Carlson and Vance—Two Smart Guys Who Play Dumb for Power
One of my favorite things about America is its limitless tolerance for personal reinvention. In Britain, where I live, lingering, unspoken remnants of the class system define you from birth to death. But you can make a brand-new start of it in old New York. There is no better place to live unburdened by what has been.
However, this same tendency also makes Americans easy prey for hucksters, mercenaries, and narcissists who cycle through identities to find the best version for their current situation. Which brings me to Tucker Carlson’s interview this past weekend with his friend J. D. Vance, the Republican candidate for vice president.
Carlson, who is appearing with right-wing luminaries on a coast-to-coast preelection tour, did not host the Vance event as a member of the media. You might have been confused about this, because he has a newsy podcast with guests and sponsors, but no. He is sui generis, a renegade, a lone wolf. He has been liberated from the shackles of the corporate media, he told his most recent audience, in Hershey, Pennsylvania, “although no amount of sauna-cold plunge-hot bath combinations can scrape off the moral stain of all the time I spent there.” Another way of putting this trajectory is that he was fired from Fox News in April 2023.
[Read: What Tucker Carlson’s spin on World War II really says]
“Every news outlet I’ve ever worked at, which is a lot of them, they’re all controlled, obviously,” Carlson said later in the evening. “X is the place that free speech lives.” By complete coincidence, X is now the best shop window still available for Carlson to promote his media empire, the Tucker Carlson Network. (He gave this publication a less enthusiastic endorsement: “If you want to know the totalitarian impulses of your ruling class, read The Atlantic magazine, where they announce all of it, ahead of time.”)
Carlson’s lone-wolf rebrand is born of necessity, then. But it neatly aligns him with many guests on his tour—people who have also been, as they say, on a journey. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. began this electoral cycle as a Democrat and is now on Donald Trump’s transition team. Nicole Shanahan was a member of the tech elite—she was married to the Google co-founder Sergey Brin for five years—before she became Kennedy’s running mate. Tulsi Gabbard left the Democrats two years ago, saying the party was “now under the complete control of an elitist cabal of warmongers driven by cowardly wokeness.” (Yes, the cowardly warmongers are the ones you really have to look out for.) Another of his guests, Roseanne Barr, had a beloved sitcom, and then unfortunately went on Twitter.
As a Briton, though, I’m most transfixed by Russell Brand, who started his career here as a shock jock—he went to work at MTV UK the day after 9/11 dressed as Osama bin Laden—and more recently has been accused of multiple sexual assaults. (He has denied the allegations, which police are investigating.) Brand, who was baptized earlier this year in the River Thames by the TV survivalist Bear Grylls, spoke with Carlson in Phoenix about his acceptance of Christianity. At one point, he ostentatiously fell to his knees and led Carlson’s audience through a verbose prayer about the “demonic forces of the deep state.” Perhaps his sudden fervor is sincere, but it’s jarring in comparison with his previous public persona.
Carlson’s latest interviewee, however, has been through one of the most dramatic conversions of all. Vance used to be an insightful critic of the Republican Party’s excesses and a formidable analyst of Trump’s flaws. Now he has gone full MAGA, and I keep inspecting his eyes for signs of pain at the humbling contortions he is required to make. Twice, he mentioned the backlash to his and Trump’s comments on Haitians in Springfield, Ohio—without ever mentioning the source of the complaints, which was that he helped spread the false rumor that Haitians were kidnapping and eating their neighbors’ pets.
Vance is a smart guy who has chosen to play dumb for power—just like the man sitting opposite him on Saturday night.
Carlson likes to begin his events with a short homily, hitting a few key themes. At the Vance event, Carlson warmed up with a light indictment of media bias, indicating the presence of Politico and New York Times journalists covering the event, and asking them “to announce who they’re voting for, if they would.” (He didn’t wait for an answer.) Another favored riff is that everyone thought Kamala Harris was a dud until she became the presidential nominee. At the Brand event, Carlson dismissively and incorrectly referred to her as “Montel Williams’s sidepiece,” as if being associated with light entertainment were somehow discrediting to anyone with political ambitions. It obviously wasn’t for Trump, a reality-television star.
Carlson’s speech template also includes an unparalleled bit of bull about the importance of unity. “If you make people hate each other, I’m not sure there’s a graver sin than that,” he told his Phoenix audience. Various hits from Tucker Carlson Tonight, his former Fox News show, floated across my mind: We have to fight to preserve our nation and heritage, which appeared beneath a picture of Representative Ilhan Omar in 2020; This man is a danger to the country, a 2021 reference to General Mark Milley; and, not long before Carlson’s ouster last year, Biden uses your tax dollars for “Homosaurus.”
At many points during Carlson’s interview with Vance, my own brain provided similar split-screen comparisons of past and present. The Vance of 2024 says that accusations of racism are being used against working-class voters to “silence them and shut them up,” but the Vance of 2017 conceded that “race definitely played a role in the 2016 election … Definitely some people who voted for Trump are racist, and they voted for him for racist reasons.” The Vance of 2024 is on a ticket that backs mass deportations; the Vance of 2012 didn’t believe the policy was practical, never mind desirable, calling it a “notion that fails to pass the laugh test.”
The man sitting opposite Vance on Saturday, however, was in no position to call out hypocrisy. The Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News revealed the contempt that Tucker Carlson has for Trump—and his own audience. In Hershey, he listened to Vance praise Trump’s keen business mind, and the men shared an awestruck anecdote about the former president’s interest in the difference between Quarter Pounders and Big Macs. In a text to his producer four years ago, however, Carlson suggested of Trump’s business ventures that “all of them fail. What he’s good at is destroying things.”
These turnabouts make one repeated theme of this year’s Republican campaign all the more ironic. Trump and his allies are furious at the legacy media for failing to highlight Harris’s own reversals, which have taken her from the über-progressive of 2019—she really did agree that America should do “transgender operations on illegal aliens,” as Trump put it—to the tough ex-prosecutor of 2024. I have limited sympathy with this complaint. The MAGA right gleefully smashed up the more fact-enthusiastic parts of conservative media, driving out actual reporters at right-leaning outlets, to be replaced with a galaxy of self-important talk-show hosts, podcasters, and propagandists. Is Tucker Carlson going to painstakingly hunt down every Harris utterance from 2019 to lay out how her positions have changed? He is not. He’s going to do a whiffy one-liner about her having dated Montel Williams and wait for the audience to laugh.
The tone of Carlson’s Vance interview was never anything less than cordial. The pair met, they said onstage, at a bankers’ conference, and the conversation made several references to mutual friends. Carlson responded to Vance’s points with phrases such as “I couldn’t agree more.” The senator from Ohio came off as far more likable than he does in adversarial encounters, in which he has a tendency to become peevish and condescending. The most interesting section of the interview by far came when Vance described his political philosophy, a blend of populism, isolationism, and protectionism. His vision for America involves lower immigration, more house-building, fewer outsourced jobs, and far less military intervention around the world. Parts of that pitch are also attractive to the anti-capitalist left, which would frame similar policies as opposition to neoliberalism—as are other bipartisan concerns, such as the danger of food additives and the power of Big Pharma. (And as someone who has both eaten a gas-station hot dog and watched incessant cancer-drug ads in prime time, I understand the appeal of these last two positions.)
To Vance and Carlson, non-MAGA Republicans and Democrats are natural allies: Both want to keep “flooding” the United States with foreign workers, Vance claimed, because it’s “good for business.” Added to that, both establishment parties are filled with military hawks. Vance dismissed recent announcements by two such Republicans—former Representative Liz Cheney and her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney—that they will support Kamala Harris. “Their entire politics for the past 30 years,” he said of the Cheneys, “has been using American power to inflame tensions in the world, to draw the United States deeper and deeper into foreign conflicts, which either shouldn’t exist at all, or certainly the United States shouldn’t have any business in.”
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Vance dates his own skepticism about foreign intervention to Iraq. He signed up for the Marines in April 2003, he told Carlson, because he believed in the necessity of the invasion, but he came to realize it was a “stupid war.” Anyone younger than Vance, who has just turned 40, might struggle to understand what an incredible statement this is from a would-be Republican vice president. In the 2000s, the GOP clamor for war was so great that anyone who opposed it was painted as a pinko and probably a terrorist sympathizer.
And that is a reflection of just how far the mainstream of the party has shifted in less than a decade. Vance is now MAGA’s leading in-house intellectual, and Carlson—who turned against the Iraq War before most other Republicans did—is its unofficial minister of propaganda. After slipping the surly bonds of Fox News, Carlson no longer faces any real restraint on his crankiest tendencies. (Since leaving the network, he has interviewed both a Nazi apologist and a man who claims to have slept with Barack Obama.) Vance, meanwhile, has ascended through right-wing politics thanks to Trump’s patronage, to which he owes his Senate seat. He seems to feel very little loyalty to the Republican Party as an institution, or to its long history and traditions. He appeared on a tour whose next stop, in Reading, Pennsylvania, was an event with the conspiracy theorists Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec.
“For 40 years, we haven’t had a real political opposition in this country,” Vance told Carlson at the end of their interview. “And now we do.”