More kids have been killed than in all of the world’s conflicts put together. So I think there are people doing great stuff like that.

And I can point to many examples. I mentioned earlier, Akbar Shahid Ahmed has been doing great reporting on the State Department for HuffPost, which is what annoyed John Podhoretz, who called him a Hamas reporter. That’s the kind of abuse those of us who are brown and Muslim get at times like this. There have been some fantastic journalists in quote unquote MSM doing great work.

Are there individual reporters, I’m thinking of reporters inside Gaza, and also reporters inside Israel, that you think are doing exceptional work here?

Inside of Gaza, of course, Western correspondents can’t really get in. The Palestinian journalists have been doing fantastic work. There’s my former network, Al-Jazeera Arabic, where I didn’t work, I worked out at Al-Jazeera English.

You have Wael al-Dahdouh, who lost multiple members of his own family and carried on reporting. And there’s another example of our biases, Aidan. If Wael al-Dahdouh was Ukrainian, I think he would be on Oprah. I think he’d be on the front of Time magazine. I think we’d all know who he was. I think we’d be saying, wow, this guy’s a hero. There would be multiple profiles and feature pieces. He’s Palestinian. And so we kind of shrug when he does something which is astonishing, loses his immediate family members multiple times, and gets injured himself and carries on reporting live from Gaza. There are journalistic heroes like that.

There’s Motaz, who I managed to meet in Doha recently, who’s become this huge figure for those who don’t, on Instagram, he’s got 18 million followers. This is a 24-year-old guy who wanted to be a National Geographic travel photographer. Gets thrown into this role of war correspondent, not out of choice, because he’s there. And he’s filming stuff that no human being should have to look at. Babies’ bodies, limbs missing, dead families under the rubble. I think Palestinian journalists have done a heroic job in telling their story, more than 100 of them have been killed.

And I think in terms of Western journalists, I look at people like my colleagues at Sky, I look at Mark Stone, I look at Dominic Waghorn, and I look at the one and only Alex Crawford, who’s had a hate campaign launched against her in parts of the British media. These are brave war correspondents who have reported on conflicts in Gaza for years. And they’ve been very, very good.

Obviously Clarissa Ward from CNN did very good reporting. Just recently reported from the Israeli crossing into Gaza with those sociopathic protesters who are blocking aid from going into Gaza.

I don’t know if you saw this, but Tucker Carlson and Chris Cuomo struck up something of a friendship over their respective ousters. Did you receive any words of support from unlikely places when you left MSNBC? Did you hear from any of the cable news hosts who have left their networks recently to express support? Is there a WhatsApp group or something?

I heard from Chris Cuomo. He reached out. I went on his show last week. He was very kind.

Did he give you any advice or was it was it just a chat about coming on the show and what you’re up to.

I don’t want reveal all our private conversations, but a bit of both. I just want to be clear, by the way. My understanding is that Chris Cuomo was removed from his job. He was fired from the network.

He was fired. You were not fired.

Indeed, Tucker Carlson was fired. Or benched. I was not fired. MSNBC did not fire me. They canceled my shows, and then I said, “Hey, guys, can I leave? Because I’d rather not be a guest anchor and political analyst. Not really for me. I need a bigger platform for myself. It’s an election year.”

And then we negotiated a departure, and I appreciate for them for letting me negotiate my way out of a contract. As you know, cable news contracts are quite tight.

They are. I want to switch gears here and talk about the 2024 election here in the United States. There are a lot of questions about Biden’s age, and I think it’s fair to say that his bear hug approach to Netanyahu has been something of a disaster for his support among younger voters. How do you grade Biden’s presidency so far?

Good question. So up until October the 7th I’d have said eight out of ten. Eight and a half out of ten. Way exceeds my expectations. In fact, people always go after me because of a Guardian interview I did last year when I was on book tour, in which the headline was, “He’s the most impressive president of my lifetime.” Of course, the second line was, compared to the other presidents. It’s a very low bar. Donald Trump, George Bush Sr, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama.

No, he did impress me. He has impressed me on the domestic scene. I think we’ve been very unjust to the Biden administration when it comes to the domestic scene. People in this country think we’re in a recession or something. Economy’s never been this good in decades. Record low unemployment, record growth, record small businesses opening, inflation a tad up today [Tuesday], but in general under control now. He did a lot on the domestic front and I was impressed by it. Including progressive stuff, the American Rescue Plan, the Inflation Reduction Act, record investment in fighting climate change, stuff he hasn’t really gotten credit for.

But I can’t really grade him on just pre-October 7th. The reality is, people say “oh you can’t be a one issue person.” You can when the issue is genocide or at least war crimes! And I think his complicity in Israel’s genocide and war crimes and ethnic cleansing and mass killing and displacement and mass starvation of the Gazan people is unforgivable, inexcusable, reckless from a political point of view, given there’s an election coming up, and I think you’d have to knock his grade down to like 2 or 3 out of ten simply because of Gaza.

Do you think that he should drop out of the 2024 race?

Yes. But will he? No.

Will you vote for him?

That’s a great question. I don’t know the answer to that question. Donald Trump is the other candidate. I can tell you for sure I’m not voting for Donald Trump. And I would not cast any vote in any way or take any decision in relation to voting, e.g. non-voting, that helped Donald Trump. I think the priority has to be to defeat Donald Trump.

And by the way, let me rephrase my answer. I do want to recalculate the answer. You said, do I think [Biden] should drop out? I just want to get some context. Morally, he should drop out. Morally, I just think what has happened over the last five months is so bad he should drop out. Politically, do I think he should drop out? Well, I’m worried about that because I’m not sure I buy this argument that there are a bunch of Democrats waiting in the wings who could beat Trump. At the end of the day, Biden does have a good record. And you know what he does have that we just all erase? He’s the only guy who’s beaten Trump. He literally beat Donald Trump by several million votes in 2020, when people like me were very worried he wouldn’t be able to do it.

So I need to be a bit humble when it comes to Biden’s electoral prospects and say I was wrong about how well he would do in 2020, so I shouldn’t write him off now. So from a political, electoral point of view, there is a good case for him being on the ballot. When I say he should drop out, that’s more a kind of moral. That’s me being morally outraged that he has allowed this to happen in Gaza and isn’t doing anything about it even now.

What do you think of voters, particularly Arab Americans, who say that they will never vote for Biden now, no matter what?

A lot of those people are hurting. And I know people in Dearborn, Michigan, who’ve lost not one, not two, not three, but ten, 20, 30 members of their family in Gaza. You can’t go up to someone who’s lost family members in Gaza to American made weaponry delivered by the Biden administration to Israel, some would say in defiance of American law on foreign assistance and Leahy law, and say, you must vote for Biden. It’s insane.

But they’re not everyone. There are persuadables. I talked to people in Michigan and Georgia, I was in Atlanta recently with a Muslim crowd. There are persuadable who, if they got a ceasefire, might reconsider and say, ‘All right, we got a ceasefire, we will vote for Biden.’ They’d still be annoyed about it. The ceasefire has come 30,000 dead people too late. But at least if you can get a ceasefire in the coming days, a real one, not this fake pause, then there are persuadables.

The whole point of the uncommitted campaign in places like Michigan and Minnesota and elsewhere, it’s not because they say we’ll never vote for Joe Biden. It’s the opposite. They’re saying, “Hear us out. We’re Democrats. We voted for you in 2020.” Every Muslim I know voted for Biden in 2020. I don’t tend to hang around, you’ll be surprised to hear, with Trump supporting Muslims. But every Democrat Muslim I know is now telling me “I’m not voting for Biden.” I’ve got immediate family members, I’ve got friends. I’ve got close relatives, all say: can’t do it.

How big a threat do you think that is to his electoral prospects?

Pretty big. It’s not insurmountable, but it’s pretty big. In a place like Michigan, Hillary lost by 11,000 votes. Biden won by 150,000 votes in 2020. In Georgia, he won by 11,000 votes. I remember that number because Donald Trump rang up Brad Raffensperger and said, find me 11,000 votes. 11,000 votes in Georgia! There’s way more than 11,000 Arab Americans and Muslims.

And by the way, let’s not make this an Arab American Muslim issue. There are Black pastors warning the New York Times in Georgia, Black pastors saying, “We’ve told our congregations we can’t defend this stuff. We’ve told the Biden administration, stop this war.” There’s young voters, there’s people of color across the board. There’s progressives. This is a much bigger issue than just, oh, it’s a bunch of annoyed Arab Americans.

What do you think a second Trump term would look like?

It’s a great question. It’s the most important question in our journalistic industry, in our media industry, and people like my friend Jonathan Swan and others have done great reporting in laying out what’s going to come. But not enough people have read it. Not enough people are aware of it.

People are busy watching TikToks of Joe Biden stumbling, and they don’t realize what’s coming down the track, which is fascism with a capital F. This is a president who’s talked about wanting to be a dictator, who’s talked about terminating the Constitution, who’s quoting Adolf Hitler in terms of “poisoning the blood” and “fighting vermin within.” This is a president who the Heritage Foundation, the conservative pro-Trump foundation, has put out a report laying out in detail what they plan to do in terms of going after independent media, going after opposition forces.

We have a former president and possible next president who says, Aidan, he’s going to go after NBC and MSNBC and accusing them of treason. Calls the media the enemy of the people. His guy, Kash Patel, says we’re going after the media criminally and civilly. We have Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller making fascistic threats. Miller bragging that on day one they’re going to build detention camps and start rounding up undocumented immigrants from across America, going door to door.

It is a dystopian scene that awaits us, and what depresses me is our media is obsessed with trivial stories rather than the main story. The story. Donald Trump just said over the weekend he’s going to pardon the January 6th insurrectionists on his first day in office. That should be the biggest story in America right now.

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