On The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses the dilemma facing right-wing media with rising gas prices and angry callers
Carusone: “If you’re part of the right-wing media, you can’t really be a truth teller”
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From the May 11, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): I think a lot of that has to go, Angelo, to the fact that people want to believe what they hear because all the objective information out there would have told you that Donald Trump doesn't have a grasp on much of anything that's economic. When you look at the ability to fail in business, to fail in the first term in terms of, you know, how he dealt with COVID and other issues and to fail coming into the game here with the nation's economy. I mean, the math would tell you, you're not going to go out and spend money on a war that you don't know how it's going to go while all these other economic things are potentially happening and then not realize that, oh, we're -- your planning to have the war has a direct impact on gas prices. And that's what we're hearing.
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ANGELO CARUSONE (CO-HOST): And that gets back to the thing that we started the show with, which was his claim of Trump derangement syndrome because there's really two standbys that Trump always goes to. If something goes wrong, he can blame the deep state, that there are these shadowy forces buried in the government that are plotting to get him and or others and his supporters, and that's why it didn't work out. And then to the point about truth and facts, if you say something that is misaligned, he'll say, no, no, no, they're only saying all the terrible things that I did because they have Trump derangement syndrome. It's not actually reflective of reality. And those are powerful things.
They've inoculated him from a lot of the realities of what he brings to the table and the truth and it getting through. It does get through sometimes, and sometimes it's by accident. But one of the things that we shouldn't underscore is those are not outliers, those callers, that is happening across the spectrum. And it, it sort of shows this tension point because if you're part of the right-wing media, you can't really be a truth teller, a few examples and those become big stories, but for the most part, you have to toe the line. Otherwise you're gonna get in big trouble. Trouble come after you, right?
But you can choose to let some callers through, right, that are reflective of things, a way to sort of help. As you know, Stephen Miller has his way of incepting things. These people all have their other ways of incepting this. Let's get that out because he's, again, he's not tapped into the zeitgeist anymore. So, they're trying to help him be tapped into it.