On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how Project 2025 “allows for the ability to operationalize MAGA and Trumpism”
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From the December 3, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, we talk so much about the ties between Project 2025 and Trump, and there was a ridiculous period of time where Trump was like, "What? I don't know anything about it," around the time when it was clear that the public really did not approve of or like what was in it. That time appears to have passed completely. I think there are 17 folks who have been tied to Project 2025 who have been tapped to serve in his administration. I know you're the least surprised person on the planet, but tell us what you know about these folks.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I think ultimately -- I think big picture, here, I want to just tie it in a little bit with the Hegseth stuff, because part of what Trump is doing here is creating a cast of characters. Authoritarianism, fascism, it's mostly theater, especially in the early days, and all these people are designed to play a part. That's where the Project 2025 piece comes in. I'll get to that, but Hegseth plays an important part in that story. And when we think about the role that he plays, Trump sort of imagines a figure like him leading the DoD in large part because of his fealty but also because of how he looks and operates.
So when you have a right-wing media echo chamber that has been designed to essentially also function as -- for the last eight years, it has been optimized to be a crisis communications operation for sexual misconduct, rape, and misogyny. These kinds of attacks and these kind of stories coming out, they're -- that's what the right-wing media is designed to operate against, and it fits into this larger arc that Trump is building, which is that at the surface level, you present people that are going to play a role in a cast because they allow you to project a certain image, and then one layer below that, you then put in operators and operational capacity so that you can implement the kinds of changes that you hope to change, and also make sure -- and this is I think the part that Trump is more attuned to -- it's less about getting toward a certain worldview. He's mostly focused on the casting, but he is interested in making sure there are no road blocks to his power.
To me, the Project 2025 piece allows for both of those things. It allows for the ability to operationalize MAGA and Trumpism in a way that he was not able to do the last time, to make good on a lot of the promises of policy changes and breaking up the status quo that he talked about during his campaign, and most importantly, to allow for revenge. You need operational capacity. Hegseth -- no one thinks Hegseth's going to do that. That's not what he's there to do. He's there to play a role in the story that Trump is telling. But there will be operational capacity behind him just like in the rest of the administration. And to me, the Project 2025 piece then takes this from a media story, which has a lot of significance and something that is designed to grab attention and tell a political and media narrative, and instead it turns it into a much more real life policy where we're not going to keep track of. And I think that's the part that is the most significant. From Russ Vought on down, these figures wrote the ideas that became the Project 2025 policy book. But more importantly, they prepared all the documents so that they can implement them on day one that will allow them to enact this agenda. And that, to me, is the scariest part about all this, is that while we're engaging with the story that Trump is telling -- it's a terrible story, it is attention grabbing -- there's also this part that wasn't there the last time, which is how you implement, and that's where these two pieces come together.
WALLACE: Of the 17 folks from Project 2025, how many of them were in these transition guides and videos that you reported on during the summer months of the campaign?
CARUSONE: I mean, on the videos, it's hard to say. I haven't seen all the training guides, so I don't want to give a number there. But more broadly, all of them in some way either appeared in right-wing media once or twice or multiple times because they were so proud of the work. That's how Project 2025 came on our radar screen long before anyone was talking about it. When they were in it -- when it was in its infancy, one of the things that we started noticing were these cast of characters appearing on places like Steve Bannon's show and others talking about the work they were doing for this new endeavor, Project 2025. So, they either all appeared on programming talking about the work they were doing in the early days, contributed in some meaningful way, or have a hard stamp of approval as part of the key set of personnel.
And of these 17 figures -- I don't think it's obviously too early for anyone to do this reporting yet -- I think what we shouldn't discount as well, is that one layer beneath the public figures, the ones that are going to get reported on, that are going to be listed in the charts and in these reports, is that they're already hiring hundreds, if not thousands, of -- or earmarking for hiring hundreds of thousands of personnel from the Project 2025 database that have been pre-vetted for fealty, for loyalty, so a lot of mini Pete Hegseths all over there, and a lot of figures that are loyal to the Trump agenda and to Trump himself that are not going to be road blocks, that are going to put their loyalty to Trump first. They're going to be filling all these lower level roles as well. And that, to me, is the part, it's not just the surface level, it goes pretty deep.