Mehdi Hasan on America's 'Neo-Fascism'

17:03Mehdi Hasan:I've thought a lot over the course of the last year. I don't know. I'm sure you've thought about it as well. It seems to me that the one of the strengths of the second Trump administration and one of the reasons that I mean, it continues to exhibit much of the chaos in different ways of Trump. one. But I don't think anyone could deny that as a political project, it has been far clearer edged, sharper edged. It has been something that has clearly got a sort of stronger philosophy at its base. And it's had a plan. That period of opposition from 2021 to 2025 was obviously completely key in forming that.

17:36Mehdi Hasan:Do you ever think it would have been better if he'd actually won the 2020 election?

17:39The News Agents Hosts:It's such a good point. I have actually thought that many people have pointed that out, including supporters of Trump, that they actually benefited from him losing that election, which he still claims he didn't lose because he's insane and deluded and dishonest. No, 100%. Project 2029, this massive undertaking that the Heritage Foundation and the Trump campaign undertook, which Trump pretended to have nothing to do with, but literally everything he's done has come out of Project 2029. Even Venezuela. I mean, there's a whole section in Project 2029 about re-hemisphering, about making the Western Hemisphere ours again.

18:08The News Agents Hosts:That's in Project 2029, which we've, as you pointed out, we've heard from him, his post in recent days about running the whole stuff and being Don Roe Doctrine. So they had a lot of time. Yes, to work out what they were going to do next. They had a lot of time to think about who blocked us in the quote-unquote deep state and government bureaucracy last time. What do we need to do in terms of personnel next time? Because in D.C., personnel is policy. And that's why this time around there are none of the adults in the room, quote-unquote, that we saw in the first administration or the alleged adults in the room, the Jim Mattises, the John Kellys, the Rex Tillisons.

18:38The News Agents Hosts:They're not around this time. This time it is RFK and Tulsi Gabbard and J.D. Vance and all the other. and Stephen Miller. I mean, this is effectively a Stephen Miller presidency, Lewis. There's an Atlantic profile piece out this week that I urge your listeners to have a read on. It's an

18:51Mehdi Hasan:extraordinary piece.

18:52The News Agents Hosts:He's got his fingers in every pie of the Trump administration, whether it's national security, where he's involved in boat bombings and now in Venezuela, whether it's immigration, where he basically has written the entire script for Trump, this white supremacist deportation. Greenland. Greenland as well, where he was making the case for Greenland. Crime, law and order. All of these issues, Stephen Miller, who's deputy White House chief of staff for policy, is basically a shadow president in many ways. And I think that we need to think about. Why is it, for example, Lewis, that the Department of Homeland Security Twitter account reads like something from a Groyper or neo-Nazi publication?

19:24The News Agents Hosts:Why do the images and the pictures they put out look like white supremacist imagery? Because as you say, this administration is much more ideological, much more clear-eyed about what it's trying to do.

19:32Mehdi Hasan:Well, I wonder, it's just worth actually just reading a very small section of that, which has got some attention, but I think illustrates for listeners who aren't that familiar with Miller. I mean, he's absolutely ideologue. But it says during debate prep for the 2024 campaign, Miller found himself in a contentious back and forth over immigration with a more moderate Trump ally. Finally, a frustrated Trump interrupted the two men. Stephen, he said, if you had it your way, and this is Trump, everyone would look exactly like you. Someone familiar with the exchange told us that's correct, Miller said before turning back to continue sparring.

20:03Mehdi Hasan:And again, that sort of illustrates sort of the point that we're talking about in terms of how far the politics has shifted. I'm pretty sure if that had come out in the first Trump presidency, it would have been denied. It would have been something that the Trump White House would have eschewed from. But they're not doing that now.

20:17The News Agents Hosts:Quite the opposite. So the Overton window, they've shifted very successfully in this country in terms of what is outrageous and not outrageous. I mean, Trump is a master of doing something outrageous. Everyone gets upset for a day, and then he waits a bit, and then he does it again, again, to go back to your point of exhaustion. And the second time he does it, it's just less new, so it's less newsier, and it's less offensive to people because they already heard it. So take the example of running for a third term. The first time that was ever broached, well, that's crazy. You can't do that. Now it's part of everyday conversation.

20:44The News Agents Hosts:Is Trump going to run for a third term? Even though it's insane. It's against the 22nd and 12th amendments of the constitution. If you take the immigration stuff, somebody made a point yesterday that Heather Heyer, who was murdered in Charlottesville by a Trump-supporting white supremacist in that famous Unite the Right white supremacist gathering in 2017 in his first year in office, today the guy who killed her would be a hero on the right. They'd be defending him. He wouldn't have gone to prison. they'd have been pardoned by now. But look at where we are today. Today, within minutes of an ICE agent killing an American, white American 37-year-old mother in a car filled with soft toys, within minutes, as you've already pointed out, they're calling her a domestic terrorist.

21:18The News Agents Hosts:And online, everyone from Elon Musk to random MAGA accounts are lining up to say, well, it's her fault. She did it to herself. She was an agitator. She shouldn't have turned the car. So this is where we are now, where we're celebrating state-sponsored violence against American citizens. And by the way, it was Republicans who told us for years that this is what we needed to to be worried about. This is why we needed guns in the Second Amendment. And it's a Republican administration doing this.

21:40Mehdi Hasan:Can I ask you a question, which, again, I wrestle with myself. It's almost turning into a sort of therapy session for covering Trump. But I'm always, I personally am always in a slight sort of dilemma and binary when whenever any kind of particular kind of policy or political issue with Trump comes up, let's take Greenland, for example, or indeed Venezuela this week, given it's so topical. I can never quite make up my mind. Maybe there is no answer. Maybe it's a bit of both. I don't know. But I can never quite make up my mind as to whether to spend a lot of time trying to kind of intellectualize and find the philosophy and the politics behind what they're doing for example with Greenland and Venezuela you know you can spend a long time talking about them wanting to achieve dominance in the western hemisphere and this being a return to kind of 19th century politics and we in economics we start talking about oh he wants to be like William McKinley and he's looking at tariff policy and whether to try because there's such a clamor particularly from audiences to try and get that sort of a slightly deeper understanding?

22:31Mehdi Hasan:Or do we simply over-intellectualise what is basically a kind of set of quite kind of, a kind of sort of set of competing urges, basically, a kind of like wriggling bag of urges within Donald Trump's mind. And it's just passing fancy from today to day. And then he makes us look stupid because we've spent all this time basically kind of suggesting that there's a great vision and philosophy. What do you think?

22:53The News Agents Hosts:No, no, you're 100 % spot on. It's a dilemma that I had in the first time and I've tried to drop it now because we all want to do that, right? You and I don't want to be the people being like, well, he's just an idiot or he's just crazy or he's just a racist. But unfortunately, that is often the simple answer to a lot of things. Yes, of course, there are people in the background, Stephen Miller and others, pushing ideological leaders. But Trump himself is a vessel for those agendas. He has no strong views of his own. This man was a Democrat 15 years ago. This man was pro-choice and anti-guns 15 years ago.

23:19The News Agents Hosts:The only thing consistent in his life is racism and chasing after women money. That's basically the only consistent things you can find. How do you count that?

23:26Mehdi Hasan:I mean, because we get people listening going in terms of the racism point. And indeed, there is a long, strong, long.

23:31The News Agents Hosts:1972 is the first time we came across Donald Trump when he was refusing to rent apartments to black people.

23:35Mehdi Hasan:Indeed so. And then how do you reckon with the facts? And again, you would have reckoned with this and thought about this over a lot of the last year. He continues or at least in 2024, he built or started to build anyway, the multi-ethnic working class coalition that Democrats have been talking about for years. And then he dropped it as soon as he came to office.

23:52The News Agents Hosts:Have you looked at his numbers with Latino voters? They've absolutely gone down the toilet. And again, you talked about media looking stupid. The media has looked stupid. I read pieces saying Republicans are now the party of young voters. The Republicans are now the party of Latinos. Have a look at his numbers with young voters and Latinos right now. Gone. With Donald Trump, he will always throw everyone under the bus, including people trying to make sense of him. In recent days, Luis, you've seen people trying to make sense of his Venezuela policy, and he throws them under the bus. Marco Rubio went on TV Sunday morning and said, no, no, he didn't mean we're going to run Venezuela.

24:19The News Agents Hosts:He meant we're going to do a blockade. And then in the evening, Trump goes on Air Force One and tells journalists, yeah, I really shouldn't say this, but no, I'm running Venezuela. That's exactly what I mean. And this is always a problem with people trying to kind of, as you say, over-intellectualize. Let me give you one example. People don't want to hear it because we're not used to a politician like this. I didn't want to hear it, but I've been doing this for 10 years. I try and tell people it is the truth. New York Times reported on the weekend that one of the reasons Trump went after Maduro is because Maduro was doing these dances and mocking the Trump administration.

24:47The News Agents Hosts:Two people told the New York Times that Trump got annoyed and that's why he pulled the trigger on attacking Maduro. Now, you might say that's ridiculous. That's just Trump derangement syndrome. How can the President of the United States attack him because he was dancing? That's ridiculous. And guess what? Trump comes out and says, you know, speech this week. Yeah, he was dancing and making fun of me. Oh, classic Don Joe. He just comes out and says the quiet part out loud. This happens again and again. Why did he not put Machado, the logical move for any American Republican administration, would be to put Maria Machado, the Nobel Peace Laureate, Democratic opposition leader, supported by the Americans, pro-Israel, it ticks all the boxes for an American administration.

25:21The News Agents Hosts:Why did they not put her in power? What? Reporting emerges from the Washington Post. Well, he's pissed at her because she won the Nobel Peace Prize and she should have turned it down. And you think, that can't be true. No one would really... No, that is Donald Trump. That's exactly the kind of stuff that motivates him. Not geopolitics, not democracy, not even kind of, you know, oil prices. And of course, Machado, we see the absurd scene, Lewis, where Machado then has to go on Fox News primetime this week and say, I would love to share my Nobel Peace Prize with the president of the United States.

25:48The News Agents Hosts:I mean, that is the insane world we live in now. People are having to do and say this kind of stuff to appease this kind of clownish figure in the White House. And I get it. I get why people in Britain and Europe don't want to take this seriously and say, well, you know, this is TDS. But this is who he is. I don't know how many times Donald Trump can tell you, this is who I am. This is all I care about before we try and add all these extra agendas. Remember, Lewis, he spent an entire three years saying, I'm going to be the anti-war guy. I'm the anti-neocon guy. I'm the anti-George Bush guy. And people wrote long essays about how Trump was going to redefine foreign policy.

26:22The News Agents Hosts:Isolationism is going to be a different type of administration. Voters fell for it. They said, we're voting for Trump, not Harris, because we don't want any more foreign wars. And he comes and he bombs seven countries in his first year in office. He appoints Marco Rubio, Hawke as his national security advisor and secretary of state. And he bombs Venezuela and does regime changes. We're going to run the country ourselves. Something even Dick Cheney didn't say about Venezuela. So, again, think about all the people who've made fools of themselves writing long, long pieces about Donald Trump's new intellectual anti-war foreign policy.

26:49Mehdi Hasan:A lot has also been written precisely on that subject, suggesting that this turn towards a more sort of traditionally hawkish, neoconservative kind of position or attitude on foreign policy will divide the MAGA movement, perhaps fatally undermine it.

27:03The News Agents Hosts:Do you buy that? No, I think that's been exaggerated by people on the left and in the media, because the MAGA movement fundamentally is a personality cult. So of course, there are people on the fringes, there's your Tucker Carlson's and your Marjorie Taylor Greene, who was a loyalist who's just stepped down from Congress. There's your Candace Owens. And these people have high profiles in social media, so they always get talked about. Wherever I go, I get asked about Marjorie Taylor Greene, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, right? I get it. They have big followings and they make a lot of noise. But fundamentally, look at the polling.

27:29The News Agents Hosts:Trump still commands 80, 90 spent support of the GOP base. Look at the way he's able to just click his fingers and people switch their positions. So Venezuela is a classic example. The same people who spent months saying we shouldn't be doing regime change. We shouldn't be nation building. Since Sunday, where are they? Have they criticized Trump? Nope. They've all fallen in line. Tulsi Gabbard, who is on record saying we should not touch Venezuela, we should not do any kind of regime change, came out and kept her job in the administration saying, I stand with Trump. This was the right thing to do.

27:58The News Agents Hosts:MAGA voters are all over my social media telling me that this was great. We should do more of this. We should take more countries. Next, we should go after Colombia and Cuba. Literally, literally last week, they were telling us the opposite. So Donald Trump is a man who's been able to always just click his fingers and MAGA base will switch with him. If he says I'm anti-tariff, they'll switch to anti-tariff tomorrow, Lewis. Tomorrow morning, if Donald Trump wakes up and says tariffs are bad, the MAGA movement will switch with him instantly. No one will say, but you told us tariffs were good for the last four years.

28:26The News Agents Hosts:They will say tariffs are bad. I'll give you another example. He famously said in his 2016 race, I could shoot someone in the middle of the street and not lose a single voter. That was put to the test.

28:37Mehdi Hasan:Right, we'll be back with more from Eddie right after this.

28:43The News Agents Hosts:News you can trust and the conversations that matter.

28:47Mehdi Hasan:With award-winning journalists at the heart of the stories from the UK and around the world. Breaking news here in Edinburgh. I'm Simon Marks.

28:54The News Agents Hosts:My American Week is next.

28:55Mehdi Hasan:Reporting from the heart of Cardiff.

28:57The News Agents Hosts:Discover how today's story affects your life.

29:00Mehdi Hasan:Listen on our free Global Player app or the new LBC app.

29:04The News Agents Hosts:LBC. Leading Britain's conversation.

29:13Mehdi Hasan:The News Agents. Do you, in terms of thinking about what might happen this year now, there's been so much talk about the midterms. Do you think the midterms will actually, it's also a question of will they go ahead. Do you think they will go ahead in a free and fair way?

29:26The News Agents Hosts:I don't know the answer to that question. There's a high chance that they won't go ahead in a free and fair way. He even speculated about cancelling elections in his speech this week. And people will say, no, Mehdi, he said, I won't cancel elections. But think about that statement. No one asked him. where there's the idea that you're even thinking that you have to deny cancelling elections. Where does that come from? Trump doesn't just throw things out there. That means something's marinating in his head.

29:48Mehdi Hasan:So the fact that he has to state it, no other previous president has had to state it.

29:52The News Agents Hosts:Exactly. Has had to do a denial that no one asked for. So one is elections going to go ahead in 26 and 28. Two is if they go ahead, are they going to be free and fair? We already know what they're doing on the gerrymandering front. They are gerrymandering openly, brazenly, like crazy to make sure.

30:05Mehdi Hasan:Just for people who don't know the term, they're changing the boundaries of the districts to make them more favourable to Republicans.

30:10The News Agents Hosts:Much more favourable. Of course, the United States is the only country in the Western world where politicians get to pick their voters. Voters don't get to pick their politicians. In the UK, you have the Boundary Commission. In other countries, independent, impartial people draw up the nature of the constituency. In the US, state legislatures can do it. So wherever the Republicans control states and they control a majority of states, places like Texas, they can say, we are redrawing the maps. And they are redrawing the maps. So instead of it being, for example, eight Republicans and two Democrats, in that state, they make it nine and one or 10 and zero because they draw the maps brazenly in a way that favors themselves.

30:43The News Agents Hosts:So that's going to help them in the midterms. But look, if the Democrats, if it's a free and free election, every poll tells you and history tells you Democrats will win. The opposition party tends to win a midterm. And especially right now where Trump's poll ratings are collapsing, they're on course to take back the House. The Senate is much more difficult. If they don't take back one or both of these chambers, then Lewis, I really do worry about 2028 because there will be nothing to stop him. There are no checks on Donald Trump right now. A man who is so led by grievance and impulse and narcissism, there are no checks on him.

31:11The News Agents Hosts:He controls the Supreme Court, both chambers of Congress, vast swaths of the media, and of course, law enforcement and the military.

31:18Mehdi Hasan:Do you ever, and this is again something else I've wrestled with myself, when you're watching him, do you ever still laugh at him? I mean, laugh when he says stuff? Because this is my dilemma, because this is the thing about Trump, right? And this is why he makes such a sort of arresting, beguiling, weird political personality. I was watching him in his speech to Republican gathering earlier in the week, and repeatedly, I mean at one point he actually had me in hysterics, right, because he is genuinely, despite it all, his presence and political vitality continues to astound. You know, his shtick, the thing that surprises me, I don't know about you, the thing that surprises me in a way, even to myself, is like, how has this shtick, this shtick, not got old?

31:57Mehdi Hasan:You know, it's like ten years of this stuff, and And yet somehow he can still make me laugh, which on some level I'm sat there thinking I uphold this guy's politics. I uphold what he's doing. I recognize it. I basically see this guy like you in some respects as being neophascistic. And yet here I am laughing at him. Do you wrestle with that?

32:12The News Agents Hosts:So so I kind of half agree with you. Mostly I'm laughing at him, not with him. And even if I'm laughing with him, I find it hard to differentiate whether I am with or at. Yeah, true. But it's more like, you know, a drunk in a bar will tell a story that you enjoy. It doesn't mean you want to put him in charge of nuclear weapons and make him lead your nation. So, you know, there are certain things, you know, you can't look away from, like rubbernecking. I watched that speech he gave this week where he did the weird orgasmic noises as he impersonated a transgender weightlifter. It was insane. Like no other politician in the world could get away with that.

32:41The News Agents Hosts:He does. So in that sense, it doesn't get old. I mean, it has gotten old. For some of us who've watched him nonstop for 10 years, it's certainly gotten old. I know all of his takes and all of his one liners. Poor me. Yes, sadly, I moved to the U.S. months before he declared his candidacy. My entire time in this country has been following Trump 24 hours a day, sadly. But look, what's interesting is the only advantage to the fact that he has this weird narcissistic charisma and reality TV stardom, you know, he is the guy, he's the only president United States who was on Home Alone 2, right? The only good thing about this is that it's not replicable.

33:12The News Agents Hosts:So this idea of Trumpism after Trump is a great debate to have. I don't know what happens when he's gone, if he's gone. I mean, there's a different issue whether he even agrees to leave. But let's say he does leave the scene. Who comes after him on their side? Because J.D. Vance has the charisma of a wooden chair. None of the other pretenders to the Trump throne have anything like him in terms of the cultish control over the party or the kind of ability to command the news agenda with whatever you want to call it, entertainment, charisma, stupidity, insanity. So in that sense, that is one advantage.

33:42The News Agents Hosts:It kind of makes me feel a little bit better about the future of this fascistic movement on the right.

33:47Mehdi Hasan:Well, because I was listening to John Bolton the other day. I mean, obviously Bolton worked for him in the first term. And, you know, he was talking about Venezuela. And he said at the VARIA end, he just sort of said, because he was talking about, you know, what advice he might give to Keir Starmer and European leaders. And his main sort of message, which I've heard him talk about before, which is, you know, just sort of hold on. And in three years time, America will get back to some sort of political normality. Do you buy that? It feels to me that the forces that Trump has unleashed, certainly within the Republican Party alone, never mind the rest of politics, it feels to me it's impossible to imagine that suddenly they'll just be put back into Pandora's box.

34:20The News Agents Hosts:So a couple of things. One is, if you're taking advice from John Bolton, you know, go see a shrink. Number two, Bolton himself has no credibility. Remember, he's one of these many Republicans who went to work for Trump thinking that they could control Trump. How did that work out for John Bolton? He's now being prosecuted by the Trump administration. He could go to prison, ironically, not for Iraq, but for other things. No, we don't have time on our side, Lewis. Let me give you one example. In the middle of the shit show around the killing of an American citizen, the Trump administration, Rubio, announced that they pulled out of 66 international treaties, multiple UN organizations.

34:50The News Agents Hosts:The kind of damage that they're doing to America's standing in the world, to our institutional architecture, to international law, to precedents and norms, to our culture. That can't be undone. You don't just put that genie back in the bottle. This will take decades to undo, if it's even possible, to undo the damage Trump is doing to the democratic cultural social fabric, not just of this country, but the international arena. There's already mini Trump's copycats mimics around the world. I do a show for Al Jazeera, as you know. I noticed in 2017, 2018, when I was interviewing foreign government officials from Asia and Africa and Europe, that they all started sounding like Trump.

35:23The News Agents Hosts:They're all taking their lead from Trump. I don't think you can put this back in the box. I think we are going to have to live with the consequences. Just take the Supreme Court in this country, for example. Trump made that Supreme Court. It is a Trump court now for decades to come. And he may appoint another. In 30, he may appoint another. God help us all to make it 7-2. In 30, 40 years time, Trump will be long gone. Trump's children will be gone. America will still be living with the consequences of the Trump Supreme Court.

35:47Mehdi Hasan:Just thinking about British politics a bit. It's obviously something else you know extremely well. When you're looking at British politics right now, do you see the glimmers of Trumpism, of Magarism? Do you see a scenario in which we're going down similar sort of paths? Because, I mean, you know, one of the things certainly over the last year, which has been so striking, has been the emergence of what feels to me to be a sort of fully-fledged sort of Anglo-Sphere US-UK political conversation dominated by the US, but it's not entirely one way either. I mean, I've been surprised when I've been in the US talking to MAGA people, their sort of unbelievable knowledge sometimes of quite esoteric UK political stuff, you know, kind of little mini core celeb on the British right here, sort of travels over there.

36:29Mehdi Hasan:You know, every single time, certainly the start of last year, Musk would tweet something or whatever, it would make huge, huge waves over here. Yes, the gang story. It feels, correct, it feels as if increasingly there is a shared US-UK political space, which is new.

36:41The News Agents Hosts:Yeah, so, I mean, to go back to your original question, I see more than glimmers. I think Trumpism is very much taking hold in the British Conservative Party, in the British right wing movement. Obviously, Nigel Farage was the first person. Remember when Trump got elected first time? He was the first person to go out there and meet Trump before any of the British government officials.

36:58Mehdi Hasan:And that seemed very, very eccentric. That seemed eccentric, exactly. And now it's here we are.

37:01The News Agents Hosts:Nigel Farage could be the next prime minister of the UK. And God help us then with an Anglo-American alliance. I think the UK has always been, you know, a country where, you know, America sneezes and the UK catches a cold. It's always been a place where our political developments have followed pretty closely, whether it was Stature, Reagan and Blair Clinton. And, you know, the examples are many. And I think I worry that that is where we're heading now. If Trump is back for a second term, is there going to be a British mini me? I do worry that this Labour government is doing everything possible to make that happen.

37:29The News Agents Hosts:If I was on the British right, I couldn't ask for more than what Starmer and the Labour government are doing. They're a perfect foil. And I think, you know, it feels like we've gone back in time where you've got a Labour prime minister thinking I've got to be tough on migrants. that's the only way to fend off the right. Didn't work for Tony Blair. I don't think it worked for Starmer. And the rhetoric that's coming out of the British right. In Trump's first term, Lewis, correct me if I'm wrong, you lived there then, I didn't. The British right pretty much resisted a lot of Trumpism. They were happy to distance themselves.

37:54The News Agents Hosts:I remember Boris Johnson condemning Donald Trump when he was mayor of London. There weren't anti-vaxxers all over the British conservative movement. Now you've got this conspiratorial, white supremacist, great replacement. I hear British politicians now saying, deport, deport, deport. that wasn't part of British political culture when I lived there 10 years ago.

38:11Mehdi Hasan:Even stuff like, I mean, you've got the housing secretary, Steve Rea. I mean, it's obviously far more innocuous, but it's just very telling and interesting, you know, him turning around and going, build, baby, build. You know, like the sort of, as you're saying, the kind of almost the sort of reflexes of our own politics being rebuilt.

38:23The News Agents Hosts:Do you remember calling immigrants an invasion was once something Nick Griffin did? Then it was Suella Bravham, and now it's just kind of consensus across the board of the right. I was asked to go on Newsnight to talk about the shooting. I couldn't make it. I was stuck in traffic, but I did catch the clips online. They had some guy from Reform immediately just defending the killing of an American. But there's a British politician sitting in the UK defending the American government killing a citizen. So that is there reflexively. The Trumpism on the right in the UK is definitely growing and festering.

38:46The News Agents Hosts:Liz Truss, an embarrassment to our country, just kind of, you know, telling Trump to go after the UK. The way that, I mean, history books are written, Lewis. Elon Musk will play a big role in that transatlantic movement. He's elevated Tommy Robinson. He's elevated the Reform Party and Rupert Lowe. He tweeted yesterday, Lewis, you can't make this shit up. He tweeted, Britain is a police state now. It's like, imagine tweeting that on the day that the country you're in just killed an unarmed American woman in her car in cold blood. But that is the kind of propaganda. I don't think people in Britain realise, Lewis, if you talk to anyone on the American right here right now, they think London has fallen, to borrow a Hollywood movie title.

39:25The News Agents Hosts:They think Britain is some run by Muslims and communists and just prosecuting innocent conservatives. Like it's hard to exaggerate just how much they have a complete misunderstanding. And that's Elon Musk.

39:37Mehdi Hasan:Just finally, I mean, we were talking about your time in America and you going over there and becoming a very prominent figure on the American left. Do you ever regret it, given the sort of 10 years of Trump in your head, as you say? And clearly it is exhausting. It's not just exhausting, but it's it's psychologically debilitating covering this stuff. And you have been at the absolute forefront of that. Do you ever regret moving to this country?

39:58The News Agents Hosts:Trump relatedly? Yes. Take Trump out of the equation. I mean, I love living in the US. That's why I'm here. I would leave if I didn't. But it is frustrating to me. I do sometimes think I moved here in, I think it was May, April, May of 2015. And he came down the elevator, I think a month later down the golden escalator. And my time here has been marked by Trump becoming this public figure. And as I say, not just politically, but like, I'm a Muslim immigrant trying to bring up kids in the US. Like his impact, the impact of Trumpism on this country, this has become a more racist, more abusive, more violent society.

40:29The News Agents Hosts:And that all of it, of course, it's upsetting. It's and just dealing with you.

40:33Mehdi Hasan:Do you feel that you experience that daily on a daily basis?

40:36The News Agents Hosts:Not on a daily basis. Online, definitely on a daily basis. No, not in everyday life on a daily basis. But, you know, I wake up yesterday and Elon Musk is calling me a pathetic weasel and says, game is over for me. And then I get threats off the back of that. I do public events, especially after the Charlie Kirk killing. I have to have security wherever I go in public events, as do many of us journalists and political figures on left and right. It's a real problem. And of course, nobody wants to live like that. I said to my kids the other day, I feel sorry for you that the only political figure you've ever known in your lifetime is Donald Trump.

41:02The News Agents Hosts:You didn't get to grow up in a normal time. And I think people have understated just how much psychological, as you say, damage has been done to the populace as a whole. But also, you know, to those of us who cover this stuff, it is exhausting every day. I made a joke last year to people who said, oh, we can't have Harris as president. She did the genocide. I said to friends of mine on the left and the Muslim community, I said, at least Harris will give us a day off. At least we'll have a day to recuperate, rethink, regroup, reorganize. With this guy, as we started our conversation, like, do we want to talk about Venezuela?

41:30The News Agents Hosts:Or do we want to talk about ICE? Or do we want to talk about Epstein? Or do we want to talk about corruption? There's never a day of rest right now. They have, to use your phrase, just absolutely exhausted us. And we can't let them exhaust us because when they win in the exhaustion battle, they win in the fascist battle.

41:45Mehdi Hasan:Mehdi Hassan, thanks so much for joining us. See you soon. Thanks, Louis.

41:58The News Agents Hosts:The News Agents

42:00Mehdi Hasan:And a reminder, you can read Meddy on his excellent sub-stack Zetio, which is also the name of his media company. We'll, of course, be keeping a very close eye on the Minnesota story over the weekend. It's been a long year, hasn't it? The News Agents production team are Michaela Walters, Mikey Baggs, Jess Williamson, Anna Georgievich, Lizzie Ward, Natalie Inge, Shane Fenley and Arvin Baddowal. Our executive producer is Louis Degenhardt. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It's presented by Emily, Lost in Patagonia, Maitlis, John, Not Back on Blue Sky, Soapal and me, Lewis Goodall. Don't forget to listen to my Sunday political show on LBC from 10 this Sunday for the best interviews and analysis.

42:32Mehdi Hasan:And with that, we'll see you on Monday. Unless, of course, the president of the United States invades somewhere else, kidnaps someone else or uses the military against his own citizens. So chances are we'll see you in about five hours. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a Global Player original production.