On MSNBC's The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone explains how Trump in unable to squash MAGA discontent on Epstein files fallout
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From the July 17, 2025, edition of MSNBC's The Weeknight
MICHAEL STEELE (CO-HOST): Angelo, can you believe that this is still a big deal? I mean, you're looking at this story. You go, okay, all right, all right, I get it. Three, four days. We're in week two, and the escalation of intensity in the MAGA response, the burning of the MAGA cap. Oh, my. I mean, this is serious. But then again, how serious is it? I mean, we are in the dog days of summer here. Come on.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Well, that also speaks to how significant it is for his base and his audience, right? Is that it has so much kinetic energy. I think there's a few ways to think about how serious this is. One, I want to note that and this validates your point about it getting bigger, not smaller, is that it's broken containment. It is no longer just within the far-right MAGA universe or, you know, online, you know, Twitter and X elsewhere.
It's now being part of sports programming and other shows, right? Comedians are making jokes about it now. It's no longer just, you know — Barstool Sports is talking about it, and they're not talking about it in a way that it's defensive of Trump. They're reinforcing the idea that there's something really weird here. What's going on? So one, it's gotten bigger, in that way it's metastasized. That's one of the consequences of him not sort of containing it in the first place.
The other thing is that it weakens his relationship with his audience. And that's important for two reasons. One, that's how he maintains narrative dominance. That's how he gets to control and shape the lens to which people see the world. And the other is how he channels that into political power. Now, it hasn't really affected his political power yet. But again, it's only been two weeks. But there are real significant divides there. And I think that to me is the real tell.
And to put a fine point on it, it's what the callers are saying. You know, those callers are small representation of what's actually taking place every single minute on talk radio, not just talk radio, all online. If you go on to TikTok live or one of the other live streams, you know with, you know, that these Trump supporters do all the time, but not really big names, you know, 100 or so audiences, they're saying the same thing.
And one caller really stuck out to me. He called in to The Alex Jones Show and he was saying, Trump tells us not to care about this anymore because it's old news, but all he's ever done is tell us to care about the 2020 election. How are we supposed to care about that and not this? How is this old news and not that? So, part of it is that it's hard for them to break away from the logic chain that he's sort of had them all living in. So, you know, I think time will tell here. But it is a real softening of the earth.
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STEELE: Here for me, Angelo, is the question of the hour that I think at least I'm looking for an answer over the next ten days or whatever, however long this plays out, and that is when or if do you think Donald Trump sanitizes a version of this and releases to the public? Because I don't think the — just a cold, here it is — release of these documents is going to happen. This thing's going to get cleaned up and it's going to be, here you go guys. See, I told you there was nothing there. And, he's got the perfect people in place to do just that.
CARUSONE: Yeah, he sure does. And that's — I mean, why should we believe them, right? I mean, there's no there's no doubt, eventually the pressure will mount.
I mean, one thing that is probably slowing that down is that his own disconnect from his people right now, you know, he's only seeing the world through a very narrow, you know, not even a keyhole view. It's sort of like a closed door, completely with no keyhole. It's Fox News and they're not connected to what's happening here in the larger MAGA universe. And, you know, even on Fox, if they're not ignoring it, they're basically saying, surely Trump is going to deal with this. I mean, that's what their current position is right now. We trust him. He's going to — yes, it's a problem, but he's going to deal with it. Now,that gets to your question, how is he going to deal with it?
But part of the challenge here, and this gets to it, is that I don't think they know what they can release right now — because you had Mick Mulvaney doing an interview that's about to come out, that's being teased where he's not actually trying to attack Donald Trump, but says, yeah, Donald Trump's name is all over the Epstein files, but it's really not a big deal because a lot of people's names are on there and there's nothing you could — That's the former chief of staff, right?
So, part of the challenge here is that you have all these people that are trying to help him or even sort of not even help, just not add fuel to the fire. And they're adding fuel to the fire by talking about documents that they themselves have seen.
So, if you do exactly what you just said, let's game it out. Let's say he gives a sanitized list. You have people that have been following this with cultish fashion, like it's a video game for five, six years? They know every potential detail that is possibly there and will say, well, you didn't give us this, but you gave us that. That's why it was such a flop when Pam Bondi gave them those binders at the beginning of the year because everyone was like, wait, we already have all this. You didn't give us anything new. We'll be patient. We'll wait for the full list.
So do I think he'll probably release something? I don't know if it'll be that, but it'll be — I don't if they'll manufacture a document, but they're going to have to put some kind of a cap on this because even his staunchest advocates are saying that — Steve Bannon, Laura Loomer, Alex Jones were all together today, quite a rogue's gallery, are basically now centering around this one position that Trump didn't mean to attack his people. He needs to do a better job explaining this, and he needs to do something big.