Bulwark Takes - The Backlash Is Here: Trump Supporters Beg Right-Wing Hosts To Stop DOGE Firings

Episode Date: February 26, 2025

Tim Miller is joined by Angelo Carusone, President of Media Matters, to discuss the public outcry to right-wing radio and tv hosts to help amid the Trump administration's cuts and policies impacting their lives. Read More in Media Matters Sam Stein, "He Took Musk’s Resignation Offer. He Was Fired Anyway." JVL, "The Washington Post and Autocracy’s Asymmetric Advantage"

Did you know that many products for pregnant women do not have their own clinical trials for safety or efficacy? That's because pregnant women are often excluded from clinical studies. Ritual is aiming to set a new standard with their Essential Prenatal Multivitamin. It's the number one best-selling prenatal and the only leading prenatal backed by its own human clinical trial. Essential Prenatal is proven to deliver key nutrients, including folate, biotin, and vitamin D during pregnancy. Moms taking Essential Prenatal had a lower overall cortisol level during pregnancy than those taking a leading prenatal. Plus, it's designed to be gentle on the stomach. Ritual doesn't just

have your back. They have the receipts. Get 25% off at ritual.com slash clinical. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. You can't rely on blind faith to get the pregnancy support you deserve. Ritual's Essential Prenatal Multivitamin is the only leading prenatal backed by its own human clinical trial. Essential Prenatal is proven to deliver key nutrients, including folate, biotin, and vitamin D during pregnancy. Get 25% off when you visit ritual.com slash clinical. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.

This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Hey guys, Tim Miller from The Bulwark. I'm pumped to be here with Angelo Caruso, the president of Media Matters for America. And we were on with Nicole Wallace yesterday, and he was making some points. And you have a limited time on cable news. And I was like, I want to go deeper on some of his points. I was like, let's YouTube it. So what's going on there?

Yeah. I mean, you're right. It was, I was kind of making a point basically that, you know, when you actually listen to talk radio, it's a little bit different than what you get on the online fever swamps. And that's, that doesn't happen that often. Usually, you know, the right wing media is it's, it's an echo chamber. So the whole point of an echo chamber is that no matter where you go, you're kind of getting some version of the same thing, especially with Trump. But that's not entirely the case, not from the host on the right wing on talk radio, but from from the callers. Yeah. So I'll put a link to this

where people can go into a deeper if they want into the media matters piece on this in the in the description. But basically, you know, what you're saying is that listening to the callers, and I'm a podcast man, so I do deal with the fever swamps. I listen to my band and Candace Owens to know what the freaks are saying, but there's not calling. And as your point is, you've got Hannity's show, you've got Clay Travis and Buck Sexton's show. You just gave a couple examples here of listeners who are calling in

and bitching about Doge, who are obviously conservative listeners if they're listening to to those shows so anyway talk to us a little bit about the examples yeah i mean i think the examples kind of fall into a few categories right the first one the one that really seems to resonate the most when i'm like sort of hearing it is people that are calling in that either lost their jobs or know people that lost their jobs. Right. And they are appealing to these media figures to, to advocate in some way to say, Hey, you know, not all of us are, are bad. You know, we are, the work that we do for the government is actually important. That's not what we wanted. And I just don't think they know that, you know, they're giving Trump the benefit of the doubt,

but they're expressing frustration and they're hoping that people like Hannity, you know, or Clay Travis can sort of sort of set the record straight. And then the adjacent piece to that is they know law enforcement officials in particular or they don't think it's all the FBI officials. It's just some of them. And that's actually the callers repeating back to Hannity in particular stories that he told them for years. You know, they've been attacking the FBI for a long time. And one way that I think they inoculated themselves against getting pushback from their audience is to say, when we criticize the FBI or law enforcement, we're not talking about all of these people. We're just talking about the political leadership at the top, you know. And and so they're basically saying, hey, Hannity, you need to stand up for the rank and file. You know, you need you need to remember what you've been telling us all these

years, that it's not thousands of FBI agents that are a problem. It's just it's just a few dozen that were sort of using abusing their power that are the problem. And and so there's this moment where the callers are sort of putting things out there, especially about the job losses. And they're either saying it's overly broad, it's inconsiderate, that they're not part of the deep state. And they are hoping that these figures will appeal to them. And that's just sort of the employment part of it. There's obviously other pieces, too, where they're calling in. But they are. This is not like, you know, it's clearly not like a grassroots, you know, like some astroturf thing where people are calling it fake. You can kind of tell the authenticity.

They're not, they're genuinely not trying to mess with their hosts. They're really hoping that they will, you know, exercise some leadership or maybe clarify for the administration. And then people bring attention to it. I guess you've seen this, right? They, like the Doge has this happen where attention is brought to something that they screwed up and they've rehired people. I mean, we reported on this at the Bulwark. There was a guy that was chief of staff at FEMA in the Midwest, and he was wrongly fired. We reported on it.

They brought him back four hours later. So, I mean, that is, I guess, a legitimate strategy to call Sean Hannity's show. It seems like he'd have more influence in the Bulwark. But, you know, like the interesting thing is like the ties those things together for me, Angela, just like listening to you talk about it is like the attack on the bureaucrats is easy when it's faceless. Right. It's like, oh, there are these, you know, they're real FBI people, but they're also guys you don't even know about. They're in the Hoover building and they wear suits and they like they sit behind desks and they create problems and they come after, you know, and then like with the bureaucrats, it's like, oh, there are these people that are on K street in DC and they wear suits and they're liberals and they put their pronouns in their bio. And it's like, okay, like that is easy to demonize those people. But then when it's like, oh shit, like it's a forest service guy. It's the nurse at the VA. It's like the law, it's the cop, you know, it's the, it's the federal law

enforcement guy. That's like doing drug arrests, right? Like all of those things are much more sympathetic. And I think that like the reality is, you know, I mean, again, it's not like this is this, that everyone's, the scales have fallen from everybody's eyes. But like for certain people, the reality is starting to sink in. Yeah. And I think that I'm not like some cockeyed optimist here. I'm certainly not in the camp of some officials or public figures that are writing op ed saying that we should not be doing anything. You know, I'm not I'm not like sort of in that position. But I'm realistic about what's happening. And, you know, to your point, it has been faceless. And that that's one thing when you sort of express these policies, because when it's faceless, you put a face in. And when you're when you're a listener and you're hearing this, you're thinking about the worst version of a caricature of a D.C. liberal disconnected from everything. Right. You're not thinking about the fact that you live five miles from a park that is managed by the Bureau of Land Management or that you like literally engage with them or that your fiance is filing for immigration status.

And that all of these, like, you don't think about it from that perspective. You just sort of inject the worst caricatures. That's because these people live in a narrative and the calls, I'm very surprised by how many calls there are, because I, you know, if you just put it, take a step back and these call-in shows that they have, these are millions of listeners, right? People are getting call-ins all the time. They're screened, right? So if you're letting some of these calls through, you should think about, it's like when somebody calls a member of Congress, they always assume that there's a certain number that are just like that, that didn't actually call. It's the same thing here.

If you're a radio host or you're a show, you're letting some of these calls through, which means you're getting a lot of that topic. And sometimes you just can't avoid it. So you let through the more reasonable callers because that's that's what you got that day, which means that the boards are probably saturated with this. And that is because it's really hard to find an area that's not touched in some way by this. And there was this one guy who called Mark Levin's show and he was making a plea for his fiance. The great one. Yeah. You know, and that. Yeah. And he yeah, you know, he's like pleading for his fiance because she her immigration status is like not is likely now not going to end up getting. He's likely not going to. She's likely not going to stay because of the policy changes. And he's hoping that Mark Levin will just explain to the administration that

like, she's a good one and that the policies are not meant to hurt her. And, you know, that's where I think it starts to play out. And the part that's really surprising about, I mean, in this case,

by the way, this, this example, the wife, the cause life is from Ukraine, right? So in some ways maybe he has reason to believe that she's a good one right you know it's like i thought they were just mad at the you know i don't want to project anything onto this person or what what i have no idea what their views are of

latino immigrants but it's true like that was like trump you had good reason to think that based on trump's own rhetoric but like yeah there'd be good immigrants would be fine that's right that the good immigrants would be fine right That there's a segment that they're not talking about. And the hosts are not, they're not shutting it down. They are, they're not attacking them aggressively. They're not being very supportive though, or backtracking. So like Hannity tells veterans that are losing their jobs and 30% of the federal workforce are veterans. And I like, we have to keep hammering away at that because I think people forget just how many veterans work for the federal workforce that are getting indiscriminately fired here. And a lot of them are listening to these shows and, you know, Hannah's like, well, there'll

be other opportunities. And, you know, one of these hosts, you know, Clay Travis, like cuts them off, you know, when they're, when they're appealing to him and that that's going to start to break the connection to their audience. It's one thing when you're on the outside telling these audiences that your host is lying to you. But when the host starts to collapse on his own narrative and his own story they're telling, it's a lot harder to continue to maintain that relationship. And that's where I think there's both a reflection of how much people have already been affected by this.

And I think these seeds are just beginning to germinate. And so it's a signal of where it's going. And that's why I do think it's important that these things get through, because they have such narrative dominance elsewhere that this is one of the few places where, you know, a real sense of just how much harm and damage is being inflicted upon people widespread. It can get through. One other thing you mentioned yesterday, I want to connect to something in the news today i'm curious about but you said that fox had done a bunch of segments on these doge cuts that weren't true there's a new york times uh story that like they had exaggerated five of the doge cuts like since you guys are monitoring that i mean like there's just no like they just bowl through that stuff right there's no mea culpa there's no whatever yeah

it's an obvious question but i just it's worth saying you'll get why i want to take you there because no no yeah no they don't not even in the tiniest bit i mean and it's not just like a little bit i mean they're i mean they they made the claim you know they're like the claim about that 55 billion dollars being saved they mentioned it at least least 87 times in the span of a week. There's, you know, the claim about how there were, you know, all of these like fake social security recipients that they received millions. They mentioned it. I mean, they went all in on like last week. They, they went, they did, they went,

they discussed it 43 times in a single day. 43 times in one day. It was like in a day, 43 times in a day that they hammer away at the idea that millions of dollars of Social Security funding was being sent to fraudulent and deceased people. All of which, and these are just the things that have become fabricated. And this was the case for people who weren't following the story. It was the opposite was true. There were some fraudulent social security, but it was actually people that wanted to work. So they're using other people's

social security. So they're paying payroll taxes. So actually getting rid of them would cost the government money. Because they were defrauding it, but they were using it to get jobs and then they paid payroll taxes on it. So anyway, it was the opposite of what they said. That's right. And I will say that there's something significant about this in a weird way.

One of the things, Trump always used to watch Fox. Everybody knows he would live tweet it. He hadn't done that in a really long time. Certainly not since he's been president, even since he got elected. He has not live streamed Fox. One thing that I think is notable, and I'm not saying there's a cause and effect, but it seems connected, is that for the last two weeks, they've been hammering away at all these doge cuts. And even though they keep unwinding, they're just digging in deeper, just amplifying these stories.

They're at the back end, but they're helping bring it home. Trump this morning in Washington, Fox, friends, bright and early, live tweeting all three hours. And that's something he hasn't done in a very, very long time. So why don't you think he's doing that? I think in part it's because they have really found a sweet spot, which is that they can be sort of like the last man in the relay race, right? They'll grab that baton and just continue to run with it. And, you know, Doge can sort of put these sprinkles out there. They can sort of echo through the right-wing media.

Fox can then give it a stamp, sign it, put it on the website. That'll help them. They can cite Fox News articles on talk radio the next day. And because they never go back and correct it, those pieces of information can stand. Yeah. The reason I mentioned the correction thing, because there's this thing going on the internet the last couple of hours, and it appears it was a fake Don Trump Jr. AI thing where he says we might as well send the uh weapons to

russia yeah and uh and several people retweeted it including including maybe somebody sitting right here and uh you know i feel like we unretweeted send out a thing that's like oops my bad i know it's a pretty good fake you know like uh sam stein sent out a thing for us it's just like oops our bad it was a retweet not a big deal that's how accountability journalism supposed to work you send out a wrong thing like this is such asymmetry and so and and jbl wrote about this for our newsletter today people should go read that at theblork.com but it's like it's like the playing field is so fucking slanted when like fox can just lie 43 times in a day about a made-up story and then pretend like it didn't happen the next day

and like everyone else on the responsible side like makes a mistake cast a bill maya culpa apologize i mean it really it creates like a real imbalance oh and they're gonna i mean and and they would they would talk about this relentlessly right even even if even though people have corrected it they're still gonna probably oh yeah about it oh you're right so the imbalance is even more than that right because the media did it wrong, even though they apologized. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the asymmetry of bullshit is pretty incredible here. And that that is definitely another advantage. And this has been the expectation. Right. It applies not just in the media, but also with Republicans, like the way most of the media talks about Republicans.

There isn't an expectation that it hasn't been for a long time that they're going to govern, at least the current iteration. And that's obviously a disadvantage. And that will – and part of it – but to get to a deeper point, part of the reason why they hype these things, and this is a significant side of it, and this is where it's so corrosive, is that the narrative that they have is that liberals lie. And that therefore the ends justify the means so sometimes you have to fib or push the envelope a little bit it's because they deserve it and there's no other way and that so when they when they over amplify these stories or make a big thing about it they know that they're lying but they need to keep reinforcing that narrative that liberals will do anything to win so therefore it's okay for you to do anything to win and that

that's the part that's deeply disturbing about the asymmetry part of it is that it's actually being used to intensify that asymmetry and allow them to do increasingly worse things. All right. Thank you for monitoring this shit. So our viewers don't have to, Angelo. I appreciate you. And I guess I'll be seeing you on Deadline White House or maybe around YouTube soon.