Mehdi Hasan on MAGA, Maine and media cowards

0:01This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:30Closing you down? Not yet. CBS News projects Graham Plattner has won Maine's Democratic primary for U.S. Senate. Plattner has been engulfed in a cascading series of controversies, but he beat Governor Janet Mills, who suspended her campaign in April, yet remained on the ballot. Graham Plattner is officially the Democrats' nominee for Maine. If you haven't met him before, you're going to hear an awful lot about him now. This remarkable rise of the unknown Oyster Man, a working man from Maine with progressive politics in his head and a Nazi tattoo on his back. What does it tell us about American politics today that it almost seems vital that you have a chequered backstory, that you're not squeaky clean?

1:25Is it that the Democrats are learning finally from the Republicans about how you have to win in today's America? Welcome to the News Agents USA. The News Agents USA with Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. It's John. It's Maitlis. And the thing you've got to understand about this corner of America, Maine, is it's a very blue Democrat state. A lot of the voters are Democrat. And yet it has this unshiftable Republican senator, Susan Collins, who, through an extraordinary career of threading a needle, walking a tightrope so delicately, she never quite pisses anyone off. She has retained this Senate position for the Republicans.

2:21And the Democrats are getting pissed. I mean, as they would say, angry. They can't work out how to knock her off the top spot. And up until now, really, over the decades, they've always played a fairly safe pair of hands against Susan Collins. They've chosen people who have been backed by the Democratic National Party, backed by Chuck Schumer, backed by the sort of traditional Democrats. And this time they've gone, hang on, let's rip up the rules. Let's go for somebody that you don't expect. And they've landed upon this chap, Graham Plattner, who the left of the party loves. He talks about Gaza.

3:05He talks about taxation. He talks about the need for progressive policies on the left. but he has what we might call baggage. There have been voices from his past who've described his, what would we say, manhandling in the relationship. One woman says she was locked in a room by him. She was forced out of a cab by him. She has told her story to the New York Times. She is, we should say, a conservative voice. But there's been other stuff. Oh, yeah. This Nazi tattoo. the phrases that he used to use on Twitter, the names he's called people, poor, rural, stupid. Police are bastards. And so it goes on.

3:52The list is quite long. I mean, look, if he was going to an airport on a flight, you'd have to pay excess baggage for all the baggage that he carries with him. I mean, this guy is just, in conventional political terms, a conventional political manager would say he is a one-man disaster zone. There is so much that is wrong with him. If you were his spad, you'd go, it's uncontainable. In fact, several of his spads, I think, did quit after the tattoo episode became known. They were like, we can't handle this. We can't explain this. We can't do the messaging. And yet, last night in the primary results, he won so comfortably against the Democrat opponent that he is now the candidate.

4:35And for better or worse, I think that come November, when the battle over control of the Senate will be raging, this is going to be ground zero now of the Democrats campaign, because if they lose Maine, then their pathway to taking over control of the Senate looks like it has gone. And by God, the Democrats have now got themselves one hell of a risky candidate who is going to be a hard sell to the public. I don't know if Maine is ground zero or patient zero, whatever. I think what is happening now is in the midterms, the Dems are playing pick and mix. Yeah. One of my favourite games. But I think what they're doing is they're putting out very different candidates, partly depending on the state, but also to see what works.

5:24Right. They're figuring not only do they have to try and take the Senate, take back Congress, but they're also trying to work out the shape of their sort of presidential bid in two years time. So if you look at what's happening in Texas, they've got this squeaky clean pastor, James Tallarico, extraordinarily gifted orator who is up against a real kind of MAGA crazy heavyweight. and I think the party will be saying, well, is that the shape? Is that where we're going? Mamdani is their sort of blueprint for a big city win, a progressive mayor in New York who frankly hasn't really put a foot wrong since he won last November.

6:09You're then looking at somebody who sort of could be a complete rule breaker like Graham Plattner and saying, well, should we be kind of going for whatever he looks like, a bit more, you know, rough and ready, a bit more authentic? You know, is that the shape of the Democrat Party? So I don't think they know yet. I mean, they would say, oh, we're just we're playing the people according to, you know, the places they're standing. And that's normal. And you don't have the same candidate as a cut out in, you know, every state. But I do think something else is going on here, which is they're trying to work out who they are right now.

6:43It's so interesting, isn't it? Because if you go back a few years, you know, 20 years and looked at American politicians, American senators from the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and compared them to, say, British politicians, the American politicians were better looking. They were square-joyed, chiseled, better teeth. It all looked like they were all kind of slightly, not sexy, they were unthreateningly good-looking. And that was the sort of template for an American politician. And now you've got John Fetterman, the Democrat senator from Pennsylvania, who really does look rough and ready and he's tattooed and he wears sweatshirts and hoodies and kind of that's how that's his grungy sort of look.

7:25And you've now got Graham Plattner. And it's like the Democratic Party is leaning into the idea that we've got to have people that are just a bit grittier, a bit authentic looking. They haven't got the Harvard, Yale backstory of some of these other people that we would have nominated in yesteryear. Well, we're joined now by Mehdi Hassan, who is actually here with us now, amazingly, in the studio, launching Zoteo UK. Mehdi, I want to try and understand what is happening with the Democrats right now. This overnight experience for main voters has put a guy who we just call the oyster catcher. You know, he's the main oyster catcher.

8:10He is this outrider for the Democratic Party. Somebody, Graham Plattner, somebody who I guess the Dems couldn't have seen themselves choosing, you know, five years ago. And overnight he won the primary. Astonishingly solid margin, I think 72%. and he's made all these controversial remarks. He's had ex-girlfriends, women coming forward saying pretty much he manhandled them. He's got the covered up now Nazi tattoo. He's not your typical... He's got some baggage. I think it's fair to say he's got some baggage. But he's your kind of guy? Politically, yeah, sure, he's my kind of guy. Personally, maybe not.

8:52Politically, he's on the left. He's progressive more than his left wingness. It's authenticity, right? Everything that matters in American politics right now comes back to authenticity. People are fed up with the political machine. They're fed up with spin doctors, consultants. They're fed up with the political class. They're fed up with Washington, D.C. They have been for a while. The Republicans worked this out much before the Democrats. I don't understand the word authenticity. In fact, I actually recoil from it because I don't know whether authenticity just means working class now. Because I've listened to the interview with Graham Plattner when he said he denied stuff that his former girlfriends had said.

9:29He tried to explain that he never knew what his Nazi tattoo had meant, even though one of the girlfriends said that he clearly did. And he called it, you know, by the Nazi name. I'm just saying. So let me just say two things. Can you be a big fat liar and authentic? Well, I'm not sure how authentic that makes you then. So a couple of things. Number one, you mentioned a couple of times the girlfriends plural. It's one girlfriend who's accused him of manhandling him. She's also the same girlfriend who accused him of the Nazi, knowing about the Nazi tattoo. She also happens to be a longtime conservative activist, which doesn't help her cause.

10:00So you don't believe her? It's not that I don't believe her. I don't know what happened between the two. I'm not going to get into that. But I'm just saying it doesn't help your argument in American politics when your main accuser turns out to be a longtime right wing activist who helped Brett Kavanaugh get confirmed to the Supreme Court, a person who was incredibly accused of sexual assault. So that doesn't help the cause. He's denied all the things that she's accused him of. That's between, you know... Well, the Nazi tattoo was uncovered by... He's denied knowing about it, my point is. By Pod Save America.

10:24But he's denied knowing it was a Nazi tattoo. So if you're authentic, just wear your Nazi tattoo on your shoulders and say, this is who I am. No, but what he said, though, he's talked about PTSD. He's talked about the periods he went through when he posted some horrific stuff in the past on message boards. Clearly, that's not the person he is today. Anyone who knows him today says otherwise. I've interviewed him. He didn't come across to me. Well, why can't the authentic person say, no, I still believe what I said about poor, rural people. I still believe what I said about black people. No, that's not authenticity.

10:50Authenticity is owning who you are and not hiding behind canned talking points. Grant Plattner does not talk in talking points. Bernie Sanders does not talk in talking points. Donald Trump does not talk in talking points. And by the way, authenticity does not mean working class. It means someone who is actually who you think they are. Now, Donald Trump, in my eyes, is a fake, authentic person. But when he ran for president, he didn't pretend to be working class. In fact, he leaned into the fact that he was a billionaire. He called himself a blue-collar billionaire, that he was a billionaire on the side of the little guy.

11:17And I think that's what Democrats have lacked for a long time. But that's not authentic. I'm saying he's fake, authentic. I'm saying he's fake. So, OK. You can fake authenticity as well, which doesn't make it authentic. So now we're into real pedophilia. That's getting better. Yeah, it was getting better. That's a bit better. But my point being is the Democrats never understood the anti-establishment anger. They kept running centrist establishment candidates who lost to Susan Collins, who lost to Donald Trump. And now they're trying something different. So are you saying let's flip this around?

11:44Are you saying it's positively advantageous that you've got this rough diamond who's got a terrible backstory, who's a bit of an awkward life? And that will do better with the voters of Maine than it would be if you'd had some storied lawyer who had been a litigator, who had been in the Democratic Party, who'd made a lot of money, went into private equity and is now standing for the Senate. That's what some recent results seem to tell us. I'm not saying it's a good thing or a bad thing. I'm just saying that's where America is right now. I'm not a guy who's happy with the fact that Donald Trump is serving a second-time president.

12:18But that happened because people clearly don't give a damn that he was a convicted felon, that he was found liable for sexual abuse, that he incited insurrection. Didn't stop him from getting re-elected president of the United States. That's the country I'm in, unfortunately. OK, but isn't it that Donald Trump has this special carve-out with the American public that no other person does? I mean, you know, Donald Trump running for president, five kids from three marriages. If that was Barack Obama, the narrative would have been slightly different. Agreed. And by the way, we don't know if Plattner is going to get away with this.

12:45He's won the primary. Let's see what happens in November. If he loses, then you're 100 percent right that only Trump has the carve out. If he wins, then maybe not. I would point out that other candidates running in this race who've got awful records, much worse than Graham Plattner's in Texas. The Republicans have put up a candidate. Ken Paxton, attorney general. He's been dogged by corruption, scandals, accusations, investigations for more than a decade. But that's the point. He was impeached by his own party and his wife is divorcing him on biblical grounds. He's got 1 % of the media coverage that Plattner has, which tells you again that this is Democrats being held to a standard.

13:15That's rubbish. We've spent a lot of time talking about Ken Paxton. I'm not here to judge the newsagents. I'm telling you, I'm in the United States of America in the last 7 to 14 days since both candidates either won their primary or picked. Plattner has had 100 times more coverage than Ken Paxton. But Mehdi, did you think genuinely that the Democrats... Democrats are held to a standard that Republicans are not. That's a fact. Well, yes, but also would the Democrats have to be saying about their own candidate, oh look at Ken Paxton he's worse I mean that's not a great place Democrats are not saying that I'm saying that as someone who deserves the media but go back to your initial point which you started the discussion on you said Democrats wouldn't have picked a guy like this five years ago I think you said when we started they wouldn't have picked him five months ago he wasn't the candidate of the establishment Chuck Schumer the leader of the Democrat Senate endorsed his opponent the sitting governor who was expected to be a shoe-in she was the only Democrat who had won a statewide race she was a popular governor he destroyed her because people don't want that and by the way we haven't talked about any policies People in the Democratic base don't want to support people who supported the genocide in Gaza.

14:10Grant Platt knows very anti-genocide and anti-Israel. That matters. People in the base want universal health care now. Well, frankly, they don't want anyone that Chuck Schumer has supported. Exactly. They don't want Chuck Schumer's support. But again, I just... But can't you do better than that? I mean, sorry, but can't you do better than a guy? Maybe. According to the polls. You can fill out the ex-girlfriend's comments because she's conservative or because there's only one of her. He's got baggage. I've never debated that. Right. Clearly, he's been a dodgy guy. I don't think he's denied that.

14:34Every time I listen to the sort of main voices and the opinion polls, it's like we're going to have to hold our nose because the most important thing is flipping the Senate. We haven't said two words in this conversation, which are at the core of all of this. Susan Collins, the person he's running against, is the sitting senator from Maine for 30 years. She's enabled everything that Donald Trump has done while pretending to be concerned about it. And Democrats are fed up there. Independents are fed up. Trump is more unpopular than ever before. so that is a state that should be flippable in a midterm where the president's going to take a hit.

15:05Easily flippable without having to get somebody who is... I'm not sure about easily flippable. Mills right now, the woman he beat, I think four points up on her. Plattner's had a big lead, now he's down to two points up on her. Generic Democrat is ten points up on her, which is great, but I love these polls. Where is this generic Democrat? There's always going to be real-world people with real-world issues. OK, so you say the politics of Plattner is what Democrats want. Is it what America wants? Isn't that an activist view, that America's sort of heart is where Bernie Sanders is or where AOC is or where the squad are.

15:38America's not a monolith, as you know. It's a very divided country. So when you say what America wants, I think there are enough Americans to win with that message. Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. I think the American public has shifted to the left on a lot of issues like taxing the wealthy, like universal health care. By the way, these issues transcend left-right issues. Every Republican under the age of 50 wants to oppose, not every, a majority of Republicans under the age of 50 want to oppose further aid to Israel, right? Health care is an issue that unites Americans across the board. Corruption.

16:05People are fed up of corruption in Washington, D.C. We have the most corrupt president in modern American history. So these are issues that unite. But this is Maine. I'm not saying every senator is going to run on Graham Plattner's. Even Mamdani went in one in New York, conceded. Not everyone's going to run a Mamdani campaign and win. But Plattner's showing you can win in Maine. Until these recent scandals, he was up double digits. Well, he's shown he can win the nomination. Well, he also shows he was, no, he was also beating Susan Collins by double digits in the polls. His message, I keep saying, come back to the policies, his message is very popular.

16:33Does he have baggage? Yes, I think all three of us agree with that. Could it cost him the election? Sure, it may do. I would also make one last point to go back to the double standards. James Tallarico is running in Texas against Ken Paxton. He's got a squeaky clean record. He's a former seminarian compared to, and they're still smearing him as a weirdo, as someone who wants to abuse children. So the Republicans will always smear whichever Democrat you put up. Barack Obama was supposedly, you know, the most evil man in the world, a secret Muslim communist born abroad. Let's go to the other side, to California, because overnight we also had the results from this gubernatorial primary race, which has got a very sort of cut out and keep Democrat, Javier Becerra.

17:14Right. Would you agree with that? Sort of a Biden-y guy and a Balmer-y guy. Biden-y guy who even the Biden people don't like. OK. People will be slacking him off. And in second place now is Steve Hilton, our old mucker from here. First thing you're talking about, Steve Hilton, living in the US, no one ever mentions his British political past. I find it odd. Really? Yeah, no, it never comes up in any piece, any profile, that he worked for David Cameron, that he was a British politician. They just call him former Fox host. Isn't that amazing? He just buried his entire pre-Atlantic career. We just don't matter.

17:43Well, it's good for him. I don't think people want him talking about, you know, it doesn't really fit with the modern Republican party. But he's got a British accent. Yeah, well, I think he may have modified it. I don't know. I haven't listened to him recently. But I think he doesn't want people knowing about his touchy-feely, compassionate conservators of days. Or the green stuff. Yeah, the green, green building. I just find that fascinating. Tom Steyer was the populist choice in that race. A billionaire. I interviewed him recently. The man spent$140 million of his own money to lose again, sadly.

18:09So does that mean that that race then is pretty much nailed on for the Democrats? I think so. Because Hilton is not going to win California. I agree. There was a time when Republicans could win statewide in California. This year is not one of those times. I don't know if you're following the L.A. mayoral primary, which has caused huge controversy because they took a long time to count and immediately became evidence that this is another stolen election where this reality TV star called Spencer Pratt was the Republican candidate. Social media built him up. Elon Musk, the algorithm pushed him. But in real life, L.A.

18:40is a very blue city. He was never going to win. And now because he took a long time to count his votes, Donald Trump is claiming this election was stolen. the entire MAGA media has now decided it's another regged election. So this is the country we live in right now. More of Mehdi in a moment. When we come back, what is happening in the American media space right now?

19:10The News Agents USA. Mehdi, there are convulsions going on at one of the main networks in America, CBS, where 60 Minutes, the storied documentary making programme on US television, is in turmoil over a series of sackings made by the editor in chief, Barry Weiss. Is she just trying to modernise American television or is it something darker? A much more sinister, much more sinister. You're far too kind in your introduction. Barry Weiss went from the New York Times to setting up her own substat called the Free Press, which she turned into this kind of centre-right, contrary place, anti-woke, anti-DEI, very pro-Israel.

19:50and then she got bought by David Ellison, son of Larry Ellison, I think third richest man in the world, big Trump supporter, big Netanyahu supporter. They paid, I think,$150 million for this blog that nobody thought was worth$150 million and then rewarded her by basically letting her take over this entire TV empire under Paramount, which Ellison owns. So now she runs CBS News, one of the big mainstream brands. She's got this curious title, Editor-in-Chief, which doesn't really transfer to TV, Barry Elton. She doesn't transfer to TV. So there's a couple of things about Barry Weiss. that run in parallel.

20:22One is her politics are horrible, which you'll come to in a second. Two is even if her politics were amazing, she's completely out of her depth for TV. She's just messed it all up. She doesn't understand television. CBS has had multiple failures. They couldn't get their correspondent into China with Trump the other day because they didn't get the visa in time. That's basic stuff because she fired the person who used to run that bureau. The whole thing is chaos, separate to the politics of it. The firings, then hiring people back, the internal politics, the griping, the inability to run an evening news channel that has any ratings.

20:5260 Minutes was doing really well. She's now taking a hatchet to something that was doing well. Took it up by about 9-10%, right? I don't know the exact numbers. The last editor apparently had... You're talking about 60 Minutes? 60 Minutes have been doing great. When she took over, she had actually been... It was up, and it was also up online. She was selling this whole thing. I'm going to modernise it for the internet. It was doing fine online. So that's one thing. Number one, incompetence. But more sinister is the ideology. She is there. What is happening in the US? I just need to make this clear.

21:19In Hungary under Orban, how did they take over the media? His billionaire friends bought the outlets. Erdogan in Turkey, how did he take over the media? Not with tanks, his billionaire friends bought it. Modi in India, billionaire friends bought all the channels. That is the playbook in the US. You have Ellison's buying CBS, he's about to buy CNN. Rupert Murdoch owns Fox, Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. You have a bunch of right-wing billionaires controlling much of the mainstream media that people have relied on for years. That is a very scary prospect when you have a president who makes it very clear that he expects loyalty, he expects people to fall into line.

21:49Trump said recently CNN will be better when the new owners take over. That's a very dark moment for a country that's always celebrated the free press, the First Amendment. So where is the First Amendment now? You know, any journalist in America always talks about the First Amendment rights, free speech, all the rest of it. The First Amendment is still there, but is it not being practised? Trump treats the Constitution as an option. He follows it when he wants to, ignores it when he wants to. he's lost multiple court cases. Other presidents have lost court cases, but other presidents didn't then just ignore the rulings in the way Trump does.

22:20He arrested Don Lemon, the ex-CNN journalist. He raided the home of a Washington Post reporter. He banned the AP from covering the White House and the Oval Office. He tried to defund NPR and PBS, public broadcasting in the United States. He's threatened multiple media stations with lawsuits, settled multi-million dollar cases. He's threatening to pull the license from ABC because a comedian mocked him. I mean, this is the kind of thing you hear in a tin pot dictatorship. The comedian got pulled off the air on CBS, Stephen Colbert, and then Jimmy Kimmel of ABC, they suddenly said, oh, we're going to do an early review of all ABC's local news licenses.

22:53So there is a lot of retribution going on here, a lot of targeting of the press that we see in authoritarian countries. It's a very worrying time for the media. And again, instead of the bosses of these companies standing up for journalistic principles and their staff, instead you have these billionaire owners either rolling over for Trump, like Bezos, or enthusiastically backing him like Ellison. But I suppose someone listening to this will say, hang on, how many of you just introduced Mehdi Hassan is a guy who's got a media company in America, which is very outspoken. Yeah. No one's closing you down?