Angelo Carusone on MSNBC's The Weeknight: “They didn't even trust that Fox News would not ask a question that would somehow knock them off their narrative, because they don't have these answers and they don't want to be confronted by it.”
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From the March 2, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): When you couple what will become the experience of everyday Americans with the price of gasoline and other effects from this war, with the fact that the administration is not telling us anything, and it's not just rankling, you know, everyday folks, but it's rankling those other folks that you had the finger on the pulse of, the MAGA community as well, how does this how does this bleed out, if you will, for this administration? Because it's not going to, I don't think, go as well as they think it will.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): It depends, right? So, no, it's not going to go as well as that they think it is. Not at all in any way. And you know, one of the things that always has been a backstop for Trump is that he had this massive constellation of right-wing media figures and influencers and Fox News and talk radio, and because he was like the conductor for that chorus, he could get them to all echo the same narrative. And that would then sort of shape the story. It would shape the landscape, shape the context. He doesn't have that right now. In fact, most of the fractures, the little cracks have fully broken open in the last few days.
So, that's, to him, his biggest challenge. He's lost one of his most important tools, which he's used not just to build political power, but it's also how he's used it to keep his political power. There's a, you know, there's not sort of two equal sides here where it's just a schism in the right-wing media and then, by extension, the larger cultural echo chamber around it. There's a few players, essentially Fox News and, you know, Ben Shapiro and then everybody else, even the most diehard MAGA loyalists, are out there tempering sort of how they engage on this war, like Benny Johnson, for instance, who's basically a full on propagandist for Trump.
So, that's it. The legacy for Trump in this context is going to be that he's kicking it old school. He's basically going back to where he was in 2014, which is when -- in 2014, 2015, 2016, all he had was Fox News. Everything else was kind of irrelevant off his radar screen. He's been able to do an awful lot by harnessing the other parts of the landscape, and right now all he really has is Fox News and a relatively muted one as well. It's basically Sean Hannity and Brian Kilmeade and some of their correspondents. Everybody else is kind of middling.
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SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): Is the United States military absolutely the greatest military might on Earth? Yes. But why is the president sending our men and women into war? He don't got an answer.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I'm so glad you brought that up because one thing to consider, we should all be warned now, because look at what's happening. Trump is working the phones. That should be your alarm bell here. He's calling all these reporters for the first time in a while. He's on the phone with Jake Tapper at CNN and other reporters. And what is the effect of that? You adjust your coverage a little bit, right? You start to -- it gets in your head, you work the refs, you say, "I want to be able to get that phone call the next time. I want to be able to get that scoop." You know, he's starved these people for so long and has attacked them for so long that the little bit of crumbs that he's putting out there now, they're excited. And what that means is not that they're doing bad journalism necessarily, but he's working the refs.
He's working the newsrooms. And that gets back to the point you're making. What that means is that they're not asking the hard questions or pressing the urgency that's actually there. They're doing reporting, but they're not doing the kind of truth vigilantism that we need when the stakes are as high as they are right now. And just to reinforce that point, Fox News usually has a seat right in the front row at the Department of Defense briefings. Somehow they got moved to the back row today because they were going to ask questions. And the only people that Pete Hegseth called on were these MAGA diehard loyalists that they knew were going to be pro-Trump sycophants. They didn't even trust that Fox News would not ask a question that would somehow knock them off their narrative because they don't have these answers and they don't want to be confronted by it.