On MSNBC's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone discusses how “everything now is the 2020 Big Lie all over again”
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From the October 27, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Weeknight
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): I, you know, I think for a lot of folks, you know, Angelo, this boils down to how the administration is executing or exercising its authority as counsel's just laid out in terms of what this environment looks like from a legal standpoint. From Donald Trump's perspective though, this is really about the raw powerness of it all. That, I have the power to do whatever I want whenever I want. If I tell you to jump, only question is how high and where do you want me to land?
And so with that kind of authority, we can sit and, you know, have a nice cocoa on the porch talking about, you know, the impact that this has on things like the rule of law. But at the end of the day, that the three words of the founding documents, particularly the Constitution, we the people, is the crux of this. You break that? If the President of The United States is above that, what does this look like? I mean, this is not hyperbole anymore. This is real because the administration is doing everything in its power to do exactly that.
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): And I think what you said at the beginning there, when you said how he's exercising power, is actually the most important part. Because the how here gets into the strategy in the play, which is that he's -- everything now is the 2020 Big Lie all over again. Meaning that he makes a claim, and then the rest of the right-wing media backfills it with evidence or support, you know. So that is how he -- I'll give you a counterfactual thought experiment.
So let's say he makes one of these claims, and instead of the backfilling of it, so he's --it's okay to exercise power, killing all these people in these boats without any sort of oversight or any real rule of law there because they're terrorists. Let's say now Fox starts questioning that. Let's start saying Fox actually starts saying, well, some of them haven't been proven to be terrorists and we don't know that. What if they start putting out, instead of backfilling it, they start questioning it? Does he still get to exercise power in the same way? The answer's no. We all know that.
So part of the way that he is exercising power here, and the way that he's able to taint and bend the rule of law is by bending the narrative in the world that we all live in, and the vehicle for doing that is this large propaganda ecosystem behind him that is backfilling and reinforcing every single one of these claims. Because that then creates the conditions where all of these people with power to check him, Republicans in the House and Senate, they have no incentive to do so because they'll run afoul, not just of Trump, but the very ecosystem that is giving him the political power to do all this bending in the first place.