Angelo Carusone highlights how the Trump administration is forging ahead with implementing Project 2025 despite its unpopularity

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the February 25, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House

NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): It's such an interesting point. I mean, it's like the existential question of Trump 2.0, right? Like, the reason he was reelected, Angelo, is because – and I said this in the last hour – he might have seemed like a, you know, a drunk uncle who shouldn't have been driving, but he wasn't going to have the keys. Congress would be a check. The Cabinet wouldn't let him do anything too crazy. There would be all these guardrails. What he ran on, if you read Project 2025 or listened to any of his speeches, was burning them all down before he got there. That's what we're seeing.

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, that's right. And, you know, a big part of it was that people, you know, that they ignored the policy, because they said, “Well, some of that stuff is so bad, he’s certainly not going to do it.” And they went for the vibes. And you know, some of the vibes were cool. A lot of them were authoritarian and anti-democracy. But one of the other vibes that was very clear, though, was that, “I am going to break the status quo.” That, “The establishment, that the entrenchment, that the inertia that exists in any sort of major structural change, I can break it.” And that was the thing that was genuinely appealing to people, that people said, “Look, whatever the system is right now, it's not moving enough. It's not fixing enough, it's not nimble enough, it's not adaptable enough. It doesn't feel like it's responsive to me.” 

Now, unfortunately, that lack of responsiveness is based on a lot of those economic inequality, a lack of service to those audiences. And they just said, “Well, surely when it breaks, it's going to come – it has to come back in a way that supports me in some way.” That part he has been right about. He's going to get the vibes, he is going to break it. But that's –  but people didn't want a lot of this other stuff. They just thought it was, you know, “Oh, that's just politics. People make promises to win elections, but certainly they're not going to do those things.” But I mean, 30% of the federal workforce are veterans. The, you know, the biggest states that have – you know, the top ten states, the majority of them are red states, not blue states that have, where the federal workers are – sort of have the largest concentration of federal workers. I mean, Georgia's one of the top ten states that employs federal workers, for example, you know, and Texas being another one. 

And I think when you start to add up these cuts – and it's not just the employees, it's also the cascade of cutting off all these grants and slowing down all this money and creating all this chaos. As Russ Vought said, they're going to traumatize the federal workforce, but also imply that then there is traumatized anything sort of connected to government, which then forces people to automatically sever their ties as they naturally start to adapt to what seems like an unpredictable landscape. And that is what nobody voted for. It will be deeply unpopular. 

And this is where the risk is. The risk is that they seem to know that and don't care and are going to forge ahead. Some of it is because they're high on their own supply, and some of it because they think they can brute force their way through. Look at some of these appointments in the Justice Department and elsewhere. We shouldn't underlie the fact that they are making genuine and sincere, authoritarian moves, and that this popular pushback is significant and important and necessary. But it's not going to be the only thing, it's not sufficient to get us to where we need to go. It's the first major step. And they know that. And they're making themselves and girding themselves to disregard that as well. And that's why these Republican congresspeople, that very slim majority, are really a key pivot in whether or not we get through this with a real functioning democracy on the other end.