On August 5, Angelo Carusone joined MSNBC's Deadline: White House to discuss MAGA efforts to undermine the election.
On MSNBC's Deadline White House, Angelo Carusone discusses MAGA plans to undermine the 2024 election
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From the August 5, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): You know, and I guess, Angelo, I -- airing it is another piece of his weakness. I mean, Eddie Glaude in the last hour described him as a political figure who's shriveling under the sharp prosecution of a former prosecutor, as his current opponent in Kamala Harris. And I wonder if these tactics start to look less appealing to part of his -- the coalition at least he thinks he can rely on in November. I want to show you how my colleague Rachel Maddow describes these tactics.
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So Rachel Maddow does a lot of really important things on her program, that's why it is the Rachel Maddow show. This warning I think we could play that every single day and it wouldn't be enough amplification of this warning. Not just to the Democrats, but to the country. This is the Trump plan.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, and there's a lot happening that reinforces that assessment that Rachel Maddow gave. Like, so for example, in Georgia one of the biggest stories that was being pushed over the last five days, not just in right-wing media, but then even on places online, even by Elon Musk himself, was a -- sort of one of these like Project Veritas-like sort of sting operations, which did -- one of their fake investigations in Georgia that claims that at least 14% of non-citizens are voting, which would amount to about 40,000 votes, which was way less votes than Trump -- that would have turned the election for Trump in the last cycle. And that's happening all across the country.
So, one is that they're feeding and putting fuel on this fire, that their vote is going to be stolen in some way, that there are all these examples and all these instances of it. So, they're laying the scaffolding for the misinformation and for the narrative that the election was stolen. Last cycle, it was sort of a thing that came together. This time it's an actual backup plan. They're putting in place, not just the players and the operatives, as you noted, but then they're also building the narrative. And what's scarier is that the antidote, one of the important antidotes to it, which would be other Republican leaders, have actually all bought into it. So, by and large, the Republican Party orthodoxy now is that, 'Of course we'll accept the election results, if there's no malfeasance.' But they're already preparing and planning to sort of lay the groundwork there. And I think that's the part that's most concerning to me, is that in addition to sort of all the little examples that we see, they've already put in place a lot of the pieces. This is just like the stuff that we talked about with Project 2025, is that this time around there's a lot more intentionality and deliberate planning.
And just one last piece on the voting part that's concerning. We're at the end game here, the end stage. One of the things that's been happening over the past couple years is right-wing media and right-wing extremists have been attacking election -- local election officials all across the country, so that basically many of them either quit or they leave or they just get cowed into submission. And that's the part that's concerning, is that they've evacuated and pushed out a lot of people that they've then replaced with their own. And part of the strategy that Trump has this cycle is to lean into what he did last time, which is to organize power on what used to be considered the fringes. And the more extremists you bring into the fold, the more violent and more risky and more scarier the tactics that they would be willing to deploy in order to succeed become. Because ultimately, they were on the fringes for a reason and now they're no longer there.
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From the August 5, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): That man speaking about the necessity of confrontation is named Russell Vought. We have covered him quite a bit on this program. But to refresh your memory, he served in the last Trump administration as the director of Office Management and Budget. He wrote a chapter of the Project 2025 agenda. The A.P. has some brand new detailed reporting on him that includes this, quote, "If former President Trump wins a second term in November, Vought may get the opportunity to go on the offensive. A chief architect of Project 2025 -- the controversial conservative blueprint to remake the federal government -- Vought is likely to be appointed to a high-ranking post in a second Trump administration. And he's been drafting a so-far secret '180-Day Transition Playbook' to speed the plan's implementation to avoid a repeat of the chaotic start that dogged Trump's first term."
We're back with Bart Gellman, Ruth Ben-Ghiat, and Angelo Carusone. Angelo, not so secret to you. You flagged this 180-day super rollout of the Project 2025 horrors. It's getting a lot of public attention and I guess that's good and bad. I mean, good because voters know what they would be voting for in a second Trump term. They know what would come to pass from the projects that the Brennan Center is engaged in. Bad in that I think we know enough about Trump to say he would turn to his base and say, 'We told you we were going to do all this.' And the only reason for hiring J.D. Vance is because of his ability to implement this 180-day program.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, I mean, he's deeply connected to it and I think we should be alarmed. And I think one of the benefits of talking about it as consistently as we are is, one, it's not only politically unpopular, but that's how you start to put some antibodies into the system. It's a lot harder for them if they have to navigate around these speed bumps, you know? It's like, that's what this is all about at this point. If the goal here is to prevent sort of this authoritarian nightmare that was discussed in this tabletop exercise at the Brennan Center, then the way to prevent that is to win the election. And the way to win the election is to do things you noted, like the Republicans for Harris, which helps create permission structures and validates some of the arguments about democracy.
It also is about shining a light on this. And that's why, when we were talking about Project 2025, I was really fixated on the 180-day agenda, because it was designed, that playbook was actually the precise way in which you implement a lot of that policy. And it was being done in secret, whereas the policy document was public, which would help to sort of keep Trump's people supported around it, give them something, you know, to talk about and to feel like they had buy-in. This is an actual plan.
And Russ, you know, his background is a bit of a scary guy. And it's notable that it was the Trump campaign that actually nominated him to be on the Republican National Committee's platform committee to make sure that they have some degree of control over that. So, you look at his background, he founded the Center for Renewing America, which is not only a Christian nationalist sort of outfit, but one of the things that their senior fellows, their sort of intellectuals are pushing is the idea that Trump has to implement the Insurrection Act almost immediately upon taking office. And that sort of pushes, sort of validates and reinforces a lot of the nightmares that we've discussed, that was discussed in the first segment.
So, for me, I think the bottom line here is that we should know who this guy is, we should know what he said, we should know what he's doing. It certainly closes the door on any possibility that Project 2025 is shutting down or is somehow not connected to Trump. And it should factor into the types of efforts that we're seeing, like Republicans for Harris, that, you know, there needs to be not only a permission structure, but a recognition on their part that the core argument here is that it is about what kind of country we're not going to be, not even about policy so much.