On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone discusses how right-wing media leaning on “more bloodthirst and more cruelty” in SNAP coverage
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From the October 28, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
BASIL SMIKLE (GUEST): And the the point I would make in addition to that is if you are looking to punish people, right, they're mostly punishing their supporters. There are more people in this country from red states -- there are more white Americans, particularly Republicans, that are on these programs. So if you want to even use the sort of, you know, that sort of welfare queen trope that a lot of Republicans have historically used, it doesn't even touch that or come close to touching that. So the suggestion -- the point I would think is that they're only just trying to punish Americans using this tactic.
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Well, Angelo, to build on the point that Basil just made, I'm sure you've seen the highly partisan framing of the USDA's -- a government agency's communication in a message saying that Democrats are to blame and, quote, "The well is about to run dry." I wonder the extent to which on conservative media that message is being echoed or how they are justifying to Basil's point about the fact that this is a lot of Trump's own supporters who are being impacted by this, how they are explaining that away.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah. I mean, you know, I think the way they look at it is in a few dimensions. One, they never acknowledge the reality, right, that it's going to be a lot of their own supporters. Even though they all kind of know it, they never actually acknowledge that. The predominant right-leaning narrative is what's been that way for 20-plus years going all the way back to Rush Limbaugh, you know, sort of really reinforcing the false notion of a welfare queen or, you know, one of the things he used to say about the WIC program in particular was that it was all just a gigantic fiction because why would you need a program like this if they were able to have babies in the first place? Surely, they weren't that desperate if they were able to have babies. So clearly, it was just sort of a Democratic fiction, and that's been percolating forever.
So it's basically the notion that it's liberals and Black people that are getting this program predominantly. So to some extent, they're happy. There's a lot of schadenfreude and they're leaning into the cruelty that there's a whole bunch of people that don't get it, that they don't like, that are going to be punished.
And on the flip side, some of this soft undercurrent, and you sort of got to that in your messaging, is that, yeah, there are going to be some of their people that are going to suffer from this. And to an extent, they're perfectly fine with that as long as they know that they can convince their people that it's Democrats at fault. Because recognize that a big part of what they want to do here is not only to punish liberals and Democrats, any of their perceived political opponents, but to keep the anger flowing on their side so that they can continue to justify and rationalize the cruelty that they're inflicting on the country and our slide toward authoritarianism. And you sort of need that as the fuel to then justify all the other extreme measures that you're taking. So that's the large framework that's playing out in the right-wing media right now. More bloodthirst and more cruelty.