On Deadline: White House, Angelo Carusone discusses Trump's Strait of Hormuz crisis: “Only Fox News could really change the course of this ship, and they're not”
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From the March 20, 2026, edition of MSNOW's Deadline: White House
ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Well, Angelo, let's talk about that, both the fracturing we're seeing within MAGAverse and also what we are seeing from Republicans in Congress. There was this reporting today from The New York Times: “Nearly three weeks after the first strikes on Tehran, GOP lawmakers are resisting the idea of calling top administration officials before Congress to give a public accounting for an escalating war with uncertain objectives, a rising price tag, and no clear exit strategy. ‘You don't want to show that kind of division to your enemy when you're in the midst of a war,' said Sen. Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin. ‘I don't have a problem with the administration avoiding showing our enemy that they don't have 100% support of Congress.’”
I mean, what are they there for, Angelo, if they are not going to provide oversight on a war that their own base does not support and that the president is going to ask another $50 billion for in funding?
ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS): Yeah. They're not even going to go so far as to vote on it, right, or to take any sort of official action to stop it or to slow it down or to rein it in. They're not even going to talk about it now. They're not even going to get, you know, get more information. They're not even going to do, as you noted, their oversight function.
And that's a big tell as to where we go from here because they're not just giving him a blank check. They're giving Trump clear runway to essentially execute on however he's feeling. And that's where this all comes together because Trump basically lives in, like — he doesn't think in reality. He thinks in 1990s action movie montages. And, you know, I mean, when he was running for president, you know, aside from prom — while he was promising no news wars, I would also note that he would have this giant opening scene from the Patton movie.
I mean, this is an irresistible temptation for him. And part of what's happening with respect to the fracturing is, you know, before we got to this most recent development about boots on the ground, the fracturing was between sort of the new MAGA coalition, these cultural figures that came in, parts of the new right, sort of the the white nationalist, groyper crowd, the isolationists, like the the Nick Fuenteses and the Tuckers of the world, and then the sort of the traditional right-wing media. But you're beginning to see some cracks emerge within the traditional right-wing media. But instead of criticizing Trump, they're mostly just being quiet about boots on the ground. And even the soft people, you know, what they're doing is they're saying, look, Kharg Island, but you have to stop there because it's technically not Iran proper. It's not actually in Iran. It's an island. So he can get away with only Kharg Island and nothing more.
So they're beginning to say, well, we won't support all the way in, but we will support this. And it's the — exactly what the first few days of when we started to — before the the strikes happened — started to feel like, that there was a little, tiny little cracks before they fully broke wide open. But what's the point of it if Republicans have already said they're not going to do anything with their official power?
MENENDEZ: It is quite the distinction without a difference. As great as it was to listen to you paraphrase Fox News, let's hear it from them themselves.
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MENENDEZ: Angelo, I want to pick up on something that Missy pointed out, which is which inputs the president is getting at this point. Let's pull up some of the polling that we referenced earlier, but we didn't get to look at in full.
This was released yesterday: 65% of Americans think Trump will order a large-scale invasion. Just 7% of Americans support that. Just 34% support deploying small-scale special forces. Your sense — is that factoring into their thinking? And if that is not factoring in, then what is?
CARUSONE: I think what is factoring into Trump's thinking is Fox News. And that's it. The people that he has paid attention to for a really long time. The, well you know, the lens through which he sees the world. They are really coloring this, not the advisers around him — as much as they may make some noise in the room. The truth is, really, it's all a stage, and he really cares about how this stuff plays out in the shows he watches. And what he's seeing is the usual suspects criticizing him, and I think the fact that he's willing to engage uniquely in ways that he hasn't in the past is sort of a tell here that he thinks he has some room to move things, or that at least he has to do some damage control to backstop it. But in the places that he pays the most attention to, the things that's factored into his thinking, he's not being told that he needs to stop.
He's being told that gas prices are starting to go up a little bit, but that's the price of freedom, that this is worth it, full steam ahead, backing down is going to look weak, that there's a way for him to put boots on the ground but not violate any of his promises and also achieve success. And he has his own long arc here, which is that he never sort of retreats from these positions. He always stakes out more leverage, more extreme posture. He doesn't really care about anybody else in the room at the end of the day. He cares about the story.
And the story in his mind is: This is ending a 47-year war, and he gets to put another notch in his belt if he just shows some strength and some muscle. And when this all first started, he's — he literally said people are going to die. Oh, well, we're going to do this. So I don't think there's, that is going to be a factor for him in this moment. The moment is, on the stage he's watching, it's playing out really well, and I think that's the single lens.
Much like in the lead up to January 6, ironically, only Fox News could really change the course of this ship, and they're not.