On MSNBC’s Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses the links between Project 2025 and the Trump campaign
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From the August 19, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): You are so expert at bringing this to life in such a granular level. That's obviously part of what they're doing this week, but it's also what Taraji P. Henson did, right? Just informing people, saying there's this thing out there. And I wonder what you make of the opportunity to message at all those levels, Basic awareness to the granular details of Project 2025.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, I mean, think about it, so what they did is Project 2025 HQ. That only works if you know what Project 2025 is, right? If seeing that is going to give you the visceral reaction, that's why that projection works. And in part it's because it's penetrated so much of the American public already. It's only been a month or so that people have actually been really focused on or talking about it and already 59% of Americans say that they have heard either a lot or at least some things about Project 2025.
And when you drill down lower than that and this is when it starts to connect all the dots, when they actually learn about it, it's deeply unpopular. Anytime somebody learns about Project 2025, they find that it's not only unsettling but they don't like it, they want to reject it. Even if they're maybe soft on Trump or somewhere in the middle, even the conservatives, when they hear about the elements of it, they say this is not a thing that we would like.
And that then at a granular level, the more you start to shine a light on it, one, it forces a question and then Trump or the Trump campaign has to either distance themselves or modulate or moderate or try to sand out the edges of those things, but the effects of that is it either creates more media attention or alternatively, within the right-wing media, they start to cannibalize each other or attack Trump for distancing himself from something or backing away from parts of the project. So he's really in a bind here and the more that he tries to engage on it, the more attention it gets and the harder the bind actually constricts him.
WALLACE: What's amazing to me is that the Democrats have learned all of the lessons of Trump's presidency, when like you're saying someone would get in trouble and he'd say, "Well, I hardly knew that person." And then it would become this sort of slippery slope. They are stuck together because he picked Vance in part, but also because all the people at Project 2025 are Trump's people. His personnel guy went over there and they did all these interviews. I mean, just talk about the inability, as you said, to do the usual Houdini when it comes from getting away from these deeply unpopular policies.
CARUSONE: I mean, I think the important thing is, like you said, a lot of this depends on us allowing it. And by us I mean people, citizens, whether they be members of the media or Democrats or just individuals. And I think too often Trump was allowed to get away with it. So one sort of sleight of hand was effective because people didn't dig in and ask those questions. Now, Project 2025 is a little bit unusual in that the ties and the binds, there're so many connections that it's really hard to actually escape it. And the people are so deeply invested in Project 2025 that anytime Trump started to walk back from it, they would go out there on the media and be like, "Oh, he's only distanced himself as a tactic, but we're still really hand in hand." The overlap between key staff and Project 2025 is really intense.
So for example, one of the people right now, his national press secretary who's out there trying to distance Trump and the Trump campaign from Project 2025, Karoline Leavitt, she worked at Project 2025 right before Trump hired her and she was in training videos explaining to people what it was like working in the Trump administration, helping would-be hires because part of Project 2025, as we talked about, sort of setting up this pipeline for personnel so they can get in there and really hit the ground running. She was explaining to people what it's like to be on the inside and then talking about how Project 2025 promises to be a resource for it.
There's literally a video of her explaining Project 2025 when she worked there and now she works for the Trump campaign trying to disassociate themselves. So to your question, I can't think of a better example or a better embodiment of just how deeply the overlap is than the actual national press secretary for Donald Trump who herself was a member of Project 2025 just before she started working for Trump.
WALLACE: You're very good at helping me and us as a show not follow a shiny object. What are you, sort of at a substantive level, what are you tracking this week over these four days in Chicago?
CARUSONE: So I would say the thing that I am sort of -- two things I'm concerned about, one is underneath the surface here, it's worth keeping in mind that while at a national political level, this is creating consequences and problems, but all the reprobate suspects that are around Project 2025, they're a little uneasy but they're still full steam ahead. If anything, they've just extended the onramp and know they have to do a lot more work in October.
So while we're all focused here, it's worth keeping in mind that they're all focused on the types of things to help sort of make it harder for voting to happen and the vote to count in the lead up to October, and I was really proud to see that the Harris campaign had sort of started to even spin up a larger election war room with new personnel from Elias Law Group to sort of help them. And I think that's really important.
In terms of Chicago, I'm really concerned. There obviously is some disagreements and dissension around, you know, around Palestine policy and sort of the protests there, but I think the thing that concerns me the most is taking that kinetic energy -- and this is where the right wing and the extremists are really good, is exploiting that kinetic energy by putting in bad actors and steering them in other directions so that you can then sort of create some of that ire and turn it inward.
And I think the media has to be really careful when they're reporting on these things not to oversaturate it and to really think about when things get out of hand, if they do where it's coming from, how it's coming from. That's the stuff I am really concerned with. I see a lot of high jinks already happening online for that.