On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone discusses Project 2025 and SNAP being cut off: “They have long wanted to do this”
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From the November 2, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Velshi
ALI VELSHI (HOST): I want people to remember, Angelo, when they see another video of another boat that has been taken up by a U.S. missile in Venezuela or they watch video of a helicopter, people rappelling down a building in Chicago to arrest people. You might like that stuff. You might not like it. We're taking away taking away $10 a day from people to eat for that nonsense.
So, Angelo, I — and by the way, I think we should — you should comment on this. I know you you know a lot about this, Angelo. This whole idea of The Heritage Foundation and and Nick Fuentes. Like, there are just no boundaries to anything anymore.
ANGELO CARUSONE (PRESIDENT, MEDIA MATTERS): There's no boundaries to anything anymore. And I think the bigger part about this, though, is that it also is an illustration of where the power is, right? I mean, we've — Trump built and organized power on what used to be considered the fringes, so it shouldn't be surprising that all of these institutions now start to reflect that because they're reflecting where the power is.
And I think what's more disturbing about it and more significant is that they're not just reflecting the moment. They're telling us where we're going.
VELSHI: Yep.
CARUSONE: And and that's what all these are about. Right? One thing is we can shake shake our hands at how terrible it is, and that's — we should do. We should talk about how bad it is. But we also should indicate that — where it's going, because it's not just stopping here. This is just the beginning. This is just the beginning.
VELSHI: We're now 10 months into this, just to be clear. We're now 10 months into this.
CARUSONE: Right. I mean and it's all laid out. You — I think anchoring it in Project 2025 is not just a talking point. It it helps us understand and contextualize what's happening, why it's happening, where we're going.
And then to what Steve was getting to before, and it it all the more sort of a pox on all of us because they're telling us in plain sight what their plan is, and we can't find a way to thwart it — to stop it — even though it is hurting so many people. And so in in this larger moment, you know, part of what's happening here is that this is just one of the many programs that they plan on cutting or gutting. And the core part of that, the reason for it isn't just because they have long wanted to do this. It's part of what, you know, Russ Vought and others describe as soul-crafting, that a lot of these people deserve to be in these situations. They lie and say many of them are foreigners, and the ones that aren't foreigners, well, their Calvinist sort of Christian nationalist worldview says, well, God wants them to be that way, so it's not our problem.
But the other part about this in the transformative piece is that this is all a tool, and we shouldn't forget that, to make the presidency more powerful by using the power of the purse, by taking something that is explicitly Congress's power and moving it into the executive branch. So this is actually part of that larger effort unfolding, and we're just one step closer to that new reality.
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VELSHI: Angelo, I had Judge Luttig on the show an hour ago who said the same thing. He said you can hope that the Supreme Court will do the right thing. There's no no cards on the table that suggests they will. And at that point, when the Supreme Court actually functionally fails us, which is coming possibly with one of their next decisions, it's going to be up to Americans and like Steve said, the ability to vote and the ability to protest, it's — Americans are gonna have to take their country back somehow. That's not what politics feels like right now.
CARUSONE: No, it's not. And and part of the reason politics doesn't feel like that, right, is because you don't see Republicans acting with typical political calculuses. I mean, this is a lame duck president doing all this stuff. In theory, he should be weak. Right? He's doing all these horrible things. One in eight Americans are going to lose access to food. This is a problem. But yet, their normal political calculus doesn't work.
And part of that reason, as you noted, why it doesn't feel that way is because we live in a world with right-wing narrative dominance. And Trump is consistently expanding his control over that narrative, as Steve was referencing before. And so they're able to shape the narrative and the larger story. So all these terrible things are happening and yet the normal political rules don't apply because he's bending the reality around him. And I think that is why, you know, to Steve's sort of frustration and in his calls for sort of mass consistent effort, the only way to buck that narrative is with consistent, demonstrable activity, and recognizing that we're — essentially it's theater. We have to perform perform in order to help counteract that story.