On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses how reaction to Trump's Rob Reiner remarks shows he is losing his grip on right-wing media
“It's an illustration of the fact that Trump is losing his grip on ... the engine that has given him political power, which is the right-wing media. And the more he has these slip-ups, the more people that were following him see the truth.”
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From the December 16, 2025, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): We go through these cycles of just indignation and condemnation of Trump and eventually it gets a little tired. I agree, I hate to waste breath on it.
But in this case, it's interesting, you know, because it's who's condemning him. And we saw this in the first time in the spring with the Epstein stuff where people -- where if you listen to what the callers were saying on talk radio, you got a keyhole view into a large part of MAGA and how they felt about Trump. And that's happening again, that's happening all over again. There's a large contingent of the audiences there that are pushing back, that they don't like it. And I think their condemnation of Trump is significantly more interesting and compelling right now than Michelle Obama's, not because, you know, they're better necessarily, but because it tells us about where we're going.
And it's an illustration of the fact that Trump is losing his grip on the political power, the engine that has given him political power, which is the right-wing media. And the more he has these slip-ups, the more people that were following him see the truth. And I don't really care how they feel about Trump. And I certainly don't have an expectation that Trump's behavior changes. But the one thing that is a guarantee is that the more these cracks continue to expand, the weaker that he gets politically, he is still not being treated the way he needs to be treated by standard rank and file Republicans. But increasingly, you're starting to see some of the loosening up in the space for that treatment to actually take place and for his power to be diminished.
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): And downstream from that diminished power, you hope you see fewer institutions capitulating to him, fewer esteemed universities paying millions and millions of dollars to him, fewer businesses funding his destruction, literally, of the West Wing. I mean, it is the most consequential thing to watch.