Is Tucker Carlson aiming for the White House? The podcaster has a taste for power and attention

America is perishing. The streets are awash with fentanyl and beset by homelessness, illegal immigrants flood the border, lawlessness sweeps from Maine to Montecito. Under the stewardship of today’s elites, this once great country is collapsing.

This is the Republican message of 2024. And it is best articulated by the most important man in the conservative movement, after Donald Trump: Tucker Carlson. Over the past month, Carlson has been travelling America on a speaking tour, visiting 16 different cities with guests including Robert F. Kennedy Jr, Kid Rock, and Russell Brand. The shows have not toured the liberal bastions like New York City or Los Angeles, but cities where the Trumpian message of decline is not only seen and heard, but felt, too.

I see him in Reading, one of the most dangerous cities in Pennsylvania, where violent crime is significantly above the national average and rising. Its school system is failing and buildings are collapsing. At the 7,000 capacity Santander Arena, unhappy residents cram in for Tucker: if there’s a uniform, it’s MAGA regalia, camo vests and Infowars Ts. One member of the faithful tells me that he had already been to three of his shows. “He just understands us,” Chris, clutching two beers, says. “He’s not a politician.”

Tucker isn’t in a t-shirt. He stands out in his own uniform: blazer, chequered shirt, beige chinos and loafers. But he speaks for the crowd. “A leader’s only job is to take care of the people he leads,” he declares. “It’s not to defeat climate change or to defeat Vladimir Putin — or anybody else.” The audience is enthralled, buttressing Carlson’s comments with chants of “USA!” and “Survive till ‘25!”.

His rhetoric is earthy and vulgar, describing the state’s governor and former V-P contender, Josh Shapiro, as “evil”, “creepy” and a “ghoul”. Comparing the governor with a father who abandoned his family, Carlson doubles down on the character assassination. “I don’t care what story he tells you about himself,” he says, “he is a bad father and a bad man.” He’s appalled by a picture of Shapiro signing an artillery shell bound for Ukraine with Zelensky at hand.

Ukraine is a Carlson fixation — representing, as it does, his metamorphosis from Iraq-war supporting neocon to isolationist firebrand. It mirrors a similar evolution on the New Right. Disturbed by the Iraq war and its fallout, Carlson and the new Right became foreign policy radicals, with their outlook defined more by alienation than patriotism. Carlson describes a visit he made to Iraq that precipitated this change of heart. It is also why so many Trump voters in Pennsylvania voted for Obama in 2008, before switching. They did not like Obama per se; they just hated George W. Bush and his foreign-policy adventurism more.

At his best, Carlson is a tribune for the disenfranchised and disaffected, criticising elites for neglecting the interests of their own population in service of the military-industrial complex and other targets like Big Pharma and the banks. At his worst, he is bitter, vindictive and more interested in owning the libs than telling the truth. As Andrew Ferguson described of his days on Fox: “You get some poor little columnist from the Daily Oregonian who said Trump is Hitler, and you beat the shit out of him for 10 minutes.”

His gift for oratory, however, is undeniable. In Reading, Carlson speaks for 25 minutes without notes, playing several different characters at once: the nation’s healer (“I’m trying to cool the temperature”), the patriot (“American citizens are your brothers and sisters”), the flame-throwing populist (“our leaders hate you”), the Republican surrogate (“Biden voters have no skills”) and the family man (“a father’s job is to watch over his family”). He works the crowd into a frenzy, creating a carnival atmosphere. “He speaks from the heart,” one raved. “He was talking about this stuff way before anyone else did.”

Carlson never graduated with a diploma or college degree, admitting that he was a straight-D student, which might explain his militant non-conformity. He did, however, love to read, becoming something of an autodidact. But the problem with autodidacts is that they don’t have anyone to tell them when they’re wrong. Perhaps this is why, since losing the institutional guardrails of Fox News last year, Carlson’s interviews have taken on a more conspiratorial flavour, featuring Second World War revisionist historians, gay crackheads claiming to have had sex with Barack Obama, and, of course, Alex Jones.

Jones joined Carlson in Reading this week. During a live show, you don’t watch Jones — you experience him. He marches onto the stage like a WWE wrestler, grabbing the microphone and speaking into the camera as if he was about to challenge John Cena for the world heavyweight title. “When we get President Trump elected,” he booms, “all of us are going to lift the curse off of this country and we’re gonna send the globalists to prison!”

This is not politics. It’s performance art. And watching through this lens, Carlson’s soft-ball questions begin to make more sense. Rather than challenge Jones on his Sandy Hook denialism, for which the talk show host must pay $1 billion to the parents of the shooter’s victims, Carlson instead plays the role of fluffer. “What is it like to always be right?”, “How does it feel to be totally vindicated?” and “I would make fun of you but every word you said is true” are his most common refrains. That is because Carlson understands something about this audience that his liberal critics don’t: they don’t come for a Crossfire interview, they come for entertainment.

Despite liberals’ best hopes, Carlson is not “fading away”. If anything, his influence has grown. His new podcast, The Tucker Carlson Show, has had 26 million downloads since its December launch and regularly features in the top five of Spotify’s weekly podcast rankings (sometimes even beating The Joe Rogan Experience). He is one of the few men to have Donald Trump’s ear, having persuaded the former president to secure RFK Jr’s endorsement, and pushed him to nominate JD Vance as his running mate.

Such is Carlson’s power in conservative circles that it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the dog is wagging the tail or the other way around. On Vance’s last visit to Pennsylvania in late August, he attracted a few hundred people to a rally in Erie. Yet during his appearance with Carlson in Hershey last week, he spoke to thousands. And much of what Vance talks about on the trail — deindustrialisation, drug deaths, immigration and opposition to foreign wars — Carlson has been saying for years.

So why doesn’t Carlson run for office himself? Despite being one of the most popular conservatives in America, he has explained that he is just “a talk show host”. Yet to be so closely involved in GOP power politics and have no ambition to enter the fray stretches belief. This man is touring the nation and meeting world leaders — it certainly looks like a dress rehearsal.

The White House would be quite the final destination for Carlson in light of his journey over the past 20 years: from bow-tied geek on CNN, to Rachel Maddow mentor on MSNBC, to uninhibited populist on Fox, and now the truth-seeking conspiracist on his own podcast.

As he gazed out into the Reading crowd, there was a glint in Carlson’s eye that suggested that he had a taste for this. The chanting, the applause, the attention. This is a man, after all, whose whole modus operandi is attention, doing whatever he can to provoke, excite and anger. Wouldn’t the White House be the perfect venue from which to mastermind all those things?

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James Billot is UnHerd’s Newsroom editor.

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