On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discuss how callers to MAGA shows are reacting to Trump's sudden “betrayal” on the Epstein story
Carusone: “They're calling this a betrayal because it gets to the very heart of the story that he was telling about himself and why it mattered for them”
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From the July 16, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): If you find that out, you're gonna know a lot. So what would you do if you wanted to find that out? Might you, I don't know, release the Epstein files? That was then and this is now. Given comments like that, it is no surprise that Trump is being eaten alive, literally, since we've been on the air. It's still happening by his own voters, by his own base of MAGA voters and the most prominent MAGA influencers.
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WALLACE: So that wasn't the question, but that was the answer. That was what was on Donald Trump's mind. I had nothing to do with it. And then Donald Trump told journalist John Solomon that he is open to a special prosecutor to look at the Epstein case, but that there's a catch that the probe could look at his own grievances, like what he calls the Russia hoax and so called stolen 2020 election, as Marc Elias just predicted. And all that that was after he called those who he believed what they were fed by him and his closest allies, including people who now run the DOJ and the FBI, quote, weaklings. And so he doesn't want their support anymore anyway.
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WALLACE: Joining our conversation is the president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone and publisher of The Bulwark, host of the focus group podcast, spokesperson for Home of the Brave, Sarah Longwell's here. Marc Elias is here as well. Sarah Longwell, let me start with you. This isn't just an old conspiracy. Pam Bondi said in February that she had the Epstein client list, quote, on my desk, end quote. How how do Trump's supporters feel about being treated, one, as stupid, and two, as replaceable and disposable, being called, quote, weaklings by Donald Trump.
SARAH LONGWELL (GUEST): Yeah. Well, nobody has more contempt for Trump voters than Donald Trump himself. Nobody thinks Trump voters are stupider than Donald Trump does himself. I mean, these are people who are really deep on this conspiracy. They can work out pretty quickly that the timeline doesn't include Joe Biden writing the Epstein files or James Comey writing the Epstein files. Donald Trump, I don't know about you guys. Donald Trump seems pretty scared to me. He's acting awfully squirrely. These are some really long Truth Social posts with a lot of capitals, kinda capital letters, a lot of weird, you know, phrasing structures. He seems panicked.
Now, I wanna talk a little bit though about who Trump's base is and who cares about the Epstein files because not everybody does. And I think you're gonna start hearing people saying, do people really care about this? I mean, a lot of Trump voters, they just care about the economy, and let me tell you that is true. Okay? Sort of normies who are not terminally online, they voted for Trump because they wanted prices lower. That's not happening for them.
But the base that we're talking about here, these are people who, either are part of the manosphere — so let's say people who came to Trump a little bit later. They are red-pilled. They tend to be more libertarian, anti-woke, free speech warriors. These are people who believe that the establishment covers things up and that Trump was gonna be a guy who was gonna tear down the establishment and show them the things that everybody has been hiding.
The other group of people that cares about this a lot is the activist class, the podcast class. Right? And these people have already been kind of frustrated with Trump. They don't like the bombing of Iran. They don't like if he's sending weapons to Ukraine. They didn't like the spending on the BBB, the Big Beautiful Bill. And so he's been tweaking some of these voters now for a bit. And so on top of that, to come in and say nothing to see here on Epstein, which not only did everybody in my cabinet, including the vice president, including the attorney general, including the head of the FBI, all say was gonna be an enormous deal. I mean, these people — Kash Patel is in charge of the FBI in part because of Epstein, because he went on every right-wing podcast to to fan the flames of this particular conspiracy.
So they have nobody to blame but themselves for the fact that they are in this situation. Pam Bondi didn't say I have explosive material on my desk when she was out of office when Biden was running. She was the acting attorney general. Everybody has a right now to demand answers on this, not because of the Democrats or anybody else, but because of what Trump's own members of their cabinet said while they're in office, and so their voters want answers, and you can't blame them.
WALLACE: So when I worked on campaigns and we would do this, Matt Dowd was the chief of polling, and he would sort of win. So I I made one of my little data charts, but it it has these categories I think you're talking about. The people that voted for him for the economy, and it has a big zero. Right? The because they're getting tariffs and inflation, things are not cheaper. They're more expensive. Everything from food to things you need for your kids, to sporting equipment, to people raising prices preemptively and people raising prices because things are more expensive.
And then you have the people that wanted no war. Right? And they're mad about the bombing of Iran. They're mad about funds and weapons for Ukraine. So big x, big nothing, big survey says, ehh.
And then you have this third category, which includes the people that believe the conspiracies about 2020, that believe the conspiracies about COVID shutdowns. They may not be the biggest, but they're certainly the most fervent. And they are the ones making all this noise. And that's the group that he seems to be telling to go pound sand, Sarah. That seems like the most politically perilous group to antagonize.
LONGWELL: Yeah. And I think in part, you've got to sort of understand the layers of influence on this because the the people who really care about this make up sort of the middle layer of mediation between Trump's really intense voters who love to get in deep on the conspiracy stuff and Donald Trump himself. So we're talking about Benny Johnson. We're talking about Megyn Kelly. We're talking about Alex Jones and, like, the tinfoil hat wearing-crowd.
But this is an enormous media ecosystem, and they have this is — and this is a thing that I think it's tough for the mainstream media and even Democrats to understand because they don't live in this world. But if you are an observer of this world and you see how how much content got churned out on Steve Bannon's War Room, how many times Kash Patel was on there while they just jawboned it up about how deep this conspiracy could go and how they were going to be the people who were going to be the the voices and the eyes of regular Americans who were gonna blow the lid off the deep state elite like, the global elite cabal conspiracy. There are a lot of people who think that. And for Trump to say, can't do it and nothing to see here is an enormous betrayal to all of them. And Trump, he really is vulnerable here to an enormous — people with megaphones really turning on him.
WALLACE: Alright. No one's going anywhere. We have just started. I have been spending a lot of time in this space. I am dying to pull Angelo in on my favorite thing that we talk about, narrative dominance on the other side of a quick break. Don't go anywhere.
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WALLACE: Angelo, Media Matters just came out with this new report, and and I love seeing this. Is and to Sarah's point, we don't always have a ton of visibility into what's happening. But, these are calls into Glenn Beck show, quote, I feel really betrayed, and I feel really, really angry.
A caller to The Larry Elder Show said this, quote, this is a sad, sad day in America. This cemented permanent deep state power, calling it, quote, the ultimate betrayal.
A caller to The Chris Stigall show said, quote, I'm concerned about being able to trust Donald Trump to keep his word.
Is this the moment where Trump starts to lose his narrative dominance?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): This is definitely, you know, yes. I mean, you know, that's a prediction. Unless he gets it under control, then, yeah, it is. And here's why. A few factors.
And Sarah was sort of getting into this when she was talking about before when she was getting to the people that really care about this. They have the most kinetic energy. And in an atomized landscape, one of the ways that you maintain that narrative dominance is that you have a lot of listeners and a lot of viewers that are really engaged, that are keeping the hosts continuing to feed the narrative and story, to realize that their bread is buttered with the Trump story than opposed to the Trump story.
And when you sort of start to have narrative dominance, you know, break break a little bit, then everybody else comes in with their own pet projects. So while this is happening and the audiences are mad about the Epstein stuff, and I'm gonna get back to it in a second, you're also hearing all these other grievances now suddenly getting aired as well.
Shawn Ryan, a prominent podcaster, Trump supporter, is out there criticizing Trump on immigration, something he hasn't done yet, saying it's really bad, and it's gonna hurt the economy. Right? You have Marjorie Taylor Greene out there. You have all these other hosts complaining about immigration or another part of the bill, of of BBB that they passed. Right? So there are now these little grievances that are becoming secondary stories. And why that matters, that means that they're no longer carrying water for the larger Trump narrative. That's the first thing.
The second thing is and this gets to the core part of the question here as to whether or not this is the beginning of the end here on narrative dominance.
And, look, there's a long way to go. I wanna be clear. Inertia's a lot. But part of a one of the pillars, the central part of Trump's narrative dominance is that there's this establishment. They are bad. And the establishment is the deep state, Democrats, the media, all these elites. They're bad. And they're bad for all these reasons. They hurt you. They don't care about you. Oh, by the way, they're pedophiles. They're child sex traffickers. And I'm not that. I'm gonna break the establishment. And then, you know, he promises to do all this other stuff — Project in 2025.
But the thing that really excites people is the idea of breaking the establishment. You know, a lot of the new people that voted for Trump, whether it was the conspiracies or not, the one thing they wanted was something really different, and he promised that. And what's happening here and he really well, he did center himself in this. Let's not forget that in his first term in office, he promoted the QAnon conspiracy 300 times on Twitter. In the two years since he started using Truth Social, his own platform, from April 2022 to April 2024, he promoted the QAnon conspiracy 800 times.
The Epstein story is a hallmark. It's at the center of the larger QAnon theory. It's one of the biggest pieces of evidence that they have and point to that there is this deep state elite cabal out there child sex trafficking. So here you have Trump now with all the power saying, I'm gonna do everything I can to both protect the establishment and tell you that all the things that you believe are no longer true. And when you're faced with that question as a listener or as a supporter, say, well, gosh. This is the one thing I believed about his story that it drew me to him, and that's not true. What else is not true now? And then all the little thing that you've been holding your nose for, unless, you know, all the polling reflects it, a lot of his supporters hold their nose on things because of the other thing, the thing that he's gonna do that's gonna change and transform stuff. And here he's saying is, oh, that thing you believed about me, it's a lie. And I'm the one telling you it's a lie.
And, you know, people were using the term betrayal when it came to the Big Beautiful Bill. They were saying, oh, this is a betrayal. His supporters never called it a betrayal. But they're calling this a betrayal because it gets to the very heart of the story that he was telling about himself and why it mattered for them. And now he's out there pushing back.
And the last piece, as callers. You don't just see this in the callers, you see it in the hosts. Charlie Kirk announced at the beginning of the week that he wasn't gonna talk about this anymore. And yet, he spent most of his show today on defense complaining that there were so many callers that he has no choice but to talk about this. Steve Bannon's show, which I think is one of the the real lighthouses in the ecosystem, it's a really good indicator of where things are going. It's always on attack. It's always on offense. I mean, he's literally the flood the zone guy. Today, he spent the entire show on defense. I can't emphasize to you how weird and different that is. So I don't want people to be excited, feel schadenfreude. There's a lot there, but that's not the thing.
We shouldn't assume it's all gonna unravel on its own. But there is something really big happening here, and it's an illustration of how both the power of narrative dominance, but when it starts to go, it goes fast. And Trump is just not connected to the zeitgeist right now, so he's having a really hard time getting his handle around it. He thinks by making Fox News stop talking about it, somehow it goes away. And in fact, it's just feeding the beast more.
WALLACE: Well, and Fox News, we know from the Dominion lawsuit, preferred in that instance to go along with the conspiracy about the election largely, then part with its viewers. We have all the text messages that they sent among themselves. Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump demonic, but went ahead and and amplified the lies about voting systems and cost the company millions of dollars. It will be interesting to watch all those figures.
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WALLACE: Marc Elias, let me read you one more from this Media Matters report of the calls. This is from an Infowars caller who said he was, quote, at January 6 and said Donald Trump, quote, saying we need to forget about Epstein, suggests, quote, he is a part of this whole system. He also said Pam Bondi, quote, covered up Epstein. These are folks who went to — in this instance, this is a caller who was, quote, in his telling at January 6, but feels betrayed by this, not about the criminal exposure he may have faced for being being there that day. That's how big this is in Trump's space.
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WALLACE: Angelo, I mean, they've done that already. Can they run that play again? Are those adrenal glands totally shot? I mean, they have the Durham probe. They had the Senate Intel committee. They had — they ran the government they've investigated all these things already. Is that something that this base that now feels betrayed is gonna swallow?
CARUSONE: They're gonna want stuff on Epstein. So they will take a special prosecutor. They probably won't accept that answer even if it's a special prosecutor like Ed Martin, who, you know, that that's been one of the names that's been floating out there to sort of try to appease people. I do think Marc is right, and his alarm bell is correct. This is where you know, you you remember, and as Sarah pointed out, a lot of that kinetic energy, it matters.
That's how Trump built an organized power. He took the fringes. That's how he that's how he started. He built and organized power on the fringes. The kinetic energy matters here, so they're gonna try to steer that toward this special counsel thing. But, again, Bannon's show is a good illustration here because when he was pushing that, his own guest — who've been carrying water here and are Trump supporters were saying, that's not gonna be enough. We're gonna want more. And so, look, the bloodlust is scary. We shouldn't you know, like I said, we should not be too celebratory here on its face. It can go in a lot of directions.
You — there are the the bloodlust is real, and that is volatile. That volatility is unpredictable. It could be very dangerous and very scary. This could be a real moment where he consolidates power and hurts a lot of people as a as a consequence of that, and his base is still mad, but he also gets to further entrench his own power. So we just need to be really careful, but, I don't think that alone is gonna be sufficient. They're they're really gonna wanna see some stuff, and and his people aren't gonna buy it.
WALLACE: Well, sir, I don't I don't think there's anything to celebrate. I mean, I will not — well, I will — I listened to two hours of Joe Rogan today. I've watched more Megyn Kelly in the last 72 hours than I have since she left Fox News. I mean, you have to understand what's happening in the MAGA media ecosystem to understand what is driving Donald Trump. And I think, that may be healthy to understanding MAGA, but I don't think anyone's celebrating that new reality.
CARUSONE: Yeah.
LONGWELL: I do think that there is a sense of, hey. Maybe this is the thing. I mean, Donald Trump now for almost a decade has been in our faces saying if I shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue, I won't lose any votes. And that increasingly started to feel true. And so I think part of what this is is people saying, wait. Is this the thing? I mean, if you live by the Epstein files, do you die by the Epstein files? You know? So I think that there's it's not celebration so much as it is a sense of wait, is this the thing? Could it be the thing that actually moves the base away from him? And I think, though, though, the question becomes, is it just something that is exists between Donald Trump and the base and the rest of us are all observers, or do we, as Americans, also say, hey, well wait a minute. Is the the attorney general lying to us, or were they all cynically ginning up, Americans by telling lies in order to get them to vote for Donald Trump? We have an interest in this too.
I think that there's a sense from people that because Trump pulls politics into the gutter, that everybody should ignore it because, well, that's what the conspiracy theories theorists over there believe. No. This is the attorney general of the United States, the top law enforcement officer. We all have a reason to care about this, and we should continue to press for answers, not just the base. We as Americans should do it.