Tucker Carlson, you might have heard, is sorry. Early this week he posted a long conversation with his brother, Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, in which they tried to make sense of the wreckage of the second Donald Trump presidency.
“We’re implicated in this, for sure,” said Tucker. A few moments later, he added: “It’s a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be, and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”
For those of us who have spent the last 10 years horror-struck at the mass delusion that Trump is a great man rather than a singularly rapacious and volatile charlatan, Carlson’s words might seem cathartic.
Over the past decade, conservatives have been angrily insisting that our mad emperor is elegantly clothed rather than obscenely naked. Now, finally, there’s growing agreement about his obvious unfitness. Indeed, some former Trump superfans are suddenly wondering if he might be the Antichrist.
I’m all for embracing converts to the anti-Trump cause. But if you listen to the dialogue between Tucker and his brother, it’s clear that rather than honestly reckoning with their role in America’s derangement, they’re developing a new conspiracy theory to explain it away.
Trump, they strongly imply, has been compromised — maybe even blackmailed and physically threatened — by Zionist or globalist forces seeking the deliberate destruction of the United States. On Tucker’s podcast, Buckley described a systematic undermining of America through the George Floyd protests, mass migration and now the war with Iran.
“It can’t be a confluence of random events,” Buckley said. “It is clearly by design. It’s clearly been a long-term plan.”
After World War I, when Germany humiliated itself in a war that it started, right-wing populists embraced the dolchstoßlegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, blaming Jews for their country’s defeat. Now, as the American right contemplates the entirely foreseeable catastrophe that an unbridled Trump has visited on America, some are creating a new stab-in-the-back myth about Zionism to make sense of it.
Decrying Trump’s Easter Sunday threat to annihilate Iranian civilization, the podcaster Theo Von said, “It feels like he’s just been compromised by Israel, by this dark government over there.”
I don’t want to minimize the malign role Israel has played in persuading Trump to launch his catastrophic war on Iran. As former Secretary of State John Kerry has said, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel tried to persuade previous American presidents to strike the Islamic republic, but only Trump was vain and gullible enough to agree. America’s hand-in-glove relationship with Israel has become a liability, and we should end it.
But it wasn’t Israel or Zionist donors or some shadowy internationalist cabal that made Trump a buffoonish maniac who glories in threats of violence. If the second Trump administration is worse than the first, it’s largely because the establishment figures once demonized by Carlson as deep-state subversives are all gone. Trump is who he always was. He’s just more politically unfettered than before.
The president’s erstwhile champions, who now recoil at what they helped create, don’t want to admit this, so they make up stories about how he’s changed. Sohrab Ahmari, once a tribune of MAGA-style right-wing populism, turned to a psychoanalytic theory that holds that people become who others say they are: “Trump the war-weary populist has now fully given way to his liberal caricature: venal, erratic, childish, a chaos agent.” Ahmari should consider that perhaps the liberals were never caricaturing Trump at all.
This need that some MAGA apostates feel to rationalize their previous poor judgment can be harmless, if irritating. It’s only dangerous when they insist on creating a scapegoat.
As Jason Zengerle pointed out in his biography of Tucker Carlson, the signature move of the former Fox News host wasn’t to defend Trump, but to lambaste his enemies. Even now, Carlson clings to his anti-anti-Trump stance, repeatedly saying that Trump’s progressive critics hated America or white people or both.
He needs a way to reconcile this worldview with the undeniable evidence that, as his brother, Buckley, said, “Trump delivered a war and delivered high prices and delivered misery.” So he imagines conspirators forcing Trump to act calamitously. When Carlson apologizes, it’s for his role in enabling their ostensible plot. “Was this always the plan?” he asked plaintively.
Carlson is often vague, trafficking in insinuation rather than outright accusation. But if you want to get a sense of who he thinks is ruining America, consider a weird tangent he went on about the journalist Catherine Rampell, who is Jewish.
He recalled Rampell telling him about a conflict her father had with a Palm Beach country club that refused to allow in Jews as either members or guests. In Carlson’s telling, Rampell’s father sued to join; Rampell later clarified that her father waged a newspaper campaign against the club after his 4-year-old son was excluded from a birthday party there.
Carlson described this demand for inclusion as “repulsive,” accusing Rampell’s father of trying to “destroy something that you didn’t build.” Then he started talking about “dynamics” that are “absolutely consequential, and we’re seeing their effects, but no one will tell us that.” Listeners are left to infer a link between pushy Jews and the lamentable state of the country.
During Trump’s first term, some of his followers came up with a conspiracy theory to reconcile the Trump administration’s bumbling chaos and their desire to believe in Trump’s heroism. QAnon, you might remember, originally posited that the stolid and admirable Robert Mueller wasn’t investigating Trump, but secretly collaborating with him to take down a global pedophile network. As QAnon adherents liked to say: “Patriots are in control.”
Not many people believe that patriots are in control anymore. Disillusioned, some former Trump acolytes are defaulting to an older conspiracy theory: The ones in control are the Jews.
In reality, Trump is in charge: not some fantasy alpha-male version playing 12-dimensional chess, but an unstable reality TV huckster with a lust for defiling everything he touches. He’s never been better than this, and he didn’t need to be manipulated to make everything in America worse.
