On MS NOW's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses MAGA podcasters breaking with Trump over ICE
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From the January 14, 2026, edition of MSNOW's Deadline: White House
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): Trump built and organized power on the fringes, and his vehicle for doing it was this coalition, this constellation of media entities. There was no longer just Fox and Rush Limbaugh. You know, he used online entities. We use Rogan as an example, but obviously it's a lot of other voices just like that, who sort of glommed onto the MAGA train and were reinforcing a pro-Trump narrative. But they're not -- you know, Fox is out there saying, this is great, right? They're toeing the line. Newsmax is saying, you want affordability, let ICE deport. They're pro-Trump.
But a big part of MAGA media is shifting on this. They're being much softer. They're questioning whether or not this is appropriate. They're even expressing outright criticism. You don't get that outright criticism unless, one, you get the raw material like these clips that then, as you pointed out earlier, it's not a left right issue, it's are we American or not? Are we going to sort of live in the environment that Stephen Miller is defining for all of us, or are we going to live something much more similar to what we thought America was? And that's where you're starting to see the cracks form. So that's what it all means. The swing is because it's, you can't ignore it. You have people's own perception, and then you have validators like the Tim Dhillons, like the Joe Rogans, like the Shawn Ryans of the world that supported Trump, that are saying, no, I'm no longer a part of the pro-Trump train. Not on this. This is too far.
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): And it's a business decision, perhaps, not to give them any more credit than they deserve. But it's a generational divide where the people still getting all their information from Fox News' broadcasts are not the future voters, they're not the future podcast streamers, they're not the people that will go to any live shows of any of these sort of manosphere figures. And so they're betting on sort of their future, not the past.
CARUSONE: Yeah, that's I think, you know, these are savvy business people. They're very sensitive to their audiences, the same way anyone in media is, you know where your audience is and where they're going, you try to respond to them. And their audiences when they're not listening to their podcasts are consuming raw video content, they're seeing the clips in their feeds. So they have to respond. They can't do what Trump does. They actually have to in some way engage with reality. And this is reality coming home.
WALLACE: Well, I guess the bad news is they're not doing it for the right reasons.