MILWAUKEE — In 2021, Tucker Carlson, then the most-watched host on Fox News, made his feelings plain about former President Donald Trump. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote in a text message. But on Thursday evening when Carlson, no longer at Fox News, stepped into the spotlight at the Republican National Convention, to some of the biggest cheers of the convention so far, he struck a much 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 told the crowd, referring to the attempted assassination of Trump last 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 Carlson underwent a genuine change of heart, or decided to hitch his wagon to the 2024 GOP presidential nominee out of craven opportunism, he is poised to wield tremendous influence over a second Trump administration. When Trump — wearing a bandage over his ear to protect the wound he suffered from a would-be assassin’s bullet — made a surprise visit to the convention on Monday, he waved at his adoring fans before making a beeline for Carlson, who was sitting in the stands, to shake his hand. Trump then walked a couple of seats over to greet his new running mate, Sen. JD Vance — a man whom Carlson told Trump to choose as the vice presidential nominee.
The scene may have offered a preview of Trump’s inner circle if he is to win a second term: Vance, a bearded millennial authoritarian, and Carlson, who has spent the past few years producing ugly propaganda.
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Mere hours before taking the stage at the RNC, Carlson posted a video on X (formerly Twitter) of him conducting a friendly, softball interview with Mike Cernovich, the Pizzagate conspiracist who once said date rape isn’t real. The video was produced for the Tucker Carlson Network, the digital media company he founded after being pushed out of Fox News amid a $787.5 million defamation lawsuit filed by Dominion Voting Systems, a company Carlson frequently and falsely blamed for stealing the 2020 election for President Joe Biden.
On his new network, Carlson has routinely conducted sympathetic interviews with extreme figures, including philosopher Alexander Dugin, an outright fascist — with extensive ties to American white supremacists — who is often described as the “brain” behind Russian President Vladimir Putin. Earlier this year, Carlson interviewed Putin himself, laughing along with the suspected war criminal as he held forth on Russian history.
The same month as the Putin interview, Carlson sat down with Lydia Brimelow, a leader of the white supremacist organization VDare. The pair talked, per the episode description, about how “mass immigration is completely destroying our country.” Carlson did not challenge Brimelow during the interview, which received 18 million views on X, with the help of a retweet from the platform’s owner, billionaire Elon Musk.
Brimelow’s VDare is a hub for propaganda about the “Great Replacement,” a conspiracy theory that is one of Carlson’s favorite subjects. The Great Replacement, in Carlson’s rendering, is the idea that Democrats support lax border enforcement in order to replace white American voters with voters of other races, who would supposedly be more likely to vote for Democrats. It’s a conspiracy theory often found in the genocidal screeds of white supremacist mass shooters, but which Carlson nevertheless frequently promoted to his millions of viewers while on Fox News. Per a New York Times analysis, Carlson promoted the Great Replacement in over 400 episodes of his show, often describing non-white immigration as an “invasion.”
While at Fox News, and as a host on the network’s digital channel Fox Nation, Carlson was also a frequent booster of conspiracy theories about the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, often casting the rioters as American patriots being persecuted by a tyrannical government.
He produced a whole docuseries, called “Patriot Purge,” on the topic for Fox Nation; it was co-directed by Scooter Downey, a filmmaker who previously made films for white supremacists. Some of the talking heads and rioters depicted in the docuseries were white supremacists, though they were never described as such.
Carlson was ultimately pushed out of Fox News as the network grappled with Dominion Voting Systems’ defamation lawsuit. During the course of discovery in that lawsuit, Carlson’s text messages about Trump were made public, including the one in which he wrote, “I hate him passionately.”
“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights,” Carlson wrote another time, after Trump was no longer in the White House, adding: “I truly can’t wait.”
Reflecting on Trump’s time as president, Carlson wrote in another text 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 at the time, Carlson was still boosting Trump, just as he did Thursday evening in Milwaukee. Carlson appeared to deliver his remarks extemporaneously, fawning over Trump for more than 10 minutes, eventually even suggesting that God may have saved Trump from the would-be assassin’s bullet so that he could lead America into a glorious 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 said. “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.”
