MS NOW's Ali Velshi on Covering Trump, the Mess at CBS and Press Freedom Under Threat

23:48On the other hand, literally we're all journalists now. Use that to uphold the legacy of this country. How was the Delaney protest different from the Floyd protest? Because the Floyd protest in Minneapolis, that's where you got shot, the rubber bullet, right? Talk about that for a minute. So that was very unusual. That was kind of a, I wouldn't even call it a march the night I got shot. It was just kind of a walk. It was very Gandhi and everybody sat down. The curfew hit and in theory the police said, if you don't evacuate, don't leave, you'll be arrested. that everybody got up and started walking.

24:20Now, in a normal logical world, you would just let these hundreds of people, there were some thousands probably, walk around Minneapolis. Everybody just gets tired, goes home, and that's how it goes. For some reason, and this is a similar thing that happened at Delaney Hall, at some point, somebody gives somebody an order to clear everybody out. Now, again, in my world, I would just say, let everybody just walk. It's their First Amendment right. They can do that. But there was a curfew, and police opened fire with tear gas and with flashbangs and with rubber bullets. And what happens is we have gear.

24:50So we have protective gear and we have gas masks. So we can stay a little closer. Most people can't withstand. And you're wearing flag jackets that say press on them. Yes. So we were way at the back of the crowd in Minneapolis in 2020. But at that point, because of the shooting and the gas, the crowd had filtered back. And now we were toward the front of it, but very, very distant from the police. But they could see who we were. And then as I'm live on TV, I suddenly feel like what felt like a hockey puck to to just below my knee. Missed it by about an inch or so would have wrecked my knee if it hadn't.

25:24The shin is apparently not a terrible place to get shot. And a million stories came out of that. There was all sorts of criticism. Why were you there? Well, I'm there because we're bearing witness. Why don't you observe the curfew? There should be no curfews that relate to media at all. The news media doesn't get under a curfew. We don't meet this curfew. But even to this day, people are unclear about that. Why are you in the way? Why were you doing this? It's like, this is what we do. This is what we do. And then, of course, Trump got all into the story. And the way he tells it is much more interesting than what actually happened.

25:57Of course. He really fixated on this. Oh, he was very into it. He did rallies week after week. It became a bit. And I kept – it was a bit. And I kept thinking to myself, none of these people know who I am. The people showing up at a Trump rally on a Saturday night don't know who Ali Velshi is. So he had to start describing, you know, the bald guy. So but so the cable news is very important to this man. The difference with Delaney Hall is that it's it's in Newark. It's in a it's a warehouse. All that stuff around Newark Airport are warehouses. There's no people. There's no restaurants. There's no.

26:27So it didn't have that sense of being in a neighborhood. What happened in Minneapolis in 2020 and then again last year is these things are happening in America in people's neighborhoods. and the really neat thing that came out of the recent Minneapolis ICE protests is that we all struggle. What do you call what these raids are, immigration raids? And some people call them illegal aliens and some people call them undocumented. It's even weird to call them undocumented because many of them have a document that says you're to appear in court in six months or whatever. In Minneapolis, they just started calling them our neighbors.

27:00And I thought that's what the 250th anniversary of this country is. We have realized. After Rene Good and Preddy. Yes, yes. They started referring to the people they were protecting as our neighbors, the people for whom they were bearing witness as our neighbors. In other words, what an interesting thing that I look at you and my first instinct is not to wonder whether you're a citizen and whether I might see your passport and whether you're here legally. My first instinct is to say, hey, we're in the same place. Right. What's your name? What do you like? It's a different way to think about America.

27:31Well, it's very well said. And it's also just fascinating to me that when you think about it, you know, Trump doesn't back down. Right. And that's sort of his whole thing. That's the mystique. Right. But he did in Minneapolis. Yes. He got he got. If anybody beat him in the last two year and a half, it was the whistle carrying ribs of Minneapolis. Yeah, two of whom got killed. Right. But yes, that's correct. They beat him back. When Renee Good got shot, her wife said, we had whistles, they had guns. Yeah. And that's really interesting. We had whistles, they had guns. The whistles can still win.

28:06Yeah. That's really the truth of it. But the whistles are, they're a euphemism for bearing witness, right? They are, you see something, you blow the whistle to warn those around you that there's danger. But you are there to bear witness. You are there to tell them, to tell your neighbors something. And I am of the strong belief that that is what will prevail in America. And that's not a political statement. I don't care who you vote for. Sometimes I do. But I generally care that you vote because as many people as voted for Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, for all intents and purposes, statistically, did not vote.

28:42So we're very obsessed with non-citizens voting in this country. That's a – mathematically, it's not a thing. Citizens not voting is a real thing. That's what we should be worrying about. How do you get everybody in this country to say I have a vote and I have agency and I'm going to exercise it? Right. Well, it's – so we're talking now. They're still tallying the votes in California from that primary. And there's nothing wrong with that. California takes a long time because they vote – because nine out of ten ballots in California are not cast in person. So this is what I wanted to ask you about.

29:15Right, because they do have a particularly sort of like odd way of vote counting. And it's not new and it's not a sign of fraud that it takes them as long as it does. But at the same time, I can see why if you're a low propensity, low information voter, that's a terrible euphemism. If you're somebody who doesn't pay attention to this stuff a lot, and you say, well, wait, I remember when I was growing up, we knew who was the winner election night. Yes. aren't the democrats in california just creating a system that can be abused by somebody like donald trump to say oh look oh they're doing all of this ballot harvesting the reason why you know you get these you vote dumps in the middle of the night i'm not saying any of that's true but it create what i'm i guess what i'm inarticulately trying to to say is you know the the liberal the democratic ideal of let's get as many people to vote as possible to make it as easy as possible for people to vote which i think most americans would agree with how can you do that and also, you know, create some sort of like sanctity of people in believing that the vote is.

30:17So this is this whole good. You're right. The Donald Trump latches onto this idea that so-and-so was in the lead and then suddenly so-and-so took a lead when, you know, new votes came in. Right. So you look at this two ways. Go back to November of 2025, New York election, Zoran Mamdani. We called that within one minute of the polls closing. It was so evident. And we had information, you know, and you know how we gathered this information from different sources. And we knew he had one and that was it. The California system, it's really complicated. If you live in California, you get a book. Not a pamphlet.

30:51You get a book about all the things. They've got these ballot measures and all these things. Then other interest groups send you books about the candidates. So it is – there's a lot of work that's put on the California Voter. And they take great care. And they've got ballot boxes that they can put their ballots into all over the place. Or you can mail your ballot. And they do it. And it works. And mail-in balloting has been something – or ballot boxes have been something that had been growing in America because it's actually more convenient than thinking you might have the day off on election day to stand for two hours or three hours in a – Or if you're elderly and it's hard for you to get to a polling place.

31:25It's a better system, but it was unheralded until Donald Trump somehow tried to convince everybody that mail-in balloting, which was largely introduced in this country by Republicans and has worked flawlessly, is somehow nefarious. Right. And so now we're in this world where if the vote doesn't come in, if I don't know within two hours of poll closing, somebody's holding on to a ballot. And it's just not true. But that's on us. That's on all of us, including guys like me who stand in front of a data board on election night, to be careful as I hype up this special tonight we're covering the election to remind people over and over again.

31:59It may be days before you know the result, and that's okay. The system's built for that. Like, it doesn't matter if everybody got to vote for Election Day. The fact that it takes a week to find out the result is OK. The fact that it might be close and might have to go to a recount is OK. That's all part of democracy. People have won by a handful of votes in this country. All of it's OK. Right. I wanted to ask you. So you started your show, the show that you just ended. Yeah. Velshi six years ago. I didn't realize this. So you started it in February of 2020. Yes. I would argue that's the last normal month in America.

32:34It may have. It was it wasn't even fully normal because it was December before that. We had started hearing about this virus in China. Yeah. And then in January, we started hearing about it. And yes. And then everything really when everything when the world sort of March 12th, when it fell off a bus. But yeah, we knew something was afoot. If you existed in February of 2020, you knew something was afoot. But you didn't know enough to be gathering toilet paper or coffee beans or any of that. You know, your life was about to change in a momentous way. So, Ali, I ask you about about the timing there, because if we sort of like look at America from over that last six period, it's kind of an interesting capsule.

33:08Right. I mean, what like the crazy stories, crazy, crazy news environment, literally crazy news. Right. We're all learning about this novel coronavirus that had various iterations that we couldn't pronounce. We didn't know. We learned about how fast things move between people. We all had to learn. Yeah, we'd all gone from talking. And remember, in the news, we've been talking about legal matters for a long time. And all of a sudden we had to find doctors. And then we all regret that we didn't take science classes in high school longer than we should have, because we spent all these years thinking, why aren't we teaching kids coding?

33:41We're teaching them how to dissect pigs. And then we're thinking, hey, maybe we should have taught more kids to dissect pigs. It was a wild time. And even that got politicized, which was interesting. Like we didn't even all come together in the face of a global pandemic. We didn't do we couldn't even do that. And that's when I realized, because we are so fed by disinformation, misinformation. What I didn't realize that a lot of disinformation experts realize is that before it was all about politics, it actually manifested in health care. That was the first place that you could get bulls**t everywhere.

34:13It was the first place where you could say, I've got some symptom and they tell you to rub potatoes on your feet for whatever reason, because people are susceptible to it. They go to the Internet when they've got some kind of symptom. And and we saw all of the things come together. Health misinformation, political misinformation, anti-vaccine, anti-expert skepticism. All of everything came together all at once, plus a recession and people staying home from jobs and inflation and shortages and semiconductors you didn't even know were in your dishwasher. Like I cannot imagine a greater concentration of stories that all came together at once.

34:47And over the last six years, what do you look back on as sort of like the skeleton key story, I guess you could say, to explain where we are today? Look, there were triumphs, right? I remember the day. I happened to be in Houston. But I remember the day the first vaccines rolled out. I remember too, yeah. I was live on TV and I was crying. I remember that for me. Just watching those trucks roll out for the first time. It did not occur to me that that was going to be – A moment. In retrospect, but not just a moment. It didn't occur to me that that was going to become this this moment in like choose your own adventure, America.

35:23I thought I was like, we're all this is amazing. We've got a vaccine for this thing. This is over. This is going to end. It's not going to. Who knew that that wasn't even the halfway point in this whole thing? And to Trump's credit, he did it. I'm fascinated by this. I would have said that's it. Right. All you need to worry about is the fact that I found you a vaccine, dude. And look, scientists would have argued, no, actually, some of us have been working on this for 40 years or whatever. But you know what? He brought the power of the U.S. government to do the warp speed thing. And that wasn't even half the battle.

35:51And then when he got reelected, I would have thought that that would have been more central to the operation, that he kind of was on the wrong side of COVID after being on the right side. He was on the wrong side in the beginning because he didn't want more people with COVID on a ship coming in. Then he was on the right side of it with the vaccine. Then he went back to the wrong side of it. And yet Americans elected him again. For whatever you think about Donald Trump and all his foibles, I would have thought that alone would have been disqualifying. Sure. But it wasn't. No, God, that was just such a weird period of time in this country.

36:23But it's really informed. It's informed all of us. Right. And I've had people who were in the Biden administration who say knowing what they know now, they might have done things differently in terms of realizing that there would be this massive reaction to what some people think of was government overreach in terms of shutdowns and schools and, you know, things like that. Again, we don't know what we don't know, but I wouldn't have thought that that would have become a central point of political and ideological divergence in this country. I would have thought when those vaccines came out, wow, the world got saved.

36:54Let's celebrate for the next 15 years. And right, we made mistakes. I think almost everybody would agree now that like schools were closed in blue states and blue cities longer than they should have been. But again, like nobody was operating with the information at that moment that we all have now. So it's just kind of this like pointless, you know. Well, it's good to study, right? I mean, I'd like to, I'm sure I'd like to study how different countries handled it, different states handled it, who came out better, what kids were really disadvantaged by this, how did it affect them, did it affect little kids more than it affects the college students.

37:25So I think there's work to be done to figure out that because it's probably not the last pandemic. we're going to see in this globalized world. But I would really like it to be more of a, what did we get right? What did we get wrong? As opposed to this, everything now is just a politicized argument. No, it really is so depressing. On that note, I do want to ask you before I let you go about the Democrats and the state of the party. We're in the middle of primary season. By the time you guys are watching or listening to this, Graham Plattner will likely be the Democratic nominee for Senate in the great state of Maine.

37:57He is an interesting sort of case study or Rorschach test, I guess you could say, for the party right now. That comes with a lot of baggage. There's a lot of Democrats, including my good friend of mine from Maine, who I was just texting with yesterday, who was saying, I'm riding with this guy unless he's accused of murder. And his point is essentially that we are sick, we being the Democratic voters, the base of the party foisting candidates on us who are too old, too out of touch, et cetera, et cetera. And then there's other people, and I even have a streak of this myself. I'm kind of like, look, I'm not a main voter.

38:37I don't even really know this guy. I kind of want better of my politicians, right? I don't want them coming into office with scandals as long as a freight train following them. So I struggle with this. Yeah, yeah. No, it's a real struggle. This idea of like the ordinary guy politician. Politicians used to be lawyers. Right. So you'd have your career as a lawyer, then you go into politics. You went to Harvard or Yale. Yeah, exactly. Correct. So now we have this problem where many politicians are very, very, very rich. Right. Some of that richness is connected to there being an office because they are able to trade stocks on information that you and I don't have.

39:13Which is, by the way, something, if there's ever an issue that every American could agree on. 99 % of people, 100 % of people should be on the same side of that one. Right. More people should agree with that than what day it is today. So there's a real issue in the Democratic Party. There's a base of people who do not identify as Democrats. They might be registered Democrats. They might not. But they would like fighters over folders. They would like people who are not removed from their experience. And they would like the Democratic Party not to be making those choices because they look at the choices the Democratic Party has made.

39:44And they've said, well, you really are the establishment. And they feel that they're super old. The most active voters in this country tend to be younger right now. They tend to be out of touch. They think the Democratic Party is out of touch on a lot of key issues. So I get it. We're in this moment where people are saying, OK, we're going to we're going to back some candidates who may be flawed. The question, as your friend from Maine has to address, is what's the rubric for flawed? Right. Right. To your friend. So your friend's red line is murder. Donald Trump, remember, said it's not even murder.

40:18He said I could shoot somebody on 6th Avenue and we'd be OK. So one doesn't know what the line is. What is morality? What is ethics? If you fight enough for your people, does the fact that you have skeletons in your closet work against you? I think we still have a general agreement, and I would say much respect to your friend. The bar is lower than murder for most people. Sexual assault, sexual harassment, violence, generally speaking. But again, I can give you lots of examples of people who committed violence and those kinds of things who are still in public office and still doing things. We don't want to get into this what about-ism, right?

40:56We want to have a discussion about what do our representatives look like. Do they look like us or should they look like better versions of us? In other words, maybe us but without the baggage or without that kind of stuff. I think it's a real discussion. It's a – Graham Plattner has forced that discussion to the fore because Maine was one of the most obvious paths for Democrats to take control of the Senate. So that's now going to be something that the Democrats have to think about. But Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer are facing a lot of pushback from a lot of people in the party who say, I don't know.

41:32We're on the same side of stuff, but I'm not sure you guys are fighting for me the way I want you to fight for me. It's a very active conversation in the Democratic Party. On one hand, I'd say it's really healthy that they're having that conversation because Republicans are not struggling with this at the moment. This was my friend's point, by the way. He was being hyperbolic about the earth. And this point was essentially how dare you, you know, centrist, moderate, just regular Republicans, tell me that there has to be some sort of— How do you give Republicans a pass for this? The president of the United States, you're going to talk to me about morality?

42:03Give me a free break. And I think both can happen. In other words, I think you can say, OK, that train has left the station. Lots of things are happening. the Republican Party is going to have to figure out what it is. And I hope it comes back as a party because I think it's unhealthy to have one party, essentially, in the United States. But the Democratic Party can't get away with the, because they do that much worse. They have to establish who they are and what they are. Race to the bottom. Yeah. So I think this is a moment. Unfortunately, we don't have a lot of time. This is like 140 days away from midterm election day.

42:35So everybody's got to sort this out fast. It's going to be a grueling one and an expensive one. Ali, before we let you go, I want to just briefly ask you, you, I don't want to say grew up, but you made your bones in this business as a business reporter, a finance guy. Simpler times. You know, 2008, 2009, back when everything was more sets. I just have a couple economic questions because we're in this very bizarre moment. Yes. Very weird economy, right? We hear about this K-shaped economy where you're doing well. If you've got assets, things are going great, right? Like, you know, all of this AI - Literally one of the best economies ever.

43:11You're not. It could be. It feels like a recession. It feels like a recession. And that's, and, you know, even as somebody who is not really in either of those arms, right? I mean, I'm not, it feels to me, the vibes of the economy are just downright bad. But I say that, you know, I'm looking at statistics today. Corporate earnings, great job market, at least according to the data, firing on all cylinders. You know, consumer spending is up. So it's like, how do you make sense of this? There's a ceasefire. The stock market goes up. There's a ceasefire is broken. The stock market goes up. There's talk of a peace deal.

43:46The stock market goes up. The stock market and some indicators are completely divorced from reality. You'll hear a lot of people tell you, for instance, that consumer spending is up. It's very disproportionate. Consumer spending at the bottom is up because people are paying more money for gas and food. They're not buying more things. No, and Kevin Hassett made this inane point the other day on Fox where he was like, credit card spending is through the roof. That's not a good thing. That's not a good thing. So this K-shaped economy, and that is not the fault necessarily exclusively of this administration, although that big tax cut bill certainly helped a great deal.

44:18It was a massive wealth tractor. That is a fundamental problem that America has got to deal with. We have for a long time treated the wealthy and people who make their money off of money differently than we treat working people. It's a tax code issue. It's an everything issue. Why is capital tax in a different way than labor? Why? Why is capital tax differently than labor? But you're right. If you're asset rich right now, if you've got stocks, you've got a house or many houses, you are doing fantastically. So this is a real problem. In the end, it's not the problem that will motivate the voters.

44:54But Donald Trump did come in and say he was going to solve the economic stuff, and he hasn't. And so that's going to be important to people. You're seeing that in the polls now. Yes, the economy no longer. But you can't call it. You can't blame Biden for where we are right now. No, no, no. But what you can blame Trump, Biden, Trump, Obama, Bush, Clinton, all of them for is not seeing 30, 40, 50 years ago that we are building into a country that will have a K-shaped economy. America was a country you came to because of possibility. Capitalism was supposed to actually make it fair for everyone. We're now in a very – as a capitalist and a guy who spent a lot of time defending it, we're in a very bad place as it relates to capitalism.

45:37Capitalism is not affording people opportunities across the board. So that is something that Democrats – one day Republicans – but Democrats have to take very seriously in their messaging around the election. By the way, this is my – I don't want you to just solve my fertilizer and oil problem. I actually want you to make the society feel a little bit more fair for those of us who actually work for a living. Right. And you're seeing people, Plattner, it's resonating in his messaging. Yes, yes. You know who else is making this great message? And I'm not seeing a lot of people cover this. Don Ossoff in Georgia.

46:05Yes. Who was thought of as a vulnerability. That was a that was a pickup seat for Republicans. And Ossoff is now leading, at least currently in the polls. He has it's that's resonating with him. So and he's resonating with people. So that's the thing. And that comes back to the Graham Plattner main story. A lot of Americans just want somebody who will fight for them to have a fair chance. Whether they decide that Graham Plattner is a bridge too far remains to be seen. Okay, let's leave it there, Ali. You've got a busy night tonight and a busy life ahead of you with this new show. The 11th Hour with Ali Valsh.

46:43Actually, let me just quickly ask you that. You're going from weekend mornings to weeknight primetime. It's jet lag. How's the vibe going to change? How's your life going to change? How's the vibe going to change? Well, it'll be, you know, I've done Friday nights for a very long time. So there was jet lag Friday night to Saturday morning for a long time. You know, the weekends were three hours a day. Yeah. It's a different type of show. I could get into some remarkable analytics on my weekend show and some great context and some really deep dives, which I love and I hope I can preserve some of.

47:17But a daily show is a daily show. It's a different beast. And I will say people are busy and they do get their news from the news and they will switch on at the end of the day and they haven't been following every nuance on their phone. And they're going to want a place that's going to tell them what happened today and why did it matter and what's going to happen tomorrow. And that's the space I'm going to live in a little bit. I'm going to be about what was relevant and important. If you weren't on your phone all day and didn't see every tweet and post. You forget most normal people are not like you.

47:44Most normal people are not like us. Yes, correct. Good. Thank you. Please stay that way. Stay normal. And so that's what this show is going to be for that consumer to say, I'm going to get we're going to talk about what happened today, what happened tomorrow, how it affects you. You know, I everybody's heard all the arguments all the time. I think people want some sense of how does this make my life better? How can it make my life better? What's the world going to look like? The uncertainty is prevailing right now. And it's that's something I'm going to try and help bring the temperature down on.

48:13You know, it's a great moment for your type of journalism. I've always been a big fan of your show. Thank you. The show is called The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi. It'll be weekdays at 11 p.m. Eastern on MSNOW, formerly MSNBC, or MS as us in the biz call it, starting on June 15th. So that would be tonight. Ali Velshi, thank you so much, man. Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.