Tucker Carlson seems to be having the time of his life at the RNC

July 08, 2024

MILWAUKEE — When Donald Trump made his triumphant return to the spotlight on Monday night, after surviving an assassination attempt just days earlier, the first person to greet him in the VIP box at the Republican National Convention was Tucker Carlson.

The former president offered Carlson a firm handshake and put his left arm on the former television host’s shoulder. Carlson nodded, leaned in and smiled. It wasn’t a bad place to be for a guy who 15 months ago received his pink slip from Fox News, losing the biggest platform in conservative media.

“I guess they thought at Fox they would limit his reach” by canceling his show, said Roger Stone, the longtime Trump adviser and self-described “great friend” of Carlson, as he cleaved through a gaggle of reporters on the convention grounds. “If anything, they have boosted his reach and his influence 20 times.”

Carlson is having a moment at the RNC. He’s being followed by a documentary crew. He gave a prime-time speech Thursday. And to top that off, he gets to celebrate the fact that his friend and fellow nationalistic conservative, Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), got the nod to be Trump’s running mate — an outcome Carlson had been lobbying for privately. (According to a report from the New York Times, Carlson had warned Trump that if a “neocon” — a Republican with an interventionist foreign policy — were vice president, deep state forces would be more likely to try to assassinate Trump.)

Carlson’s address on Thursday night was a hit with the convention crowd, with many audience members standing throughout his speech and one man yelling “I love you Tucker!” as the former Fox host came onstage. Carlson greeted the crowd with a “thank you” and his signature giggle, before saying he felt like he knew half of the people in the room.

“I have never been to a more fun convention, or a convention with better vibes," Carlson said.

Carlson or Vance “would have been the two people I would have loved to see as VP,” Donald Trump Jr. said in a live event hosted by Axios at the RNC, after Vance became the nominee.

Carlson did not elaborate when asked by The Washington Post, via text, to explain his presence and purpose in Milwaukee this week. Instead he replied with a 93-word tirade against The Post.

Carlson told an audience at an RNC event hosted by the Heritage Foundation that he didn’t want to come to the convention at first, but is now glad he did.

Now the hesitant attendee seemed to be everywhere. At the Trade hotel, Carlson was spotted walking past his former boss, Rupert Murdoch, with a smile, according to Jake Sherman of Punchbowl News. There are college-age clones of Carlson, with the same moppy head of hair and khaki pants, drinking free beer at the after-parties. On Tuesday, he followed his buddy Don Jr. into the Fox News green room, uninvited by the network but welcomed by at least some of his old colleagues, according to NOTUS.

“I saw him yesterday,” said former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson on Wednesday. “Tucker was Tucker.” Asked to elaborate, Carson would only say: “Tucker has many opinions that sometimes are in advance of society still catching up.”

Does Trump’s pick of Vance mean that society — or at least the Republican Party — is “catching up” to Carlson in real time? Both Carlson and Vance share an anti-elite ideology (despite their status as elites), with isolationist and populist tendencies that can, at times, seem xenophobic.

“You really understand what’s going wrong with the country,” Carlson told Vance on Carlson’s namesake Fox show in 2021, when Vance announced his Senate candidacy. “I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’m really glad you’re doing it. I admire you, and I wish you luck.”

“Tucker Carlson Tonight” averaged 3.3 million viewers in 2022, but in April 2023 Fox abruptly canceled the show, despite its popularity. The network never explained the decision, but it came less than a week after Fox agreed to pay $787.5 million to Dominion Voting Systems to settle a defamation lawsuit. Emails and text messages released as part of that case showed that Carlson had disparaged Fox executives, his colleagues and leading Republicans, including Trump, whom Carlson called “a demonic force.”

In December, Carlson launched his own company, the Tucker Carlson Network, and began charging superfans $9 a month (or $72 a year). Still, Carlson faced lagging viewership counts on X, according to Mashable. In February, he traveled to Russia for a bizarre interview with President Vladimir Putin and posted videos that seemed like pro-Kremlin propaganda.

But even a somewhat diminished Carlson remains a powerful force in conservative media.

“He’s significant to the movement in so many ways because he asks the questions so few dare to ask,” said Trump’s former deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley. “Donald Trump likes fighters. Someone like Tucker has fought on the president’s behalf for a long time.”

Just how much does Trump like him?

“There are very few people sitting in that box” in the RNC arena, Gidley said. “I’ll leave it at that.”

Terris reported from Milwaukee. Barr reported from Washington.

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