On MSNBC's The Weekend, Angelo Carusone describes how talk radio callers are showing the impact of mass government layoffs
Published
Citation
From the March 1, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Weekend
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Taking a risk, taking a stand, if only Republicans in Congress could learn to do the same thing. I am curious from you, since I don't watch a lot of right-wing media. How are they portraying what is happening at these town halls?
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): So, one, I mean, at the town halls, they're portraying it pretty universally that this is sort of a paid protest operation funded by George Soros.
MENENDEZ: All of them?
CARUSONE: I mean, yes. And that's how they're portraying it.
MICHAEL STEELE (HOST): George Soros has done so much.
CARUSONE: He's a very busy guy. And so and that's universal. That's consistent. They're definitely making that point.
The thing that is different though is that if you take it a step away from the town halls, and I've never said this before, in the my — I've worked at Media Matters fifteen years, but if you want to hear what people what's really going on, you have to actually listen to talk radio. Not what the hosts are saying, but what the callers are saying. Because they can't ignore the calls and the call-ins are consistent, and it's their own listeners saying, please Sean Hannity, not me, help me get my job back. You know, I'm a veteran and I just got laid off. I've been working here for ten years. I need this job. They just don't understand. And they're calling into these shows hoping that these hosts will advocate for them. So while the town halls are sort of being dismissed as just, you know, protest operations, the call-ins are just — that is where there's a really big disconnect in right-wing media between what you see online, which, you know, they love the schadenfreude and actually what the callers are saying. And I think that's, to me, is the top line takeaway because when I look at the landscape in the future, they laid off about a hundred thousand people so far, but the minimum number is about 300,000. If you just look at all the Project 2025 reporting, it'll probably be somewhere between 500 and a million when they're done. So we've barely scratched the surface of the impact that they're having.
...
STEELE: Yeah. You have though the the reality which we started to level up in about a year ago this time on this show, about this little thing that everyone would come to deny called Project 2025. And as the New York Times has noted, Mr. Musk's transformation of DOGE from a casual notion into a powerful weapon is something possible only in the Trump era.
...
So this idea that somehow there's compassion in any of this, especially as expected from these Republican members of Congress is ludicrous because the core action is exactly what we're seeing unfold. And to the broader point, which you raised up, you know, you mentioned about folks, you know, being fired. Well, guess what? Don't be afraid. Don't, I wouldn't fill out a form, period. You know why? Because you're gonna be fired anyway. How do you get to a million employees, federal employees being let go? Right?
CARUSONE: I mean and the appeals to compassion are tough in this situation to at least to them because cruelty is the point here.
STEELE: Right.
CARUSONE: Let's keep in mind that their audience has been simmering in a right-wing landscape that has basically convinced everyone, at least their people, that all of these people working for the government are deep-staters that have been in cahoots with the Democrats and the news media to destroy Donald Trump for the past ten years, that they are all bad people, and they need to be punished. So one, is these government employees deserve it. I mean, even NOAA, the part of the reason they got rid of the weather service was because they thought that they were engaged in a conspiracy theory to push climate change. And that's why they're gleefully not just laying these people off —
BARBARA COMSTOCK (FORMER REPRESENTATIVE): All those DEA agents getting fentanyl off the streets. They're bad guys.
CARUSONE: It's wild, you know? I mean they've really convinced a very large number of the people that they're rooting out all these corrupt people. And another part of it is that — and this is where these emails come in — is that they're beginning to put the ingredients together for new sort of attacks. So one of them is that who have when people don't get replies, what they'll start to point to, and they were beginning, is saying, well, you know, we have a hundred thousand dead people working for the government that we're paying, so we're just gonna cut these names off, and and Trump will consume it. He'll get it because they'll pump that into the landscape, and then he will pluck it from the fever swamps on his own social media platform, and that will become policy.