On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains how the right-wing media will use Department of Education cuts to push for privatization of other federal services
Carusone: “What they like is what this demonstrates, which is that he can do it ... This is really the opening salvo in sort of this larger arc here, which is that this is the full scale elimination of the department without having to go through Congress”
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From the March 20, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): You are looking at live pictures from the White House. Donald Trump expected to speak any minute now, where he will sign an executive order to dismantle the DOE. Any news that comes out of that, we will let you know.
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Angelo, help me understand something. Again, we're not taking the president's press conference live, we're monitoring it to see what he says and if he makes any news. Your sense of what he will say, and then your sense of how it will play in the right-wing echo chamber.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I'll start with what he's going to say. He's going to say that they're actually empowering states, and that this was sort of just a gigantic waste, and it does nothing but sort of, you know, prop up, you know, federal workers who are already getting paid too much to do very little, and they're sort of cleaning out the waste, and making the system more efficient. That's what he's gonna say, or some version of that.
How it's going to play in the right-wing media initially is celebration and excitement. No, this isn't, like, the top issue for the right-wing media. They're not just like clambering away and, "Oh my God, the Department of Education is all I think about, it's all I want to talk about." I mean, they're products of it too, you know, many of them have had student loans or their producers. Like, they know.
But, you know, what they like is what this demonstrates, which is that he can do it. And what they like is that where this goes, because this is really the opening salvo in sort of this larger arc here, which is that this is the full scale elimination of the department without having to go through Congress. Next up, you're going to start to see them tee it up as FEMA, right? They're going to want to privatize TSA. All this stuff is laid out. They're going to want to privatize the Department of Veterans Affairs and gut out its functions.
So, that's where I think the right-wing media is going to talk about is, that they're going to use this not to sort of talk about the Department of Education. They're going to just assume it goes back to the states, everything's fine. Instead, they're going to use this as an example of his change capacity. And the fact that -- and aspirational as to how much more they can accomplish. And that's where they're going to talk about the stuff that's in front of them.