On MS NOW's The Weekend: Primetime, Angelo Carusone explains that Tucker Carlson's apology is a view into the darker future of the MAGA movement
Carusone: “What Tucker is giving us in that discussion, which lasts for hours, was a keyhole view into the metamorphosis of MAGA into something much darker and scarier and more bloodthirsty”
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From the April 25, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weekend: Primetime
CATHERINE RAMPELL (HOST): Joining us now is Angelo Carusone, president for Media Matters. Angelo, you and your colleagues at Media Matters have covered Tucker for many, many years, including when he was a prime time host at Fox, as someone who is familiar with Tucker and his oeuvre what do you actually hear in that so called apology?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah. I hear an apology, but I don't hear it for the reasons that I think a lot of people are talking about it for. He's not apologizing because he thinks that Trump is doing bad things. You know, he's not apologizing for his worldview. What he's apologizing for, if you listen to that, that entire discussion, it's that Trump's not going far enough, that Trump is too weak.
And he's apologizing for overlooking things like Donald Trump not engaging in massive violence in order to crack down on the George Floyd protests, or him and Buckley complaining that Trump was too soft after what they say was winning the 2020 election and then allowing it to be stolen from stolen from him by not using more extraordinary measures at his disposal.
So I think, you know, people to hear the apology and understand why it's like, wow, Tucker's going against Trump. So that's the thing. But what I hear is going on here is something very significant. You know, there's a story about Trump — about Tucker. There's a story about what this means for Trump and his political power right now.
But I think the real story that I hear is the story about the future. And what Tucker is giving us in that discussion, which lasts for hours, was a keyhole view into the metamorphosis of MAGA into something much darker and scarier and more bloodthirsty. That's what I hear.
ELISE JORDAN (HOST): I guess what I would ask you is how much is Tucker Carlson the bellwether of sorts for where the MAGA grassroots is? And I read earlier this week, Andrew Sullivan had a great piece where he talked about, how this is actually a true implosion, the war in Iran, because it is such a disaster for Trump. And he wrote that, you know, those who join MAGA for reasons other than celebrity worship have been publicly humiliated and lists off a litany of different influencers. And, yes, the Internet and podcast land are not reality, but these people do represent a real swath of real opinion to realize Trump has preferred Miriam Adelson's vision to theirs all along must burn. What do you make of that?
CARUSONE: That's a good question. That is the so-what of all this. Right? Is, so what? What does it matter? What does this mean for our current moment, our politics for Trump?
And I think there's a lot to - there's something there to this idea that the coalition, Trump's base, is breaking. Part of, you know, what propels Trump's political power isn't just that he organized and built power on the fringes, but that he's been able to engage in and have narrative dominance. He's been able to largely control the storyline. And the vehicle for doing that is this massive right-wing media ecosystem that he has been getting to sing from the same tune and then sort of function as an echo chamber.
And that coalition that he built is one of sort of grievance and grift, but it's basically a coalition of coalitions. There's a lot of different factions. There are sort of these manosphere people and people that aren't into a cult of personality. It was never about Trump. It was just about some of the ideas, the anti-establishment stuff.
And so when you have these fractures, these fault lines, they can turn into full blown cracks, and that is definitely happening here. And the — it wasn't just the Iran war. That was one of the breaking points. There were these fractures that were happening for a while.
It started with the Epstein stuff, and you start to say, wait. I thought he was going to expose it. He seems to be helping enable it, and there's not something there. There's some frustration on the MAGA side about him being not aggressive on immigration enough, and this is sort of the tie in on Iran. You know, there's a large part in sort of what made Iran sort of break out into something much bigger, is this idea that — and it's not just that he's violating the America First principles, there's a bunch of his people that really are isolationist.
But then there's another segment of his people that are mad because they think, or they're upset because they're antisemites. And they think that there's too much — it's not just about Israel's control of foreign policy. They go much further than that. They argue that this is a reflection of Jewish control of American society.
So, you know, it's not as simple as that but I think the so what takeaway is that, yeah, the coalition is fracturing. Trump doesn't have narrative dominance. That's why his poll numbers are tanking. But when this thing breaks, there is going to be sort of a resorting and a reshuffling that happens after that. But no doubt, his coalition is is absolutely falling apart, and it doesn't seem like it's going to reassemble.