On MSNBC's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone explains Donald Trump's struggle to maintain narrative dominance amid the Epstein scandal
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From the July 28, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Weeknight
SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): Don't even get me started about why the president is spending time on an international foreign trip golfing at his own establishment. Like where, just -- hello, emoluments, are you out there? I'm pointing at the images, but this is actually, I think, substantial. And you juxtapose that with the protests that were happening here at home. I think it tells me two things. One, that people are tuned in, they are not checked out. And as much as folks made a lot about, "Oh, there wasn't really a lot of pushback to Trump in the beginning," not from our elected officials. No, but I think the people have consistently been pushing back. They have literally been in the streets since Donald Trump has been inaugurated in smaller factions. And I think that there is something brewing there. Now, crowds don't vote. Okay, I worked for Bernie Sanders in 2015, 2016, but crowds mean something. There is some kind of -- and the crowds aren't just in America, there are crowds in Scotland. And the signs in Scotland had everything from Gaza to Epstein to immigration.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I think you said something that I want to really put an emphasis on, which is that if you look at the protests this time versus Trump's first term, there are actually more demonstrations and protests in his second term than the first term. There's not these big, significant, huge things like the Women's March, these things that reached the cultural zeitgeist, these big one sort of one offs every month or so. But there's more activated action across a spectrum of issues. Obviously, some get more energy than others, but that is significant because -- and this is the part that's significant about it.
It's hard to tell that story right now because we're sort of living in this contradictory moment, which is on the one hand, he is amassing an enormous amount of autocratic power. I mean, you're just watching this show with the channel before the show. We're talking about the way he's leveraged the FCC to break CBS and Paramount, right? I mean, this is -- every day there's a new example of him flouting the law or leveraging government power and being a scary sort of burgeoning authoritarian. And that's contradictory or at tension with there's more demonstrations, people are out there more.
But I think that underscores the -- so, one, it's harder for the media than to tell that story, right? It's like, how do you tell both those things at the same time? But the second part is it shows that the stakes that he's intersecting so many different things all across the board, that it is an important political moment to mobilize, that he's building the biggest, widest coalition possible. Now, you just need to have the opposition political party be able to harness that, and they're not going to win it on one issue. There's not going to be one story that does it. They need to be able to operate in an atomized and fragmented landscape in the same way that he does in his right-wing media megaphone behind it.
And that's why the Epstein story is so important in all of this, aside from the substance of it. The reason it's so politically important is because it's the one thing that has taken away his major advantage to be able to operate in that atomized landscape, the connective tissue, his right-wing media helps him have that narrative dominance. And right now, they're at odds too. So, there's the political moment, as you pointed out, all these intersecting issues that cut across the spectrum. And he's also a little bit on his heels in his ability to operate in a landscape that he's largely dominated now for so long.