Ryan Wilkins

2541 days ago

We get the pundits we deserve, and we deserve to be fed from acrid piles of space garbage.

Carlson knows that many people watch his show simply because they like Fox News, and they like the anchors who surround him. O’Reilly positions himself as an elder statesman, the cranky but avuncular voice of mainstream America. Hannity, the ultimate loyalist, often functions as a member of Trump’s extended Cabinet, giving the Administration a nightly dose of encouragement and advice. But Carlson is a bit harder to pin down. His inclination to defend Trump might best be understood less as ideological commitment than as media criticism. “If you wrote a piece saying, ‘I think Trump is a buffoon and he’s reckless, and he doesn’t really know that much, and he’s kind of the accidental President, and he plays upon people’s fears in order to gain power’—I’d say, Yeah, O.K., that’s totally defensible,” he said. “But, like, the Nazi stuff? Maybe I’m the deranged one, but I don’t see that as supportable at all.” During a 2015 interview with Alex Jones, the loose-cannon Infowars host, Carlson said that he hated listening to the media “whine” about the dangers of Trump. “Every time I hear that, I feel like sending him money,” Carlson said. And, even now, he is more viscerally annoyed by what he calls the “self-satisfaction” of Trump’s critics than by anything Trump has done, or failed to do.

Tucker Carlson’s Fighting Words

newyorker.com