Angelo Carusone on MS NOW's On the Line: Trump's grasp on current issues has faded because “he's no longer connected to the media landscape that used to give him that insight”
Carusone: “Fox News is just echoing back to him what they think he wants to hear. All the people around him are totally sycophantic. ... The incentives are just so deeply baked in now that they've forgotten how to have their own opinion.”
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From the July 24, 2026, edition of MS NOW's On the Line with Alicia Menendez
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, you have always made the argument to me that if the president has a gift it, in the past, has been having his finger on the pulse of the zeitgeist, really understanding sort of where the conversation is going. He has so clearly lost the thread. I mean, literally everyone I talk to, all they want to talk about is how much things cost, how much gas costs, how much groceries cost. It is a reminder of just how insulated he has become.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Yeah, totally. He's not connected to the media landscape that used to give him some of that insight. Fox News is just echoing back to him what they think he wants to hear. All the people around him are totally sycophantic. And then the Republican Party as a whole, which I don't -- I don't expect much out of them, but, I mean, the incentives are just so deeply baked in now that they've forgotten how to have their own opinion. So when you ask them right now, if you asked them, what are you doing? What is Trump doing wrong? Give us something. They have nothing to say. They won't say he's doing bad on the economy. They won't say anything. And that to me is the real tie-in is that he's not able to get that insight anywhere.
Now, I'm not sure that would really force him to course correct at this point, because I think broadly he's not interested in building popular power. He's interested in leveraging as much of the power that he currently has. And so I think he's transitioning to something kind of different. But that's honestly a big part of it is that he isn't connected to the zeitgeist, so he can't do any of those modulations. And that's why his approval ratings on the economy right now are as bad as Joe Biden's were when inflation was 9.1%.