Angelo Carusone on Deadline: White House: To understand the Trump administration, “look at it from the perspective of somebody that has been sitting in the right-wing fever swamps”
Things like infiltration of people's personal data inside IRS or FBI purges are “designed to do is validate those falsehoods and then operationalize them”
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From the February 17, 2025 edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Back to Project 2025 which was so wildly unpopular that Donald Trump said he had never heard of it. After deporting people in this country illegally who committed violent crimes, you have a majority of Americans who oppose everything else, majority of Americans oppose retribution if it means that FBI agents are purged or prosecutors are purged, and the IRS having more reach and having more political people with more fingers and grubby hands on your personal data is almost universally opposed.
What is going on?
ANGELO CARUSONE: Yeah, I mean, and Project 2025 sort of teed this up. Their proposal for sort of getting to where we are right now was to, and the objective, and that's the thing, the objectives were stated pretty clearly, which was to increase the politicization of the IRS so that it could be another instrument of revenge, and that's the important thing to consider here.
A lot of these initial actions are as much about sort of aggregating and consolidating power as possible, but the through line, the part that he's appealing to and It's not the majority of Americans, it's the most intense sort of fervent part of Americans that have been pickled in misinformation and rage for decades. That’s who he’s appealing to here. That’s why he announced his campaign in Waco which is a site of an attack against the government, it’s a symbol.
It’s to say we are going to be revenge. And so part of it was to turn the IRS into that and what they were proposing was adding in additional appointees into the IRS. It’s one of the agencies that has very few. I think it’s one or two, they wanted to add an additional seven and that was to help politicize it to speed it along. And what DOGE provides and it provides it not in this context but also more broadly, is essentially an accelerant for Project 2025's objectives and policies and that's that's really the difference maker here is that something that was already going to move at breakneck speed is actually going to speed up quite a bit.
And the other part that’s illuminating – why the IRS, why this data, what’s the point? Sarah sort of got to it about a bunch, when she was talking about how it could be weaponized and deployed and as a tool to shrink civic spaces. And so to really understand why they were going after the IRS in Project 2025 and now it’s that you have to look at it from the perspective of somebody that has been sitting in the right-wing fever swamps for a while. And if you have been, if you’re a consumer of the same kind of content Trump consumes every day what you believe is that there’s a massive conspiracy by liberal billionaires and the deep state to fund protesters, to feed, to fuel the deep state attacks on you, to turn the IRS into an instrument of revenge against conservatives over the past few years.
So what this is designed to do is validate those falsehoods and then operationalize them. And that’s the scary part.