On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone breaks down Fox News' hypocrisy around its coverage of the Iran war
Carusone: “It's this long con. They are amping Trump up again on the same thing that they sold him on that got us here in the first place, that if you escalate now, ... the power of America will succeed here, and that will be the end of it.”
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From the July 22, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Let me show you the contagion of squirming. This is Brian Kilmeade, Angelo, on Fox and Friends, getting a little exasperated himself.
(CLIP BEGINS)
BRIAN KILMEADE (FOX HOST): Senator, from this 11 days, are you heartened that we're taking kinetic action again as opposed to pretending we're making progress with talks and an MOU that wasn't worth the paper it was printed on?
(CLIP ENDS)
WALLACE: Somewhere JD Vance is screaming into a pillow. I think that was his handywork. But I don't know what sort of jujitsu Fox thinks they're playing with their audience that if we end up coming out against an MOU and for kinetic fighting, which is another one of Pete Hegseth's favorite buzzwords, will what turn support around? I mean, they didn't even take this hearing yesterday with their former colleague testifying for about five hours about a war that over the weekend took the lives of four U.S. service members.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I mean, that Fox News is full of it I understand is not a novel concept, but this really is just a really striking example, because it was not that long ago that they spent several weeks wall-to-wall coverage celebrating the MOU as a signature crowning achievement that only Donald Trump could be capable of putting together something like this. And that was his mastery in this entire conflict, was to get that very document. And yet just casually in that one notion -- and we'll get to the kinetic part in a second -- but just in that one question, he tossed it away: “It wasn't even worth the piece of paper it was written on." They spent a week bragging about how amazing it was. And it's just like in the context of what we were talking about before with Trump, in putting the words in the fallen soldiers' mouths. They did a week-long outrage machine in 2014 when President Obama gave a salute to somebody while holding a coffee cup. They called it shocking. There was a shocking display of disregard is how they described it. And yet here they are just completely ignoring it. So that's the one piece.
And then the second, and this is the scary part because that's where the prescription comes from. It's sort of this -- again, it's this long con. They are amping Trump up again on the same thing that they sold him on that got us here in the first place, that if you escalate now, if you just keep pushing, if you just follow your instincts and your impulse that somehow this will resolve itself, that if you just stake out the ultimate position, the power of America will succeed here, and that will be the end of it.
So, in the second part of that question, and that is reflective in the rest of their coverage, they're amping him up again to intensify the attacks and beginning to lay the groundwork for more aggressive action in Iran for real, meaningful escalation. And that to me is the alarm bell about where this goes. It's not just -- it doesn't just begin and end of the hypocrisy. It actually is that they are giving him a prescription. They're telling him to do something.