On The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone says “the misinformation engine of Fox News in 2020 is quaint compared to the environment that we’re in now”
Carusone: “The landscape to backfill the narrative that Trump puts out there is way more potent than we saw in 2020”
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From the January 12, 2026, edition of MS NOW's The Weeknight
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): Some of the things, pushing states to redraw House districts, demanding to end mail voting, attacking voting machines, seeking millions of voters' private information, staffing the administration with election skeptics, as you've just noted and deniers, calling out the troops who are right now on a lot of streets across cities, across the country. But where are those cities? They're in blue states, right, where the voting population is likely larger and going to turn out. So, if you can cut that short on the front end, you have to worry less about it on Election Day on the back end, right? Am I missing something here or is this part of the authoritarian playbook? Simone likes to give us the history of how they play the game. But the reality, folks, is being played out right in front of you right now.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): That's right. I mean, we see this in international law, in the international arena. Might makes right, power and the exercise of power to implement your ideas. Why does that somehow not apply domestically? Everything so far has demonstrated that he's willing to do it. The one thing that I would add to that list is that the misinformation engine of Fox News in 2020 is quaint compared to the environment that we're in now. By the time we move into the midterms, Larry Ellison will have control of TikTok, CBS News is no longer a fixture. A whole bunch of Trump entities have been buying up local media properties and aligning it.
The landscape to backfill the narrative that Trump puts out there is way more potent than we saw in 2020. That doesn't mean we're impotent and we don't have any ability to respond. There are just increasingly few levers. And so I think now there's the so what comes in and that is there are a few senators that always express concern, the Republicans. They should be on the record now that they're not going to tolerate this stuff. They're not going to put out statements. They're going to change their party and caucus with Democrats if they start to see this kind of nonsense. They need to start drawing red lines. They need some political pressure for them to do it. That's one lever of power. It's not the be all and end all, but we're going to need to start putting antibodies into the system because this is the reality that we are living in. It's happening.