On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses lessons from the Florida primary: “Their media machine and their politics and their apparatus for building and organizing power is adapting, and we have to adapt along with it”
Published
Citation
From the August 18, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): You know, my interest in Florida, unlike a lot of others, it can be, oh this fantasy that maybe it will be great for Democrats. Yeah, maybe. But that's not what makes me interested in it. What makes me interested in it is that Florida is sort of a lab. It's an incubation for what our politics are going to look like post-Trump, because there's two candidates in the Republican primary, Donalds, who is basically MAGA through and through, but he was a MAGA media creation.
He started as a backbencher, just like Ron DeSantis, except Ron DeSantis made his way up by Fox News, got Trump's attention, and made his way into the establishment. Donalds ran the same playbook. He started on One America News, made his way to Fox, got Trump's attention, moved himself into that position.
But then there's the next generation mutation that we're dealing with. The other guy is sort of a creature of the right-wing fever swamps of the first genuine, bona fide groyper candidate, and he won't be the last. And that's my interest, because what David Jolly has done is figure out how to engage in politics in a world where we're going to be dealing with these new mutant MAGA creatures.
And that's not just to be cute about it, that's the reality of what we're dealing with. Their media machine and their politics and their apparatus for building and organizing power is adapting, and we have to adapt along with it. And David Jolly is one of the people sort of illustrating what that looks like. And Florida is the terrain. So that's my interest in it is what does this tell us about the future? Is this a keyhole view? I think it is.