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“So many things have shocked me about the past 100 days,” says the Guardian US columnist and author of Win Every Argument, Mehdi Hasan.
“Even for me, even the person who was saying it’s going to be so bad, it’s much worse than even I thought.”
What’s been shocking to Hasan about Donald Trump’s second term so far is not the policies – they were laid out on the campaign trail – but the lack of resistance.
“I didn’t realise how quickly mainstream US media organisations would roll over,” he tells Michael Safi. “Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai of Google all lined up at the inauguration. No, I didn’t see that coming. I didn’t see universities and big law firms bending the knee so quickly.”
Hasan discusses the impact of Trump’s first 100 days on people in the US and around the world, his plan to run for a third term, how the Democrats are performing and why public movements are the only way to resist the dismantling of democratic norms.
“My greatest hope is that the American people – not all of them, I think 30 to 40% are unreachable – but the vast majority of them recognise the peril that American democracy is in, the peril that the American economy is in, and the peril that the globe is in, and actually do take to the streets, do take to town halls, and do take to the ballot box, eventually, when we get there in ’26, to say this was a huge mistake that we did twice.”
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