On MSNBC, Angelo Carusone explains why MAGA feels betrayed by Trump over Epstein files

ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): Angelo, that media sphere is more fractured than it has ever been before in this moment.

…

And secondarily, can we play this out a different way where Donald Trump had told the Wall Street Journal that he was going to sue them if they ran the piece, and they would have chosen not to have run it, what would that have done to the length of this story? 

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): I don’t think it would have changed the length of the story. I mean, I think there’s enough there — his own behavior is going to keep stumbling into this, that it is going to, you know, it’s going to continue to exist. They didn’t take the boiling pot off the oven. All they did was lower it back down to a simmer. So, I actually don’t think it was going to go away regardless of the story. This just changes sort of the contours.

And I’m tracking exactly a similar thing, which is that people are going to, you know, they don’t trust the deep state. That’s the problem with conspiracists, right, is that they’re always going to gravitate toward the easiest or the biggest, baddest villain. In this case at the center of this, as much as it is about Trump, and that’s how we think about it, it really is about this larger thing, that there’s something nefarious right underneath the surface, this overpowering deep state that Trump has been battling, that has been going after Donald Trump because he’s been trying to stop it. And that’s what they’re mad at him for. They’re mad at him for not doing one extra thing to help expose the deep state. That’s what all these calls for transparency. There’s no — a lot of his supporters are not saying, oh, we think you’re a pedophile too.

They’re mad at him because they don’t think that he is releasing or exposing the thing that would help illustrate how damaging and destructive the deep state is. That’s why they’re so mad at him. That’s why they feel betrayed because that was the thing that he promised them he would do. So, it isn’t totally surprising that the audience, that the immediate reaction of the top influencers especially, is to be skeptical.

But one thing I would note is in this sort of what happens in this larger, atomized landscape, as you talked about, is that this thing now has the plant and then percolate, right? All the examples that we talked about, they’re going to — yeah, it does sound a little ridiculous. 

But then there are other things that he says that are demonstrably not true — so those questions sort of percolate back up. And then eventually, just like we saw with the callers at the beginning of the show, these own personalities have to be accountable to their audiences.

And so you have the core political, I totally expect them to do that. But then you have the Theo Vons and the Tim Dillons and the Joe Rogans and the conspiracists that are not going to be as reflexively willing to defend Trump here, especially because their audiences aren’t. And so we have to have a couple days to let it cook to really see what the overall effect on the landscape is. But they’ll backtrack and be responsive to the audience and that’s just what’s going to happen over time in this atomized landscape.