How Tucker Carlson Becomes President
The New York Times piece this weekend, the one everyone in your group chat forwarded with “WTF ????”, is being read wrong. People are reacting to the spell-bound Trump stuff, the Antichrist business, the Fuentes regret-that-isn't. All worth reacting to.
None of it gets to the underlying why of Tucker Carlson’s very public apostasy.
Tucker Carlson just broke with a God-Emperor of the MAGA party a few weeks ago, all echoed in this piece, loudly defended the vice president as a personal friend, and called the Secretary of State's people treacherous, all in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, not Breitbart or the Daily Wire.
This isn't an interview. It's a soft campaign launch with some explicable stages and milestones, the same kind we’d whiteboard in the first steps of a campaign:
Get out from under Trump’s shadow
Tucker is doing this in plain sight. The little jabs at the administration, the “I love the President, but…” framing on Iran, on Israel, on tariffs, on the cabinet. The careful distance from Vance. Sorry, the very public friendship with Vance, which everyone is supposed to read as proof he isn’t running. That smells…tactical.
Tucker is smart enough to know two things about Vance: first, Vance will inherit all
