Let’s just say this up front: Tucker Carlson has too big of a following to do nothing. Any liberals who are looking back on the way he slinked off from CNN and MSNBC and fantasizing that we’ll get another 5 years of him fading into the background — this time, taking along his sizeable proto/quasi/neo-white-nationalist base with him — are kidding themselves.
And the reason is quite simple: he’s got a base now! When he was infamously embarrassed in 2004, he had been faithfully playing the bit of a stereotypically bowtied Reagan-era College Republican. He was an educated media elite, through and through; and back then, building a brand as a media elite didn’t involve building a massive base of support, but rather just doing journalist things and arguing with other journalists about still other journalists doing journalist things.
Oh, but how the times have changed. In 2012 and 2016, it became obvious that Republicans viewed national politics1 as a vehicle for building a media brand a la Sarah Palin. They refined Palin’s strategies and avoided her clueless missteps, and made many of their own.
And then, Trump shut down the entire burgeoning presidential-primary-to-Fox pipeline. Or rather, he turned fealty to himself into the price of admission, which was very different from the “can you say enough wacky-but-just-plausible things to build a national profile and reliably entertain Fox’s audience” dynamic that had been ruling previously. In this environment, the most successful personalities were those who most stridently told Fox viewers (and Trump!) what they wanted to hear. The establishment politicians and businesspeople who were used to just sauntering into the room and being heard out, weren’t just unwelcome, they were ignored as a matter of course.
Tucker Carlson came to embody the alternative path to success more than the rest of these wannabes. He railed hard on Trumpism’s greatest hits: white nationalism-via-Great Replacement Theory, racial grievance politics, anti-vax demagoguery, and more. And he beat out all the other contenders precisely because he’s fundamentally an actor. His original schtick, the College Republican, had grown old and stale, so he abandoned it and rebranded.
Chris Christie, Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, Mike Pence — these guys are all just cowards who knuckled under to Trump without ever really believing in his core message. Maybe DeSantis is the closest because of the real sense of grievance he seems to feel against other educated elites, but the rest of it is just kayfabe for the extremely-online base he thinks he can cater to. Tucker, on the other hand, isn’t knuckling under, he’s just acting. He’ll tell the Republican base whatever they want to hear.
And now, he’s been set free from whatever scantly thin shackles of decency Fox may have kept him in.
So, what is he going to do now? The big question is whether he runs for president. With DeSantis flagging, and the others barely poking above the background noise, Tucker’s one of the few Republicans left with enough of a profile to challenge Trump. And as a professional actor, I think he’s got a decent shot of winning the upset, because he can mimic Trump’s lack of restraint more adeptly and naturally than RDS ever could. In other words, RDS could only ever try to challenge Trump within a framework that Trump fundamentally shapes — famously exemplified in his moniker as “Trump without the baggage”. But now that Tucker doesn’t have to hold down his spot at Fox, he can just go out and give Trump a true duel, to fight him on his own turf.
Trump hasn’t had to deal with the kind of challenger who’s willing to shamelessly pursue the schtick like he himself is. And that’s the real lesson we need to learn from Tucker’s previous failures: When he has nothing to lose, he’s willing to do anything to get back to the top. Just like Trump.
And if he doesn’t run? Well, if he’s smart, he’s going to realize that the future of media is multi-channel, but either way he’ll launch his own personal media empire — whether through the shells of Newsmax or OANN, or striking out on his own.
Some are already saying, “Whoever replaces Tucker at Fox will be worse”. No, could be worse. Not “will”. Sure, it’s a scenario we’ve seen play out countless times throughout history, but this is one of those folk wisdom memes that sounds more profound and clairvoyant than it truly is. The reality is, Tucker isn’t leaving a classic power vacuum, he’s just being exiled to the opposition. This is more like the drug kingpin’s top lieutenant escaping to a rival cartel after a botched coup attempt, not a government killing the kingpin only for a lieutenant to rise as the new king. So, sure, new lieutenants will replace Tucker. But Tucker’s got no option but to rally the rivals against the cartel and remake the drug world’s status quo.
The drug metaphor is intentional here. In many ways, Fox is a cartel, and its viewers are addicts. This is what gives Tucker the only real political capital he’s got left: because he can keep selling them the same red pills as Trump does — the ones they're addicted to — and he can sell by appealing to their addiction more convincingly than RDS. Because he doesn’t actually care about getting elected to any particular political office, or working for one specific media shop, or have any deep-seated long-term political ambition2 or policy program3. No, he just wants to sell drugs, and he'll do anything to keep making the sales.
Particularly, running as presidential candidates amidst a party still reeling from Bush’s failures and unable to unite around a single candidate with a clear political vision
Like how most politicians fantasize about being elected president some day.
Like actually building the wall, or a thousand other pies-in-the-sky he and Trump lure voters with.
Spot on sir, one thing I’ve learned is you can never keep a shitty man down. I’ve heard that he most likely signed a non compete agreement, so he may not be able to slink over to newsmax, etc. That being said the only thing that could help him here is Biden administration rules regarding non compete agreements, irony?
If you would have asked about tucker running for 2020 I would have called you crazy. But after trumps second run and all the shit he has spewed, tucker running doesn’t seem out of control. DeSantis may have the grievance policies on lock, but he doesn’t seem to be a very inspiring leader, like he would crumple in a debate with a wet noodle. Tucker on the other hand would be able to give it back to trump. Hopefully he runs and we get some mutually assured destruction. That or the reconcile and we get a “unity” ticket with trump and tucker.