So Tucker Carlson is sorry. So, so sorry.
Last week on The Tucker Carlson Show, the former Fox powerhouse-turned-streamer populist jackanape sat across from his brother, Buckley (who, lest we forget, wrote speeches for Donald Trump) and delivered what is apparently meant to pass for a reckoning. “I’ll be tormented by it for a long time,” he said, his voice heavy with the weight of a man who just discovered consequences. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.”
Not intentional, my ass.
The man who campaigned for Trump. Who used the largest cable news platform in the country to nuke his audience with MAGA propaganda night after night after night. Who told millions of viewers that Trump’s critics were hysterical elitists. Who mainstreamed the Great Replacement Theory as a gateway drug for white nationalism. (I’ll leave aside his foray into testicle tanning.)
Not intentional.
Okay, Tucker. Sure.
Here’s the thing. Some corners of the internet are treating this like a homecoming, like the prodigal son has finally seen the light, and maybe we should kill the fatted calf and welcome him back to the table of Reasonable People. The Never Trump crowd should make room, the thinking goes. He’s one of us now.
No. He is not.
And not because people can’t change. People can. Lord knows, many of us in the former-Republican space have taken our hits for what we did in the past. Contrition is real, and it matters. It has for me.
But Tucker Carlson’s support for Donald Trump was never the disease. It was a symptom. One of many. And if you think dumping Trump is enough to earn a seat at the adults’ table, you haven’t been paying attention to the last two decades of Tucker Carlson’s career.
Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we?