On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone details how Project 2025 “operationalized Trumpism” to target political enemies
Carusone: “I think what we should recognize is that he is refining this sort of agent, the revenge agenda, and, he's drawing firmer lines around who are on the teams”
Published
Citation From the September 24, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): "These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges."
Come again? That was America's Republican nominee for president of the United States of America threatening to jail the citizens of the United States for criticizing judges, but not all judges, just Trump's handpicked Supreme Court justices who are in the majority who made the decision on Dobbs.
It should have been predictable at this point given that the Supreme Court has time and time again shown its willingness, its enthusiasm, frankly, to do Trump's bidding, including granting Trump more than he asked for on the immunity question, giving him absolute immunity from prosecution in their last term.
And it is just the latest in the many ways Trump has openly vowed to weaponize the federal government for his own political purposes if elected to a second term.
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"I say go down and indict them." Joining us now, president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, is back. Claire's still with us. Angelo, at some point, there are no new Trump stories, but this was a new twist, right?
Trump, who is the subject of gag orders because of the actual, tangible connection between his rhetoric and threats against judges and people attached to court proceedings that affected him said yesterday that "people should be jailed who criticize judges." Not all judges, just his picks and the people who side with him on the Supreme Court. That's how it would be, should he be reelected.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, I'll start by noting and unfortunately, I have the great pain of watching almost all of his speeches now, but, actually, this is the second time he said that.
He said it at a rally back in Wisconsin on August 20th. Nearly identical, the same thing. The same language. "Our judges, our justices, they should be punished. They should be put in jail. They should be fined or worse." He was sort of refining it back then, and now he's sort of landed on it.
And the part that I find staggering about it, aside of the fact that he really does think about it as "our justices" -- that there is. And this is a pattern that we've seen time and again, right? That the DOJ is "ours." It's his.
It's not only there to defend him, but as we've seen with Project 2025 and all these discussions about what would be his new administration, it is going to be a weapon of revenge and retribution against his political opponents.
But in addition to that, it's just the rank hypocrisy. I mean, this is a guy that back in March took content from Laura Loomer. So, this is you know, not a new story. But he took something that Laura Loomer was saying about Judge Merchan's daughter and then himself promoted it, a totally fabricated attack that ended up getting the judge to have to revise his gag order to include a attacks on his family.
Or, you know, even places like Fox News where, you know, his beloved Sean Hannity, the Fox host that he's been talking about more recently at the rally is sort of, you know, warming them back up again. In the 3 weeks from when the trial started to when the trial ended, Fox News launched 220 specific individual vicious attacks against Judge Merchan. Not criticism, we didn't even count those. Just the actual attacks that were totally fabricated are the bogus things.
So, I guess we shouldn't be surprised at this point by the rank hypocrisy, but I think what we should recognize is that he is refining this sort of agent, the revenge agenda, and, he's drawing firmer lines around who are on the teams.
And it's his judges. It's not all judges. It's not the system. It's just his people.
WALLACE: Well and, Angelo, you know, we now have all the information we need, right, to decide if this is what we want. What is the -- I mean, and he did this with his generals, right? "My generals. My generals."
It's why I think most of them quit. Mattis quit. Kelly ultimately quits. After failing to impart on him that the generals don't belong to him, they serve the country. What is -- what is in your view?
And I take your point, I missed it in August when he said people would be jailed for attacking "his judges", the Supreme Court judges who rolled in the majority on Dobbs. But what in your view gets that to break through in these last 42 days?
CARUSONE: I mean, it's just like what's happened now, right? It's that we -- we're paying attention with a new lens, and I think that's what's been incredible.
It's something that we've discussed as the summer has progressed, which is that in a way, you have to look at some of these things with fresh eyes -- that we've either become too numb to the sort of the flamboyant extreme things.
And I think one of the things that's changed the context there is that because Project 2025 has operationalized Trumpism, it's a much more professional operation, so the chance of it being executed is more real now. The threat is much more significant because of all the planning that has gone involved. We have to sort of take a new look at what it actually means.
These aren't just offhanded comments or political statements or red meat, you know, to get the base sort of activated. These are actually expressions of intention that will in turn, turn into reality.
And so even something here, this comment about the judges, I can see why people would maybe let that gloss over the first time that gets said because he says so many random and haphazard things in his speeches.
But this is the moment where we have to actually start to become -- we're scrutinized.
So, I think to your question, what you're doing now, what others are doing, the fact that we're paying attention to these comments and not treating them as just off handed remarks or red meat, but instead saying, "Wait a minute, this is another example." This is another pearl in the string, that is being constructed here and we have to decide if this is the reality that we willingly want to walk into.
And that's the choice that we still have, as you noted, in these next few days, is that it's still the choice that we get to make.
And, you know, just before the show started and it put into focus, one of the would be attorney generals that gets talked about, Mike Davis, sent a note saying that he was going to be -- that me and my colleagues will be put in jail right away when under a new Trump administration.
And this is sort of that larger, ironically, working the rest, trying to get people to shut back, to go along to get along, and they are escalating because they're impressing an advantage.
And I do think the most critical thing that we can do, especially people with positions of influence and platforms, is to not let ourselves be numb to the past, and to take a fresh eyes and a fresh glance, at what's being said here, because they will be actualized reality.
WALLACE: And to talk about it. I mean, I started talking over the summer about the fact that I was swatted in the spring, and George Stephanopoulos said, "Oh, me too. Jocelyn Benson said, "Oh, me too."
I mean, I think to sort of out their tactics is having the intent of silencing all the critics.