How Tucker Carlson instigated an inevitable war within MAGA

Jamie Kirchick

The inevitable fracturing of President Donald Trump’s MAGA movement is in sight, the instigator of its rupture that most narcissistic and destructive of media personalities: Tucker Carlson.

Since his firing from Fox News two years ago, Carlson has turned his podcast into a weekly circus featuring guests such as rancid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Russian despot Vladimir Putin and Darryl Cooper, a Holocaust denier who claims Winston Churchill was the villain of World War II and whom Carlson praises as “the most important historian in the United States.” Carlson’s approach with his guests is not that of a skeptical interlocutor, prodding their arguments for weaknesses, but rather that of a reputation-launderer making reprehensible ideas respectable for mainstream conservative consumption. Even Trump calls Carlson “kooky.”

Carlson’s fascination with conspiracy theories has ineluctably drawn him toward the most ancient of them all: the perfidious power of the Jews. Among countless other examples of his unhealthy obsession, Carlson has described Ukraine’s Jewish President Volodymyr Zelensky as “rat-like,” “shifty” and a “persecutor of Christians”; denounced “the farce of Nuremberg”; and attacked Jewish conservatives for having dual loyalties. His career is an exemplar of the sinister leading the credulous.

It was only a matter of time, then, that Carlson would invite Nick Fuentes up to his Maine cabin home studio for a chummy colloquy last week in which the self-professed Hitler and Stalin admirer ranted about “neocon Jewish types behind the Iraq War,” “organized Jewry,” “Zionist Jews … controlling the media apparatus,” and “the historic animosity between the Jewish people and the Europeans.” The furthest Carlson went in rebuking Fuentes was to offer the friendly advice that he refrain from condemning “the Jews” per se, because “going on about the Jews helps the neocons.” Otherwise, the two were simpatico, particularly on the subject of Christian Zionists, who, Carlson said, have been “seized by this brain virus.”

Carlson’s jovial exchange with Fuentes naturally stirred controversy, particularly within the conservative movement, which many pro-Israel Christians call home. So intense was the anger that the Heritage Foundation removed Carlson’s name from a donation page on its website. The scrubbing must have been unauthorized, however, because the following day Heritage President Kevin Roberts released a defiant video reaffirming the organization’s relationship with Carlson. “Christians can critique the state of Israel without being antisemitic,” Roberts began, fending off an unmade accusation. Pummeling another straw man, Roberts allowed that while supporting Israel is fine when done in the American interest, “conservatives should feel no obligation to reflexively support any foreign government, no matter how loud the pressure becomes from the globalist class or from their mouthpieces in Washington.”

If there’s anyone conservatives should reflexively support, according to Roberts, it’s Tucker Carlson. “We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said, a group that includes the podcaster, who “remains, and as I have said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation.” Roberts attacked Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition” whose “attempt to cancel him will fail,” and while acknowledging that he “abhor[s]” much of what Fuentes says, insisted that “canceling him is not the answer either.”

In a speech at Hillsdale College on Monday night, Roberts apologized for the video as “a mistake made with the best of intentions,” without condemning Carlson outright. Roberts delivered the same, equivocating message on Wednesday at a town hall with Heritage staff. Yet Roberts still seems not to understand the elementary distinction between “canceling” and ostracizing. Stalinists and Holocaust deniers like Fuentes are perfectly entitled to spew their nonsense on street corners, through self-published manifestos or in online livestreams. What they are not entitled to is the imprimatur of purportedly respectable institutions whose reputations hinge upon the voices they choose to amplify.

Carlson’s promotion of Fuentes was a signal moment in the former Fox News star’s moral atrophy. It also has forced an overdue reckoning on the American right. For far too long, the problem of antisemitism has been allowed to fester there because too many conservatives have been reluctant to speak out against its chief propagator. Finally, the battle lines are being drawn, with Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, the Wall Street Journal editorial board and the editors of National Review lambasting Carlson as a reckless hatemonger, while former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former congressman Matt Gaetz and the executive director of the American Conservative disingenuously defend him as a good-faith, just-asking-questions skeptic of the U.S.-Israel relationship.

Earlier this week, Carlson said the controversy over his parley with Fuentes is really “a fight over what happens after Donald Trump.” He’s right. Carlson and his fellow paleoconservatives have been explicit in their desire to avenge the honor of Patrick Buchanan, the former pundit and aide to presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Buchanan was exiled from the conservative movement over three decades ago when William F. Buckley Jr. accused him of antisemitism and Republican voters rejected his 1992 bid for their party’s presidential nomination. Roberts is backing a campaign to persuade Trump to give Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Trump has largely embraced Buchanan’s trade protectionism and immigration restrictionism, but he has taken a noticeably different approach on Buchanan’s third signature issue: foreign policy isolationism.

Though Trump campaigned as an isolationist, he has certainly not governed as one. He has recently pulled a U-turn on Ukraine, imposing fresh sanctions on Moscow and calling off a proposed summit with Putin in Budapest. Trump is also ramping up action against Venezuela, citing dubious legal pretext to launch airstrikes against alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea and amassing military assets off the country’s coast for a possible attack on the mainland. And with Operation Midnight Hammer, he joined the Israeli assault on Iran’s nuclear program. Even in symbolic ways, like changing the Defense Department’s name to the War Department, Trump has taken American foreign policy in a more interventionist, even bellicose direction.

These decisions collectively constitute a repudiation of Tucker, Fuentes and their Buchananite paleoconservative followers. If this crew had had its way, Russia would have seized Kyiv years ago. Instead of aiding Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado, whom Carlson assails as the puppet of a “globohomo” conspiracy, Washington would back strongman Nicolás Maduro, whom Carlson credits for banning gay marriage and sex-change operations. Israel, it almost goes without saying, would not only be cut off entirely from U.S. military aid but probably sanctioned as well.

Republican post-Trump foreign policy is of course a legitimate issue to debate. For years, there has been a spirited argument between hawks and self-described “restrainers,” those who advocate a less ambitious interpretation of America’s global responsibilities and a more parsimonious use of military force. The problem that many isolationists like Carlson and his acolytes have, however, is that when engaging in these debates they can’t help but sink into the antisemitic gutter. For example, on Tuesday, Carlson said Republicans with a “neoconservative posture … don’t care about domestic policy because they don’t care about the United States. But they do care about the U.S. Treasury and the Pentagon, the projection of force on behalf of Israel.”

Ironically, the politician Carlson is harming most with his antics is the person he wants to succeed Trump: Vice President JD Vance. Carlson, who praised Vance in his discussion with Fuentes as one of the very few people on the right who shares his foreign policy views, reportedly played a decisive role in convincing Trump to name Vance as his running mate. Vance, who has since employed Carlson’s son as his deputy press secretary, invited Carlson to the White House when he guest-hosted the “Charlie Kirk Show” following the assassination of its eponymous host. Having benefited from Carlson’s scorched-earth campaign against “the neoconservatives,” Vance now appears stuck with Carlson’s antisemitic, conspiratorial, anti-American baggage whether he likes it or not.

Thus far, Vance has done nothing to distance himself from this kind of politics. When Politico exposed racist and antisemitic text messages sent by members of Young Republican clubs last month, the vice president forgivingly characterized the appalling behavior of these 20- and 30-somethings as “what kids do.” A more disturbing incident occurred last week, when Vance responded to a question from a student at the University of Mississippi. Sounding very much like one of Fuentes’ “groyper” followers, the young man in a MAGA hat asked Vance why the U.S. supports Israel “considering the fact that not only does their religion not agree with ours, but also openly supports the prosecution [sic] of ours.” Instead of correcting the student and the disturbing number of people who applauded this morally inverted query by explaining that it is Christians who have a long history of persecuting Jews, Vance bypassed the accusation of Jewish religious oppression and legitimized the crowd’s fears of Jewish political oppression, declaring, “When people say that Israel is somehow manipulating or controlling the president of the United States, they’re not manipulating or controlling this president of the United States.”

The MAGA civil war is about more than Republican foreign policy, the U.S. relationship with Israel or antisemitism. It’s about competing visions of America. Six decades ago, William F. Buckley Jr. performed the conservative movement and the country a service when he condemned the paranoiac John Birch Society. He performed a similarly salutary act with Buchanan 30 years later. Buckley isn’t with us anymore, and so it will be up to a new generation of conservative leaders to exercise moral hygiene and cleanse the movement of the bigots in their midst.

• James Kirchick is author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington” and “The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.”