On MS NOW, Angelo Carusone warns of right-wing media’s efforts “to preload a narrative” about the GOP’s SAVE Act ahead of midterms
Carusone: “The point of all of this is the debate, is the opportunity for them to get out there and sow the seeds of misinformation ... of a feeling that the election is being stolen, to preload a narrative for after Democrats in theory win the midterms”
Published
Citation
From the March 21, 2026, edition of MSNOW's Velshi
ALI VELSHI (HOST): Joining me now, Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters for America, nonprofit media watchdog, and Wendy Weiser, a constitutional lawyer and vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice upon whom we rely for many of our statistics on these matters. Thanks to both of you for being here. Angelo, I — it's not really part of the discussion, but it's the most important part to me what Donald Trump just said there. That if you don't — if you don't do this, you won't win, meaning to Republicans. And if you don't win, I get impeached, kind of beginning and end of the segment to me.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS FOR AMERICA): Yeah. I mean there's a tie in there too because one, you know, one layer beneath that, you know, throughout the larger right-wing media, one of the things that they're saying over and over again is that it's not just going to end with Donald Trump. They're going to get revenge on all Republicans on all MAGA people, trying to create some incentive to really lean into what Trump has said explicitly is designed to ensure that they win the midterms.
VELSHI: Wendy, there's this thing going around in these hearings coming from Republicans mostly about you should — voting is for citizens, and why shouldn't you have to prove ID? Those two are different issues. They're two separate issues. Voting is for citizens, and ID requirements are a different thing. This is not a normal ID requirement.
WENDY WEISER (GUEST): No. I think you laid it out very well. This goes well beyond asking people to show IDs at their polls. It requires every eligible American to go in person to an elections office and bring their passport or birth certificate, not only when they register, but when they reregister to vote. As you said, 21 million Americans do not have those documents, and it doesn't only do this. It would end mail registration. It would end online registration. It will require states to hand over all of your sensitive private voter data to the Department of Homeland Security. It might even lead to widespread purges of eligible voters from the voter rolls. This is a vote suppression bill, pure and simple.
VELSHI: So, Angelo, how — and I think this is an issue for you because you're a critic of how media handles things — how do we express to people that you can't, in a country that has made a decision to not be a papers please country, decide to do this stuff? Because as a guy who gets his passport renewed as regularly as he should, it's actually harder than it should be. And they're making it easier. It gets kind of online, but it still actually costs a good amount of money. And getting a birth certificate replaced is actually a much more complicated procedure. Getting a naturalization certificate replaced is a truly more complicated procedure than that. We're not built for this.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I think that's the right question to ask because if you just look at the politics of it, right, it doesn't really seem to be about getting the bill passed into law. I mean, I'm sure that they would be happy to have that happen, but that doesn't really seem what's the case. Right? Because lots of other legislation is in the same bucket, but it's considered dead on arrival and nobody talks about it.
Right? They can't break the filibuster according to Thune himself, and so what's the point of all of this? And I think that's it. The point of all of this is the debate, is the opportunity for them to get out there and sow the seeds of misinformation, of deceit, of a feeling that the election is being stolen, to preload a narrative for after Democrats in theory win the midterms, that they can come back and say, see how not legitimate it is? They stole it. We tried to prevent it, but you wouldn't let it happen. And in the meantime, they get to preload the narrative and put all this misinformation out there. And so to your point, the question is, you know, we should talk about how bad the policy is, as is noted, the legislation itself, but we should be doing what we're doing more broadly here, which is actually getting into why they are doing this? And more importantly, not only why are they doing this, but how much easier it can actually be.
And I really do appreciate that you focus on all the people that don't register in the first place because that's the so-what and the significance of the other side. Instead of just shaking fist in frustration, you can get to the solutions.
VELSHI: Wendy, let's talk about the nature of the underlying problem that Donald Trump says we have. I spoke last week to the secretary of state from Arizona this morning. I spoke to the secretary of state from Michigan. Secretaries of state run audits. It's their interest to run elections properly. The percentage of noncitizens who register to vote, in many cases, they're mistakes, by the way, but the percentage of it is tiny. It's just like, it's got four zeros before it. It's not a thing, and it's punishable. It's seriously punishable anywhere in this country. There's no actual incentive for a noncitizen to try to vote in this country. Only bad things will happen to you if you get caught.
WEISER: And, actually, recent reviews by the Trump administration itself keep on reaffirming that. They are running these checks. They are trying to gather up. They have a few willing states who've turned over their voter rolls, and they are turning up only small handfuls of noncitizens who are even on the voter rolls, and those are being further investigated and whittled down. This is not a problem. This is actually not the goal of this. This is a key element of the president's broader campaign to meddle in elections. He says he wants to nationalize the voting, take over the voting. The SAVE Act, he said now this is his number one priority. He's not going to sign anything else.
VELSHI: We're in the middle of a war, we've got high prices, but the number one priority is getting people to prove their citizenship for voting in a country that does not have a problem with noncitizens voting.
WEISER: And a whole bunch of other things that would upend elections and make it completely impossible this year to do those elections. This is not what the Americans' priorities are. This is the president.
VELSHI: Angelo, is there a counter effort to this? We're a week away from No Kings. Is there an effort to say, maybe we shouldn't have 40% turnout in midterm elections. Maybe we shouldn't have 60% part turnout in presidential elections. Maybe your obligation as a citizen of this country and I don't want to be lecture-y about this, but is there a way to convince people that you can at least try and overcome this by registering and showing up to vote?
CARUSONE: That's exactly I mean, yeah, it's going to come from the bottom up, and that's sort of the one of the differences here. You know, one of the effort this, what Trump is doing, you know, a thousand times on Fox News, they've talked about it in the last three weeks, 700, you know, 700 times on Newsmax. I mean, it's been off the charts. Right? You know, it's top down.
They are driving this, and they're sort of enforcing this narrative. The antidote is actually not going to come from some overarching big national singular figure that creates a center of gravity. There's going to be a catalyst that then inspires that peer-to-peer conversations, and that's why it's so dastardly for them to pushing on this particular thing in the first place, because the very thing, once you catalyze somebody to action, increasing any barriers or the implied threats that somehow going to boomerang back around to you, makes it harder for you to take that first step in the first place. But I do think that's the antidote, is that it doesn't have to be this way, and the only answer is that. There is no other alternative. You actually have to do something, that's what people are doing with this peer-to-peer.
VELSHI: So, Wendy, I want to be clear because you at Brennan have numbers that you attach to this. One very, very large group is women. Women who either change their names for whatever reason, whether they got married or maybe got married and got divorced again. Now they say bring your birth certificate. Now your birth certificate is not going to marry match your driver's license. You're literally just going to disenfranchise a whole lot of women.
WEISER: Yeah. Well, 69 million married women have changed their names. That is the vast majority of married women, and they would have to jump through extra hurdles just to be able to register to vote under this bill. Rural Americans, overseas Americans, I mean, how are they going to get in person to an elections office? There are so many people from all walks of life that are going to be impacted if this passes. And, nothing else is happening in the Senate right now while this is going on.
VELSHI: This is, Angelo, this is remarkable. The United States Senate is working on a Saturday. Not to discuss war powers. Right? Not to discuss whether there should be this war in Iran.
...
We're discussing this.
CARUSONE: Yeah. I mean, that's — that is an illustration of the power of Trump's narrative dominance or at least the narrative engine that props him up is that it isn't just that he gets to control people's attention or or shape it. It's that he has this political lever that he can actually make them do something on a Saturday, let alone, that has nothing to do with reality, but has to do with what's happening in his own head and sort of this larger arc that he's interested in.
VELSHI: Every human I talk to, I'm sure it's the same for both of you, what a crazy world we're in and what's going on, they don't bring up noncitizens voting in elections like Americans are worrying about nor should they be. Thanks to both of you. Angelo Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America. Wendy Weiser is the vice president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice.