President Donald Trump's empowerment of voter fraud conspiracies, immigration enforcement, and violent crackdown on protesters in places like Minnesota are all connected, Media Matters for America chief Angelo Carusone argued on MS NOW Wednesday.
"There are others all across the government, you know, not just on the inside but on the outside that are helping reinforce and buttress that narrative from official purchase," said Carusone, whose own liberal watchdog group has faced legal attacks by the Trump administration. "People like Heather Honey, other 2020 election deniers, suddenly have special government employee status so that they can help work on these investigations that are now taking place elsewhere. So that's the first piece. They have the ability now to operationalize threads of that narrative from an official position."
But that's not the only issue, he said.
"They have a constellation of these sort of investigative-type creators, people that were doing things like what James O'Keefe used to do, who are going out there and putting together these exposés, these reports, this of the scandal," said Carusone. "They're manufacturing the evidence through this intrigue, and then they use those official positions and their larger right-wing echo chamber to then pluck it up and make a big thing about it."
The Minneapolis crackdown, he argued, was "a test run" for this.
"A video guy goes out there, he does a video about all this, you know, all of this Somali fraud," said Carusone. "They then make a big thing about it and they say, we have to send in ICE to crack down on it. Look how big it is. Well, that same person is out there right now and just many others that are doing similar types of sort of videos in California and elsewhere. And then, so they're going to help fuel that narrative as time goes on."
This is obvious, Carusone added, because "they're not saying it quiet. They're saying it very blatantly, out loud."
"There are 20, 20 election deniers that are talking about their relationship with the White House right now, who are teeing up what they're doing in Arizona and nine other states," he said. "They're bragging about it on right-wing media, because that is how the loop gets completed. There is this connective tissue between these fantastic storytellers, this larger right-wing echo chamber and the Trump administration."
All of this, he said, "is sort of win-win from their perspective."
"Either you can gin up enougheffort on the front end to, tocreate obstacles to voting andsort of essentially have, youknow, sort of a position whereyou end up winning or yousuppress the vote enough thatyou win some places or youdiminish some some victoriesfor Democrats or the other hand,you create so much chaos andconfusion afterwards and somuch undermining of theelection, that the only thingthat's left in all that chaosis the strongman," said Carusone.
"And that'sthe Trump administration," he concluded. "Andthat all ties into thenarrative power that he'sdemonstrated again and againand again."