Former longtime ABC correspondent-turned-Substack poster Terry Moran brought out frequent MS NOW guest Anand Giridharadas — yes, the guy with the crazy Jimmy Neutron hair — on Wednesday to chat about the war on Iran and the Epstein Files when Giridharadas asserted President Trump is worse than Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Mao Zedong because Trump, along with being “a weak man pretending to be a strong man,” has been “selling merch.” Giridharadas insisted the press have come to run “the risk of...warning” so much about the threats of Trump they’ve “inflat[ed] his strength beyond what it actually is” because “[h]e is not invincible,” “indomitable,” or “particularly popular.” In turn, he declared, the President is a “highly incompetent” “weak man pretending to be a strong man” and thus “not up there with like the great historical dictators” despite “trying to do that.” WATCH: Far-left pundit Anand Giridharadas (the guy with the hair) argues Trump is worse than Hitler because “I don’t think Hitler was selling merch” along with “Stalin and Mao” b/c they were “very serious”... Giridharadas: “[H]e’s a weak man pretending to be a strong man. He's… pic.twitter.com/mGGbL9i0kb — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 11, 2026 Then came the deranged hot take that, despite Hitler’s “awful project” or the atrocities committed by Mao and Stalin, they “serious” in achieving their aims and not weren’t “selling merch”: I think he’s...trying to do an authoritarian attempt and trying to barnacle the authoritarian attempt with so much personal stealing or whatever which, by the way, a lot of these authoritarians have the discipline to not do. I don’t know. Someone’s going to call me on. Maybe I’m wrong. I don’t think Hitler was selling merch. Hitler was very serious on his awful project or Stalin, and Mao and all these people were — had, like, were trying to do, like, other things. Like, serious other things in addition to the thing that looked — right? So, he’s, like, an unserious authoritarian who’s — it’s — he’s like a part-time side hustle authoritarian, which I think has limited the power of the attempt. Moran chose to tweak the idea supposedly modern authoritarians are all that cogent or singularly focused on their agenda: I would say that modern authoritarians — Putin became the richest man in the world without a paycheck from private enterprises and tire life. He’s arguably the richest man in the world. One of them certainly, Erdogan and Orban, they all combine their authoritarianism with — Chavez, too, with a kind of, you know, with thievery, basically, with that kind of corruption. Moran — whose views are almost certainly commonplace if not universal inside his former employer, ABC News — then declared Trump’s “incompetence...a gift” although “he is going to make an attempt to steal the [midterm] election” in November. Giridharadas zoomed out with a vile smear of the entire Trump administration and its tens of millions of supporters, arguing conservative, reformed Christianity is akin to the Islamic laws carried out by the brutal Iranian regime (click “expand”): OFFENSIVE: Anand Giridharadas says Christian nationalism and conservative-leaning Christianity aren’t really that different than the radical Islam coming from the Iranian regime.. “So, it sounds like if I’m taking [the Trump administration] seriously, it sounds like they’re… pic.twitter.com/fOoM7spswi — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 11, 2026 So, it sounds like if I’m taking them seriously, it sounds like they’re really offended by institutionalized misogyny from what I hear about their — their motivation for going into Iran. It sounds like they don’t like women being treated as second-class citizens and kept in the shadows and deprived of their rights, okay? Take — take that seriously. It sounds like they don’t like religious nationalism. That, you know — that kind of, you know, single — single religion kind of being given an elevated position in, in the country. It sounds like that kind of church and state thing feels, I guess, important to them. It sounds like they don’t like, you know, this kind of — this idea of like a singular leader, like a supreme kind of leader, just deciding things arbitrarily. It sounds like they don’t like now that the bombing happened, they don’t like, you know, the son just being anointed as like a successor, just because of birth, okay? So, I’m going to — I’m going to take — I’m going to take them at their word. If it turns out we have hundreds of millions of dollars a day, which I’ve heard, you probably know better than me, hundreds of millions of dollars a day to do what we’re doing in Iran. We have that money around. It turns out, and we are suddenly interested as a policy matter in fighting institutionalized misogyny, religious nationalism, authoritarianism, and kind of this like, filial succession kind of vibes. Why don’t we just spend that money in America to fight those things? And why don’t the people who are fighting those things in Iran — who are also doing those things to America — why don’t they just not do them? It’s actually just so much cheaper to just not do those things here than to fight other people doing them somewhere else. Just don’t do them here. It’s free. You could just for free stop doing them here. Before spending the rest of their time obsessing over the Epstein Files, Moran insisted Trump is “actually an idiot” and “megalomaniac”: Former ABC correspondent Terry Moran: “[Trump’s] a megalomaniac...He’s got Alexander the Great notions that he's going to change the world. And it will have a Trump sign on everything in the world. I'm serious. I actually think part of that is the mechanism. I also think that in… pic.twitter.com/Ednitx5pyk — Curtis Houck (@CurtisHouck) March 11, 2026 To see the relevant transcript from March 11, click here.