On July 8, Angelo Carusone joined MSNBC's Deadline: White House to discuss Project 2025. Below is the entire conversation, with host Nicolle Wallace and guests Ruth Ben Ghiat, David Jolly, and Issac Arnsdorf.
On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses Project 2025: “A mechanism for enacting the very revenge that Trump promised”
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From the July 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, I have to start with you. You helped focus my attention on Project 2025. What does it say to you that it's getting so much bad press, Trump is distancing himself from it?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, I think it's what happens when you shine a little bit of a light on what's been going on for quite some time now with Project 2025. It's terrifying. The comment that Kevin Roberts made isn't even the scariest thing that we see when it comes to Project 2025. It's just small enough to latch on to so that we can talk about it in these moments. But it really isn't the scariest thing. And I'm not the least bit surprised that Trump sort of distanced himself from it. But it doesn't really matter, right? It's very clear right now that they're focused on trying to win this election and they understand what's popular and what's not popular.
They know that Project 2025 will turn off voters. It will. What it is calling for and prescribing will turn off even their own voters. Some of the policies that have been tested, you know, polled on Project 2025, even MAGA Republicans don't like. Not huge numbers, but 30%, 40% hate some of these things. So, they get it. And the distancing was just enough to sort of try to move it through the news cycle but not enough to burn it, right? We know what happens if Trump wants to incinerate something. Right?
They're out there talking about their association with the Trump administration -- future Trump administration potential, they're out there bragging about their past work, you know, getting 64% of their recommendations put into policy in the first year of his first administration. And they're out there continuing to do the work that they were doing before Trump denounced them. So it was really a political and communications calculus. But it doesn't really matter. The facts are there. They're still doing their work. They're still doing their work unabated or unchecked, so everyone sort of knows that it was a wink and a nod. And they're going to continue to plug ahead with it. And that's the part that I think is ultimately really scary here, is that this is a blueprint. It's a plan. It's not just a series of ideas.
One of the things -- Steve Bannon had really helped explain Project 2025 to so many and helped really rally a lot of big public support for him amongst the right -- one of the things that he always reinforced about Project 2025 is that this is not rhetoric, that was a quote, "This is not rhetoric." He would say it over and over and over again because he wanted to emphasize this was a mechanism for enacting the very revenge that Donald Trump promised at his announcement speech for re-election in Waco, Texas. So it is a through line here to this larger agenda. And I think that -- I'm glad we're talking about it. We should continue to talk about it because it is both frightening and it really helps put to a fine point a lot of the fear and anxieties that I think people are feeling. It's in black and white right on paper.
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From the July 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
WALLACE: What in your view is the scariest thing in Project 2025?
CARUSONE: I mean, the granularity, the specificity of how they would implement some of these things. They've already dealt with the staffing thing, so let's even take Trump -- let's say it's true he doesn't know anything about it. It wouldn't matter, because ultimately Project 2025, as Isaac was saying, it has consolidated all the infrastructure and then by extension the personnel that would be implementing, that would be doing all the work.
And then, so when you start to unpack it, the biggest thing is that most of it centers around the Department of Justice. And once that Supreme Court decision came in, it really helped open the floodgates for a lot of what Project 2025 wanted, which was to turn the Department of Justice into sort of the arm for implementing a lot of the initial wave of revenge. It requires a really quick, intense 180 days of going out there and doing mass arrests, targeting political opponents, going after journalists. It's trying to really radically reshape the culture, our norms and sort of cement power as fast as possible. And it uses the Department of Justice to do that.
And when I say granularity, I'll give you an example. They want to just reclassify a whole bunch of material around transgender education and LGBT education, books for kids, reclassify that as pornography and then arrest librarians, teachers that were distributing or reading this content to kids. Maybe none of that would hold up in court, maybe not. It wouldn't matter. You go out there and arrest a few hundred people and educators who are doing that stuff, you change things. And that's the type of granularity that I'm talking about here. It's not just these sort of big lists or grand visions. It really gets into the details of how they -- of what they would do, the types of questions and inquisitions they would have.
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From the July 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
WALLACE: Angelo, you're sort of my canary in the coalmine. It doesn't feel gruesome enough. But what do you think about that we've failed to imagine at this point so far, 120 days out from the election?
CARUSONE: I think what I would just note is that a lot of the things we talk about in terms of authoritarianism, they need -- when you plant those seeds, they need to be able to grow, and the ground right now is very fertile. I've been monitoring right-wing media for 15 years. The thing I would note is the bloodlust is boiling and there's a real bloodlust. It's not your average sort of talk radio audience you think of some of the late '90s, early 2000s be where it would be just conservative far right. There's bloodlust. This is what they want.
When you have that kind of bloodlust and that cauldron bubbling and boiling the way that it is, and then you take this plan and you focus it on a demagogue and a would-be authoritarian like Trump, that's where it starts to become much more of a reality. And that's the part that I find really scary and that I think has to really be emphasized, is that you have this sort of cauldron of bloodlust that's already bubbling, and I don't think people really appreciate it. They sort of get it, that's partly where the anxiety comes from. I don't think they really realize how much bloodlust there is at every level on the far right.
And then when you couple that with the potential in front of us. We haven't even dealt with foreign interference or massive disinformation attacks yet as we get closer and closer to Election Day. So, the fertile ground there is not just ready for authoritarianism but it's sort of ready for that cauldron to boil over at any minute even before the election. And that's the stuff I think -- when I see this fear frenzy right now they're all sort of experiencing or many, especially in the wake of the Biden performance, I think we need a lot more antibodies in the system and a lot more sort of resilience in preparation for not just next year but the next few months because we haven't even really been exploited yet. Certainly that cauldron hasn't been.
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From the July 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
CARUSONE: And that's the part that's so incredible about this moment and important as you noted, is that -- we're at this inflection point. And I don't think enough people have really woken up yet around it. Even the clip around Mark Robinson, I think back to -- when you're thinking about waking people up, part of that starts with the news media and journalists and reporters. And one of the framings I've heard you say a bunch of times, I really appreciate it, is that you talk about us being in a post-January 6th world. That is a moment we have to start defining a before and after for because things really changed.
And I don't think that that post-January 6th mentality has really filtered into the way newsrooms operate. I'll give you an example about Mark Robinson. He said this thing, but that's not an anomaly for him. That's who he is. If you go back and look at the news coverage of Mark Robinson when he became the nominee, the New York Times in their reporting was describing him as "a firebrand" and "a fiery conservative with new ideas." Okay, fine. But they didn't capture the venom, the history, the violence, his endorsement of it, his "might makes right" sort of approach. They just reported him as -- a Republican maybe with some wacky ideas or an extra personality.
And that's really where the trouble is -- and it's not just the Times, it was endemic across the entire news media -- is that they don't have the tools yet for engaging with the question that's in front of us. And so they're using old language and old models and old style of storytelling for a very, very different story. A post-January 6th story. And that's where it all comes together, because if you think about it in the arc of Trump, in 2016, if you think about his outside force, it was bikers for Trump. In 2020, the outside group, the arm was the Proud Boys. Now it's explicitly paramilitary operations. You have Patriot Front and others like them marching at his events and engaging in violence and he's openly courting it.
So, part of the challenge there is that even he's shifted in his approach in who he's engaging as the outsiders, so we have all the pieces and all the touchstones, but the storytellers haven't quite figured out how to present that story for the people, as you noted, in the middle that would be persuaded to take action now but certainly won't take action after November.
The full interview can be seen here:
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From the July 8, 2024, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House