Ha! Points for honesty. Well done.

Why aren’t you exhausted?

I am! I am a catastrophe. I’m [worried] I will have a herniated disc collapse while I’m on the air. And I’m only 46!

Have you put aside other projects for now?

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I’m always sort of working on some other thing. But I have made a deliberate effort to kind of clear the decks a little bit for 2020. I think the president’s reelection effort right now, given what the president has just gone through and how he’s behaving, how he’s tended to his reelection effort, means that we really all need to be on full alert for anything happening. I feel that whatever the third rail is supposed to be in American civic life, it has been de-electrified. And there are now no places where people can’t go and where he won’t go. So I feel like we all need to prioritize this election in a way that maybe we wouldn’t to any other, you know, first-term president seeking a second term.

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Has President Trump been the president you expected him to be?

Yeah, I think so. I didn’t have much awareness of him as a public figure before he was running. But once he was running, given the sort of recurring dynamic in the campaign — where his opponents and observers and the sort of graybeards of our democracy would identify a place where you’re really not supposed to go, and as soon as that was identified, he would instantly go there — I saw that as a template. And so I have sort of expected all along that there really isn’t any line that you can draw in terms of hurting the country or defying the Constitution or defying norms and mores in terms of what we think our civic life is supposed to be. I can’t imagine anything that Trump wouldn’t do. It doesn’t seem to me like there’s a line that he wouldn’t cross. And so, yeah, I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.

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Is it a problem for America that we have large chunks of viewers who won’t watch news channels because they find them either too conservative or too liberal?

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I don’t know. I tend to think that the objectivity of the golden age of news is overstated. And I tend to think that the both-sides-ism about, you know, there being TV for liberals and TV for conservatives and that MSNBC is a mirror image of Fox, I think that tends to be overstated as well. I think at MSNBC we are doing a fundamentally different project every day than what Fox News is doing every day. I mean, Fox News was founded by the media consultant to Richard Nixon, who was trying to create a conservative media environment that would boost conservative politics and the Republican Party. And that’s what Fox News is. And that’s their project. And that’s what they became. That’s what they were from the beginning under Roger Ailes. And that’s what they have, you know, accelerated toward, I think, with even less restraint since he died.

So I think it’s a hard question to answer. My role in it is something that I think about all the time. I mean, I want to be proud of my work at the end of the day. I want to be able to be proud of my role as a citizen at the end of the day. Our sort of internal mantra on our show is that we try to increase the amount of useful information in the world. And that means that we have editorial freedom. I have editorial freedom to choose which stories I want to not cover and choose which stories I want to cover. And I get to choose how I cover them within the bounds of NBC News rules and standards. And I ask my viewers to trust me. And when I get stuff wrong I issue corrections. And I try to do my best every day to tell people what I think is the most important thing and why it’s important. And I don’t really know a more ethical or a more civic-minded way to do this job.

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When you were a kid, what did being an American mean to you?

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I don’t know that I have a great answer for that. I mean, my mom is an immigrant from Canada who came here as a young adult and grew up very, very poor in a very large family in northeastern Canada. She came to the United States because she felt like she had basically three job options available to her in Newfoundland: She could be a nun, which several of her sisters did; she could be a nurse, but she’s a little squeamish about blood and guts; or she could be a teacher. And she wasn’t super-psyched about children. [Laughs.] She only had a high school education, but she is incredibly, incredibly smart and incredibly literate. Like, my mom’s just a brilliant writer and a really good reader. And she felt like she had no options.

And so she kind of snuck out. One of her older sisters had immigrated to the United States to try to have a more exciting life and to try to have other economic options, and my mom kind of snuck out and joined her. And they were the real black sheep of the family for a very, very, very long time. And that backstory, in terms of my mom having sort of paid the price in terms of connection with her family, but wanting to come here because of what this country had to offer — my mom made an overt decision to become a citizen so that she could vote for Gene McCarthy as president.

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And I knew that story growing up. And she met and married my dad when he was a captain in the Air Force. And I think that backstory of my mom — I mean, it made me feel like being an American was not just an inheritance; it was a boon. It was something that my mom had made great sacrifices to achieve and had made a deliberate decision about that she was very, very proud of. And it made me not take it for granted. And so I think as a kid — that’s the way that I thought about it. We’re Americans because my mom made this choice for this to happen.

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You’ve had critics who say you’re too obsessed with Russia and you see malfeasance in all of Russia’s actions. What’s your response to that?

I don’t worry about that kind of criticism very much. I don’t really worry about any kind of criticism too much. I don’t have time. I do feel like I was aggressive in covering the Russian interference in our 2016 election. If you go back during the election, like, when the RNC platform toward Ukraine and Russia got changed, I was one of the only people who put that on TV. And when it came to, you know, [Paul] Manafort as a strange addition to a Republican nominee’s campaign, given his previous work for a pro-Kremlin kleptocratic pseudo-dictator who had escaped from office and had escaped to Moscow to avoid the angry mobs in the street, like, I covered that stuff as it was happening. Not more aggressively, but maybe with more interest than other people at the time. And that’s just simply a product of my news judgment.

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I don’t know how important those things will turn out to be in the long-lens-view of this time in history. But the fact that an adversarial power, a fascinating adversarial power like Russia, concocted this scheme that it enacted over a long period of time to intervene in our elections in a multitiered way, specifically to try to hamper Hillary Clinton from becoming president and to help this other guy who then turns out to be oddly and irretrievably supplicant toward the Kremlin, towards the Russian leader who led that operation? I mean, I don’t make any apologies for covering that intensively. How can you not? It is absolutely fascinating to me still.

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You rarely have a panel of guests. It’s almost always just one person. I wondered how you decided that was the way you want to do things?

I had been a panelist. [Laughs.] That was enough. I don’t mean to cast aspersions on any other way that anybody else approaches cable TV news, but I have been in one of those chairs set up for a right-versus-left “Punch and Judy” show where, you know, everybody’s hoping for zingers, and the kinetic activity is the apex of what you’re aiming at. I recognize there is entertainment value in that, and there can even be some educational value in that. It certainly is a good way to demonstrate good arguing techniques, and that’s a substantive thing. But when it comes to, like, actually explaining stuff about what’s going on in the world and helping people understand what’s the important news of the day and what’s important about it, it’s just not an effective vehicle for that form of communication.

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You’re Catholic. Does your faith inform your work?

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I think it informs who I am and my values. And it certainly informs the way I live in my own spiritual life. But, you know, if the Vatican screened my work product they wouldn’t identify it as particularly Catholic. [Laughs.]I mean, I think of my faith as mostly a private thing.

What about you comes across on television that isn’t representative of what you’re like off-air?

I have better posture on television. [Laughs.] Which is literally true and actually a very consequential thing in my life now because I have a terrible back. You know, 12-hour days, five days a week has a way of destroying one’s spinal column. I never wear makeup in my real life. And I think I cover electoral politics on TV a lot more than I am interested in it as a private citizen. Not to say that I’m not interested in electoral politics, but I think the news, particularly right now, is so driven by federal electoral politics that it would be remiss to not be covering it as much as I do. The way my partner, Susan, talks about this, she says it is the real me on television, but it’s just a slice of me. It’s the real me. It’s just not the whole me.

Is it better to be the interviewer or the interviewee?

Being the interviewee is one of my least favorite things in the whole world. You are a very nice person, but I would prefer almost anything to this.