The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.
The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.
T he narrative out there is that Tucker Carlson, recently canned by Fox News, has been badly exposed by the disclosures from the lawsuits. He says one thing in private — that he hates Trump passionately — and he’s never said anything like that on-air. Charles Krauthammer used to say, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think — and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” Tucker is a hypocrite, condescending to his audiences.
This is just fantastically wrong. Tucker’s real views on Trump have been out there in the public the whole time, dating back to January 2016 when he published them in an arresting feature, “Donald Trump Is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”
In that article, Tucker gives you the basics of his view of Trump. He admits most of the downsides about Trump, that Trump seems proud of his corruption, that he’s faking it among Evangelical audiences, that he’s “vulgar” and “emotionally incontinent.” Tucker contends that Trump is viable only because of the failures of the governing class, especially the conservative nonprofit world, which had the keys to the kingdom under George W. Bush and produced the Iraq War, a financial meltdown, and the displacement of millions of Americans from their homes in an economic calamity. In that article, he calls out the class divide between Republican voters who care about controlling the border and slowing down the pace of immigration, and elected Republicans who value cheap immigrant labor and wanted amnesty.
The Democrats assume [Trump’s] a bigot, pandering to the morons out there in the great dark space between Georgetown and Brentwood. The Republicans (those relatively few who live here) fully agree with that assessment, and they hate him even more. They sense Trump is a threat to them personally, to their legitimacy and their livelihoods. Idi Amin would get a warmer reception in our dog park.
I understand it of course. And, except in those moments when the self-righteous silliness of rich people overwhelms me and I feel like moving to Maine, I can see their points, some of them anyway. Trump might not be my first choice for president. I’m not even convinced he really wants the job. He’s smart enough to know it would be tough for him to govern.
Tucker understood and implied that in some ways he sympathized with people who would treat Trump as less welcome than Idi Amin. Yeah, that in fact does sound like a guy who, in private messages, would make fun of Trump’s business acumen, or credit him with being good only at destroying things.
In that same piece, Tucker also said some perspicacious things, such as that Trump had a decent chance in the general election. And that the conventional wisdom was wrong that Trump would crater the Republican Party with racial minorities. Tucker anticipated the opposite, which turned out to be farsighted. He also saw that Republican elites would get so upset about Trump’s success that they would begin to talk about and treat their former voters as proto-fascists.
The Tucker thesis about Trump stayed the same in his 2018 book Ship of Fools: that Trump’s election was a middle finger to the existing ruling class, a sign that the people at the top had to change their ways.
Where Carlson complimented Trump, he did so with heavy qualifications: “At times, he seemed interested in what voters thought. The people in charge demonstrably weren’t.” This was rapidly followed by Carlson’s noting that nobody in the ruling class seemed to internalize the lesson that voters were trying to teach them with Donald Trump, and instead they doubled down on conspiracy theories about Russia, or simply on demonizing the voters. He warned darkly that if they continue down this path, Americans will “vote for radical populists who will make Donald Trump look restrained.”
While everyone else was making a splash by selling similar-looking books about Donald Trump as the main character of our politics, Carlson took the exact opposite view. He maintained on his show, night after night, that America’s “Ship of Fools,” its ruling class, was still the most important player.
And he demonstrated that attitude constantly with what might be the most often-used verbal transition in Carlson’s opening monologues. “Whatever you think of Donald Trump, millions of Americans supported him. You think the ruling class would ask themselves why, but instead they want to” — take your pick: blame it on Putin/try to silence their critics/sic their red guards after you.
And Carlson has stuck to that thesis — this isn’t about Trump; it’s about our ruling class — through nearly every spin of the news cycle. It’s the theory that shaped even his coverage of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, including his focus on law enforcement’s actions, or how the narrative of January 6 is being used to justify deploying the security state against ordinary citizens.
You can argue that he’s wrong, that some of the stories of the Trump years really were primarily about the faults and foibles of Donald Trump. And I have. While I’m curious and open to theories about the placed and removed pipe bombs on January 6, or question the lack of Capitol police assigned to work on that day, I still think the main story of that day was that Donald Trump lied about the election and lied about what Pence could do about it, misleading his assembled followers into a mob that he refused to call off. And I’ve said as much by text to Tucker, and presumably to the CIA handler who reads our private communications. But he still thinks the main legacy of January 6 is that law enforcement can now treat the domestic Right with the tools developed to combat foreign jihadists. I can’t knock him for inconsistency there.
And on the matter of private texts revealing the whole truth — I’m sorry, they don’t. Carlson has his own explanations for some of the most extreme things he said about Trump privately — mostly having to do with being jawboned by campaign people in the days after the campaign. But the private communications of my friends in political journalism bear roughly the same divergence from their public work as Carlson’s. In private conversation, people blow off steam, they speak emotively, they grab each other’s attention with gossip and slander and shock value. That they don’t print this stuff to their audience is not a sign of their dishonesty or cravenness, it’s a sign of their considered judgment, almost always for the better.
Some of the other matters in the texts have been blown out of proportion. For instance, Tucker’s called for the firing of reporter Jacqui Heinrich for fact-checking a Donald Trump claim about Dominion. Among the prime-time hosts, Carlson had actually been the most vocally skeptical on-air of the Trump camp’s theories about Dominion. He humiliated Trump’s conspiracy-theory-peddling lawyer Sidney Powell repeatedly. But Heinrich’s fact-check did collateral damage to Sean Hannity’s show. You may care only for the truth, egos be damned. But it was a breach of a rule at Fox News that the news and opinion side don’t fire on each other in public. The same rules would apply to me. My colleagues are free to disagree with me and even show that I’m wrong on the facts. But I’m not allowed to offer what purports to be an impartial fact-check of my colleagues’ articles, as that would call into question the integrity of National Review as an organization for having published them in the first place. The text chain from which it was taken was one that included the prime-time opinion hosts, who were operating under a constraint from criticizing the Fox News Decision Desk for its unjustifiably early call on Arizona — a call that turned out to be correct, but which was questioned even by liberal media outlets.
As Ross Douthat pointed out in the New York Times, Tucker’s radical suspicion of accepted institutional authority now extends far beyond Trump, and far beyond what could plausibly be construed as the narrow commercial interests of a Fox News host. Is there a giant Fox audience demanding to be served and catered to with content about how JFK may have been killed over a dispute with the U.S. intelligence agencies over the Israeli nuclear power plant at Dimona? The same suspicion of institutional authority makes Tucker curious to hear and air Kanye West — a man evidently going through a psychological break — talking about the phalanx of political and entertainment figures who wanted to control what he said and represented in the culture.
The most prominent populist voice in media has been temporarily silenced. A lot of people are going to take the relative moment of silence to convince themselves that America’s institutions are doing just fine again.