During Monday's edition of CBS's The Late Show, host Stephen Colbert asked guest Chris Hayes who he trusts “over there” in the Trump administration. Hayes, the host of MSNBC's All in, responded quickly: “No one.”
Colbert, who once hosted The Colbert Report on Comedy Central, described the current cable news situation by stating: “Let's call a spade a spade. You guys are the 'liberal lefty' news thing, right? Fox is the conservative. CNN (the Cable News Network) is a bit of a mish-mash at times.”
The CBS host then asked Hayes: “Are you guys ever mad that (Trump is) more mad at CNN than you guys” because he talks about them all the time?
“It’s the classic neg [negative attack],” the MSNBC host replied. “He’s negging us by not mentioning us.”
“But things are going great for MSNBC now,” Colbert asserted.
“Yeah,” Hayes responded. “In a great way, I think you've seen a real reawakening of civic consciousness broadly. I think it's benefited me, it's benefited our shows, media from newspapers to all kinds of shows people are doing.”
After stating that he had been “out of town for a week,” the late-night host asked Hayes to “explain what is happening to Donald Trump right now.”
“You want me to catch you up?” Hayes asked in response before Colbert stated:
I thought maybe we'd be going to war with Korea because we were dropping some bombs on a couple different countries right when we left. China is no longer a currency manipulator. Russia is no longer our friend.
(Syrian President Bashar al-)Assad is now bad. N.A.T.O. (the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) is good. How are you and your compadres processing all the shifts?
“On things like N.A.T.O., I'm glad that he has come around,” Hayes stated. “You know, the thing about the president is he's not particularly well-informed and doesn't have any principles,” a line that generated laughter and applause from the audience.
“Here's the thing,” the MSNBC anchor continued. What it means is "he's endlessly flexible, but it also means he's easily manipulated.”
“It means whoever is the last person in the room can get him to go from China's a currency manipulator to China's not a currency manipulator. From Russia is great and Vladimir Putin's our buddy to they are now our adversary,” he added.
“There's something about that that's really, really unsettling,” Hayes noted, “because you just wonder: 'Well, who's going to be the person in the room? Who's going to be the person who just flips him in any given moment?”
“It almost seems like a matter of mood, what mood he's in today,” Colbert stated.
“There's a little bit of this kind of mad king air to it,” his guest asserted before noting:
It's like the way that we think about it, sort of Shakespeare depictions of courtly life, right? And the king is just there, and the king just has impulses, and then there's advisors who come in and have actual views.
And if they get close enough to the king, then they can get the king to have their view as well, and you get that feeling, particularly all the way all this sort of palace intrigue is covered that, you know, who has his ear can get the guy to do essentially anything.
The conversation then turned to Hayes' new book, entitled A Colony in a Nation. “Okay,” Colbert began, “what is the colony, and what is the nation?”
“Basically, the premise of the book is there are two sort of distinct policing regimes in this country,” Hayes responded. “A large part of it, which I call the nation, (is) what you expect in a free and open society, and the part of it which I call it a colony (is) where you have a policing regime that's what you would expect in a police state.”
Hayes continued: “The easiest test of which regime a person is part of is: “How often do you interact with cops?”
“I think basically, a lot of people in this country go months, years without ever interacting with the cops,” the MSNBC host stated. “They interact with them casually, and that's what you would want.”
The Monday night conversation began with Colbert introducing his guest as “the Emmy-winning host of All in With Chris Hayes on MSNBC.”
The CBS host quickly asked Hayes: “Did you ever think to yourself, 'Maybe we should have called it something else because it sounds vaguely sexual?'”
“You're literally the first person to mentions that,” the MSNBC host joked. “It never occurred to me.”
