Tag: Tucker Carlson

Tuckered Out

UPDATE: Carlson broke his silence Thursday for the first time since being fired by Fox News with a tweet saying “See you soon,” The Hill reports. In a two-minute-plus message, he said that after “stepping outside the noise for a few days” he is gratified by how many “genuinely nice people there are in this country.”

Tucker Carlson Tonight's eponymous host has left the building. Fox News Monday in a statement said that Carlson and the network have mutually agreed to part ways. Carlson's ultimate Tonight broadcast was last Friday night, though the host leaves behind a sort of director's cut of the January 6 Capitol insurrection video recordings after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) handed him previously unseen footage, as well as fawning interviews with Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbån. 

The network will air an interim program creatively titled, Fox News Tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern Time weekdays, with interim personalities until a replacement host is named.

Carlson’s departure comes less than a week after Fox News’ $787.5-million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems. Evidence for Dominion’s lawsuit included emails by Carlson saying he was “fed up” with Donald J. Trump after losing re-election in 2020.

“I hate him passionately,” one of Carlson’s emails said.

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Russian, Chinese and Iranian Tweets (Oh My) --

Twitter has lifted “shadow bans” on the government accounts of Russia, China and Iran, NPR reported last week. All Things Considered confirmed Twitter’s “stance of allowing the Russian government posts to pop up freely” on users’ feeds “and has now become company procedure.”

NPR reported the policy change days after the public radio outlet, along with the BBC and others left Twitter after owner/CEO Elon Musk falsely accused these media outlets of being “government funded.”

Musk defended anti-Ukrainian rhetoric posted by former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev on Twitter, responding; “All news is to some degree propaganda. Let people decide for themselves.”

Irony alert: Twitter is not allowed in Russia, China and Iran, according to the NPR report.

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It’s Trump’s GOP, but is it Still the Conservative Party?

By Todd Lassa

The Lincoln Project and its followers have been agonizing over the future of the heart and mind of the GOP since the Democrats first had comparative moderates running for the nomination such as Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and of course, Joe Biden.

What if Republican stalwarts, they wondered, helped propel one of those people to victory? 

After such a victory, what happens to the Republican Party? Does it revert to its Mitt Romney-esque roots, thus rejecting such erstwhile party leaders as Sens. Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham, who quickly turned from profoundly anti-Trump to enthusiastic supporter-enablers by November 2016? Or does it continue to be the Trump Party?

Anti-Trump Republicans now find themselves at a fork in the road with especially sharp tines. When (or if) President Trump vacates the White House, the Grand Old Party could revert to its pre-populist ways and welcome back the “never-Trumpers.” Or the party, such as it is, could shun those who have been associated with people from John McCain to George W. Bush.

The struggle has been playing itself out among Republicans inside its Washington power structure, where potential candidates for its 2024 presidential nomination have been lining up. 

That struggle hinges at first on whether Donald J. Trump himself chooses to run again in ’24 (the 22nd Amendment limits presidencies to two terms, but they do not need to be consecutive), or whether his son, Donald Jr. or daughter Ivanka gains more traction within the party. If not, the first Trump loyalists already on the short-list include former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas), Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and even Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

Alternatively, never-Trumpers who espouse traditional conservative values, have been getting behind Govs. Larry Hogan (Md.), Charlie Baker (Mass.) and Phil Scott (Vt.), all from Democratic-leaning states, former Ohio Gov. John Kasich or Sen. Ben Sasse of Nebraska, who gained notoriety before the Nov. 3 election for the leaked (wink, wink) recording of a call to his supporters in which he said Trump “kisses dictators’ butts” and spends like a “drunken sailor.” 

Sasse had warned of a “Republican bloodbath” in that recording, predicting a Nov. 3 “Blue Wave” would give Democrats a big Senate majority. That didn’t happen, but questions of Trump’s authenticity as a conservative and whether he and his family can maintain control of the GOP remain.

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