On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses how Trump “is losing a lot of power” with right-wing media
Carusone: “He really is truly so separated out that I don’t even think yet he realizes he has a problem”
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From the November 19, 2025, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): I think Trump still has his two white-fisted hands on the steering wheel, and that in and of itself is scary. And I think he'll keep driving toward autocrat, you know, paradise, and that alone is scary. And I think he'll keep finding Lindsey Halligans to go before grand juries and do things that totally annihilate the rule of law, as Tim and I were just discussing, and that is scary and that is dangerous. But I do think that the curtain has been ripped up and it can't be pinned back on and it can't be stitched over. And behind the curtain, the Wizard of Oz is buck-ass naked, and I don't think anyone can unsee this, Angelo.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I think that's right. I'm glad you started with that, you know, sort of his white knuckle approach because that's real, and -- but at the same time, and this is where it can be a little bit disorienting, he is losing a lot of power. His power rests on narrative dominance, and his narrative dominance is basically that he connects all of these disconnected parts of the right-wing and right-wing adjacent into an echo chamber, so that they will reverberate or backfill the things that he needs backfilled, carry all the water for him. So things that are clearly, patently absurd, they'll say is funny and quirky, whereas now, instead of saying they're funny and quirky, like Tim Dillon alluded to, they'll portray it as sort of old and bumbling and disconnected. And that is the current state of the moment.
A few things to consider -- and we could talk about how much it's unraveling and all the cracks because they're certainly there -- but, you know, he hasn't tried yet to get these people back, really. And I think that's, to me, evidence of why I think it's going to get worse, because he is that disconnected that he doesn't even realize that this problem is happening, that things are unraveling, because he's not engaging with these audiences anymore. He really is truly so separated out that I don't even think yet he realizes he has a problem. Because if you go back in time, every time there was a moment within the right-wing media space -- for all of the time that Trump has been a big public figure in politics, he's always immediately calibrated. Jumped in, engaged, give them a wink and a nod, sort of engage with that community, pull them back into the fold, kept that coalition together. He knew there was a problem and he was sensitive to it and acted accordingly. He's not doing that right now, and that's why you can assume it's only going to get worse.