On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses Trump sharing AI videos and how they provide a concise way to reinforce a narrative already percolating in right-wing media
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From the September 30, 2025, edition of MSNBC's Deadline: White House
NICOLLE WALLACE (HOST): Angelo, I want to start with you and this thing that you put in my brain that I look at everything through this lens now of narrative dominance. This to me feels like a sign that he knows it's slipping. And this new tool to me feels like a grab at getting it back. How do you see it?
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, and I think that's a fair point, you know, because there's something very powerful in these AI images and sometimes they're really sophisticated deepfakes designed to actually be presented as truth. Trump himself seemingly fell for that AI about the med beds. It didn't seem like he didn't realize that it wasn't him actually talking in that Fox News segment. You know, I don't think he posted it in the way he's posted other AI images, for example, of like Chris Christie and Governor Pritzker sumo wrestling. I think he knew that was a fake when he posted it. He did it for fun, right? So, there's that damage there.
But then other times, it's a piece of visual collateral that reinforces a narrative that's already percolating in right-wing media. And one of the biggest narratives right now in the larger right-wing ecosystem, it's fairly universal, is that the reason why Democrats are resisting, fighting sort of spending as much as they are, why they're threatening to shut down the government over healthcare, is not healthcare for American citizens, but the argument is that they're doing it because they want to give healthcare to illegal immigrants. That's what they are claiming in the right-wing media.
So, when you have a visual clip like this, it's not the first time they're hearing it. They're seeing something that whether or not they know it's fake, it doesn't really matter, it gives them a validation, something very concise, for the story that has been percolating in their ears, on their podcasts, on their TV for the past week. And that's the real power of the most recent attack that he did because it gives them a concise way, and it implants that false memory. It sort of replaces the image of Schumer and Jeffries there in reality with this version that was produced by AI.
WALLACE: Well, and Angelo, just to follow up, it's also likely that the AI image reached people that hadn't even seen the real image, didn't even know that Schumer and Jeffries were at the White House for a meeting that didn't go very well.
CARUSONE: That's right. And I think the damage of Trump doing this more regularly, and this has been an increasing trend that we're seeing from him in particular, is that actually this environment, not just Trump, but this environment more broadly where this becomes more of a common practice, it actually pays the ultimate liars dividend, because in an environment where people have difficulty discerning or everything seems like it could potentially be misinformation, the liars benefit the most from that.
Because anytime something truthful is said about them, they can just say, "Well, it was misinformation. It was a deepfake. Don't believe your lying eyes." Right? And that's the real harm here, is that it isn't just poison the well from the beginning through these official accounts and people use his account for official announcements. On the back end, the more he pollutes the ecosystem, the more he is then able to exploit that pollution for his own gain. And that's ultimately why this is about narrative dominance because it gives him the ability to distort so much truth and help put the focus on the narrative that he gets to have so much control and influence over through this right-wing media ecosystem.