In Defense of Tucker Carlson

The worldview of Carlson has been remarkably consistent the last seven years, in public and in private.

The narrative out there is that Tucker Carlson, recently canned by Fox News, has been badly exposed by the disclosures from the lawsuits. He says one thing in private — that he hates Trump passionately — and he’s never said anything like that on-air. Charles Krauthammer used to say, “You’re betraying your whole life if you don’t say what you think — and you don’t say it honestly and bluntly.” Tucker is a hypocrite, condescending to his audiences.

This is just fantastically wrong. Tucker’s real views on Trump have been out there in the public the whole time, dating back to January 2016 when he published them in an arresting feature, “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar and Right.”

In that article, Tucker gives you the basics of his view of Trump. He admits most of the downsides about Trump, that Trump seems proud of his corruption, that he’s faking it among Evangelical audiences, that he’s “vulgar” and “emotionally incontinent.” Tucker contends Trump is viable only because of the failures of the governing class, especially the conservative nonprofit world, which had the keys to the kingdom under George W. Bush and produced the Iraq War, a financial meltdown, and the displacement of millions of Americans from their homes in an economic calamity. In that article he calls out the class divide between Republican voters who care about controlling the border and slowing down the pace of immigration, and elected Republicans who value cheap immigrant labor and wanted amnesty.