Tucker Carlson
Tucker Carlson's problem, it would seem, is that what he says doesn't matter, because he has a long history of not saying what he thinks. True, he once starred at Fox News, and even now his followers on social media number in the millions. But he's shifted into crackpot conspiracies and turning on Donald Trump. Anything for an audience.
Carlson long hated Trump in his heart while praise poured from his mouth. The war in Iran polls poorly as does Trump, and so Carlson uses the opportunity to inflate his diminished importance by blaming himself for making Trump possible.
"We're implicated in this, for sure," he said. "You know, we'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people."
On trying to mislead people, Carlson is expert.
In 1999, he wrote that Trump was "the single most repulsive person on the planet." But when Trump was elected president in 2016, Carlson wrote a Politico piece headlined "Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right." In it he gave Trump the lightest of spankings. Trump was "imperfect."
After 2020, Carlson expressed contempt for Trump but only privately. He had a job to keep as political pundit on pro-Trump Fox News. There he was paid more than $15 million a year to air fake opinions.
When Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, Carlson sent private messages doubting the Trump camp's claims of election fraud. "I hate him passionately," he also texted.
On air, though, Carlson tiptoed around Trump's phony assertion that Dominion Voting Systems software helped steal millions of votes. Instead, he vaguely stated that "something was wrong with the election."
After Fox dropped Carlson as a legal liability as well as pain in the butt, he rebranded himself on social media. He was now a persecuted truth-teller focused on corporate power, demographic changes and other sprawling issues.
But when Trump ran for reelection in 2024, Carlson jumped right back in line and heartily supported him in public. After the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, Carlson said the shooting "changed everything." That's when Trump "became the leader of this nation," he said.
Thus, a "commentator" who wrote in an email that Trump's first term was "a disaster with no upside" started campaigning for him. As a warm-up act at a Trump rally, Carlson did his icky "Dad comes home" routine.
In Carlson's recent telling, Trump has been manipulated by Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu into entering the war in Iran. If true, where was the strong patriarch Carlson had been heralding for a decade?
It is Netanyahu's job to look after Israel's interests. It is the American president's job to look after America's interests. Often those interests align, but sometimes they don't.
Netanyahu had urged other presidents to strike Iran, but the other presidents declined. There may be an argument for stopping the exporter of terrorism from developing nuclear weapons. Too bad Trump's big mouth couldn't stop itself from hurting the cause with bloodthirsty threats against Iran's civilization.
I share Carlson's displeasure at Trump's many character flaws, but I didn't cover them up when Trump was more popular. Nor did I buy into the president's vows to save Obamacare or "drain the swamp" of Washington corruption. Only suckers would believe a man who stiffed his workers, oversaw six bankruptcies and transparently lied about Barack Obama not being American born.
Carlson wasn't a sucker. He knew, like Trump, how to play the chumps by selling himself as an honest man speaking his mind. Nonetheless, The New York Times just ran a long interview credulously titled "What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?"
Unbelievable.
Froma Harrop is an award winning journalist who covers politics, economics and culture. She has worked on the Reuters business desk, edited economics reports for The New York Times News Service and served on the Providence Journal editorial board.
Reprinted with permission from Creators.
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