On MSNBC's The 11th Hour, Angelo Carusone discusses Epstein controversy and Trump: “He doesn't really have a sense of how much this is metastasizing”
Carusone: Trump “doesn't even realize that with his own base because of how disconnected he actually is. He's adding more fuel to the fire for these fractures to turn into full-blown cracks.”
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From the July 14, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Eleventh Hour
STEPHANIE RUHLE (HOST): Let's move forward and get smarter with help of our lead-off panel tonight. Carol Leonnig is here, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter with The Washington Post. Luke Broadwater, Pulitzer Prize-winning White House correspondent for The New York Times. And Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters.
All right, Luke. Normally, when I say what are you hearing from Trump world, that means Trump's base and it means the White House. But right now, in the case of the Epstein files, the two could mean very different things. So tell us about Trump's ardent supporters and the White House. What is their messaging and feeling with regard to Epstein right now?
LUKE BROADWATER (GUEST): Yeah. I think this is the first time of Trump's term that he's faced a real serious backlash from his base. And this is very much of his own making. Donald Trump and his allies really led on the base to believe that the Biden administration had covered up a client list and that there were all these pedophiles that would be arrested once he got in there and put his people in charge of the Justice Department. And that wasn't the case.
And so, and they continued to lead on the base in interviews, Pam Bondi and others, about the so-called Epstein client list. Then it turns out she actually gets the files. There isn't a client list, and now they have nothing to release, and they have to sort of come clean and say there's nothing here. And the base is lashing out like I have never seen. And you you can tell it's really getting to Trump, and it's really worrying him by his reaction and the reaction of people around him.
This is the first time he's actually seen them turn on him in any real way.
RUHLE: Carol, you have been covering the Department of Justice and the FBI for a very long time. What are you hearing about these leaders and specifically the behind-the-scenes fighting that is going on between Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Pam Bondi, the whole lot?
CAROL LEONNIG (GUEST): The argument that Deputy Director Dan Bongino and Pam Bondi had on Friday was fairly vitriolic. A lot of people are describing it as, you know, a showdown in which Dan asked, Pam, what are you thinking? How could you have said what you said? I'm paraphrasing, obviously, Steph. But this argument is very serious because, and I think Luke says this well, but when you feed your base conspiracy theories like gummy bears, when you hand these out like candy and you stoke people's appetite for this, you better deliver on your conspiracy theory.
And Dan Bongino, you know, in his podcast has talked a lot about how, you know, he questioned whether or not Epstein actually really killed himself. Could he have been killed actually in prison? He's questioned a lot of things about the Epstein conspiracy, so to speak. So now he's got an answer to a lot of his viewers who adore him and now are questioning whether or not they should have adored him. And honestly, Steph, this could have been resolved a lot sooner if Pam Bondi had framed things a little bit differently when she said it's the client list is sitting on my desk right now for review.
She says now that she meant not the client list, but she meant the Epstein files, the actual evidence. But if she had this file sitting around, she could have said, you know, I have the files. I'm not seeing a client list yet, but we'll have more on this soon. You know, she could have kind of tempered this appetite, this raging appetite that the MAGA base has, for this incredible conspiracy in which a bunch of pedophiles were being blackmailed by Epstein, overwhelmingly allegedly Democrats. She could have done something to to calm this fire down.
RUHLE: Angelo, MAGA has always been very into conspiracy theories, and the president never seemed to have a problem with that. Is what we have here the natural result of cultivating a base that loves crazy things like this?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah, I mean, a big part of it. I mean, you know, remember, he organized and built power on what used to be considered the fringes. And conspiracies are fun. They're great stories.
I mean, that is the part of it. And that is part of the appeal is that it takes these really complicated, intensive things, sometimes really highly emotional stuff, and it weaves it into something that everybody can understand. And it's a story you want to follow, and Trump and the rest of the MAGA media get to tell that story.
I mean, where we are now, I'm not sure it was entirely inevitable. I think one of the big factors here is that, you know, in a weird way, Trump is very disconnected from just how bad this is.
Because right now, you know, when he looked at, you know, during the election, he was going on those brocasts and all those other podcasts. He doesn't actually watch those shows or listen to those shows. He has no idea how widespread this backlash really is. So, you know, we're talking about MAGA media, the sort of the core right-wing audiences, but the places where he expanded last cycle, the Joe Rogans, the Tim Dylans, the Shawn Ryans, who Gov. Newsom just sat down with, those individuals are — he's losing them faster and faster than even the MAGA media. They're basically out.
This has validated every anxiety and concern they had when they got on board with Trump to begin with, which means their audiences go too. So one of the inevitabilities here is, obviously, you feed the audience this, so you have to have control over all the different parts that are contributing to the narrative. And you have to also pay attention to it so that you can steer it. That has been one of Trump's greatest strengths, politically and communications-wise, is that he's able to shape and drive narratives through all the different parts of the echo chamber. And because he's so monomaniacally focused right now on largely Fox News, it's gone.
As far as he's concerned, to a degree, I mean, he knows there's some backlash, but he has no real sense of it. If you watch Fox News, you think it worked. You know, he calls Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk says today, I'm done talking about it. He tells you — he sends out the tweet, we're no longer gonna talk about this stuff.
And then Fox News talks about Joe Biden 85 times between yesterday and 4 p.m. today, and zero times do they mention Epstein. He only got two fleeting mentions tonight. So, as far as he's concerned, the trend line's going in the right direction. He doesn't really have a sense of how much this is metastasizing. And the last thing I'll say here, and I think this is — I was so glad during your intro when you tied the two together, when you talked about the Epstein stuff in the context of what is happening right now with Ukraine as well, because he's stepping on another landmine.
And he doesn't even realize that with his own base because of how disconnected he actually is. He's adding more fuel to the fire for these fractures to turn into full-blown cracks. But, yeah, it was inevitable to a degree because these are the people he pulled in.
RUHLE: Well, they are hoping that the news keeps moving on. I said this last week. I remember covering Trump in his first term, and I would regularly talk to sort of the team in Jared's office. And when Trump would say his most outlandish things, they were never bothered. They said we just have to wait it out.
The news cycle will keep moving, and people will forget this. That could be their calculation this time, but people aren't forgetting. The MAGA base, many people there are dug in. And I wanna move on, though, and talk about Russia, Ukraine. Luke, why is the president choosing now to make this big turn on Putin?
BROADWATER: Yeah. So according to people who are close to President Trump, he really believed that he and Putin were sort of bonded through the first impeachment, that they had this great personal relationship, and he was going to be able to get through to Putin, and then Putin would end the war and deliver to him a Nobel Peace Prize. That is not happening. Putin is not listening to Trump. Trump has — he's probably the last American president in recent times to come to this realization, but he has finally come to the realization that all other American presidents have, that Putin is not a good faith actor, that he is not someone who's going to negotiate with him and end the war because they are so close with their personal relationship.
And when he — when President Trump had this great phone call, or what he thought was a great phone call, and then he turned on the news right afterwards and saw that Russia was continuing to drop bombs even though he thought they had agreed to something else, he seems to have finally realized that Ukraine is not the bad guys in this war and that Russia is not the good guys. And he might be the last person to come to that realization, but it does seem like he finally has.
RUHLE: Carol, all of a sudden, we have the president very bold. Right? Very forward. He's talking a very big game, but tariffs haven't gone anywhere. He's just moved to another deadline, and that countdown clock is ticking. What happens if the president backs off on tariffs again, which, mind you, is what Wall Street has priced in, that assumption?
LEONNIG: Fine. Totally, Wall Street has priced it in. I was talking to somebody today about it who said they just kind of expect him to back away. Another person I was talking to referred to tariffs as Donald Trump's squeaky toy, you know, something he grabs onto almost for comfort, in certain moments or looking bold. If you don't mind, though, Steph, because you're the genius on Wall Street, I want to go back to Putin for a moment and just say, it is amazing to me to see Donald Trump start to talk out loud that Putin is not to be trusted.
Because in the first presidency, you know, Rex Tillerson, the secretary of State, tried to sit Donald Trump down and say to him, you know, Putin — who he knew very well, by the way, from all of their interactions about oil and when he was running Exxon — he said, Putin wakes up in the morning, Mr. President, thinking, where is America vulnerable today? How can I send some little bit of trouble into that vulnerability to make that worse? And Donald Trump didn't believe him and kissed that off. The National Security Council was listening in on calls when Donald Trump was talking to Putin, and they were aghast. And they would not tell — some of my sources would not tell me for the longest time, what are you so aghast about? They were beside themselves because Donald Trump was asking Putin for his advice about North Korea. Like, should I trust North Korea about this, that, and the other? Putin's not the person that's going to be a truth-teller to Donald Trump. And, it's exactly right that he's sort of one of the last people to figure this out.
It is also, I think, really important at this moment for a lot of us to notice who is successfully whispering in Donald Trump's ear, and that's NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte. He has been, you know, some people say sycophantic. Some people say amazingly strategic. While Donald Trump is watching Putin drop bombs after saying, “Oh, yeah. We've got a good talk going on. I'm not gonna bomb anymore over there," Mark Rutte is telling Donald Trump that his plans are great, and stay with me. Stick with us. NATO will be with you and the United States. We will do what you want.
We'll pay more. The European nations will pay more. You were right always about that, Donald Trump. And it's a really interesting split screen between Putin misleading Trump and Trump finally figuring that out and Mark Rutte saying, I'm in your corner. I'm here with you.
RUHLE: All right, Angelo. New topic. Today the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to go ahead with widespread layoffs at the Education Department. We're looking at a picture of Linda McMahon right now. Is this this just the latest example of a conservative supermajority clearing the way for Trump and Russ Vought to transform the way our government works?
CARUSONE: Yeah. Shortly, yeah. I mean, the answer is yes. And I think, you know, they're abdicating their responsibility. I think one of the thing that's key here is that you don't have to read into their intentions.
The administration was very clear that they, you know, they framed this when they announced it in, not only in Linda McMahon's appointment, but then these first wave of actions as closing the Department of Education, as shutting it down, as effectively shutting it down. They didn't hide. They didn't do subterfuge. They didn't describe it as reform or trying to change it. They were very clear what their intentions and objectives are with the actions they're taking at the Department of Education.
And why that matters is that they can't do that. They're not supposed to. They need to go through Congress to do that. And that — and so when the Supreme Court gets up there and makes this action and does what they do here, they have — they're further clearing the way for a unitary executive. It ties in exactly with the Russia stuff too.
I mean, Trump is preempting Congress from passing legislation that would put 500% tariffs on it. The number sort of doesn't matter, but it would have confined him. Right? I mean, part of it is that it's always about maintaining as much power as he possibly can. So the same time that this is happening with the Supreme Court, he's also taking actions here, which on the one hand, demonstrated a shift in policy, but also demonstrated another, which is that he is not going to let any other branch of government exercise their functions and their powers and serve as a check on him.
And that, to me, is the real alarming part about this is that we've already seen Congress sort of abdicated and now can — yet again another example, even when they really didn't need to — of the Supreme Court doing it.
RUHLE: But that's the thing, Angelo. It's not a surprise that Donald Trump wants absolute power. The surprise is the Congress is letting him do it. The Supreme Court appears to be letting him do it, giving up their own power and only increasing his. All right. Angelo, Carol, Luke, thank you for starting us off tonight.