On MS NOW, Angelo Carusone describes how right-wing media are laying the groundwork for attacks by the Trump administration on elections

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the December 15, 2025, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight

MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): As they look to set up 2026, right, and make the case that if a Democrat wins, I don't care give a damn where, it was by fraud, it was cheating. Talk about what this looks like. You know, even if the courts don't side with Trump, that's really not where the battle is. The battle is what they're doing and why they want the data and the fact that their boy Mr., you know, rocket man got there with his little, you know, organization and pulled back that data, started collecting data from people, Elon Musk and his crew. So what does this look like?

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): So, you're right. I mean, I think that, you know, there are a lot of conspiracies or narratives or ideas from 2020 that they're still going to pull the thread on all over the place, right? QAnon and, you know, obviously, things related to vaccines and healthcare, which we'll talk about later, I'm sure, and the voting rules stuff. And it's not just -- when I say they, it's important to keep in mind that and this gets to the question of where we're going, because they're no longer catering to the outside voices that have been pushing these theories. 

I mean, Trump staffed the administration with right-wing fever swamp creatures, people that were part of the right-wing media now have official positions in government. So, for instance, Heather Honey is one of the -- she's in charge of election integrity at Department of Homeland Security. She's at the nexus of this. A few years ago, she was a right-wing media figure that was conjuring up a lot of and fueling and perpetuating all the tales about the 2020 election and where -- so, we don't have to really speculate as to where they're going here because they told us, because as much as they want to backfill and reinforce the story about 2020, and the fact is most Republicans either, even if they don't agree that Trump didn't win that election, they're not going to say it out loud anymore. That lie has fully calcified amongst a very large part of the country. 

But the real threat is what they're doing and these 18 states that they're suing for the voter rolls. They kind of told us what their plan is there. It's to use it to purge the voter rolls, to make it harder for people to win in some elections. When you win elections, a lot of these races are marginal. In some cases, you're just trying to get a couple points here and there. That's not been the case for them lately, but if you can knock off a couple percentage points in a few key districts, you could change the outcome. And they've said that. 

And in fact, the DHS told Democracy Docket in September that that was the stated purpose of the DOJ suing these things, that they were taking this data, and then it was being shared with the DHS so that they could then use it to determine the eligibility of some of these voters. Now, Heather Honey was suddenly, in the last week or so, said, "Well, that's not really true." But she didn't really say then why the DHS confirmed that to Democracy Docket back in September, but I think that's it. We don't have to speculate. It's the right-wing media figures that now have positions of power, and it may not be front and center. Trump at the top level, and all this infighting has weakened the political narrative at the top level. But they have power right now. They are in positions of government. They're going to continue to enact as many of the things as they can, as if the lies that they've been telling are reality. They're acting accordingly.

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CARUSONE: He's at a weakness of political power here. But there is general buy in amongst Republicans about this particular narrative, about voting and the ability to sort of suppress and limit participation from voting, civic engagement. And what concerns me about this digging around and fishing, whether or not they get the voter rolls or not. The part that worries me is that they can conjure up a story, a mess, and then make it appeal to something like a national emergency or not. Both of the people who are deeply involved in this operation, before they joined the government, were out on the sidelines saying the president can declare a national emergency, and if he can't declare a national emergency, he can use plenary power, something Stephen Miller has also suggested, to engage with the national emergency to protect the integrity of the election.

So, you know, they're beginning to lay the seeds here that are incubating. But in three or four months from now, they could pull a couple threads, make a mountain out of a molehill or nothing. They could just conjure out of thin air. It's not like we live in a world where right-wing lies have turned into realities, because they can just manifest it. And that's the piece that we're seeing unfold here. And I think the reason we're talking about it so much now is because we're much more attuned to the sensitivities of them being able to bake and incubate these lies, and then the harms that they can -- it can materialize into. And I'm glad we're talking about it early.