On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone explains why the Epstein files have Donald Trump flailing with his media allies
Carusone: “He can’t really shape the narrative around Epstein anymore”
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From the July 23, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): First paragraph says that Donald Trump told by Bondi and her deputy that his name appears in the Epstein files. Angelo, where is Trump in terms of his ability to influence this narrative around Epstein?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): He can't really shape the narrative around Epstein anymore. What he can do is take some of the kinetic energy around it and divert it to other things, and that's going to have to be sort of a scatter bomb approach. And this is not novel for him. I mean, you know, a lot of times people think about this as one of Trump's major assets. But, I mean, he came out of New York tabloid society. He understands the concept of a lead steer, that you push a story, and the rest of the media kind of goes in that direction. So, that's where this Obama stuff has come from because it takes some of the kinetic energy out from the audience, from the media circles and from his base, and sort of directs it toward animosity toward Obama. And we're seeing that play out in the more traditional political right-wing media ecosystem where they're talking a lot more about Obama exponentially in some platforms. And, you know, obviously less and less and less about Epstein.
That's the best that he can do is deflect. But the problem with that, and it gets to the core here, is that he used to be the lead steer himself, that when he -- especially around Epstein and not just Epstein, but then his broader ability to sort of take this larger QAnon, Pizzagate, as Sam pointed out, this gigantic conspiracy of child sex traffickers, demonic interests on the left and the media all colluding, he's been able to really -- he used to own all that. He's been able to control that and direct that at any point to anything he wanted. That's why he talked about, you know, at least promoted QAnon more than a thousand times on his social platform because he understood the power of that. He can't direct that anymore right now. And in fact, anytime he even attempts to do that directly, it's just going to backfire and actually move it in the opposite direction. So, the best he can do is deflect.
The problem is -- and is exactly what we're seeing reported here today is that he's both been contradictory, and every piece of new information just fuels the conspiracy even more. It seems increasingly suspicious. And the last thing I would note that I think is key from The Wall Street Journal reporting, and we sort of could have inferred this, or at least that we see it is that eventually the self-interest here starts to overtake people. And people like Bongino, they have a lot to lose. That's why you see these Republicans leaving, closing down early because they know they have to take a vote that's going to make Donald Trump mad. But they also know that if they do that, if they don't take that vote, it actually has real political consequences. So, they're hoping they can just wish it all away, same thing with Bongino. The Wall Street Journal reporting made it pretty clear that Bongino is pretty mad. He's going to be the first one to break, and that's how this thing consistently starts to escalate over time.