Andrew Marantz: The World According to Tucker Carlson

Donald Trump had the raw power on the right. But it was Carlson who set the ideological agenda.

Tucker Carlson’s last hour as a Fox News host—“last” as in most recent, and also, we now know, as in final—ended with him sitting at a shiny white desk, a green-screened image of the Capitol behind him, eating a soggy, sad-looking slice of sausage-and-pineapple pizza. “It is a disgusting order,” he admitted. “But I have no shame.” He wore a Rolex, a repp tie, and a slightly manic grin; his hair, as usual, was jauntily mussed, as if he’d just stepped off a catamaran. The segment seemed calculated to promote three things: Carlson’s salt-of-the-earth charisma; the heroism of a particular Delaware County, Pennsylvania, pizza-delivery man, a ruggedly handsome white guy who had acted as a vigilante assistant to the local police; and a new special on his streaming show “Tucker Carlson Originals,”a half-hour documentary called “Let Them Eat Bugs.” (“Could there really be a plan to make us all eat bugs?” Carlson asked, in an ominous voice-over, followed by a guest providing a putative answer: “It’s a global agenda that is pushing all of these things.”) In the studio, Carlson put down his slice. “What a great way to end the week,” he said, with a satisfied chuckle. “We’ll be back on Monday. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-world-according-to-tucker-carlson
 

Jennifer Rubin: Republicans’ ‘best’ issue on the debt is still horrible

Sober Republicans certainly must know their threat to blow up the economy and cause a default is untenable. They probably know that draconian cuts they propose, which will amount to 22 percent of law enforcement, veterans benefits, health care and the rest of nondefense discretionary spending, won’t endear them to most voters. However, they might be under the illusion that instituting work requirements for food stamps and Medicaid is going to score with working people who resent others getting something for “free.” In fact, it’s rotten policy that will not encourage more people to work.

Upon closer examination, we can see Republicans are taking away funds for food and medical coverage for poor people and sending the money to tax cheats. The estimated cost of the “savings” from denying food and health care to the poor is roughly the amount they want to take away from IRS funding that would be used to go after tax cheats (those people who are by definition stealing from the taxpayers). House Republicans say their Medicaid and SNAP cuts save tens of billions; the Congressional Budget Office score shows a $114 billion cost for repealing the IRS enforcement.

Taking a step back, the work requirements are advancing a noxious vision to make the government budget (taxes and spending) more regressive. MAGA Republicans want to keep all the Trump tax cuts and eliminate President Biden’s plan to make corporations pay something and to tax stock buybacks. The things that help poor and middle-class people have either already expired at Republicans’ insistence (e.g., the child tax credit expansion) or have been put on the chopping block (e.g., $35 insulin, drug caps on Medicare, green-energy subsidies, student loans). One doesn’t have to be a “socialist” to think it grotesque to make the rich even richer as a result of cutting benefits to the poor.

As Biden says, show me your budget and I’ll tell you your values. For Republicans, that means making the poor sicker and more food insecure while fattening the wallets of the super rich. Fortunately, little to none of the Republicans’ debt plan will see the light of day. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/24/work-requirement-republicans-debt/

Michelle Goldberg: Tucker Carlson’s Great Replacement

When Fox settled the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems for $787.5 million, the conventional wisdom was that it would alter little about the way Fox News operates. “Don’t Expect Fox News to Change After Massive Dominion Payout,” said a Vanity Fair headline. “Will Fox Settlement Alter Conservative Media? Apparently Not,” said The Associated Press.

Maybe the settlement didn’t change much, but it increasingly looks as if the lawsuit itself did. On Monday, news broke that Tucker Carlson, Fox News’s highest-rated and most demagogic prime time host, was out, and wouldn’t even get a final show to say goodbye. The Los Angeles Times reported that Carlson was defenestrated by Rupert Murdoch himself, and that his exit was related to the discrimination lawsuit filed by Carlson’s former head of booking Abby Grossberg. Grossberg alleges that Fox coerced her into giving misleading testimony in the Dominion case, and has said she filed the discrimination suit, as well as a separate lawsuit, after fearing that the network was going to make her a scapegoat. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reported that Murdoch was incensed about insubordinate remarks Carlson made about Fox management, which were revealed during the discovery phase of the Dominion case.

All this suggests that Dominion was responsible for shaking loose the information that brought Carlson down. The end of his Fox News tenure should be a reminder to people on the left not to surrender to the cynical illusion that, to revive a Trump-era phrase, LOL nothing matters. Sometimes the terrible elements of our political culture seem so immutable that it’s tempting to give in to despair as a prophylactic against perpetual disappointment. But it turns out that it is in fact sometimes possible to shame the shameless. Once in a while, justice is delivered. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/24/opinion/tucker-carlson-fox-news-dominion.html

Rick Wilson: A few quick thoughts about Tucker

The white nationalists loved Tucker, whom they called "Our guy" and correctly saw him as a gateway drug for their more virulent and obvious messages. For normies, Tucker could wink and nod about it, but the white-robe crowd filled their hate spank banks with Tucker clips.There was nothing he couldn't amp up. election fraud, vaccine denial, Soros, and every other nutbird conspiracy was laundered into the "THEY are hiding the SECRET TRUTH from you"...and it validated the crazies in the same way as the white nationalists.

Which leads us to a fascinating prospect…

What if he runs for president? He's rich enough. He'd instantly have an online fundraising juggernaut second only to Trump, and perhaps surpassing him. He's polarizing, terrible, and utterly amoral...in short, better than Ron DeSantis for the base.

I'd argue he's the only Republican..who presents a material danger to Donald Trump in a primary.

Celebrity, money, mental acuity, cynicism, pro-Putin isolationism, and an overt love of authoritarianism are a pretty strong secret sauce for the MAGA base.

Celebrity got Trump the WH.

It could certainly do the same for Tucker. And spare me your "That could never happen. Even Trump's GOP would never vote for a former TV host pushing white replacement theory."

That's PRECISELY who they'd vote for.

This iteration of "A Face In the Crowd" doesn't end with a revelation of the real character of the showman-as-politician. This one ends with Tucker running and possibly winning a herrenvolk campaign, where his flaws don't matter, only his capacity for hate. https://twitter.com/TheRickWilson/status/1650840580002398208?

Jonathan Chait: Tucker Carlson, Fake Populist and Genuine Racist

The diabolical brilliance of his racist character was that he was able to occupy a grounds between traditional Republicans and actual Nazis, bridging the beliefs of both groups and winning the adoration of both. “Tucker Carlson is literally our greatest ally. I don’t believe that he doesn’t hate the Jews,” wrote neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin

in the Daily Stormer, a white-supremacist publication. Ben Shapiro, a Jewish conservative, marked Carlson’s departure from Fox by calling him “immensely talented and one of the most important voices on the right, and he’s going to continue to be those things no matter what comes next.”

Carlson’s credibility with the most nativist, paranoid, and bigoted constituents in the Republican Party made him a valuable authenticator for its leaders. Kevin McCarthy leaked footage of January 6 to Carlson, which he shared selectively to claim the insurrectionists had behaved lawfully and peacefully. Ron DeSantis gave Carlson a written statement calling Russia’s invasion of Ukraine a “territorial dispute.”

It may have been kismet but was completely fitting that Carlson’s downfall came swiftly after leaked internal messages revealed him expressing personal hatred for Trump, a figure he lavished with praise on the air. Twenty years after he prophesized O’Reilly’s fall, the shtick was up. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/04/tucker-carlson-fired-fox-news-fake-populist-genuine-racist.html

Susan B. Glasser: Fox News Doesn’t Do Apologies

Throughout the Trump era in American politics—which began in 2015 with that escalator ride and, 2020 election results notwithstanding, has hardly ended—there has been at most a thin line separating current events from cynical satire. Donald Trump’s own lies have been so prolific that it would be wrong to call even a transcript of his words a nonfictional document. His premeditated and endlessly repeated falsehoods about the rigged 2020 election, including a bizarre international conspiracy theory about Dominion voting machines, were so laughably untrue and yet still so effective that millions of Americans still believe Joe Biden is not the legitimate President.

In the redemptive Hallmark-movie version of America, the inevitable reckoning for this offense against democracy finally, if belatedly, began this week with the announcement that Fox News would pay an extraordinary seven hundred and eighty-seven million dollars to Dominion for its role in spreading those lies. This amounts to one of the largest-ever defamation settlements. “The truth matters. Lies have consequences,” Justin Nelson, a lawyer for Dominion, told reporters outside a Delaware courthouse, where the deal was announced on Tuesday, just as the trial in the case was about to begin. “Today represents a ringing endorsement for truth and for democracy.” Dominion’s C.E.O., John Poulos, added, “Throughout this process, we have sought accountability, and believe the evidence brought to light through this case underscores the consequences of spreading lies.”

Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, as Hannah Arendt famously observed five decades ago, in the aftermath of the Pentagon Papers’ release. I’m sure there’s been someone who believed at every low moment in American history that it was a time uniquely rife with falsehood and deceptions. There’s little point in being naïve about it. The war on truth is the hardiest of perennials. It is routinely deployed with reckless abandon by those who have power and those who seek it.

But not all political lies are created equal. It is important to insist on that. Organized lying with an explicit goal in mind is a direct threat to democracy, as Arendt wrote about the dangerous affinity between politics and lying back in the Vietnam era. By historic standards, Trump’s attack on the legitimacy of the 2020 election is a big lie, on a par with those of other regime-defining untruths.

This is not the everyday stuff of political malfeasance we are talking about. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/fox-news-doesnt-do-apologies

E.J. Dionne Jr.: McCarthy’s debt ceiling plan is theater unworthy of a high school gym

It is truly astonishing, as my Post colleagues Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman wrote on Friday, that any Republican operating under labels such as “moderate,” “mainstream” or “problem solver” would vote for a McCarthy proposal that hides its ferocity behind sanitized budgetary gobbledygook. McCarthy would cut federal spending back to 2022 levels and limit its growth to 1 percent a year.

What this means in plain English, as The Post’s Tony Romm reported, are “massive spending cuts,” but without having to specify them. Shalanda Young, director of the Office of Management and Budget, helpfully translated the impact to particular programs. If Republicans exempted defense spending from their ax, as they seem inclined to do, all other programs would suffer 22 percent cuts, she said, which “would grow deeper and deeper with each year of their plan.”

That 22 percent would mean, to take just a few of her examples, 30 million fewer veteran outpatient visits; layoffs of 108,000 teachers in schools with low-income students and kids with disabilities; 200,000 fewer children in Head Start; and 180,000 children losing access to child care. And right-to-lifers take note: “1.7 million women, infants, and children would lose vital nutrition assistance through the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children.”

The Economist magazine recently devoted its cover to the U.S. economy as “a marvel to behold.” Allowing the fractious politics of an unstable House GOP caucus to tank it would be unconscionable. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/23/mccarthy-debt-ceiling-plan-theater/

Eugene Robinson: As in 2016, Trump's GOP rivals haven't figured out a way around him

A  study released last week, by Alan I. Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, traced the dramatic change in the makeup of the American electorate over the past 40 years. The study, published by the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, found that “racial and cultural issues, rather than economic ones,” have driven the enormous gains Republicans have made with noncollege Whites.

In the meantime, Abramowitz noted in an interview, Democratic gains with White college-educated voters reflect the decay of what had once been the political base for more moderate Republicans, particularly in the Northeast. Again: The pressure in the party is to the cultural right — and to Trump.

No wonder that Trump’s favorability among Republicans in the latest YouGov poll late last week stood at 78 percent, compared with 34 percent among independents and 12 percent among Democrats.

Even Republicans who are fully aware of the damage Trump is doing and the cost of Trump-backed candidates to the party’s electoral fortunes thus hold back from criticizing him. “They know this is disastrous, but they are reluctant to speak up, and they don’t know how to stop it,” Abramowitz said. Which just allows the show to go on.

A substantial majority of the country would like to be done with Trump and the nastiness he sows. Many Republican leaders may quietly agree, but their electorate and the nature of the places they represent push them toward timidity. Until the incentives change or the party’s leaders discover the fortitude to defy them, we’re stuck in the world that Trump’s neuroses create for us. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/03/26/why-republican-politicians-do-not-criticize-trump/

Dana Milbank: Republicans follow their new leader, Marjorie Taylor Greene

This is the price America pays for Kevin McCarthy’s ambition.

To understand the consequences of the many concessions the House speaker made to get his job, look at what has happened to the House Committee on Homeland Security. Created in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, it used to be a place where lawmakers took pride in overcoming partisanship for the sake of national security.

Then came the GOP takeover of the House this year. In his wisdom, McCarthy agreed not only to restore Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s committee assignments (she had been stripped of them for glorifying violence against colleagues) but also to give her a seat on Homeland Security.

Last week, the Georgia Republican used her elevated status to praise Jack Teixeira, the National Guard airman and suspected leaker of highly classified U.S. intelligence about Ukraine, China and more. “Jake (sic) Teixeira is white, male, christian, and antiwar. That makes him an enemy to the Biden regime,” Greene tweeted, adding, “Ask yourself who is the real enemy? A young low level national guardsmen? Or the administration that is waging war in Ukraine, a non-NATO nation, against nuclear Russia without war powers?”

But Greene wasn’t content merely to label the American president “the real enemy.” Next came a hearing Wednesday at which the panel was to grill Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas about the Biden administration’s proposed 2024 budget. Midway through the session, after Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) questioned Mayorkas about the effects of calls from GOP officials such as Donald Trump and Greene to “defund the FBI,” Greene began her five minutes of questioning with a sweet smile and a breathtaking libel.

“That was quite entertaining from someone that had a sexual relationship with a Chinese spy, and everyone knows it,” she said.

It was the very definition of slander. Democrats demanded that her words be “taken down.” Swalwell was one of several officials targeted a decade ago by a Chinese spy, but no evidence of a sexual relationship came to light.

Yet Republicans jumped to Greene’s defense. Chairman Mark Green (R-Tenn.) ruled that Greene’s slander was “not going to be stricken from the record.” He went so far as to suggest the unsubstantiated innuendo was a “statement of fact.” And, when Democrats challenged the ruling, Republicans on the panel voted unanimously, in an 11-9 party-line tally, to defend Greene’s defamation of her colleague.

It brought to mind the old admonition not to wrestle with a pig: You’ll both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/21/marjorie-taylor-greene-homeland-security-committee-house-gop/

E.J. Dionne Jr.: Why we’re still stuck in Trump’s world

There is a madness running through our nation’s public life. Our country seems nearly powerless to counteract it because it’s built into the structure of American politics, the belief system of Republican voters and the polarization of opinion in Congress.

The journalistic obsession with Trump is certainly part of the problem. “I can’t tell you the number of calls I’ve gotten from reporters asking me about the implications of Trump being indicted,” Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, told, well, this reporter. “They were asking me about the implications of something that’s unknowable because it’s without any precedent in our history.”

But there is something the Trump-obsessed news media did not cover because it didn’t happen.
There were no widespread Republican criticisms of Trump’s unhinged attacks on Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as an “animal” and “a degenerate psychopath,” no official GOP condemnation of Trump’s wee-hours-of-the-morning threat on Friday that an indictment could lead to “potential death and destruction.”

On the contrary: Violating his party’s incessant claims to believe in states’ rights and local control, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) wrote to Bragg demanding materials related to the investigation of hush-money payments to adult-film actress Stormy Daniels. It’s bad enough to be silent about Trump’s abusive rants, but to make a chamber of Congress part of Trump’s defense team reveals the depth of the rot. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/04/23/mccarthy-debt-ceiling-plan-theater/

Jonathan Chait: Is DeSantis Just Not Dumb Enough for Republicans?

A little over four years ago, Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign appeared to be, if not inevitable, then at least like the most strongly positioned candidacy to win her party’s nomination. The former Harvard professor had won over a large segment of the progressive intelligentsia with her impressive array of domestic-policy proposals. But the enthusiasm of activists and intellectuals seemed to augur a groundswell of support from the base that never arrived.

The Warren precedent sprung to mind when Florida governor Ron DeSantis yesterday ventured to South Carolina, where he railed against the ‘woke mind-virus,’ which he defined, perhaps unhelpfully, as ‘a form of cultural Marxism.’ These are terms and concepts that have ricocheted across the conservative elite, especially Republicans trapped in New York, Washington, Silicon Valley, and other citadels of liberal elitism, where teachers and human-resource staffers have grown enamored of Robin DiAngelo–speak. But is this worldview, and the jargon DeSantis uses to express it, actually familiar to the voters? Are Republicans in South Carolina truly in a state of despair over ‘cultural Marxism’?

DeSantis’s struggles have consumed the national media and inspired sundry explanations. Perhaps his misanthropy is the problem… Maybe the issue is that Donald Trump was indicted. Maybe it’s his refusal to engage the mainstream media. Or maybe his struggles are a passing phase, willed into existence by a campaign press corps that quadrennially seizes on any wisp of momentum, positive or negative, and blows it up into a self-perpetuating narrative, before getting bored and overcorrecting the other way… But the deepest problem may be that he has simply brain-poisoned himself into an abstract worldview that his constituents don’t recognize. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/fox-news-doesnt-do-apologies