When I saw The New York Times interview with Tucker Carlson pop up in my podcast feed earlier this month, I, like a lot of people, found myself curiously excited to listen to it. Not because I’m a big Tucker fan, or even a fan at all, but because his recent high-profile break with the president over the Iran War was an unexpected and fascinating development.
Carlson, of course, has been a vocal supporter of Trump since his first term, and he used his vast influence to play a pivotal role in getting him elected not once, but twice. He stuck by Trump’s side (publicly, at least) through all of the nonsense – the stolen election lie, Jan. 6th, DOGE, on and on – but the Iran War was finally one step over the line for him, and he decided to sit down with the Times, of all outlets, to explain his defection.
Tucker Carlson isn’t the only long time Trump acolyte to break rank, but he may very well be the most consequential, so who wouldn’t be interested in hearing what he had to say?
One of the main things that Carlson stressed during the nearly two-hour interview is that he’s sorry. He’s sorry that he supported Trump in 2024 (but not 2016 or 2020) and brought millions of Americans along with him. He’s sorry, or at least regretful, that he interviewed trash person Nick Fuentes, who he once called a “weird little gay kid.” He said the Iran War is politically “dooming to anyone connected to it for the foreseeable future,” which even though it may be too early to tell, seems like a reasonable enough prediction. He’s also sorry if he was ever part of the “distraction” (note: he was, and admitted it), which he characterized as the mainstream media’s misguided focus on culture war issues instead of the things that he now claims actually matter, like another unpopular war in the Middle East, the ongoing dissolution of the middle class, and farcical wealth inequality.
Throughout the extensive interview, he seemed less combative and more contemplative than I was expecting, and I found myself agreeing with him to a surprising degree, which made me feel faint and slightly nauseous, like I was suffering from an acute ear infection. If you were to read certain parts of the transcript without knowing the source, you’d be forgiven if you thought they were spoken by James Talarico, or even – wait for it – Bernie Sanders.
There was a decent amount of time spent on how the one-percenters are the problem, and that sort of thing, which is an issue that folks on both sides of the political divide seem to be flocking toward at the moment, despite being a problem traditionally embraced by eat-the-rich Lefties.
“I guess I’m the liberal here,” he said at a couple points during the interview, which is not a thing I thought I’d ever hear Tucker Carlson say.
This isn’t to say he’s about to publicly transition into some kind of left-wing rabble-rouser ala Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He claimed that he’s equally disgusted by Republicans and Democrats, but that he’s still good friends with J.D Vance (“I will always love [him] as a man”) and Don Junior (“a true friend”). Nevertheless, Carlson deserves at least muted praise for speaking out against Trump’s hypocrisies during a time when so many prominent characters in the Republican Party are still too terrified, enamored, or cowardly to issue the slightest peep of dissent.
If Carlson’s break from the president is a calculated one – and how could it not be, to some degree? – I still think it’s reasonable to applaud, or at least golf clap, the fact that he’s calling out the president on his rubbish, instead of falling into lockstep and making outlandish justifications for a war that, as he noted, is making the lives of everyday Americans worse; at the very least, he can no longer be pigeonholed as a blind MAGA loyalist too neutered to exit the cult.
That’s a low bar to set, for sure, but better than no bar at all.
There’s a lot to be skeptical about with Carlson, of course, not the least of which being how he’s constantly remade his image in an effort to remain relevant. His folksy, semi-oblivious, self-deprecating persona seems convincing enough, until you remember that he’s not actually Joe Schmo from rural Maine, but a rich kid from California who’s been an influential, antagonistic media personality for the better part of three decades. He’s so persuasive at cosplaying as a flannel-clad everyman – if cosplaying is, in fact, what he’s doing – that it’s easy to forget that this is the same guy who wore a suit and hosted an immensely popular, and highly inflammatory, primetime show on Fox News for almost seven years; and, before that, shows on CNN, PBS, and MSNBC.
The core tension of this nascent, homespun, Phoenix-like iteration of Carlson, which took flight after he was fired from Fox News in 2023 and subsequently formed his own media network, is whether or not he’s actually earnest and thoughtful or deftly projecting earnestness and thoughtfulness in the name of career opportunism.
Given the historically malleable nature of his personality, it’s hard to view his current shift as anything other than a calculated move to abandon a sinking ship. He zealously played the role of combative conservative firebrand when that was an en vogue reaction to the politically-correct excesses of the Left. But now that many Americans are fed up with Trumpian indecency, Carlson is spinning a more cordial and considerate web – a kinder, gentler Tucker, if you will.
It’s entirely possible that he’s arrived at this placid worldview sincerely, as he claims he has, but I think the more likely explanation is that he recognizes the looming extinction of Trumpism, and is reflexively attempting to forge a new branch of conservatism in response; he sees the comet approaching and is preparing for a new life elsewhere. It’s not hard to imagine a post-midterm world, if the Iran War drags on and the elections go as dismally for conservatives as some are predicting, in which vast swaths of Republicans start to peel away from Trump, and when they do, Carlson will be there waiting with a smug grin, wondering what took everybody so long.
Carlson may be a lot of things – a provocateur, an oddball, a shape-shifter – but he’s no dummy, and his intentional early divorce with Trump, if it lasts, has the potential to make him look like the smartest guy in the room, or at least the smartest guy on the Right…if he can, in fact, still be classified as a “guy on the Right.”
Then again, many so-called political pundits have rang the death knell on Trumpism at various points over the past decade, and all of them have been profoundly, embarrassingly wrong. While it’s true that this moment feels fundamentally different, with Trump’s poll numbers tanking to historic lows and some of his most traditionally loyal adherents – Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, to name two – schlepping away like flakes of dead skin from a sun-burnt foot, it’s equally true that the moment following Jan. 6th also felt different, with the whole insurrection thing and Trump shrugging when his most extreme supporters were clamoring for the vice president to be hanged.
The going theory at the time was that Trump couldn’t possibly recover from such a shameful and bloody day, yet there he was, four years later, waddling into the White House for a second term. Point being, it’s hard for anyone to know anything with certainty in this era of inscrutability: Trumpism is a persistent, amorphous creature, hideous as a tardigrade and equally hard to extinguish. Yet when someone like Carlson, whose political instincts are as sharp as wolves’ teeth, smells a change on the breeze, the rest of us ought to perk up and take notice.
Carlson’s coyness has never been in doubt, it’s how he’s made his millions, but his grip on reality sometimes seems tenuous at best. This manifests in a couple of distinct ways: first, he often forgets inflammatory things that he’s said in the past, sometimes the recent past, the most obvious example coming from The New York Times interview, in which the host, Lulu Garcia-Navarro, called him out for denying that he raised the question of Trump potentially being the anti-Christ.
Carlson told Garcia-Navarro that those words “never left my lips” when there’s video evidence of those exact words leaving lips that are clearly his – and just two weeks earlier, to boot. It’s possible, of course, that Carlson is simply lying in an attempt to save some semblance of face with the White House, but given the fact that he’s been openly critical of the Trump administration about many things, going as far as to say that its approach in Iran is “evil” and “disgusting,” it seems odd that he’d be untruthful about something so objectively provable.
Perhaps the more likely explanation, and, frankly, the more concerning one, is that he genuinely forgot what he said. If he’s merely being dishonest, the diagnosis is simple: he’s a liar. If he genuinely forgot, the only reasonable follow-up question is: what’s going on with Tucker?
One could ask that same question when Carlson starts to veer into conspiratorial thinking, which is old hat for him, of course, and could even be considered a political strength, given his audience has been embracing unfounded theories for years. This is a man, after all, who produced a documentary about how the violence on Jan. 6th was staged by Antifa and the FBI, and also claimed that the COVID vaccine has killed countless people worldwide.
There was a moment in The New York Times interview when Carlson began sidebarring a personal theory that, to his modest credit, he called “probably insane,” about how a lot of people close to Trump have gotten sick, hurt, or imprisoned over the years. He offered no specific examples of these purported illnesses, injuries, or arrests, and failed to expound on the conclusion he was attempting to draw. Was he insinuating that Trump was having people deliberately harmed? Or that Trump is simply so toxic that people in his orbit become poisoned by proximity?
I’m not sure that even Carlson knows what he was implying. The whole exchange had the flavor of Hunter S. Thompson going on a half-mad rant about the spiritual evils of Richard Nixon; the difference being, of course, that people took Thompson’s words with a grain of salt, because Gonzo (the melding of objectivity and subjectivity) was his whole identity, and there was a 95-percent chance that, at any given moment, he was out of his mind on cocaine and whiskey.
Carlson, meanwhile, is supposedly a Christian family man focused on the facts; he shouldn’t be afforded the same amount of leeway when he espouses wild, half-formed theories about how Trump is either knowingly hurting people or emitting some kind of invisible contagion through the pores of his wrinkly skin.
It’s irresponsible, not to mention dangerous, for a media personality with such a large audience to inject half-formed conspiracies directly into the veins of his followers. Then again, that’s exactly what he’s been doing for years-on-end, so why should we expect him to act differently now?
The subject of Carlson’s conspiracies has changed, but the underlying drive to hunt for fringe ideas with little-to-no basis in reality remains the same.
***
So, Carlson is a flawed individual, OK, but we all are, to some degree, and despite his glaring imperfections, a lot of what he had to say in The New York Times interview seemed reasonable and fair enough, if you ignore his potentially self-serving motives and take his words at face value. Even Garcia-Navarro seemed to be fascinated by Carlson, which caused my ear infection to flare up again, and this time even worse than before. I felt my equilibrium go sideways, and the following question started wafting through my skull like a forbidden smog: Do I like Tucker Carlson now? Would I dare?
The short answer is no, because this is a guy who’s made a career, and a fortune (on top of the fortune he inherited), by being shrewd and scheming. But maybe – just maybe – part of me dislikes him a little less, at least for the time being. I’m always open to hearing what people have to say, even if I have a protracted history of disagreeing with them, and I’m willing to reconsider their essence if I believe they’re coming from a place of integrity, if they lack ulterior motives.
I’m just not convinced Tucker Carlson is that kind of person, or will ever be that kind of person. Let’s wait and see what kind of stuff he’s talking about, what posture he’s assuming, six months or a year from now, before making any sweeping recalculations about his soul.
Let’s make him prove he’s an authentic person, not just a guy who plays one on TV and the Internet; because after all, that’s all he’s ever done.
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