How Tucker Carlson Becomes President
In 2015, every serious person in Washington explained to me that Donald Trump couldn’t win because he wasn’t a politician.
The New York Times piece this weekend, the one everyone in your group chat forwarded with “WTF ????”, is being read wrong. People are reacting to the spell-bound Trump stuff, the Antichrist business, the Fuentes regret-that-isn’t. All worth reacting to.
None of it gets to the underlying why of Tucker Carlson’s very public apostasy.
Tucker Carlson just broke with a God-Emperor of the MAGA party a few weeks ago, all echoed in this piece, loudly defended the vice president as a personal friend, and called the Secretary of State’s people treacherous, all in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, not Breitbart or the Daily Wire.
This isn’t an interview. It’s a soft campaign launch with some explicable stages and milestones, the same kind we’d whiteboard in the first steps of a campaign.
Get Out from Under Trump’s Shadow
Tucker is doing this in plain sight. The little jabs at the administration, the “I love the President, but …” framing on Iran, on Israel, on tariffs, on the cabinet. The careful distance from Vance. Sorry, the very public friendship with Vance, which everyone is supposed to read as proof he isn’t running. That smells … tactical.
Tucker is smart enough to know two things about Vance: first, Vance will inherit all the negatives of Trump’s term, and also that Vance utterly lacks quicksilver mendacity and brazen skill to rouse the seething hatreds of the MAGA base to his side.
Tucker sees the damage Trump has done to himself, to Vance, and to the MAGA GOP, understands no better than the rest of the prospective field that Trump’s self-destructive tear is a political disaster: he’s just getting out there early, saying it.
Sure, Trump will hold a cultlike faction for a hundred years, but he’s term-limited, eighty, and is polling in the teens. He’ll try to keep his claws in MAGA to sustain the family grift, but with numbers like his, it’s a grim race against time.
The 2028 field will be fifteen or twenty Republicans, all of them auditioning for the same MAGA inheritance. Tucker’s bet, and it’s a smart one, is that being the guy who said the quiet parts loud before it was permission-slipped is worth more than being the next loyal soldier in line or some yokel Congressman Trumpalike clone.
People forget that Tucker is not stupid.
He is not naive. He has lived and breathed media and politics his entire life. His father ran the Voice of America. He has been a magazine writer, a cable host on three networks, a podcast operator, and a wildly successful streaming experiment. He is looking a couple of years ahead, not at today.
He knows the field will fracture, knows Vance will be wounded by association with whatever Trump’s last four years look like, knows Ron DeSantis is a charisma repellent and a spent force, knows Nikki Haley has no constituency, knows Ted Cruz is, well, Ted Cruz. He’s got his eye on Marco, clearly seeing Rubio as his main competition.