Angelo Carusone on Deadline White House: MAGA media personalities are trying to intimidate judges and justices to get their way
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From the February 17, 2025 edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): if you go back to what the hardcore base has been pickled in and you sort of place it against what is wildly unpopular with the general public, including Republican voters, including people who voted for Donald Trump ostensibly for change, annihilating all of the post-Watergate reforms is high on that list.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah, I mean that is, that is one of the defining characteristics, not just of Project 2025, but some of the key figures that came in, Russ Vought being principal among them, which is that we need to reset on all the post-Watergate norms and that a lot of these things, and again we say norms instead of laws because a lot of what we're talking about here, some of these things are laws and practices, but a lot of the stuff that they really want to target and that they're targeting first is are the norms, basically sort of a new way of saying.
OK, that's the way we're going to operate, you know, and that's just how it's going to be. It's a better way to function. It's sort of like, you know, not screaming when the elevator door closes. There's no law that says you shouldn't scream when you're in a crowded elevator, but it's not nice, and most people would find it appalling, and we just don't do it, you know, I mean, that's just, it's kind of a norm. It's a basic one, but it is. And there's a lot of those. That's how we all kind of function.
They want those all gone. And to me the revealing part here is, you know, when you think about it from the Supreme Court perspective. And this also ties we were talking about earlier with the IRS. You know, the Supreme Court can be a laggard or a vanguard when it comes to establishing sort of, you know, order and laws and interpretations of it. They can, they can drive social change, which is very rare, but they can do it in monumental instances, and we remember those Supreme Courts that do it. They can also be a laggard, meaning everything else kind of changes around them and they just kind of finally enshrine it.
What we haven't really seen before is a Supreme Court that’s s a vanguard for centralizing power and rolling back so much progress in this way, it's very rare and usually they get dinged for that when they do take those actions and where it ties in with this IRS stuff and what we're seeing online and the sort of the right wing rage is that there is a consistent and persistent attack on judges right now that do even the most basic thing that could be perceived as anti-Trump or thwarting the Trump's agenda or putting speed bumps in. Even if it's entirely you know, benign.
They're ripping them apart on X and on social media. They're digging through their files. They're digging through their family members, and they're creating sort of this larger cloud around them which is designed to work the heads of the individual judges, but it's also in the minds of the Supreme Court because when you start to think about it, you say, gosh, we really need to be careful here that we don't step too far in one direction or the other. We certainly don't want to aggravate the Trump base. This may not be the best time, you know, we should probably hold off.
I'm worried that that part of that working of the refs landscape is going to further poison the well and incentivize them to be vanguards in helping reestablish and reassert this sort of concept of a unitary executive and just accelerate the removal of so many of the norms that have really been helping preserve a lot of our basic, you know, civic and democratic functions.