MILWAUKEE — In 2021, Tucker Carlson, then the most-watched host on Fox Information, made his emotions plain about former President Donald Trump. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in a textual content message. However on Thursday night when Carlson, not at Fox Information, stepped into the highlight on the Republican Nationwide Conference, to a number of the greatest cheers of the conference to date, he struck a a lot totally different tone.
“When he stood up after being shot in the face, bloodied, and put his hand up, I thought at that moment that this was a transformation,” Carlson advised the group, referring to the tried assassination of Trump final weekend in Butler, Pennsylvania. “This was no longer just a man. … He was no longer just a political party’s nominee for president, or a future president. This was the leader of a nation.”
Whether or not Carlson underwent a real change of coronary heart, or determined to hitch his wagon to the 2024 GOP presidential nominee out of craven opportunism, he’s poised to wield great affect over a second Trump administration. When Trump — sporting a bandage over his ear to guard the wound he suffered from a would-be murderer’s bullet — made a shock go to to the conference on Monday, he waved at his adoring followers earlier than making a beeline for Carlson, who was sitting within the stands, to shake his hand. Trump then walked a few seats over to greet his new operating mate, Sen. JD Vance — a person whom Carlson advised Trump to decide on because the vice presidential nominee.
The scene could have provided a preview of Trump’s interior circle if he’s to win a second time period: Vance, a bearded millennial authoritarian, and Carlson, who has spent the previous few years producing ugly propaganda.
Andrew Harnik by way of Getty Photos
Mere hours earlier than taking the stage on the RNC, Carlson posted a video on X (previously Twitter) of him conducting a pleasant, softball interview with Mike Cernovich, the Pizzagate conspiracist who as soon as stated date rape isn’t actual. The video was produced for the Tucker Carlson Community, the digital media firm he based after being pushed out of Fox Information amid a $787.5 million defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Techniques, an organization Carlson regularly and falsely blamed for stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
On his new community, Carlson has routinely performed sympathetic interviews with excessive figures, together with thinker Alexander Dugin, an outright fascist — with in depth ties to American white supremacists — who is commonly described because the “brain” behind Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier this yr, Carlson interviewed Putin himself, laughing together with the suspected conflict prison as he held forth on Russian historical past.
The identical month because the Putin interview, Carlson sat down with Lydia Brimelow, a frontrunner of the white supremacist group VDare. The pair talked, per the episode description, about how “mass immigration is completely destroying our country.” Carlson didn’t problem Brimelow through the interview, which acquired 18 million views on X, with the assistance of a retweet from the platform’s proprietor, billionaire Elon Musk.
Brimelow’s VDare is a hub for propaganda in regards to the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy principle that’s certainly one of Carlson’s favourite topics. The Nice Substitute, in Carlson’s rendering, is the concept Democrats assist lax border enforcement as a way to substitute white American voters with voters of different races, who would supposedly be extra more likely to vote for Democrats. It’s a conspiracy principle typically discovered within the genocidal screeds of white supremacist mass shooters, however which Carlson nonetheless regularly promoted to his tens of millions of viewers whereas on Fox Information. Per a New York Instances evaluation, Carlson promoted the Nice Substitute in over 400 episodes of his present, typically describing non-white immigration as an “invasion.”
Whereas at Fox Information, and as a number on the community’s digital channel Fox Nation, Carlson was additionally a frequent booster of conspiracy theories in regards to the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol, typically casting the rioters as American patriots being persecuted by a tyrannical authorities.
He produced a complete docuseries, known as “Patriot Purge,” on the subject for Fox Nation; it was co-directed by Scooter Downey, a filmmaker who beforehand made movies for white supremacists. Among the speaking heads and rioters depicted within the docuseries have been white supremacists, although they have been by no means described as such.
Carlson was in the end pushed out of Fox Information because the community grappled with Dominion Voting Techniques’ defamation lawsuit. Through the course of discovery in that lawsuit, Carlson’s textual content messages about Trump have been made public, together with the one by which he wrote, “I hate him passionately.”
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson wrote one other time, after Trump was not within the White Home, including: “I truly can’t wait.”
Reflecting on Trump’s time as president, Carlson wrote in one other textual content message: “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”
Publicly on the time, Carlson was nonetheless boosting Trump, simply as he did Thursday night in Milwaukee. Carlson appeared to ship his remarks extemporaneously, fawning over Trump for greater than 10 minutes, finally even suggesting that God could have saved Trump from the would-be murderer’s bullet in order that he could lead on America into an excellent new future.
“What’s happened over the past month, since the debate, and particularly since Saturday in Butler, I think a lot of people were like, ‘What is this?’” Carlson stated. “This doesn’t look like politics. Something bigger is going on. I think even people who don’t believe in God are beginning to think, ‘Well, maybe there’s something to this actually.’ And I’m starting to think, it’s gonna be OK.”
