THE 'DEBATE ME BRO

Mehdi Hasan's aggressive interviewing style landed him a Sunday show on MSNBC. Until he started talking about Palestine.

- E. ALEX JUNG

AS A MATTER of preference, Mehdi Hasan likes a smart opponent. "It's no fun interviewing village idiots," he says, for instance, of Marjorie Taylor Greene. He recounts some of his favorite interviews during his three years as the host of The Mehdi Hasan Show on MSNBC and Peacock with the pride of a grizzled prizefighter: the short-lived Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, Texas congressman Dan Crenshaw, Elon Musk's newfound mouthpiece Matt Taibbi. Many of them began as Twitter arguments. They would trade barbs and hyperlinks and quote-tweets, and invariably Hasan would bait them into saying something like "Why don't you invite me on your show, then?"--the cable news version of "Catch me outside." There was a schoolyard braggadocio about it, a crotch grab with a bachelor's in political science. (Yes, they were usually men.) Someone like Taibbi might have fanboys gathered around jeering, "Nahhh, dude, he's scared of you." But of course this was exactly what Hasan wanted all alonga worthy adversary and an audience-so by the time his subject was seated with the earpiece plugged in, the public pantsing could commence.

"Other people have, you know, horse riding or basketball," he says. "I argue in interviews. This is what gets me going. Imagine an action movie with a debate with Jason Statham. That's like heaven for me." The one he's telling me about now, with Mark Regev, a senior adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, defined the end of his MSNBC tenure. "The Israeli government is very good at putting out a spokesperson. Regev is one of the smoothest operators. Probably one of their best media performers. And that was, for me," Hasan says, clapping and rubbing his hands together, "a challenge."