On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses what Stephen Colbert and CBS reveal about the Trump administration’s role in media decisions
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From the February 18, 2026, edition of MS NOW's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): This feels like the wrong fight to pick. One, nothing enrages Donald Trump more than being laughed at. Two, nothing projects weakness more than your heavies having to muscle in the person getting under your skin. And three, Colbert just keeps going up, up, up, up, up into the stratosphere in terms of his reach and his courage.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah. I mean, it's a weird fight to pick, but it's an important story here. And I think what Colbert has done is help identify something a lot bigger than just what's happening at his show because it's just a couple of weeks ago that the FCC changed a rule that was designed to sort of start to create these kinds of disruptions. I mean, they basically said they're going to get rid of a waiver, an exception that has been in place for more than 20 years and that they're going to get to decide. They didn't issue any guidance about definitions or who's in and who's out. They said they're going to get to decide when that exception applies now in this new sort of weird terrain. And they've already used it, by the way. I think everybody keeps forgetting that.
But a few weeks after they changed that rule, they went after The View with an investigation for, coincidentally enough, a James Talarico interview. And so I think this is the new normal here. And so that's to me, the big part is what Colbert was doing was not just protecting his own program in this case and obviously illustrating what was going on at CBS, which we all know, but also something much bigger, which is that they've now created the conditions where they get to disrupt the way that the media has helped tell stories for more than 20 years. And I think, you know, I'm a firm adherent to the idea that, you know -- and I believe that when there's a will, there's a way. And I think it's a reminder that they've, you know, they've made all the tweaks. They know where all the levers are to implement the kinds of changes that they've intended. And that's what we talked about with Project 2025. And, you know, sometimes they seem like a bummer, but it's worth knowing that that will works in reverse, that we can fix things too. And we just have to be mindful of that.
WALLACE: Well, and I think the problem that they have right now politically is that Donald Trump is -- his popularity is thinking like a stone. And for all the coalitions that glommed onto him to project him to victory, they are most repelled by the assault on the First Amendment. Also, at a personal level, Joe Rogan is the guy who said to Talarico, "Why don't you run for president? You're a good person." What threat is it that Talarico represents to the Trump coalition?
CARUSONE: That's so right. And that's, you know, look, you know, when we talk about narrative dominance and these things, you know, one of the few things that tends to break through are some of these very prominent national satirists and satirists at their core, part of the reason they resonate, they have such a strong reaction from recipients, is because they're truth tellers. They are telling a truth about something that people feel. But instead of speaking to people's heads or their hearts, they're speaking to people's guts. And that is usually why they have such traction. And Colbert is a uniquely gifted satirist who can not just diminish and sort of portray Trump to belittle him for no reason, but actually to portray Trump for what he actually is, to strip away the veneer and the facade of a strong man or somebody that's in control and actually just demonstrate the desperation that's sort of swirling underneath it.