On MSNBC's Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone highlights how Trump is losing control of narrative dominance due to “fractures” in right-wing media
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From the July 7, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Joining our conversation, former Democratic senator, MSNBC political analyst Claire McCaskill and the president of Media Matters for America, Angelo Carusone, who I like to be here for every incremental crack in that narrative dominance that Trump and MAGA have had. That feels like more than a crack when Joe Rogan says, "Really? They're taking more than the cartel members and the gang members?" And I know he should have known better. And I think it's possible that Joe Rogan did know better. He's a lot of things, but stupid isn't one of them. But what Donald Trump is doing is pursuing almost exclusively people at work. The raids are at Home Depot parking lots. The raids are at -- I mean, the gentleman who I had on, his father was at his job as a landscaper. That's why he had a weed whacker in his hand. What do you make of the fissures or splinters in the MAGA coalition today, Angelo?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, I think that, you know, it's true. I don't want to overstate one example, because then I think sometimes it's a little too much schadenfreude. But you're right, it is. Rogan is an illustration of this much larger trend.
And to take a step back and consider it, what's important about the media right now is the MAGA media, is that it's not one chorus with a single conductor. It's more like a music festival with a bunch of stages. And you sort of have to have everything oriented and organized correctly so that you can, each stage can work. If they're all pointed at each other, it's just a big cacophony of noise. It actually is a disaster.
And so, what Trump has to do in order to leverage that, all those different parts into a narrative and then achieve narrative dominance, which leads to political power, is that you have to sort of keep them all relatively organized and on the same page. And so, when you have these small fractures and cracks that then start to expand out, that's when you start to have problems. And so, what you see with Rogan is not a one off. It's part of this larger trend.
So for instance, Theo Von, who's probably right at a similar level of influence as Rogan, you know, when Trump was on his Middle East tour, he was talking about him a bunch. He's been throwing in his lot as well with criticisms of Trump. But, instead of being the person exercising those critiques like Joe Rogan is when it comes to immigration, he's been hosting somebody like Congressman Thomas Massie, who opposed Trump's legislation, to come on there and rip it apart and to show all the ways that it is betraying the very people that got Trump elected in the first place. That's not a Democrat making those arguments or a media figure, that is a Republican member of Congress.
So these trends are actually part of a larger pattern in this highly atomized environment. And there hasn't really been a concerted counter strategy from Trump or the larger sort of Trump administration to get this under control.
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So a fracture turns into a much bigger crack. And that's really what's happening underneath the surface of this narrative dominance, is that all these fractures are beginning to become more into light.