There’s a moment about halfway through another one of my fascinating conversations with Angelo Carusone where he says something that sticks with me long after we hang up.
“We’re in a pass/fail moment. And we’re failing.”
You might say, “That’s obvious,” or “Yes, I’ve heard it a thousand times before,” and that’s the point. Saying democracy is failing, even 10 years ago, would have elicited alarm. Now it’s met with a shrug.
The truth is that Carusone, the CEO of Media Matters for America, has been sounding the alarm for years, about Fox News, about right-wing propaganda ecosystems, about the weaponization of media, about outrage toward Donald Trump’s actions and any number of America’s failing moments.
But what makes this moment different, he tells me, is that we’re not just living in a crisis, we’ve adapted to it.
“People are burnt out. The chaos is the point,” he explainsd. “That’s not a sideshow. It’s the main feature.”
Carusone believes that Trump hasn’t just upended the federal government, he’s obliterating the very expectations people once had of what a functioning democracy should look like. What should trigger national outcry, things like obstruction of justice, the use of government agencies to target political enemies, the gutting of entire departments, and more recently siccing the U.S. military on its own citizens, now barely registers.
“By the time the thing even makes it onto the chyron at the bottom of your screen, something worse has already happened,” he says. “It’s the firehose strategy. Overwhelm the system. Collapse it.”
That strategy, Carusone argues, works not only because of right-wing propaganda but because the rest of the system has failed to adapt. Mainstream media, he says, is still trying to narrate this era as if it’s politics as usual. “You can’t tell people a coherent story if you refuse to acknowledge that the story itself has changed.”
I tell him that Trump is fully aware of the tidal wave of destruction he’s wreaking on the American people, their everyday conversations, and the general dumbing down of its citizenry. It’s as if that is his main job as president. And that, to me, the media and Democrats are trying to treat this in the realm of normalcy by covering this insidiousness or responding to it the same way they did with the presidents that preceded him.
Carusone agrees completely. “The Democrats are still trying to get an A in a class that’s pass/fail,” he says. “They’re spending months negotiating podcast interviews, trying to script every answer, while the whole world passes them by.”
It’s a devastating indictment, not just of a political strategy of a bygone era but of a broader institutional failure to meet the urgency of the moment. This and the fact that when trying to check Trump, they resort to a checklist when they should be going with a full body check.
Most Democrats still believe that winning elections is about checking boxes, delivering the right policy message, saying the right thing, and triangulating toward the middle, Carusone says. But he insists that this model simply doesn’t work anymore.
“People don’t vote based on a rubric,” he remarks. “They vote on gut. They vote on whether they feel seen.”
He brings up U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin, who won reelection in Wisconsin even as Trump carried the state. “It’s not because she took centrist positions,” Carusone says. “It’s because people believed her. She showed up. They saw her at the farmers market. She remembered their names. She built antibodies into the system. That’s what real representation looks like.”
Carusone contrasts Baldwin’s success with the flat-footed, overly sanitized approach he sees in many national Democrats. “They think they’re playing chess when they’re actually in guerrilla warfare. This is asymmetric. You can’t win this on an even playing field because it’s not an even playing field.”
Republicans, he says, understand this. They flood the zone with garbage, create confusion, and weaponize cynicism. And they’ve conditioned their voters to treat reality itself as suspect. “It’s not just that they lie,” he notes. “It’s that the lies are designed to break your brain. To make you give up.”
What terrifies Carusone is that the strategy is working, not just on the right but on the rest of us. Even the act of outrage has become predictable, anesthetized. “I can show you a video of a Republican official threatening to shoot federal agents, and the response will be, ‘Yeah, sounds about right.’”
I mention one of my pet peeves, those viral videos of Republican town halls where constituents shout out their anger. Based on people I’ve talked to in some of those districts, it’s angry Democrats showing up, asking sharp, smart questions. I tell Carusone that the media is creating a false impression that it’s Trump’s base showing up and getting angry, when in reality the base supports Trump.
“Yes,” he says. “And people clap and cheer because they’re doing what the media won’t, holding Republicans accountable. But the takeaway shouldn’t be just that the questions are good, It should be, ‘Where the hell are the Democratic counterparts to this energy in every district?’ Where are the constant town halls, the relentless presence, the showing up before the crisis?”
Democrats, he argues, are still stuck in a mindset that believes voters will reward them for being technically correct. “But voters don’t give a s**t about process. They want to know, do you see me, are you going to fight for me, and are you going to win?”
And Trump? “He doesn’t complicate it,” Carusone says. “He sells a vibe. A dominant vibe. And Democrats try to meet that with white papers. And that never works.
I tell Carusone that I was speaking with a prominent Democrat who told me that when he speaks to a room full of people, he not only tells them that he’s going to cut their taxes, but how he’s going to pay for it. That’s when I stopped him.
“Voters don’t care about how you’re going to pay for it; they just want to know how you’re going to save them money. It’s only the media that cares about how you pay for tax cuts, and voters don’t trust the media, so it’s a wash,” I explained.
Now, that’s not a call for Democrats to become liars or autocrats. It’s a call to meet the moment with equal urgency and better storytelling. “You can be smart,” Carusone points out. “But you have to be visceral too. You have to understand the terrain you’re fighting on.”
As we wrapped, I asked him how he stays in the fight when the trend lines seem so bleak. “Because people are better than this,” he emphasizes. “They just need to be reminded. That’s the job. Remind them. Help them see. Help them feel. The chaos is the strategy, but it doesn’t have to be the future.”
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