Chris Hayes on Standing Up to Trump Regime

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2:14Ben Meiselas:So not only is Donald Trump's media company Truth Social, not only does it seem to be a failing business, I mean, we saw last quarter millions of dollars being lost there, but it now seems to be fact checking Donald Trump with its new Trump AI feature, Truth Search AI. When you plug in some search queries about what Trump's doing, let me give you some example. Hat tip to Jared Poland and the bulwark on this one. For example, you ask Truth Search AI, do Trump's tariffs cost the American people money? It answers yes. Tariffs are taxes on imports that U.S. importers pay and largely pass on through higher prices.

2:56Ben Meiselas:So the costs are borne mainly by American businesses and consumers. You ask Truth Search AI, did Donald Trump lie about the 2020 election being rigged and stolen? Answer from Truth Search AI, yes. Courts, Trump's own advisors, and official investigations found no evidence that the 2020 election was rigged or stolen despite his repeated claims. Question, did people storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020 because of Donald Trump? Truth Search AI. Yes. Multiple officials and contemporaneous records attribute the January 6, 2021 Capitol breach to a pro-Trump crowd mobilized around his false election fraud claims and pressure campaign to stop certification.

3:38Ben Meiselas:Another question, how many wars has Trump ended since taking office in 2025? Truth, search, AI, answer, none. There is no verified instance of President Trump formally ending a war since taking office in January 2025. And you could enter your search query like, did Donald Trump actually bring in$18 trillion and will he bring in$23 trillion? And it will answer, no, he's making this number up. The entire GDP of the United States is only 27, 28 trillion dollars. He's not brought in any of this. The tariffs at most have brought in 200, 300 billion dollars. And I think if you look back at the election last Tuesday, beyond just the politics here, people are just sick and tired of the gaslighting and the constant barrage of lies.

4:30Ben Meiselas:You know, and I would wonder what you put in that query. Are prices going down right now? Has Donald Trump defeated inflation? And the answer will be no. But Trump's out there every day saying there's no more inflation, that saying that there's inflation or that affordability is an issue is a hoax. And people know this stuff isn't a hoax. Everything to Trump, this is a hoax. That's a hoax. People are suffering right now. And Donald Trump continues to lie. The regime continues to lie. And we've seen Trump supporters. We've seen independence overwhelmingly shift to the Democratic Party, I think, as a rebuking of Donald Trump on Tuesday.

5:08Ben Meiselas:Let me share this with you. Chris Hayes of MSNBC, which will be known as MS Now soon. Here he is talking about what went down on Tuesday. Play this clip. What you see in Virginia tonight, if you look at county level, is basically every single county moving towards Democrats, including the rural ones. Right. So one of the things we saw in the Trump years was, you'd have these nights where the top line would be the Democrats are doing well or Trump is, you know, Republicans are doing well. But when you went down, you saw the Trumpier counties getting Trumpier and the non-Trumpier counties getting even non-Trumpier.

5:40What we're seeing tonight in Virginia, if you look at the county level, everything moving towards the Democrats, including the Trumpy counties and in demographics, too. So young people, men, women. So what we're seeing is like a real kind of wholesale shift as opposed to just the continuation of those. All of these.

5:59Ben Meiselas:Now, let's bring in Chris Hayes of MSNBC, soon to be known as MSNOW. Chris, it's great to see you. So is Donald Trump going to have to sue for billions of dollars his own social media platform right there? People want the truth right now. Right. And to me, when Trump just continues to lie, It's just at odds with what people are experiencing. Yeah, I think it's particularly true on the economy where it's just really hard to tell people. I mean, keep in mind, he didn't say we're going to bring inflation down, right? Inflation is the rate of growth of prices. He couldn't say we're going to get inflation back to 2%.

6:38His promise was prices will come down. Prices coming down is an almost impossible promise to deliver on unless you induce a recession or a depression. Inflation is just part of the way that modern economies work. There's always some inflation, some price rise. So the promise, he always overpromised. And now they're under delivering because not only are prices not coming down, they're actually going up by more. We've seen inflation tick up, and largely that's driven not by macroeconomic conditions like what happened in, for instance, January, February 2022 when Russia invaded Ukraine and oil prices spiked and we saw inflation go up to 9%.

7:20Joe Biden couldn't do anything about that, right? It's the unilateral application of the tariffs. So it's a crazy situation in which he promised to bring down prices, which he can never really do. Prices are going up. He's lying about it. And also the thing that's driving the increase in the rate of prices going up is the unilateral application of literally hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars in tariffs that he alone has put on. So the entire thing is completely a lie. And I do think it's one of those situations where, you know, there's big lies, there's little lies, there's lies about trivial things, there's lies about central things.

7:56But lying about that so flagrantly is a really tough one to get away with. You know, he floods the zone with 10 ,000 lies a day, it seems at this point.

8:07Ben Meiselas:And he floods the zone with so much information. It's hard to keep track of it all. Just what's your approach, Chris, in terms of your reporting, when you're delivering this to the audience on MSNBC or MSNOW to say, here's what we need to be focused on right now. Here are the issues that matter. And how do you try to remain fearless in the face of the barrage of attacks that you personally come under and your network comes under? Well, to take the last question first, like, I don't care what people are saying about me or us or whether it's a president of Republicans. Like, I got, we got a job to do.

8:44I know what we're trying to do, which is tell the truth and act as part of a broader effort across civil society to preserve American democracy in the face of its foes. That's really the project right now. And to eventually get to a point where we see a more just and thriving country than the one we have now. So I don't, you know, I really don't day to day, minute to minute care that much about whatever is being said about me or about us. In terms of what we do, we do try to focus on what is true and what's not. We, you know, there's a certain degree to which you're always calibrating how much are you chasing the ball that he kicked and how much are you trying to assert what's important.

9:34Certain stories like the shutdown, they just are the story and they're both substantively important. And I think they're compelling to people. sometimes with something like the ballroom the ballroom such an interesting story because substantively again in the in the ranking of things he's done for instance like unilaterally destroy USAID perhaps killing hundreds of thousands of people that's not even an exaggeration um you know getting rid of a ballroom doesn't have the same moral weight but it also just symbolically viscerally narratively packs a real punch and so we're sort of always balancing those different things.

10:11Sometimes there are stories that are really morally urgent, but a little remote. Sometimes there are stories that are really, really visceral that are less morally urgent, but they tell a story. Sometimes those two overlap is in the case of like SNAP benefits running out. There's always this kind of calibration of these different, you know, these different equities at stake in terms of what story you're trying to tell and where you're trying to focus attention.

10:32Ben Meiselas:You know, and I think that ballroom also serves as a connective tissue to the USAID dismantling. When you look at the great Gatsby parties and you see here are where his priorities are. Here's 42 million Americans losing SNAP. Here's USAID being defunded. Here's 20 million Americans having their health care ripped away. But they're having a grand old time at a party where the theme is a little party never killed nobody as people are dying. But on any given day, though, like just take this morning while we're recording this. I just checked. I just said, what's he posting? I've got Chris Hayes going on.

11:11Ben Meiselas:Like, what's Donald Trump even saying today? Where in any other time, someone who behaved and made these posts, this would be front page news everywhere, 25th Amendment. Like, this is just this morning before you and I did this interview. He goes, the real shutdown story, and he's posting an account, May 15th prophecy. It's a Trump prophecy account that when you get into it, all these bizarre claims that he's sent from other worlds. It's like very strange. Then he posts patriotic pinups, have naked women dressed like in bikinis and American flags. And then he follows it up by saying that former President Barack Obama should go to prison for a Russian collision, not collusion, but Russian.

11:58Ben Meiselas:Now, any person make these posts, if Obama posted this, if Biden - If your coworker, forget the president. If your friend, forget the president. If your friend or your coworker, you'd be like, buddy, you okay? How are you doing? I feel like something's up with you. What's going on? But you've gone there and lots of reporters don't go there. I mean, like you've talked about, like, look at what this guy is saying. Like, look at his cognitive. Let me show you this, Chris. This was what you were focused on as we were focused on during the campaign. Let me just show this report that you did. And then let's talk about it.

12:36Ben Meiselas:Let's play it. Good evening from New York. I'm Chris Hayes. We've got some breaking news tonight, an exclusive all in scoop. It's this. Donald Trump is 78 years old. Did you know that? if elected, he will be the oldest person to ever be sworn in as president of the United States. He is a man that is suffering from, I think, pretty obvious mental decline. But in contrast to the breathless coverage of Joe Biden's age and fitness, which, again, made a certain amount of sense prior to his dropping out of the presidential race, we are not seeing nearly as much discussion about Trump's diminished mental acuity.

13:11Ben Meiselas:Chris, I think it's so important that you focused on that then. We did. Many others didn't. talk to us about that. Yeah. I mean, I think he doesn't, I mean, with him, it's always weird because he's always been so addled as long as he's been in the public eye, but it is strange the degree to which like so much of that story in 2024 was about Biden's age. And it was very clear that A, Biden was the oldest man who'd ever occupied the office and B, that we all know the presidency ages people quickly, right? So when you combine those two things, if you have someone who's already fairly advanced in years and they're aging quickly, like it can have a real effect.

13:50And I think that was the, you know, part of what happened to Joe Biden. It's weird that everyone just stopped applying those two things, those two obvious truths to the situation we're in now, where they elected an even older person who also is on an accelerated aging schedule. I mean, his nickname for Joe Biden, Sleepy Joe Biden, he literally fell asleep for 20 minutes in a White House event the other day in front of the camera. I don't think Joe Biden ever fell asleep on camera for 20 minutes. And this isn't even like, there's a lot of things that are uniquely awful about Donald Trump. This isn't even a uniquely awful thing about Donald Trump.

14:27The guy's 80 years old, he's 79. Yeah, he's probably been up all day. The president of the United States, he fell asleep in the middle of a meeting. But again, that is a problem, right? Like, didn't we have a whole huge thing about this just exactly one year ago? And you also see it how, I don't know if it's aging, it's his particular variety of being addled, or it's how out of touch he is. But even just the last day when he had the exchange with Laura Ingram, where she said, you really think a 50-year mortgage is a good idea? Which obviously is like a ludicrous idea on its face. And he said, well, it's just 10 years more than what is now, 40-year mortgage.

15:03And she's like, no, it's a 30-year mortgage. And that's another one of those examples of the kind of thing that for most of my life covering politics, if the president of the United States didn't know what a standard term on a mortgage was, the 30-year mortgage, the 30-year fixed mortgage, we all know the 30-year fixed mortgage. It's like the pillar of American ownership going all the way back to the aftermath of the New Deal and the aftermath of World War II. Everyone who's a homeowner basically has interacted with a 30-year mortgage. The man doesn't know what the standard mortgage is. That would be a big story in other environments.

15:37With him, it's like barely makes it for a story for more than five minutes.

15:41Ben Meiselas:Right. And then there's just the issue that we were talking about before. I just think moral clarity. Right. As you said, if I had a friend or a co-worker or just somebody I knew who behaved this way, who posted those types of things, who conducted themselves the way he does. I mean, what the other day, Donald Trump post air traffic controllers, get back to work now, exclamation point. I'm putting you on a list. Like if someone who you worked with behave that way, like who is this? Who is this guy? And so I just think there's also this recognition sometimes when we cover politics like a horse race, this party, that party, this day, that day, who's winning, who's losing.

16:24Ben Meiselas:We lose some sight of the moral clarity of like, is this a good person? Like, why are they behaving badly? And do I want my kids to behave like that? Part of it, too, is just this process of acclimation, which is a part of it's just a human issue, right? Like human beings acclimate to all sorts of crazy scenarios. And that acclimation process is part of what makes humans so incredible as a species, so adaptable, so able to live in environments from Amazon to the Arctic. Humans can get used to things. And part of what's happened with Donald Trump, they use this cliche of normalization, but it's just part of it is just the acclimation process.

17:07If you had a coworker who acted like that, to go back to the way we're discussing it, if you had a coworker who every day was in the Slack channel saying crazy things like that, your initial reaction would be like, what is going on with this guy? If they never got fired and they never got held to account and they just continued being like that, at a certain point, you'd start to tune them out. Now, it would be toxic in many respects for the workplace and for the organization that tolerated that behavior. It would start to have all sorts of insidious effects for people around this coworker. People would probably leave the job, right?

17:43It would be harder to hire other people. There's all sorts of reasons it would be bad. But for those who are, say, stuck with the job and those who are sitting there next to this coworker every day being a ranting maniac, you would have to find some kind of way to get used to it. And I think that kind of describes a lot of what's so broken right now, both in the sort of way the public discourse operates, both in just like the general press and politics is that people have found whatever way, even if they don't approve it or they when they take a step back, they realize how crazy it is. There's an acclimation process that's happened with him that is really, really insidious.

18:18Ben Meiselas:And before we go, MSNBC, name change, MSNOW. MSNOW. As it embarks, as you embark on this next chapter in the MSNOW phase, what should we expect? I mean, leaning in more on digital stuff as well. I mean, talk to us about that. I mean, the biggest, the coolest thing about the change and like the name changes basically doesn't matter at all, at least from the perspective of like what the channel is and what we're delivering. It's just a new name, barely a new name. What is it? Is it 40 % of a new name? Two letters of five. Negative 1 ,700 % of the new name. We're going to bring the name prices down.

19:01So the most exciting thing is that we are really creating now this media organization that's just fully committed to the mission that we have in a way that was never quite possible when we were part of NBC News. And that's no knock on NBC News. NBC News is a different mission than we do. We're doing slightly different things. There's overlap, but that overlap meant that we couldn't produce a newsroom that was solely devoted to doing MSNBC, MSNBC, MSNBC reporting and MSNBC content and MSNBC across all platforms and like the MSNBC vision of the world. Now we have that for the first time. And I've been here, I've been at MS now for what, 14 years since 2011.

19:50I was a contributor before that. So I've been hosting a show for 14 years. I've been part of the network for 15 or 16 years. This is the first time in my time here that we now have this dedicated newsroom of all these great reporters who are out there, all oars rowing in the same direction, trying to fulfill our mission, which is to kind of tell the truth as we see it, report the stories that matter to our audience, that matter to the survival of American democracy, that point towards a future that is going to be more just, more equitable, and where all Americans can thrive. And that's a really exciting thing that we've never had before in my entire career.

20:28So that is the most, that's the biggest change. From the audience perspective, there's zero change. Like we're on the same channel, it's on the same TV, the one you got mounted on your wall, At the same time, just press the same button. It's right there. We're not going anywhere. From our perspective, the really exciting change is creating this entirely new newsroom.

20:49Ben Meiselas:Chris Hayes, MS Now. Thanks for joining us. We hope you come back. Really enjoyed it. I'll come back for sure. Everybody hit subscribe. Let's get to 6 million subscribers. Want to stay plugged in? Become a subscriber to our sub stack at MidasPlus.com. You'll get daily recaps from Ron Filipkowski, ad-free episodes of our podcast, and more exclusive content only available at MidasPlus.com.

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