On MSNBC’s The ReidOut, Angelo Carusone details Donald Trump's reliance on extreme Fox News hosts to staff his administration
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From the December 6, 2024, edition of MSNBC's The ReidOut
JOY REID (HOST): "I've known him through Fox," that is the way Donald Trump seems to decide who he wants around him, whether they're either a billionaire or he pardoned them in the past or has some other relationship personally with them that way. But in this case, it's someone he saw on TV. He likes the way he looks. He likes the way he talks about America.
That's not the way we normally choose people for an important job like the Department of Defense, but what do you make of that, and I'm sure Media Matters has a rich history of some of the things that Pete Hegseth has said, and some of the things that Tulsi Gabbard has said. And when you go through your own archives on these two people, what do you make of it?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): What I would just note at the top is that there's a revolving door between Fox and the incoming Trump administration and the past Trump administration, and that is one of their criteria for the likelihood of getting a job. And you sort of said something in your intro there that sort of hit the nail on the head, which is that he does think of this as theater, as central casting.
And that's sort of disturbing, given all we know about sort of rising authoritarianism and sort of that bent because the reality is is that authoritarianism is theater. And so part of what Hegseth's role is designed to do is to sort of play a part. He sort of sees him as somebody that is going to be out there representing the idea of masculinity and the military, and a radical shift in how we think about that role and its orientation in our own public life and our daily lives.
In terms of what they said that's disturbing, I mean, Hegseth is especially concerning, because he's a Christian Nationalist. Obviously, his misogyny is prevalent, his policies and his perspectives. But he's somebody that is a Christian Nationalist, and he really believes that Islam needs to be eradicated from the world. He sort of sees the military as not just a part of American foreign policy, but sort of as a flaming sword for Jesus, and that is going to poison the kinds of input and advice that he gives to Trump. It's certainly going to color his approach.
And Gabbard on the other hand, as you've noticed, she is a Fox figure too. She was on air 122 times in the last year and a half. She guest hosted all the time and probably her closest person at Fox was Tucker Carlson. And that probably illustrates where some of that extra sympathy for Russia comes from.
She's not a credible messenger. She's pushed a long history of not just radical ideas, but she is a creature of the conspiratorial right-wing fever dream swamps, and that is something now that in this new capacity, If she gets into this role, is she's going to be able to pluck things from the fringes and put them directly in front of Trump in a way that it used to have to filter through a coup of tweets and right-wing radio shows. Now it will just go directly from Infowars to Donald Trump.
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REID: I think I would have considered Tulsi Gabbard to essentially be part of the left. It's like a horse shoe thing, where she believes a lot of propaganda, but it's not clear what her ideology is beyond that. But all of the conspiracy theories now come to Donald Trump's door.
CARUSONE: Yeah, I think that horse shoe thing is important to consider going forward because one of the -- a lot of things -- details will always get lost on the larger public, but the narrative they're telling about these two people in particular is that they're the incoming mechanisms of peace, that they're for peace. That's the part that is going to be so disturbing because any criticism tied to Russia is somehow viewed as, "Well, this is just the deep state trying to continue forever wars." So we have to be careful when we talk about this.