Deranged Tucker Carlson Backstabs Trump
Douglas Murray, New York Post
In politics, it is often the people who you think have your back who end up stabbing you there.
Nobody knows that better than Donald Trump, who has been stabbed in the back more times than Julius Caesar — yet has still survived.
This week, part of the noisy right-wing online podcast-sphere again turned on the president.
Leading the virtual charge, again, was Trump’s one-time cheerleader, Tucker Carlson.
There was a time when Carlson was fully Team Trump.
Carlson often appeared at Trump rallies as part of the warmup act.
But in the past year, he has tried to lead the MAGA base away from Trump and down a very dark path.
Fortunately, the Trump base hasn’t followed him there.
The president’s strong Middle East policy seems to have particularly deranged his one-time supporter.
While the president has advocated a strong defense of America’s regional allies, Carlson has spent 100% of his time trying to turn the MAGA base against Israel and in favor of Islamist regimes.
His podcast has become a remorseless roll call of Holocaust deniers, antisemites, Islamic extremists and World War II revisionists.
While attacking Trump, Carlson eagerly softball-interviews people who love both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin.
Quite an achievement.
Undermining
While accusing everyone else of being obsessed with Israel, Carlson has obsessed about nothing else.
While saying “We’re not allowed to talk about Jews,” he has talked about nothing but Jews.
This obsession has culminated in a total derangement over the president’s Iran policy.
Carlson and other people in the right-wing podcast-sphere pretend to be confused by the president acting to stop the mullahs from getting an atomic bomb.
At one and the same time, they say Iran was never seeking nuclear weapons. And that Iran has the right to nuclear weapons.
They pretend the Iranians were nowhere near having a nuclear weapon. But that it would be understandable if they were.
This culminated in Carlson calling Trump’s actions “evil.”
And suggesting he has once again been manipulated by, well — guess who?
From being Trump cheerleaders, Carlson & co. are trying to do everything they can to destroy the president.
This week, Joe Kent, head of the National Counterterrorism Center, resigned — supposedly over the president’s Iran policy.
Since his resignation, the FBI has opened a leak investigation suggesting Kent’s own turn on the president might not be everything it first appears.
But with whom did Kent appear within 24 hours of resigning?
Why, with Tucker Carlson, of course.
Where he spread a range of crazed conspiracies — all of which just happen to align with Carlson’s own prejudices.
Now it seems there is almost nothing Trump does that these one-time supporters will not try to undermine.
This week, sitting in the Oval Office, Trump made reference to the bust of Winston Churchill.
A bust that Trump returned to the White House in his first term.
This week, Trump referred to Britain’s wartime prime minister as “the late, great Winston Churchill.”
A suitable reference to the man who for a time stood alone against Hitler as the Nazi tyrant sought to overrun Britain and all of Europe.
But for the online right, Churchill has become an enemy.
In their efforts to demonize Jews and rewrite the history of World War II, they have decided that Churchill was not the hero of the war but in fact its chief villain.
Fact-checking Tucker
Just a day after Trump made his admiring remarks about Churchill, Carlson said something that is worth quoting at length.
Because it is where the ignorant and the sinister meet.
“Winston Churchill, who I know we’re required to deify, presided over the imprisonment of his opposition party during the entire length of the war. And their families, and their wives. They’re rotting in prison away from their little kids — in some cases their infants. And their crime was being the opposition party and being ‘disloyal and unpatriotic.’ They weren’t. The opposition party was led by a First World War hero who fought not just as a pilot in the sky but in the trenches. One of the great war heroes, former member of Parliament, the country ever produced.”
The person to whom Carlson is referring there is Oswald Mosley.
Mosley was not the leader of the opposition party in Britain.
That was the Labour party leader — and First World War hero — Clement Atlee.
Once war was declared, Atlee became deputy prime minister in the coalition government that led Britain through the war.
Mosley was once a Labour MP, but fell out with his party and indeed mainstream politics in the 1920s.
In 1932, he formed the British Union of Fascists — a party that wanted to introduce Hitler’s policies to the UK and form an alliance with Nazi Germany.
Mosley was not an “opposition party” leader.
His wretched fascist party never managed to get a single member elected to Parliament.
Mosley was a traitor to his country. He married his second wife — like him, a fascist and friend of Hitler — in Berlin in 1936.
They married in a small, private ceremony at the home of Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels.
One of the only other people to attend the wedding was Adolf Hitler, who gifted the newlyweds a silver-framed photograph of himself.
Why does this matter?
Because in his attempts to undermine Trump, Tucker Carlson has decided to subvert and pervert history.
Mosley and his wife were imprisoned during the war because in a time of total war, they were people who wanted to sell out their country to Hitler and would have done anything they could to continue collaborating with their country’s mortal enemy.
MAGA base can’t waver
Of course, Carlson tells his viewers none of this.
He doesn’t tell them he is running cover for the most odious fascist in British history. Simply in order to defame Winston Churchill.
But it is a reminder that the president is at the center of a battle not just for MAGA, but for the soul of the American right.
The president rightly said he is MAGA and his base follows him.
We must hope he continues to be right.
Because if his critics on the right succeed in knocking him out, they would lead this country down the darkest path possible, and destroy any chance of Republicans gaining elected office again.
