On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains what the fracture between right-wing media and its audience means for the Trump administration
Carusone: “Elevate those stories in a way that helps really connect the dots between the harms that are being experienced right now and the actions and the policies that the administration are taking”
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From the March 6, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): I mean, Angelo, I wanna come back to something that you have really put in the front of my mind, and that's narrative dominance. And I think it is clear after November's election that Donald Trump always had and maintained and, probably did today, maintains narrative dominance. I think the speech was about dominance, right?
And I think that you can want that to change. You can hate that that is, but the narrative dominance will only change when the credibility is restored on the part of all the people that were right about all of this stuff. And I wonder if you can sort of speak about -- I mean, it seems like lived experience and the pain that people are going to feel because of what Trump is doing that's deeply unpopular helps restore credibility of the folks were that were warning.
I mean, the most unsurprised people are the pro-democracy coalition, the people that were on the front lines and many of the Democratic politicians who were saying this is exactly what he's going to do. The surprised people are the Trump-voting federal workers, the Trump-voting farmers, the Trump-voting small business owners for whom the tariffs, the firings, and the cuts are devastating.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean and even to your point about the most surprised people -- and I said the last time I was here, and it remains true. If you really want to hear the truth about how people are feeling right now, you have to listen to the callers and to right-wing talk radio because it's only gotten more intense in the last few days because they are calling into the show that they typically listen to and have been for years. And they are saying I'm a listener and yet I've now been affected by this thing. And I didn't think it was going to happen to me.
And they are appealing to people like Sean Hannity and Mark Levin and these other prominent right-wing talkers to sort of go to someone in the Trump orbit and say to them, "Wait. You made a mistake. It actually is hurting me. I didn't -- I wasn't supposed to lose my job. This grant wasn't supposed to get affected. This rule that is affecting my local community was not supposed to happen. You just need to explain to them." And then, of course, they won't do it. And that's, to me, really significant because we are only at the very, very early stages of the types of actions that they're going to continue to take, and we're already seeing the consequences of it.
The other part that's really interesting about the narrative side of it is that one thing that -- you know they offset this right-wing echo chamber, but it's not one monolith. It's not just Fox News anymore. Fox News is a laggard. They used to be the vanguard. They used to be like the assignment editor for the rest of the right-wing media. Fox News and Rush Limbaugh were the centers of gravity. And if they talked about it, it would reverberate through that echo chamber.
That's not really the case anymore. It's a real loose coalition of sort of like right-wing edge lords, frustrated manosphere people, the traditional right-wing media. There's massive disparity. And that echo chamber sort of has been functioning because Trump has been at the center of it and the vibes have been so good, but it's a real loose coalition.
And one place where you see a big separation is around Social Security. In the more traditional right-wing media, there's a lot of, "Woah. Don't break Social Security. Careful. Be careful. That's going to get us backlash."
But in the younger parts of the right-wing media, they're excited for this because 50% of young people didn't expect to get Social Security in the first place, so they don't care if it breaks. And so that's the part that's really interesting is that putting aside anything that the Democrats do and the rest of the media, there is real vulnerabilities already within the right-wing space, both that they're beginning to internalize the truth, as we're seeing with the right-wing talkers and their ability to maintain an echo, is already starting to show some fracture points.
So what does that mean in the grand scheme of things and to your point about restoring credibility? That's the target. That's where both the rest of the meeting -- and I'm so grateful for Alex's reporting on this -- that to elevate those stories, in a way that helps really connect the dots between the harms that are being experienced right now and the actions and the policies that the administration are taking, either because they're reckless as John has said or because they're intentional and deliberate because they're just cruel and callous and because they're trying to reshape our culture. That is going to help restore the credibility. Don't tell people that you have to be credible. Show them that.
They'll get there.
WALLACE: And the point of the credibility is that that is sort of the doorway through which you walk to regain narrative dominance. And then once it is built on the true real lived experiences of people, again -- Democrats, Republicans, farmers, teachers, workers, Social Security recipients -- then it is unshakable.