Angelo Carusone on Deadline: White House: Fox News is selling its audience “another long con” on gas prices
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From the July 28, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Everything I'm thinking of saying right now, I really can't, shouldn't say on television, so I'm going to restrain myself. But if you wanted to make up a way to make someone sound the most out of touch, the most insensitive, the most detached from the life that just about every person in this country leads — other than your billionaire weirdos who want to freeze their bodies instead of dying — that's what you would say.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. And I mean, it sort of captures one of the things we've talked about a bunch too, which is that his campaign, his political power, his presidency, relies on telling people a story that overrides their personal experience or what they see. And in order to tell them that story, to convince them of it, you need to have, what we've talked about as well, narrative dominance, you need to have an engine around it that reinforces it.
And that's what Trump is making a bet on here. He's making a bet on the same machinery that he has been riding for his entire political life so far, is that he can just perpetuate these ideas that the rest of the right-wing echo chamber will do their job and that everybody will sort of engage in the same fantasy as him. And Fox is doing their part. I mean, they've spent, you know, 45 minutes in the first days after gas prices went down last month, you know, heralding Trump's success. They spent almost two hours in the subsequent days.
They spent 15 minutes talking about it going up to $4 recently. And even then, it's not blaming Trump. They just sort of vaguely referencing it or playing clips of other people talking about it and trying to find a way to spin it. So they're doing their part. But ultimately, and this is what's been sort of been sort of acknowledged, is that you can't avoid this. People, you can't make people be convinced of this. They go and they experience it. And, you know, and Liz made a really, said a word that was really significant, when she talked about the word convert, because that's the key here, because you have a bunch of Trump supporters that are all now, they're having that fantasy that they have been participating in now be disabused of.
But those are regrets, and they don't mean anything until they turn into something else, into converts. They actually have to defect. They actually have to vote against or stay home and not vote for Trump, and not be willing to participate in the fantasy, not just complain about it. And that's going to be, that's the political question here. That's incumbent upon Democrats. But the engine around him is failing. And that gets you to your observation.
The more he continues to lean in on that bet, and he's all in on it, the more ridiculous and absurd that he sounds. And then the question is, why are all the Republicans still continuing to participate and perpetuate in it when the rest of the supporters aren't there, the bottom is falling out. He's not at his floor. Biden, he's at Biden's floor right now and that was when Biden's inflation was 9%. And Trump has not had his floor yet. The momentum shows that it's going to get worse. So that's to me, the real opening. I don't know why Republicans are continuing to perpetuate this fantasy.
WALLACE: Let me read what you guys wrote about Fox and the time they're spending on gas prices, because I'm reluctant to cover this because I hope they keep doing this because unlike the Russia investigation and the war with Iran, it doesn't matter what Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham say about the economy. Like it really is where I hope they spend the most time because they have the least impact.
You can't change what someone thinks of the grocery. You can literally have Fox in your ear when you check out, you pop it out. It doesn't matter what they say, but to your point, here's how they're handling this. ‘Fox News paid scant attention to rising fuel costs in the days after July 20th, when nationwide average gas prices broke the $4 mark again after dipping slightly below the threshold for a three week period following the U.S. and Iran agreed to a ceasefire. And the few network figures who did acknowledge the milestone largely downplayed it.'
Again, Angelo, I hope they spend all their time lying about the economy because it will help expedite sort of the long overdue collapse of trust, which you're seeing in some of their ratings, to be frank. And I don't know if that's just as Trump limps along, they sort of rise and fall with his fortunes. But the economic approach is perhaps, and this is, I hope I'm not proven wrong, but this is, to me, one of the most cynical things I've seen them do in my lifetime.
CARUSONE: Yeah. And it's on the backs of just a couple weeks ago, them — when they were talking about gas prices falling and sort of celebrating Trump that wasn't where they were ending the story. They were telling them that this was proof that $3 gas prices were coming. You had people on Fox News telling them that gas prices were going to be below $3 now, right by now. I mean, so they weren't just telling people what to feel in the moment. They were selling them on, again, another long con that they've been pulling them in.
And it's getting more and more ridiculous. And so it's hard even for the Fox viewer to go along with it. And normally I would, the question is, so what, right? To your point. But the so what here is that it is the perfect encapsulation of the very engine that he relies on, sort of falling apart and breaking down, too. And that then should tell us where we're going. All the more reason to lean in on converting and trying to move as many of these people having this brief moment of clarity, not necessarily sanity, but clarity, and you have a chance to talk to them. So do it.