Any competent political campaign with an instinct for self-preservation should avoid Carlson.
Any competent political campaign with an instinct for self-preservation should avoid Carlson.
A lot has changed since March, when RealClearPolitics reporter Philip Wegmann first revealed that then–Fox News Channel host Tucker Carlson had been tapped to host a GOP presidential candidates’ forum in Iowa. The events that transpired in the interim should have convinced most of the Republican Party’s presidential aspirants to rethink their association with Carlson. Unfortunately, they did not.
The forum that is set to take place this Friday will feature at least five GOP candidates: Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Vivek Ramaswamy, Tim Scott, and Mike Pence. Donald Trump has decided to avoid the event, according to Iowa-based Republican kingmaker Bob Vander Plaats, the president and CEO of the event’s host, the conservative Christian FAMiLY Leader organization.
Presumably, Trump has not eschewed the event in deference to any high-minded principle. He has already demonstrated that — much like Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney — he does not need to win Iowa to emerge as the Republican Party’s presidential nominee. Unlike Trump, the rest of the GOP field has a lot to lose in Iowa. But neither the candidates nor Iowa’s evangelical Republicans should feel compelled to associate themselves with Carlson, who has spent his post-Fox career courting views and positions that have the potential to tarnish anyone who shares a stage with him.
Few contemporary issues divide the GOP down the middle like Russia’s war in Ukraine and America’s support for Kyiv’s sovereignty. The views on this conflict among the Republican Party’s presidential candidates vary, reflecting the spectrum of opinion across the GOP’s voting base. But when it comes to opposing support for Ukraine’s defense, no Republican candidate has indulged the overcaffeinated id of the Very Online Right like Carlson has:
“Ukraine, as you may have heard, is led by a man called Zelenskyy. We can say for a dead certain fact that he was not involved. He couldn’t have been; Zelensky is too decent for terrorism,” Carlson said sarcastically. “Now you see him on television, and it’s true you might form a different impression. Sweaty and rat-like, a comedian turned oligarch, a persecutor of Christians, a friend of BlackRock.”
From the implication that Ukraine’s acts of self-defense in its war of national survival constitute “terrorism” to the thinly veiled antisemitic caricatures of Ukraine’s “shifty” Jewish president, Carlson’s monologue caught everyone’s attention — including the Israeli press’s.
Do the Republican presidential aspirants who are skeptical of America’s commitments to Ukraine’s defense want to taint their views by associating them with this garbage? Do Republicans who support Ukraine’s cause want to devote precious hours on the stump to squaring their support for Israel and America’s Jewish minority with their tacit countenancing of these remarks? Can the candidates who attend this forum articulate their beliefs in such a way that they will be heard over the views expressed by Carlson?
In another ill-considered set of remarks from a dialogist who is supposedly friendly toward Republican candidates and causes, Carlson recently went out of his way to gush over the candidacy of Democrat Robert F. Kennedy Jr. “I love Bobby Kennedy,” the former Fox host told comedian Russell Brand. “I don’t agree with him on everything. I do agree with him, I’ll just be honest, on most things — on the big things.”
Drawing that distinction is always going to be a subjective exercise, but we can take a stab at it given Carlson’s prior comments about the Democratic presidential hopeful.
We can assume that Carlson agrees with RFK Jr. that the infamous and long-since-retracted Andrew Wakefield study linking childhood vaccines to autism diagnoses was not a product of shoddy research but nefarious machinations behind the scenes (a “ferocious public-relations campaign,” in Carlson’s words). That’s a “big” thing. But there are other “big” things RFK Jr. supports, as Reason’s Liz Wolfe recently pointed out.
Does Carlson join RFK Jr. in supporting Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal or curtailing the development of new nuclear reactors? Do Republican presidential candidates want to be asked whether they support such causes? Do they join the Democratic candidate in backing the prosecution of right-wing businesspeople for exercising their First Amendment rights in ways he doesn’t like? If so, they’ll have to square that with their support for the Supreme Court’s conservative majority, which only this term found that the state has no right to compel speech over and above individual conscience objections. It’s a pretty “big” thing to endorse the shoddy, revisionist narratives advanced by the Venezuelan government, which RFK Jr. has devoted years of his life to doing. Does Carlson share those views? Do the GOP’s candidates?
If we were to take the emails Fox News was compelled to disclose to the courts at face value, Carlson won’t miss Trump on Friday. After all, he wrote in one such message that he hated the former president “passionately.” But that was the old Carlson. “I love Trump,” says the new Carlson. Indeed, he has gone farther than most prudent broadcasters would in erecting elaborate defenses of the candidate’s conduct, which resulted in a 37-count criminal indictment relating to the unauthorized retention of classified information and the alleged misleading of federal investigators.
Do any of the Republican presidential candidates plan on campaigning against the frontrunner for the GOP nomination on the grounds that he is presently facing criminal charges? Do they want to make the case that those charges represent an insurmountable obstacle to Trump’s presidential ambitions? If so, they’re going to be seated across from a hostile interlocutor who rejects the very premise — and who, in the process, gives Republican voters psychological permission to do the same. How does that advance the rest of the field’s political prospects? How does it secure the interests of Iowa’s Republican voters? How does it help the GOP?
Carlson has always been a controversialist. But when he was a controversialist broadcasting in prime time on the Fox News Channel, the real estate he commanded made him unavoidable. Now, he’s not just avoidable, you have to swerve to encounter him. And his compulsive penchant for stepping on rhetorical landmines suggests that any competent political campaign with an instinct for self-preservation should steer clear.