On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses the “much scarier direction” right-wing podcasters want to take the GOP after Trump
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From the April 21, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): That was Tucker Carlson, for any sucker still watching him, apparently experiencing or at least projecting a brand new persona that embodies this regret and torment and self-loathing for helping Donald Trump three times. Tucker helped him three -- Trump has run three times. Tucker was there all the way. It is interesting, though, because a lot of people still watch him and listen to him, and other right-wing podcasters seem to follow him, people like Megyn Kelly. It's another thing that Trump has to grapple with.
It's another symptom of the public displays of buyer's remorse that we are now seeing from key members of Trump's winning coalitions, and the waves of rebukes for Donald Trump as his MAGA base splinters and grapples with what is very much in the public behavior so erratic, large majorities of Americans find him temperamentally unsuited for the job he has, as well as Trump's failures to make good on his campaign promises -- largely to keep America out of wars, or to release all the Epstein files, or to lower the price of anything. The list goes on and on.
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ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): So I think you're right to pick up on something is off there. I think there probably is buyer's remorse, but I think the reasons are actually very unsettling and scary. And I think that there's sort of two things happening at the same time here. There are these things happening in the larger right-wing ecosystem that is undermining Trump's political power. These fault lines that are turning into full blown cracks and fractures that are not going to repair, and that's going to be something that is going to plague Trump now for the foreseeable future.
And the second layer to this is what is actually being said here? Because if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and Buckley, the remorse that they're expressing is not that Trump is being unreasonable, it's that Trump is being weak. They start -- they go in and discuss how he didn't do enough to crack down on the riots after George Floyd. They say, that was the first time that we knew something was maybe off because he wasn't aggressive enough. Or they attacked him for saying that he didn't exercise his power after the 2020 election to essentially overturn it and stay in power, that he was too weak to do it, or that he didn't defend the January 6 rioters enough.
So their list of gripes and grievances -- this moment, this catalyst, because it is about the Iran war, but it's not. That's the catalyst that starts to get them to think, okay, here are all the things that he has not done enough of. This is our bloodlust. This is the story that they're telling. This is the direction that they're trying to bring Trump's base post-Trump. And that's a scary thing for all of us to come to terms with.
To put it simply, you know, they're basically mad that Trump is doing foreign wars as opposed to using all of his time, energy, and capital at home grinding immigrants and political opponents and Democrats with his boots. That's what they're fundamentally mad about. And that's really different than some of these other fault lines that we've talked about in the past, the bro-casts, the manosphere, that probably really just did both -- they wanted no new wars and they didn't necessarily want full blown fascism the way that Tucker Carlson and Buckley are talking about. And I think that's the thing to keep in mind here is that they're giving us a keyhole view for where they're trying to take things. And so we can take both things to be true. They have remorse, but they also have an agenda that is trying to steer the ship in a much scarier direction.