Verify, and Don't Trust

Seemingly regretful over his support for Donald Trump because of the latter's phony Christianity and the war in Iran, Tucker Carlson in April told brother Buckley (of course) Carlson

In real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now. We'll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be and I want to say I'm sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional.

Concered that the left is falling into a trap, David Pakman sends an important warning, noting

.....The idea is that Tucker Carlson has now apologized for helping support Donald Trump. He has said some things that sound anti-war and there are people on the left naively falling for it and saying "look, maybe there's an opportunity here to work with some of these people. Maybe we can make a coaltion with Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene"....

I've said before that populist rhetoric can be very deceptive. Populist rhetoric flattens very important issues into emotion, east-to-agree-with statements that feel like common ground when they really aren't.

He notes that rhetoric about "elites" is

designed to trigger agreement without any deep examination of what comes next. what comes next is the most important thing. I've said before: you might hear a couple of sentences from Bernie Sanders and a couple of sentences from Tucker Carlson and they will be very similar because they are employing populist rhetoric. But when you ask Tucker what is the solution here, it is an atrocity and that is whole tric. That's where the differences matter. 

We'll talk about Tucker. Tucker's criticism are not rooted in consistent principled frameworks that align with the progressive or center-left policies.

All that is valid and important, but is incomplete In an interview conducted by Lulu Garcia-Navarro apparently a couple of months ago but recently published in The New York Times, Carlson noted Israel's continuing assault on Lebanon following a ceasefire President Trump reached with Tehran. Carlson complained

And within hours of Trump announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that? Not to secure the Israeli homeland. The point of it was to end any talk of a negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal.

Steve M responds

Carlson is essentially saying that Trump is blameless in this matter -- he could have gotten us out of the war, but Israel trapped him. Carlson ignores Trump's own strategic ineptitude, and his own desire to keep fighting the glorious war that both Netanyahu and Fox News want him to fight until he achieves the glorious victory they tell him he can achieve....We think Carlson has broken with Trump, but I think he's being careful not to burn the bridge between himself and Trump. 

This is further reflected in Carlson's rationalization that

... I never saw, nor did I hear about anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like: “You want to make this country great again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran.” Instead there were a lot of cowardly people, as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality that he has that’s spellbinding. And I think it probably literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I’ve experienced this myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland. It’s like smoking hash or something. It’s interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural component to it. I’m not a theologian, but it’s real, and anyone who’s been around him can tell you it’s true. But whatever the cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I know, on either side, for or against. But people from the outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.

So Donald Trump is a big, strong, and intimidating man. And yet he also is a victim of outsiders who duped him. Trump is projected as always powerful, yet somehow the victim. Carlson believes that the President "was doing this against his will," that he was "more a hostage than a soverieign decision-maker" in deciding to go to war against Iran. Steve M explains 

Trump is too powerful to get honest advice from his subordinates and also too powerless to rebuff Netanyahu and a couple of Fox News talking heads, not to mention the 95-year-old man who founded Fox. Either way, Carlson seems to be describing Trump as more sinned against than sinning, which tells me he could return to the Trump fold in the future.

He could, and probably will. As David Pakman understands, the left's response to Carlson et al. should be, as the fictional Martin Dooley cautioned, "trust everybody- but cut the cards." 

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