On The Weeknight, Angelo Carusone explains how right-wing media led to the Trump administration’s change in ICE narrative

SYMONE SANDERS-TOWNSEND (CO-HOST): I am concerned that people are just reacting to the imagery and not the underlying things that are going on here.

ANGELO CARUSONE (GUEST): In particular, I think who’s the agent of action? It’s Trump and other decision makers that actually have the ability to control the levers of what ICE is doing here. And a big thing that they’re reacting to is how the media, the part that the media that they care about, the right-wing media is reacting to it. And a big reason why there’s a shift across the spectrum from Dana Loesch to Asmongold, who’s a prominent video game streamer, you know, to Fox News shifted their tone and said, “You know, we should swap in Tom Homan.” I mean, they all kind of shifted very abruptly. There’s a couple little stragglers that are saying, press on, Insurrection Act, go harder, but they’re the outliers. 

And that’s what Trump’s reacting to. And they’re reacting because when they saw this, they see themselves to a degree. They say this is a guy that is protesting government that has a gun, nothing in the video — they couldn’t even carry water for it. You know, there’s nothing in the video even lined up with what the administration was saying out of the gate. I mean, it was so disconnected from reality. So first, they’re business people, they’re hosts, they have to, you know, have to maintain their audience. Their audience has their own eyes and ears. They see it. So, they have to be somewhat responsive to it. And the other is that they don’t like what this played out. It’s a hard pill to swallow. And if you really listen to what they’re saying, the bloodlust is still there. To your point, that’s the thing that I was sort of trying to get to before. It really isn’t gone. You know, when Dana Loesch was pushing back against this and being mad, she was mad because she felt like this was a violation of gun rights, not because she felt like this was a violation of basic human rights. Megyn Kelly explicitly said she didn’t care about Alex Pretti. She doesn’t care that he died, that he shouldn’t have been there in the first place. But it was still a mistake. 

And that’s where the shift is. So, Trump is doing what he always does is work the media. How many times have we heard he’s going to be presidential? You know, he brought it up to 150 and he brought it down to 120. And of course, people are going to say, thank goodness. You know, there’s a little bit of relief here, but we’re still boiling, we’re still high, still over the line. And that’s the big issue here. And to your concern, it’s a real thing because Homan is going to ultimately be much more sophisticated and savvy than Bovino who was not really lined up or in line with the right-wing media. He was not a media figure. He was a clout chaser. Tom Homan is a media figure. There’s a difference.

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ALICIA MENENDEZ (CO-HOST): I’m struck by something our colleague Steve Benen has been writing about, which is if you compare this to another inflection point for the administration, what happened on January 6th, there was a very different timeline. There was a period where Republicans came out and they called it what it was, and it took the administration some time to rework their narrative. In this case, we saw them reworking it in real time. They didn’t even have a slight window where reality existed. And that says something about the way that their rapid response machine has evolved.

CARUSONE: Yeah, they’re more terminally online than they were back then, so they’re more adaptable. And what that really means is that they were able to take that insight and pipe it up to the decision makers and get enough internal pressure. We talk about the media pressure, and that’s a very important part of it, but we can’t discount all the staff that are in there, saying, “No, you don’t get it. There’s a bird hunting magazine that is out there tweeting about this, saying, ‘no, no, no,’ these are our people that are saying we’ve gone too far.” So, I think that internal feedback loop is a really important consideration as well, especially as we move ahead. They’re just terminally online, from the vice president to all the staffers.