On MSNBC’s Deadline: Whitehouse, Angelo Carusone explains how the tech industry and Trump administration will work together to pollute public information
Carusone: “They'll use that power to prop up the government in place, and at the same time, they'll be polluting the very conversation that individuals get day to day”
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From the January 16, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, to follow up on Carol's point, I mean, Trump isn't the variable, right, in demanding loyalty and money. The tech giants are. Let me just put up again Amazon in 2017, $57,000 in donations in 2021, $276,000. In 2025, a million. Google in '17, $285,000 Google in '21, $337,000 -- seems to be the going price for Trump in 2025, $1 million. Meta or Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg's company in 2017, $0 in 2021, $0. But Mark has had a change of heart. Along with abandoning fact checking. He's parting with 1 million buckaroos. Microsoft has also doubled their contributions to presidential inaugurations from '17 and 2021, forking over $1 million to the Trump inauguration in 2025.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, I mean, look, this is just the cost of entry, right? I mean, and one of the things that Trump made very clear is that, you know, it cut both ways. On the one hand, he'd be willing to leverage government power to make people's lives and companies lives more difficult to punish, to retaliate. On the other hand, he's open for business. It's transactional. I mean, this was something he said during the campaign when he sort of shouted out into the void that if, you know, the fossil fuel industry, put a bunch of money into some super PACS to help him, that the second he got into office, he would deregulate and eliminate a bunch of provisions that were undermining their financial bottom line. And he's always made it very clear that he's transactional.
And that's the part where when you overlay that with what President Biden said, the warning becomes very stark. Because where here, they're not just giving some money to go along, to get along, to avoid, you know, any kind of retaliation. It's much more insidious than that. And scary. What they each want is something out of it. And what they're going to get out of it isn't just more money, it's going to be more power. Part of the way these oligarchical systems work is that once the oligarchs sort of have power, you know, the people in power, they extract -- they use that power to prop up the government or the individual in power. And as a result, they get more power and more money as a result. It's a feedback loop that feeds on to it.
So, Mark Zuckerberg isn't just going to avoid the worst consequences. In addition to giving Trump money, what we are now going to see as a landscape not just where he is laissez-faire, but where he starts to slowly tip the scales in favor of the dominant narrative, in favor of Trump's narrative. The same way that Trump works the refs in newsrooms is the way now that he's going to work it in these technology companies, which increasingly have enormous amount of influence over the story that we tell ourselves every single day. So on the one hand, they'll get richer and more powerful. They'll use that power to prop up the government in place, and at the same time, they'll be polluting the very conversation that individuals get day to day, which is the one thing we need to inoculate ourselves to both preserve, strengthen and enhance our democracy moving forward.
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WALLACE: Let me apologize in advance, Angelo, for the little dotted lines in my brain. But that refrain brought me straight back to the all out war between Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. For the heart and soul of the MAGA movement, because it seems that what Steve Bannon's political antenna detects is -- goes beyond personal hatred for Elon Musk and the issue they're fighting about, which is the H-1B visas. But the words he uses to attack Elon Musk are about pure evil. And they seem to include some sort of threat or warning to Trump that this handing over of the entire movement, which I find dark and sinister and, and brutal and anti-democratic and autocratic, I appreciate why the country moves in terms of the pendulum. I don't agree with any of it, but I have tried to understand it and study it. And as a student of it, my sense is that Bannon views himself of the keeper of the concerns and pain and grievances of the working class, and that perhaps there's some warning he's trying to offer the whole movement in his very public fight with Elon Musk. And it and it doesn't seem too far distance from this warning from President Biden about what a complete capitulation of the government and the power and the benefits of our society to the ultra wealthy, what has happened in terms of pendulum swings in the past.
CARUSONE: I think that's a good point. And, you know, Steve Bannon is a bona fide populist. He's not someone, you know, when you look at populist movements, currently and historically, you know, you sort of have these bona fide populist movements, whether they come from the right or the left, they are genuinely about giving power back to people in some way and upending the status quo. But then a lot of times, you also have these moments where sort of the right-wing, or the extreme, sort of co-opts populism for its own self-interest. And it's not really a populist movement. It just has the veneer of that. And that's what it uses to sort of catapult itself into power. And then they don't end up following through on any of their real populist sort of ideals.
And that's what Bannon is picking up on, is that he -- that, you know, from his perspective, Musk's interests are about Musk's power, that it's not actually a populist movement, that he's not sort of sincere in his efforts for free speech, as reflected in the fact that he's censored a whole bunch of conservatives that criticized him, took away their ability to monetize their platform, and also that Bannon is deeply concerned about America's posture vis a vis the CCP, and is concerned about the entanglements that Musk has there.
And I think your point about sort of that contrast is significant because that battle is playing out right now. And in a weird way, there's strange bedfellows here. I think that Bannon, you know, I don't agree with him on just about anything. But the two things I do agree with him on are one, that we are involved in a massive information war. He knows that. And that's what he considers himself a part of. And that the second part of this is that there's a bunch of really rich, entrenched interests, you know, burgeoning wannabe oligarchs or current oligarchs that are going to use Trump's sort of instincts to be transactional, to make deals and to sort of just go along here with those power bases, to sort of enrich themselves in a way that you can never come back from. And so for somebody like Bannon, who's been working as a transformative figure himself, this is a moment of transformation. And he's about to lose it to the very powers that he's been fighting all this time for. But instead of them coming from the left, they're going to be from the right now.