ALICIA MENENDEZ (HOST): Angelo, you and I spoke earlier this week about the fact that Fox News has kind of been hiding the ball on the Medicaid piece of this. They know it is not going to be popular with their viewers. When does it become real? And how surprised are they to learn what is actually in this legislation?

ANGELO CARUSONE (MEDIA MATTERS PRESIDENT): I mean, there is going to be a deep skepticism. And I think what you just said at the end of your conversation with Congressman Raskin is probably the most important thing looking ahead, which is that the narrative matters. And that so much of the real harms and consequences that are reflected in the polling and in the optimistic assessments of how people are going to naturally vote or respond to the effects of this bill, because they’re backloaded after the midterms, we have to be really deliberate and intentional about that. 

Because part of what’s going to happen is that the very same engine, the narrative engine, that MAGA media that functioned as a real whip here to keep Republicans in line and salted the earth — or at least helped create some ability for them to politically move and even vote this in the first place, by denying, by lying, by saturating the landscape with misinformation about this bill, or getting people to just accept it, especially Republicans — it’s going to do the exact same thing going forward. 

Because once even the slightest bit of consequences start to kick in, that MAGA media and that larger narrative engine is now going to switch from boosting the bill to deflecting those consequences onto anything and everything else, and that’s the part that’s so key about this. 

People are going to start to feel effects, and like the congressman said, they’re going to certainly feel some of the effects well before midterms. But, then the real thing — and this has been the case with the Trump administration the entire time so far — is how is that harm going to be connected to the actions of the Republicans or to the Trump administration? That’s the piece that’s always missing, and it gets very fuzzy when they talk about it. 

I promise you, ads are not going to do that. We live in an environment right now where the right gets to control the terms of most of the discussions and that deflection mechanism that’s about to spin up is the most critical thing here. And I really worry about that because I haven’t seen a seismic shift yet in the larger structures of the information landscape, or in MAGA media’s inability to execute on that very function. So, I’m not trying to pessimistic about it, but I think we need to be a lot more precise about how those harms are going to be connected to the actions that Republicans took in the last 24 hours with passing this legislation.