It’s almost impossible for anyone or anything to consistently break through in a news cycle dominated by the maniacal impulses of Donald Trump. And Tucker Carlson’s ability to be on so many people’s minds day after day says something, not just for Carlson, but for Trump. Last weekend, Carlson went viral in a podcast exchange with the editor-in-chief of EconomistZanny Minton Beddoes, when Beddoes appeared tongue-tied in response to Carlson deflecting her question about whether he supported Israel’s “right to exist.” The clip is great and, by comparison, Trump is upset that his charisma has passed. He retains, obviously, the ability to deal damage at the highest level. But what was original and attractive to her, despite her disgust, is now predictable and tiresome. This absence is where Tucker Carlson is creating his presence.
Carlson is another American beast, perhaps leaning toward the Bethlehem of some kind of national proclamation. As Trump’s former romance fades, Carlson’s and Trump’s boundary-pushing has not exploded. Trump seems deceived by Putin; Carlson pays Putin a visit and sits down with him for a marathon chat. Trump Implies The Left Was Responsible For Charlie Kirk’s Murder; Carlson has on his podcast Joe Kent, the recently resigned director of Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center, who raises the possibility that it was Israel who killed Kirk. Polls could put Vance and Rubio well ahead of Carlson in a hypothetical race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. But everyone, it seems, is talking about Carlson. More than they talk about Vance or Rubio.
Statements about so much attention focused on Carlson, however, must be qualified. Trump Naked his way into American society by learning how to master the media spotlight. Carlson is the media. He lives and breathes the media environment, where he has worked and thrived throughout his adult life. His journalistic talents have two different effects. One is the type of person it has developed into. The other is the perception of the type of person he is.
For ten years, since Trump burst onto the political scene, liberals have wringed their hands over his vulgarity, his distraction, his lack of intelligence, his apparent stupidity about the minutiae of moral, social, intellectual and cultural life. Instead, they should be grateful. While Trump appears never to have read an entire newspaper article, let alone a book, Vance, Rubio and Carlson have written eight books between them – one, four and three respectively. They are neither finger-wagging troglodytes nor deal-making reactionaries, but the kind of thoughtful, reflective people liberals find hard to conceive of as existing on the right. Of the three, Carlson is by far the most intellectually agile and literary. It is the liberals who have always had a corner on intellect and culture. With Carlson, the proportions have changed. He is one of their kind.
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He is also of their craft. It was comical to watch the growing vitriol towards Vance on the left as he ascended to power. It was as if the liberal media, bending over backwards as always, playing virtuosically even-handed and praising Vance’s mediocre memoir to the skies, felt betrayed. However, Carlson is not just a memoirist. He’s a media prince, having cut his teeth at prestigious liberal bastions like CNN, PBS and MSNBC before settling down and settling down at Fox for nearly 15 years, in the process of transitioning from Democrat to Republican. Because of his success in the very habitat of the liberal media—where they eat, you might say—it’s hard to measure him through the liberal media’s characterizations of him alone. In their dismissals of his ultimate political importance, they may or may not be small; in their warnings of its political influence, they may or may not be exaggerating its destruction.
One thing is for sure: Carlson knows the tricks of the trade. And then some. His mixing of truth and lies, the indispensable skill of the demagogue, puts Trump and co. for shame. His conversation with Beddoes was like watching a dialogue between civilization and its impending extinction. For one thing is his sharp and ferocious anti-Zionism. Although he is facing rising anti-Semitism from the right, galvanized by a strengthening Catholic extremism, Carlson does not appear to have the virulence of Catholic anti-Semitism. He’s more like a sommelier sniffing his way through types of Jew-hatred. He declared to Beddoes, quite clearly, “I don’t hate Jews!” however, then, out of both sides of his mouth, said “I don’t want Israel to be destroyed or have to use nuclear weapons,” somewhat negating his opposition to Israel’s destruction in the first part of the sentence, perhaps raising the necessity of Israel’s destruction if it goes nuclear on its enemies (all in a second).
In response to Beddoe asking if Israel has a right to exist, Carlson replied, “What does that mean a right to exist… does it have a right to exist, is that what you’re asking… what does that mean… are you asking if it has a right to exist or do I want to exist…?” This is not an argument; it’s graffiti painted on an argument. He then claimed that the very phrase “right to exist” was invented by Israel to justify itself. In fact, Thomas Paine and Ernest Renan both used the phrase to describe the legitimacy of a justly governed nation. Lenin used the synonym “right to self-determination”. The term is self-explanatory.
So is the “Zionist”. But when a nonplussed Beddoes, responding to Carlson’s statement that he “wasn’t a Zionist,” said, “So you’re not in any sense a Zionist,” Carlson replied, “I don’t even know what that means.” This is like a judge asking a defendant if he is guilty or not guilty and the defendant replies, “I’m a hamburger.” Either postpone the trial or close the company. Although AI is trying to simulate a human intelligence, Carlson is creating a new kind of norm in which intelligence is just a joke that the powers that be play on the naive. A nimble hybrid of everything, Carlson ends his vandalism of Beddoes astounded with the new note of reactionary awakening, vociferously proclaiming that what he believes in are “universal standards that are universally applicable,” a nonsensical simulacrum of meaning.
Trump is too mentally compromised, too self-destructively impulsive, too megalomaniac to continue as the naked beast. He’ll wreak monumental havoc, but he’s too overplayed for the apocalypse. The question more and more people are asking is whether Carlson — with his supple intellect, his pliable dexterity, his knack for playing a championship double game out of both sides of his mouth — whether this great master of the medium as a message is America’s last enemy. There is widespread speculation that he will indeed run for president in 2028, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, another postmodern fixture, saying she will support him if he does.
Carlson certainly has charisma, which in Weber’s definition is characterized by “contempt for traditional or rational everyday economic activity,” the charismatic leader who prefers to earn income instead by “gifts, foundations, bribes, and royalties…or…by violent or (formally peaceful) robbery or extortion.” Trump has it. But Carlson goes beyond Trump. He’s lazy. According to a portrait of him by Michael Wolff, who knows Carlson for for a long time, Carlson was unable to meet deadlines as a press reporter. He got into television because, as he “happily” told Wolff, “you just have to show up.” In that sense, Carlson possesses a quality of Weber’s charisma that Trump, obsessed with making deals and developing real estate as a profession, lacks: “refusal of any kind of involvement in everyday life… (charisma).” ‘register’ irregular and casual employment”.
Being lazy seems to be what gets Carlson out of bed in the morning. The son of an itinerant journalist, abandoned by his mother when he was very young, the intellectually itinerant Carlson has abandoned one conviction after another. Starting out as a liberal, transitioning to being a country-club conservative who was angered by Trump, and now moving effortlessly between opposing Trump and cringing at him, Carlson has made a career of engaging the layabout, so to speak, of “irregular, casual employment.” He believes everything and believes nothing. He moves from opportunity to opportunity, and because America is the land of opportunity, Carlson’s opportunism lends him an almost sacred air of principle and authenticity. On the surface, he appears to be the standard Maga-isolationist, economic populist, right-wing figure. But even here, his mind seems to seek the comfortable pursuit of eye-catching, entertaining novelty. Trump seized Maduro, Carlson implied, at the behest of LGBTQ people who wanted to legalize gay marriage in Venezuela. He doesn’t think. He snorts loudly at the words.
But even as he conveys his convictions, you can’t help but notice one of those little clues the story occasionally drops so you can follow its trail to understand. Carlson wears loafers without socks, as he was doing in this one Economist interview. Even the main Wasps, George Bush father AND sonnever did that. And in some strange way, Carlson’s lazy imitations of hate have an Episcopalian balance about them. He is the reassertion of Wasp dominance in American political life, a sort of William F Buckley in reverse, the Wasp playing the Catholic as Buckley was a Catholic playing the Wasp. Where Buckley appropriated and mastered the fevered intellectual atmosphere of the postwar period, Carlson has mastered the anti-intellectualism of our post-literate moment. Where Buckley had his idiosyncratic pencil—a Wildean come hither—if ever there was one—Carlson has his laugh-out-loud cry—all the beer nihilistic bros tuning into it. bare knuckles.
Carlson’s performance of a hate-filled gravitas is culturally dangerous, that’s for sure. But it seems unlikely that he will jump from the glitter of culture to the fire of politics. For one thing, you need to do more than just “show up.” For another, you have to stick to it. And you have to wear socks, otherwise people might think that, at any moment, you might go back to bed and wake up some other kind of beast.
(Further reading: Tucker Carlson vs. Donald Trump)
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