The Current - Why Chris Hayes isn't a "doomer" about U.S. democracy

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

It can be hard to make sense of the barrage of news coming out of the United States these days. The murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk has ignited a fraught conversation about free speech and the limits of presidential power in the United States. MSNBC host Chris Hayes joins us to talk about why he says US President Donald Trump is an aspiring autocrat threatening American democracy — and why despite that he's not a "doomer".

Before making reservation dogs, Sterlin Harjo was ready to quit the industry. The director credits this nothing-to-lose attitude for allowing him to just let go and swing for the fences, which resulted in him creating the smash-hit TV show. After the series finale, Sterlin moved on to his next big project, The Lowdown. He joined me, Tom Power, to talk about why he wanted to center his new series around truth and journalism at a time when both seem more threatened than ever. Follow Q wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube. This is a CBC podcast. Hello, I'm Matt Galloway, and this is the current podcast. He did not hate his opponents.

He wanted the best for them. That's where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent. As the final speaker at Charlie Kirk's funeral on Sunday, U.S. President Donald Trump did not mince words. The murder of the conservative activist on the 10th of September ignited a fraught conversation about free speech and the limits of presidential power in the United States. In the wake of Charlie Kirk's murder, Donald Trump has ramped up the targeting of his

political opponents, media institutions, and what he calls the radical left. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended after pressure from the Trump appointed federal communications chair for comments he made about Charlie Kirk. Donald Trump also publicly called on his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to prosecute the president's enemies. To help us make sense of what we are seeing unfold in a American politics. I'm joined by Chris Hayes. He is the host of the MSNBC show All In with Chris Hayes. He's also the author of the book The Sirens Call, How Attention became the World's Most Endangered Resource. He's in New York City. Chris, good morning. Good morning. I think a lot of people are trying to understand what is going on in your country. How would you describe what's

happening in your country right now? We have a aspiring autocrat in office who is most as swiftly as he and his allies can to consolidate a regime that would be essentially the end of America's constitutional order as we've known it for a long time. That's pretty pointed in plain language. Yeah, I mean, I think there's just no other way to conclude anything else. I mean, the thing I would say on the other side of it is it's a process in this sort of regime consolidation that they're trying at pell-mell speed. I'm not sure it's going to work.

And in fact, I think there's a lot of reasons that it might not. I'm not a doomer about this. And I think that the, you know, robust constitutional structure we have and the traditions and legacies we have here are allies to those who want to see the constitutional order endure. But that is what is happening, plain as day. Let's talk about the Kimmel story. You called Jimmy Kimmel's indefinite suspension that he was put on. These are your words. The most straightforward attack on free speech from a state actor I have ever seen in my life. And it's not even close. How do you make sense of that, the attacks on free speech in your country from the Trump administration? We should note that they started very early on, and one of the things that even before the Kimmel incident to me was in the same category, and I called it similarly, was when a grad student from Turkey named Ramesa Ozturk was grabbed off the streets in the Boston area because she co-signed an op-ed in the Tufts student paper that criticized the Tufts administration's handling of politics around the Israeli War in Gaza. And she was put in detention. Now, this is someone who was here legally, had committed no crime, was accused of committing no crime or an infraction purely for her protected speech on a campus where she was a student in a country that has a First Amendment that applies to persons, not citizens. Like, that's established precedent here. So they have been at war with free speech from the beginning.

In the case of Jimmy Kimmel, what made it so straightforward was that the head of the FCC said, and I quote him here, Disney, Disney. we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way. And I've just never seen a state official explicitly threaten a private speech actor in quite that way in my entire career covering politics. And that's not to say that issues around speech aren't complicated. They are. And there are people on the right that make an argument that non-state attacks on speech can have an equally chilling effect. And there's there's something to that. There's a kernel of truth there.

There's things to debate. The head of the FCC saying, we can do this the easy way or we can do this the hard way, take this man off the air is as straightforward as it gets. And the last thing I'll say here is they can't even maintain the pretext that it had anything to do specifically with the one comment he made, which was not specifically about Charlie Kirk, but about the reaction of Mago World to the shooter and wrongly implying the shooter had their politics, right? because as soon as they try to maintain that pretext, the president says it should be illegal to criticize me. They're criticizing me too much. They should be taken off the air because they're criticizing me. There's no pretending here about what's going on. Do you worry about this?

I mean, you have a platform. You're in this business. You are not shy about what you say. But the point in some ways of what people believe what he's doing is, is that you create that chill, that you give people a reason to think twice about what they're saying and maybe they don't say anything at all. Do you worry about this? Yes, I mean, I do worry about it. What specifically are you worried about? I worry that what happens is that exact thing you said, which is that there's a sort of gravitational force that's invisible, but you feel it circulating around you.

And that's a thing that's like, don't go there. And that the size of that grows and it starts to take up more and more of the space that you occupy. My reaction to it is when I feel that force now, I force myself to talk about the thing. If I feel any feeling that, well, you shouldn't talk about that, then I talk about it. Despite the fact that there could be consequences. I mean, again, I don't, I don't, let me be very clear. I'm not scared of these people. Like, you know, what is, you know, they could, I'm a free citizen and free country.

I have a First Amendment right, and they can do whatever they want to try to do. But my concern is something more subtle that happens. I mean, I saw it after 9-11. You can see it sometimes after, I think you saw some of this after October 7th, particularly after events and a little bit after Charlie Kirk's death, when there is something genuinely horrific that happens. And there are people in absolute mourning and agony. There is a totally good faith reason to extend grace to be respectful.

And that good faith, grace, and respect can very, easily be manipulated by people into attempting in that moment to produce a kind of regime of taboo and censorship. How much support do you think Donald Trump has for what he's doing right now? There's an argument that's made that he's in some ways doing what he said he was going to do if he was reelected. I guess the question is in which lane do you mean? Like, I think his economic program is really pretty disastrous. and I think it's both on the merits disastrous and also in the polling. He's got the lowest polling ratings on any issue on cost of living in the tariffs.

People are really not happy with the direction of the country. Inflation is not tamed, despite what he said at the U.N. the other day. So in that, I don't think it's particularly popular. I think on the sort of more autocratic attempt to consolidate a kind of personalist presidential dictatorship. Like going after his enemies, as he said. I think he doesn't have support for it. But I also think that a lot of the country is kind of checked out and indifferent about it. What do you mean?

I mean that, like, I think if you ask people, like, I think the Jimmy Kimmel thing really broke through. And I think, you know, to the extent we have polling as evidence, majorities don't like it. And I think you saw everyone from, you know, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Joe Rogan, you know, conservative podcasters saying, like, this is crazy. You can't do this. I think there's still a consensus in this country that the government trying to get a comedian. fired off late night is wrong. My fear is that the level of activation among the American populace against this attempt to end the American Democratic experiment, as we know it, frankly, is not sufficient yet to what will be called upon the populace to do. that people are consumed with with the day to day parts of life and that this hasn't

tier point it hasn't broken through i think it's broken through but i just think it's a little remote you know it's and i understand that there's a lot of news right there's a lot going on it's hard to pay attention yeah there's a lot of news i think you know one of the things that's really important to understand about this is intra-party signaling is incredibly important for attentional purposes and for scandal to function and what i mean by that is jimmy kimmel's a example. It was a big deal that Ted Cruz came out and said, this sounds like a mafia threat. When a scandal has people on inside the coalition criticizing it, it is like putting wood on a fire that in the absence of that wood, it burns out. What Trump has sort of discovered is that if you just keep everyone in line on everything, there's only so much a scandal can be a scandal.

I mean, he just fired a U.S. attorney because that U.S. attorney refused to prosecute a Democratic politician from New York that Trump has it out for. And everyone kind of knows these are trumped up charges. He fired that woman. He replaced her with a woman who's never prosecuted a case who was a personal lawyer of his, who's a Florida insurance attorney, and has publicly signaled that she has the instructions to file charges against his political foe. That's as bad as it gets, really. But it's just hard to make that breakthrough. Republicans don't seem to care. No one's really criticizing it.

So there are a lot of things he's doing that should be enormous administration-consuming scandals. And the reason they aren't, in large part, is because they've figured out if you maintain complete intra-party discipline, you starve scandals of oxygen. You know what's funny? Tony Collette hates watching horror movies,

but she loves acting in them. As one of the most dynamic and versatile actors of her generation, Tony has starred in everything. I mean, from her Oscar-nominated role in The Sixth Sense to her iconic haunting performance in Hereditary. In our career-spanning conversation on Q, you'll hear why she keeps returning to the genre she's afraid of. That's on Q with me, Tom Power. Follow wherever you get your podcasts, including on YouTube. How do you, and it's not just inter-party discipline, but how do you understand, why maybe it's just about money, but why businesses, for example, are willing to bend that

knee. And you have the CEOs of, you know, Apple or what have you showing up in the Oval Office with a golden icon to give to Trump and what have, like, what is that about? Why is it, if this is as dire as you and others are saying, why is it that those companies and those politicians aren't pushing the button and ringing the alarm? I think there's three reasons. One is, I think Trump's entire career has been counterparties thinking that he's the sucker and then end up getting swindled. I think because he's in some way such a ridiculous figure, but he is kind of facile in his own way, people think they're going to be the one that gets over on him. So I think there's a lot of that. Second thing is, I think class interests are incredibly important.

And I think a lot of the capitalist class of this country, CEOs, got very radicalized in COVID and in Biden. They really came to despise their workers and their workers' power. It's particularly true in Silicon Valley. They felt like I can't control my own company and all these basically uppity software engineers making $500,000 a year are telling me that we have to have a trans flag and say Black Lives Matter and screw them. So there's real radicalization and real class interest and a desire to kind of crush this kind of worker insurgency, particularly in Silicon Valley and particularly among sort of what we call white collar workers. And then the third thing is, I think they just have a very hard time conceiving of it all going away. I don't think they understand because I don't think they've internalized it, like what the prospects for American business look like under a. personalist regime. Now, people make the argument the other way that they understand that very

well, which is why they're kissing up to him, and that might be true, too. I mean, the thing that I'm really obsessed with right now is big pharma. I have covered politics for most of my adult life and part of that time was in Washington. I have watched that industry mobilize to absolutely destroy legislation time and time and time again. Popular legislation, legislation that pulls at 80 percent or 70 percent, legislation that would make drugs cheaper for the American people. You as a Canadian know that we pay a lot more for drugs that you pay less for, that people come over the border for that reason to purchase drugs there. Pharma has managed to maintain certain price monopolies and elevated drug prices through sheer force

on Capitol Hill. And yet, you've got the president up there saying your product causes autism if pregnant women take it. And like, crickets. It's like, hey, guys, I know you got some lobbyists downtown. I've met them. I've talked to them. Anyone want to kind of mobilize here as the president tells people wrongly that you're giving kids autism because their moms are taking Tylenol?

It's bizarre. What would make that change, do you think? I mean, you said that there's the possibility that this project won't work, that you're not a doom or what would allow, what would create the conditions for those companies to change their tune and politicians to change their tune? I do think that his popularity and relative popularity matter a lot. And I think that's particularly true when you compare it to Orban's Hungary, even Erdogan, particularly Erdogan in the early years as he was consolidating the regime when his party, the AKP had and Erdogan personally had very high approval ratings. They were very popular. And this is even before the kind of regime consolidation made it much, much harder to measure some organic or pure public opinion. Being genuinely popular, having big majority. support Modi and India being another example right now is really important. And the fact he doesn't have it is equally important. I do think that's a huge weakness. We'll see what happens with the terrorists and we'll see what happens to the economy.

I mean, I think right now there's a lot of indicators that he's pushing the economy towards a recession. I'm not sure if this very audacious attempt at regime consolidation with, you know, 40% popular approval is going to survive a recession. I also just do think that it's just taking time for it to dawn on people. And to bring it back to Kimmel, one thing I think that is clear here is it's better to fight back than to concede and then just have them at your door the next day. And I think you've seen that with a whole bunch of people from the law firms that have sued him to Harvard that held out to Kimmel and the folks that rallied around him. That really that's the only thing you really understand. But that was the question I was going to ask. I mean, who has in some ways, not the moral authority, but do you know what I mean, that that could stand up and say, to be a leadership figure to rally people around them against what you're seeing right now?

I think the Kimmel moment was interesting because it broke through because he's a big star and, you know, a tough grad student named Ramesa Astark isn't. Look, I don't want to undercount the degree of actual mobilization there's been in this country. The No King's protests that happened earlier this summer was, according to some people, and this is, these are fairly rigorous estimates, like one of the largest mass mobilizations of people in the streets in the country in a generation, millions of people on the streets. There's going to be another one on October 18th. I think that people finding their power is a process. And I think that the more that you can demonstrate, he can't just do whatever he wants, that politics still exists, the public opinion still exists. and that you can use whatever power leverage you have to say no, that that can be contagious. How complicated is that in an era, and again, you talk about this a lot in the book,

in an era of an attention economy where social media incentivizes people to be their worst? It's really hard. And it's also hard to maintain focus and not get distracted. I mean, this is a challenge I live with every day, and I write about it in the Sirens Call. The other thing, though, I would say about this, and it's a point. point that the sociologist and Times column is saying, you know, Tufecki makes in a great book called Twitter and tear gas. She writes about online. That switch can flip in both directions. So you can look at a society and think like it's more abundant and people aren't coming out against the regime and then all of a sudden something happens than they are. So that can also go both ways. The attention can be sort of captured and catalyzed both by the regime, which it's very good at, or by people who want to oppose it. Let me end with, I mean, when I asked you kind of what's going on in your country, you started to laugh a little bit. You are a bunch of things. You are a journalist. You're also a dad. You're an American. When we spoke the last time, you said that your book in some ways was about what it means to be human right now and how to reclaim our humanity. How are you, as a person, how are you reclaiming your humanity and what feels like a huge moment for your country? That's a great question. My wife and I sort of chuckle about this about trying to.

to maintain some division between what's happening in our lives and our relationship and our loved ones and our friends and our kids who are just awesome human beings that I love and love spending time with and what's happening outside. And obviously those are connected. But I do try to maintain some division between those two. And I think to myself about, you know, how I'm doing or am I happy or not, or, you know, I'm really, like, inordinately blessed in a million different directions more than I ever could have asked for. And I feel truly and profoundly grateful, like, every day that I wake up. I feel really grateful for all of these blessings and all these gifts. And in a weird way, I do find it in terms of, like, when you talk about what it means to be human, like, it's invigorating for me at some level.

Like, this is kind of what it's about. I'm not a spiritual person. I don't really believe in an afterlife or a higher power necessarily, although I'm also not, like, resolutely secular. But what I do feel is we have to make meaning while we're here. And I really, really believe in this country, deeply. I love this country. I love democracy. I love the people that I share this country with, citizens and non.

And I love the project of trying to make things better collect. and I feel very mission-driven in this moment to try to fight for what I cherish. I'm really glad to have a chance to talk to you again and have you back on our program. And as I said, a lot of people are trying to figure out what's going on. And your insight into this has been really helpful. Chris, thank you so much. Thank you. Chris Hayes is the host of the MSNBC show All In with Chris Hayes and the author of the book,

the sirens call, how attention became the world's most endangered resource. It's a fantastic book. He was in New York City. You've been listening to the current podcast. My name is Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening. I'll talk to you soon. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.