On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses Donald Trump repeatedly elevating Fox News personalities who are “obviously not qualified” to powerful roles
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From the May 9, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): If devils and cleansing and reptiles are your thing, you're going to love the new acting U.S Attorney for the District of Columbia. Donald Trump announced yesterday that he is appointing her -- that was Fox News host, Jeanine Pirro -- to lead one of the Justice Department's most important prosecutor's offices. That's after he pulled the nomination of Ed Martin. Pirro is now the 23rd Fox News alum to be chosen for government job by the president, for which they have little qualification, other than working for or appearing on the president's favorite network as staunch supporters of him. She joins the ranks of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Deputy Director of the FBI Dan Bongino, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, and Border Czar Tom Homan, just to name a few.
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WALLACE: Yeah, I mean, I think the other place where there have been a lot of crickets is, we now have politicized law enforcement, Angelo. And if you look at you know -- take Donald Trump and America out of the story and you look at any tracker toward autocracy. I mean, the fall of law enforcement is, is sort of the biggest domino that falls and ends up in the reporting around the world, right? When -- if you're tracking a weak democracy around the world, when law enforcement falls, it's a big red flag. It's international news. It's the kind of stuff that intelligence agencies note the world over. When the pillar of law enforcement has fallen to the autocrat or the political leader, when it's become fully politicized. And so it's not just the lack of qualifications, it is the absence of any semblance of nonpolitical law enforcement in America.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): That's exactly right. I mean, that is the big, unsettling part about all of this. This isn't just these sort of one-offs or even these many individuals that he's put in place that are not -- including these law enforcement positions that are obviously not qualified or even worse -- it's that it's sort of already you can see how quickly it's become accepted, that those edges have smoothed out the prospect of it. Even the notion of this two years ago would have been deeply unpalatable, let alone that it starts to be implemented and executed. I mean, this was one of the big things that last summer and into the fall that everybody, Democrats and the public were up in arms about, the media, about even the prospect of weaponizing law enforcement. And here we are just, you know, a little more than 100 days into Trump's first 100 days -- a little more than 100 days into Trump's second administration and we're here already, where it's like, "Oh, well, Jeanine Pirro, okay, that makes sense," you know.
And that's disturbing in a lot of ways because then the -- it's not just that they have these positions, then they act accordingly. Then they act. They either act with deep incompetence, right? Or, you know, total cronyism, or they actually do some of the things they promised they were going to do. I mean, here's a person that has repeatedly said that wearing the hijab is antithetical to the Constitution, that it suggests that it should be prosecuted for a crime. That was one of the biggest people calling for Jeff Sessions to resign as attorney general. Why? Because he was not acting as Donald Trump's personal lawyer. That was her argument for why he shouldn't have been the attorney general at the time.
So I think to your point, you know, it's not just that she has this role, it's then she starts to take these actions. It doesn't bode well for the pushback and the blowback to doing these things to further implement and execute this. And then to put a bow on it, and it's a through line through this conversation, we need people to connect the harms of what's happening to the actions and decisions that the administration are doing. And if business leaders and others are too afraid to step up to do it, because they don't want to be susceptible to the capricious overreach and actions of the administration. And then you have somebody like Pirro and others that go into these law enforcement positions and start using the levers of government accordingly. Others, naturally, because that's the defect, that is always the posture. People naturally, when they're under attack, duck and cover. You know, heroes are heroes for a reason because they're rare, and you need them because it's contagious. And I think that, to me is the ultimate takeaway, is that once she starts to act on this, I worry that less people will speak up, and that it will become further, not just normalized, but calcified.
WALLACE: I think that's absolutely right. And I think, you know, I have a pathological desire to always pull a bright spot out of your brilliant analysis. And I would say that, at this point, the only heroes, not because they're pushing back against Trump, but because they're still articulating that which is legal and illegal are the judges, including Trump-appointed judges. So right now, people in the street, people who don't approve of the deportation policies because they're so far outside of what Trump campaigned on, and the rare business leaders who are telling the truth about the tariffs. We're keeping a list, but those are the folks on it.