On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses the fracturing MAGA media coalition over Trump’s war in Iran
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From the March 3, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Let me come back to what Marco Rubio has put before Congress and the country, this public narrative that we went to respond to what would be the response from Iran knowing that Israel was going to go. It presupposes that we had no sway or no influence over what Israel would do, which if that is the sworn testimony, the Secretary of State, that's shocking in and of itself. But this is where the most dramatic rupture is within Trump's movement since I've known you, since I've laid eyes on you, since you're having these conversations. And this is a tweet from right-wing influencer, the Daily Wire host Matt Walsh, quote, so he is flat out telling us we are in a war with Iran because Israel forced our hand. This is basically the worst possible thing he could have said.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, that's -- I mean, that's an important point to consider, because one of the things that Rubio did is that there was a bunch of people that were tepid, but they were still saying, "Look, I'm not sure I'm here," but they're not full throated attacking Trump or the Trump administration like Walsh. When he said that, he basically kicked a hornet's nest because this has been a major fault line in the larger MAGA coalition for a while. That big dustup back in October between Nick Fuentes and the Heritage Foundation that created that pile on where all these right-wingers then started picking a side, where JD Vance had essentially say, "No, no, we're going to let the Groypers in," because he couldn't say, "No, we're not going to let them out." It was all because of this.
How much power and influence do we actually want Israel to have over our politics? And then separate from that, how much tolerance are we going to have for the mere perception of that narrative thread? And what Rubio said is he confirmed for a large part of the MAGA coalition, something that they've been saying for a while, the Alex Jones of the world, the Nick Fuentes, the Matt Walshes, that actually this is all about Israel and that Trump was not really -- Trump did not have his hand on the wheel, the sort of the strong man that you've been fully supporting and carrying all this water for, backfilling all the lies for, he wasn't the one that made this decision.
We are now doing it for someone else. And that created -- that opened up a massive fault line. And it had been percolating beforehand. There was already tension, but that was the difference maker and there's no way to walk that back. He can claim that wasn't what he was saying. It's too late because there was a perception that was percolating, a feeling, they had been soaking in that narrative for such a long time. That is where the growth has been in the MAGA media has actually been around that threat. The reason that the Groypers and these other figures have so much influence is because they always tie everything back to that. Candace Owens ties everything back to that. And so that is the major sort of theme. And they're America first is what they say they are. But at the core they're isolationists. And this fear not only fuels anti-Semitism and feeds into that, but it also runs against their isolationist tendencies. So, what Rubio did was not just validate and confirm, and for them, one of their biggest fears. But he basically said, this is now the the fight, this is actually what this fight is about. And so now he's calling the question as to whether or not they're going to tolerate Trump being as closely aligned with Israel as he has been.