In a special UpFront interview, renowned US academic and public intellectual Noam Chomsky sits down with Mehdi Hasan to discuss the implications of a Donald Trump presidency, on both domestic and global issues.

“He certainly is off the spectrum. There’s never been anything like him,” says Chomsky, an award-winning author, who is witnessing the 16th president over the course of his lifetime.

“He has no background at all in any political activities. Never held office, been interested in office. He has no known political positions,” says Chomsky. “He’s basically a showman.”

Chomsky, who has spent decades critiquing US presidents, calls Trump an “ignorant, thin-skinned megalomaniac” and a “greater evil” than Hillary Clinton.

“Do you vote against the greater evil if you don’t happen to like the other candidate? The answer to that is yes,” says Chomsky, on Americans who cast their votes for third party candidates or simply stayed home on election day.

“If you have any moral understanding, you want to keep the greater evil out,” says Chomsky. “I didn’t like Clinton at all, but her positions are much better than Trump’s on every issue I can think of.”

In this interview, Mehdi Hasan and Chomsky talk Trump.

Before people took to the polls to elect a new president, analysts predicted that Hillary Clinton would win by a landslide. But in a shocking turn of events, Donald Trump nabbed the top spot.

How did Trump manage to win? Was it a boost from the economically “left-behind”, as many seem to think, or did racism play a larger role?

In this week’s Reality Check, Mehdi Hasan shows how it wasn’t just economic concerns that drove voters into Trump’s hands, but mostly racial resentment.

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