This took a while but like all things MAGA, the stresses and strains finally reached a boiling point and now Tucker Carlson and Donald Trump are done. Kaput. Finis. Per usual, Charlie Sykes’ newsletter gives us the best summary of this epic MAGA divorce.
Tucker Carlson wants you to know that’s he’s really, really sorry about Trump.
“You wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. I mean, we’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Carlson to his brother on The Tucker Carlson Show.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘Well I changed my mind,’ or like, ‘Oh this is bad, I’m out.’ It’s like in very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.”
Well, no sh*t.
Tucker’s beautiful friendship with Trump has crumbled over Iran — and the president he helped restore to power is calling Carlson “a Low IQ person,” “stupid,” and “highly overrated”.
All of this has caused the former Fox News host to relocate his conscience; and he now says it is time to wrestle with it. “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, and it was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say.”
Not intentional? As if he had no inkling that he was peddling the world’s greatest bullshit artist? Tucker had no idea what he doing when he was shilling for the orange grotesquerie?
Once again, we need to ask the question I discussed with Tom Nichols on today’s “To the Contrary” Podcast: “What Did These People Think Would Happen?”
We recorded our conversation before Tucker’s mea culpa, but while discussing MAGA’s meltdown, both Tom and I had a flashback to a scene near the end of the miniseries Band of Brothers. The guys from Easy Company are shown riding in a convoy of trucks past a bedraggled column of German prisoners, some of whom are riding in carts drawn by horses.
Private David Webster is appalled by the scene and shouts at them:
Hey, you! That’s right, you stupid Kraut bastards! That’s right! Say hello to Ford, and General fuckin’ Motors! You stupid fascist pigs! Look at you! You have horses! What were you thinking? Dragging our asses half way around the world, interrupting our lives… For what, you ignorant, servile scum! What the fuck are we doing here?
What were you thinking?
Admittedly, the parallels are hardly exact, but as we look over the clusterfuck of Trump 2.0, we feel a kinship with Webster.
It’s not like people were not warned. Again and again.
It’s not as if it wasn’t obvious from the very beginning who Donald Trump was. They had to know it would come to something like this.
Now we have Trump. And a war in the Mideast. And measles outbreaks. And an administration packed with grifty chodes.
What did people like Tucker — and Megyn Kelly and Ann Coulter — think was going to happen?
Exit take: Tucker may be going down some dark rabbit holes of crazy these days, but it strains credulity waaaay beyond the breaking point for him to argue that he didn’t fully understand what he was selling his audiences in his Trump-friendly era.
While shills like Sean Hannity are dumb as a box of hair, Tucker is actually a smart guy. So, he knew what he was doing. At some level he knew exactly who and what Donald Trump was — and what it might mean if he ever got his hand back on the country.
And there are receipts, like this one from 2021: “Tucker Carlson said he hates Trump ‘passionately’, lawsuit reveals.”
The latest filings in the case suggest Mr Carlson expressed his dislike of the outgoing US president two days before Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol to derail lawmakers from certifying Joe Biden’s election win.
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. “I truly can’t wait.”
“I hate him passionately,” he added.
But then, of course, Tucker returned to the fold and became one of the loudest voices telling Americans to restore Trump to power.
Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if Tucker returned to the fold, given the right inducement. These peoples’ principles shift like the rooster on the weathervane. Like the Inspector in Casablanca, their consciences go with the prevailing wind. But maybe Tucker does hate Trump passionately and in which case he can sleep at night now.
