ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): There’s an amazing moment in that rant where he claimed that Thanksgiving, the holiday writ large, is 25% cheaper under his leadership, according to Walmart. The prices he is talking about are in reference to Walmart’s advertised Thanksgiving basket, which contains six fewer items than last year and smaller portion sizes, which somehow to me is like the most beautiful metaphor for what Trump promises his voters and then what he delivers.
ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): Yeah, there’s a lot here. I mean, one thing I’ll just start by saying that you actually can’t disconnect what was happening with the shutdown and the infighting on the right and at the Heritage Foundation because they actually are connected. They started to feel the pressure across the board and you start to look inward, right? Because this Nick Fuentes, Tucker thing is not new. Okay? They just decided to make it a fight now because they were doing what Democrats usually do, which is they start to look inward because they feel impotent and powerless externally. So, this sort of bubbled up because of internal infighting, because of the pressure that they were feeling as a result of the shutdown. So, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that it had other consequences, aside from the politics, the optics.
There is this other piece is that it was taking these fault lines that exist on the right, and to what Tim was saying before about there not being gatekeepers or a single gatekeeper — you know, gone are the days of Limbaugh and Roger Ailes. You know, we had one or two people that really were the gatekeepers. There’s a lot of individuals that have their own fiefdoms, and sometimes they’re in alignment. And when they do, that’s a narrative that reverberates throughout the country. And a lot of times they sort of do their own little thing and they don’t get to echo. And so when you have these fault lines, you put a little bit of pressure on them, it turns into cracks and that weakens their political power.
So that I think is — there is a connection between the two. So, you know, when I think about the shutdown stuff, the Democrats win or lose, there’s a third thing, which is that what did they give up and not what did they lose, I’m sorry, but what did they potentially lose? So, for example, why didn’t they walk away from those negotiations? They could have done deal one more day and say, “Hey, you wouldn’t believe what these people just asked for. They asked for eight Republican senators to sue for half $1 million each, and that’s why we walked away from these negotiations.” Squeeze it out another day, right? So, the point is that they gave up the ability to continue to tell us their own story, as well as to expose these fault lines into cracks.
And that’s where the Trump part ties in because when you take those cracks and you start to expand them out, the things that Trump says are not being backfilled with right-wing lies. You’re not able to say, “Well, the reason you’re not feeling the benefits that Trump is telling you is because all these terrible Democrats or all these companies or the deep state is trying to screw you.” Instead, they’re all too busy infighting over their own little audiences. And so Trump is out there making these claims, but there isn’t any cavalry.
MENENDEZ: He’s like, “Guys, guys?”
CARUSONE: That’s right. And so that’s the part that’s significant. Now, when they start to get realignment, which is what they’re doing now, and now they’re saying, “Well, Democrats are just doing it for show. They’re the ones — see, we told you all along, they were causing you this pain.” So, that I think is where the tie in is here. It’s not you know, I love the schadenfreude of the weakening of the Heritage Foundation and the infighting, but there’s something more significant because this is about power and how you organize and leverage that power in a political context.
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