69% of the 900 registered voters polled in the September NBC News/Wall Street Journal public opinion poll said they do not like Trump personally, regardless of their feelings about his policies.
Why it matters: Despite the conventional wisdom that incumbents have an upper hand in general elections, the poll indicates that Trump is the most disliked president out of his 5 most recent predecessors.
Details: The poll found Trump’s approval rating rests at 45%, which is on par with where Barack Obama and Bill Clinton stood at this point in their presidencies. Both Obama and Clinton won re-election, but neither president faced the high degree of personal animus that Trump faces today.
Previously, the highest share of voters that said they disliked the president personally, regardless of their views on his policies, was 42% for George W. Bush in 2006 — in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
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Gosh, I’m so old I remember when pundits insisted that elections turned on whether voters thought the president was someone they wanted to have a beer with. I guess now it’s all about whether they want to stand beneath him as he rants from a podium about his political enemies and brags about how wonderful he is.
I guess the truth is that a whole lot of voters really want to vote for a hateful demagogue they can’t stand.
April 2019: Giuliani tweets about investigations in Ukraine charging that the “media blackout of the investigations in Ukraine of alleged Democrat corruption” proves there is a “double standard.”
May 9, 2019: The New York Times reports that Giuliani planned to travel to Kyiv to pressure the Ukranian government to press ahead with the investigations into Joe Biden, Giuliani subsequently cancels the trip.
June 2019: Giuliani meets in Paris with an official from the Ukranian prosecutor general’s office to discuss a possible Biden investigation.
July 24, 2019: Mueller testimony
July 25, 2019: Phone call between Trump and President Zelensky
Late July: Giuliani meets with Zelensky’s aide in Madrid
July 28, 2019: DNI Dan Coats resigns
August 9, 2019: Outgoing Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats disrupted a meeting his deputy, Sue Gordon, was holding on election security to urge her to resign from her post.
The abrupt interruption on Thursday, reported by CNN, happened shortly before Gordon submitted her letter of resignation later that day.
August 12: whistleblower complaint
August 28: Bolton meets with Zelensky
Late August: Trump suspends the military aid to Ukraine
August 2019: Giuliani meets with Andriy Yermak, a top aide to Zelensky, in Madrid, Mr Giuliani described Mr Yermak as “very receptive” to his inquiries.
August 29, 2019 : Trump cancels trip to Poland where he’d been scheduled to meet with Zelensky, Giuliani says it had nothing to do with Zelensky
September 12, 2019: The Trump administration released foreign aid to Ukraine.
September 1: Pence meets with Zelensky (Read this transcript of a Pence press conference in which he’s asked about the Biden thing and he admits to talking about the financial assistance in terms of the government doing something about “corruption” which we know is their crude code word for digging up dirt on Biden’s son.)
September 9: House committees investigate Trump and Giuliani dealings with Ukraine
The call in question, which took place on July 25th, was almost two months ago. There was apparently no effort to stop what was happening or sound an alarm by anyone at the White House or administration. It is basically a given that the top members of the President’s national security team would be read in on a call like this if indeed they weren’t on the call while it was happening. On top of this, at least according to Rudy Giuliani, the State Department assisted him in arranging meetings with Ukrainian government officials. So he not only issued threats and demands on behalf of the President, he had the assistance of the diplomatic corps. Finally, we don’t know who the intelligence community whistleblower is. But however this person found out about the call and other related activities, this means pretty clearly this wasn’t some secret the President was keeping just between him and Rudy Giuliani. Nor is this the first we’re hearing about a broader effort involving Giuliani. Josh Kovensky and other reporters have been reporting for months on Giuliani’s efforts and he was apparently behind the firing of the US Ambassador to Ukraine back in May.
The point is that something this egregious happened. It directly involved in the President in explicit demands to a foreign leader. Some or all of the President’s top advisors and certainly his top foreign policy team (National Security Advisor, Secretary of State, et al.) knew this was happening. And they were apparently okay with it. At a minimum, they allowed it to happen and participated in it and made no attempt to stop it. There is only a story because some unknown whistleblower decided to blow the whistle. Just as importantly, a Trump appointee, Inspector General Michael Atkinson, decided to force the matter by informing Congress of the existence of the whistleblower complaint even though administration officials prevented him from disclosing its substance.
This all has pretty dramatic implications beyond this one bad act. Many have assumed or at least left open the possibility that the President’s advisors keep him from participating himself in the most egregious wrongdoing. Maybe he has underlings like Rudy Giuliani or Corey Lewandowski do things outside government channels. Maybe the Saudis just know he’ll be happy if they pump millions of dollars into one of his hotels. We hear that the President often makes outrageous or nonsensical suggestions in staff meetings. But his advisors know to discreetly ignore these directives.
Apparently none of this is the case.
This new episode suggests that the President can personally commit the most egregious wrongdoing, clearly impeachable offenses, in full view of his most senior advisors, and we hear nothing about it. We only know about this because of this whistleblower, who is him or herself now being attacked publicly as a Deep State partisan. Could Trump have made financial demands of Gulf monarchies to help his private businesses? Could he have asked Vladimir Putin for election assistance in 2020? Given that the demand on Ukraine was considered acceptable and is now being affirmatively defended, there’s no reason to think that these actions wouldn’t have been deemed acceptable and within the President’s purview as well.
Why would a demand for election assistance from Ukraine be acceptable and ones of Russia or Saudi Arabia wouldn’t? Why would demands for assistance to his personal businesses be worse than ones for election interference? (To me, they’d be less problematic. The President profiting personally from the presidency is wrong but it’s less damaging to the country than preventing a free and fair election.) Clearly I can hypothesize any kind of wrongdoing and say that it’s now possible and that his team would go along with it. But that’s the point: whatever in extremis guard rails we may have been thinking existed, at least for what the President does in full view of the chiefs officers of state, clearly don’t exist.
We know the President wants to do all manner of bad acts and sees nothing wrong with them. This new development suggests he probably has, that his top advisors know about those bad acts and decided it was okay.
By the way, somebody must be chatting with Bolton, right? I don’t know how far he’s willing to go to stab Trump in the back, but he could certainly shed some light on all this if he chose to.
I wouldn’t count on it. Bolton is Bolton. But he’s pissed so who knows?
Vice President Mike Pence arrived at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island in an eight-vehicle motorcade Saturday, prompting cries of “sacrilege” on social media.
Cars are generally banned on the island, and that century-old ban is integral to its charm.
When President Gerald Ford visited the island in 1975 — the only sitting president to make such a visit — he and first lady Betty Ford traveled by horse-drawn carriage.
Pence, who spoke at the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference, is the first sitting vice president to visit the island. He traveled to and from the airport with a cluster of monster SUVs shipped to the island Friday night.
It was the first-ever motorcade on Mackinac.
To some, the Pence motorcade on the bucolic island is the latest outrage of the Donald Trump presidency.
To others, it’s mostly a sign of how much has changed since 1975.
This one even aroused America’s foremost font of “both-sides” conventional wisdom:
Ron Fournier, a Detroit native who covered Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama during a journalism career that included stints as Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press and editor-in-chief of the National Journal, said the motorcade was “obscene.”
As bad as extorting Ukraine to help his 2020 chances is — and that’s really, really bad — I think the larger, more lasting issue is Trump’s deliberate destruction of the whistleblower program within the Federal government.
This particular whistleblower complaint just might become public (although right now, the complaint itself has been lost in the dangling of the release of phone transcripts, a different issue entirely). So what? The Democrats will slow-drag it and the Senate will never impeach him. There are no real consequences on the horizon.
Going forward, government employees wishing to alert Congress regarding additional abuses by Trump and his cronies know very well that nothing will protect them from Trump’s wrath. They would likely not only be risking their career, but their savings, if not their freedom, when they try to protect themselves from Trump’s onslaught.
In short, Trump has completely locked down the government. And you can be sure that there are far worse abuses ahead than putting children in cages and subverting elections. But we won’t be hearing about them until it is far too late to do anything about them.
During all the months when the world waited with bated breath for the results of the Mueller report, the most pressing question was always whether the special prosecutor would find that President Trump and his campaign had colluded with the Russian government to interfere in the 2016 election. Trump had branded the investigation a “witch hunt” and repeated the words “No collusion! No obstruction!” on a loop. But legal observers made clear that there was no legal concept called “collusion.” and instead Mueller would be looking at whether or not the Trump campaign had engaged in a criminal conspiracy.
This was all borne out when the Mueller report was released and it said that his team had not considered anything called “collusion.” When Mueller appeared before Congress in July, he said this in his opening statement:
The investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired with the Russian government in its election interference activities. We did not address “collusion,” which is not a legal term. Rather, we focused on whether the evidence was sufficient to charge any member of the campaign with taking part in a criminal conspiracy. It was not.
Trump was a neophyte politician and I think it was easier for people to just accept the proposition that when Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening” — asking Putin or his agents to hack into Hillary Clinton’s emails — maybe he just didn’t understand the larger issues at stake. Likewise, when Donald Trump Jr. took that meeting in Trump Tower with a Russian lawyer who claimed to be working with her government to offer “dirt” on Clinton, maybe Junior just didn’t know that was highly unethical. After all, none of the people involved in the Trump campaign had any acquaintance with ethics of any kind.
Nonetheless, there are more than 200 pages of the Mueller report that describe “numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.” Although prosecutors could not establish the “willfulness” necessary to prove conspiracy, they made clear that a “statement that the investigation did not establish particular facts does not mean there was no evidence of those facts” and that “the investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome and that the [Trump] Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.”
Because of Mueller’s legal conclusion that the evidence didn’t prove the president and his men committed a crime, congressional investigators have largely ignored all that in favor of the evidence on obstruction of justice. But reports over the past few days about Trump’s interactions with the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, in hopes of digging dirt on Joe Biden, should show them that looking at those behaviors from a strictly legal standpoint is a mistake. If Trump was ignorant of the laws before he became president, after two years of “Russia, Russia, Russia,” he most certainly understood that colluding with a foreign government to interfere in the election was not considered to be an ethical practice, whether it was defined as “conspiracy” or “collusion.”
He did it anyway.
Why? Because he got away with it.
As reported in this piece in the Washington Post headlined, “Trump’s Ukraine call reveals a president convinced of his own invincibility,” Trump moved as soon as he believed he was in the clear:
When the July 24 congressional testimony of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III deflated the impeachment hopes of Democrats, President Trump crowed “no collusion” and claimed vindication from accusations that he had conspired with Russia in the 2016 election.
Then, the very next day, Trump allegedly sought to collude with another foreign country in the coming election — pressing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to dig up what he believed would be damaging information about one of his leading Democratic challengers, former vice president Joe Biden, according to people familiar with the conversation.
Trump felt liberated. And he undoubtedly felt that his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, had been right all along. Giuliani had been the one who publicly defended the president’s behavior as being perfectly legal and ethical from the beginning. His position had always been that colluding with a foreign nation to sabotage your rival was just smart politics — and he had been setting up this Ukrainian-Biden gambit for months. Once Mueller testified and the air went out of the Russia investigation, Giuliani was vindicated: “No collusion” meant that anything goes.
As the news broke late last week, Giuliani went on TV and admitted what he’d been up to. He had been serving as the president’s personal lawyer, working as an emissary to the Ukrainian government and asking them to reopen a closed investigation into the family of one of Trump’s political rivals. Giuliani framed it as some kind of patriotic attempt to expose corruption, but he didn’t even try to hide the fact that his job was to take out Joe Biden.
On Sunday Trump confessed to the crime as well:
Trump, looking very red, basically admits he asked Ukrainian President Zelensky to look into Biden during call that’s part of whistleblower complaint: “It was largely [about] fact that we don’t want our people like VP Biden & his son creating to the corruption largely in Ukraine” pic.twitter.com/2hvkTbHSJl
He claimed there was no quid pro quo, but the timeline of events suggests that it would have required an amazing series of coincidences for the Ukrainians to be unaware what was at stake.
The president and his enablers are now in open defiance of democratic norms to such an extent that the Democratic leadership’s trust that the next election will sort all this out is seriously in doubt. There can be no faith in free and fair elections as long as Trump brazenly uses the power of the presidency to solicit foreign interference in our elections, apparently having been persuaded that because he was not held responsible for his previous collusion, he had a free hand to do it again. But the flip side of the rule that says a sitting president cannot be indicted is that whether or not what he did is strictly illegal is irrelevant to the question of impeachment.
The process so far has been to pretend that this must be adjudicated like a normal crime. But the Constitution doesn’t say that a president can only be removed for a violation of the law, and there is no requirement that the House must get the courts to weigh in on every matter of executive privilege and testimonial immunity before they impeach the president. High crimes and misdemeanors apply to abuse of power and the only people in the government who can make the determination as to whether a president’s behavior reaches that threshold is the United States Congress. Regardless of whether the Republicans want to run in 2020 as Trump’s willing accomplices, the Democrats can no longer avoid facing that responsibility.
If the Party of Trump had any integrity
by Tom Sullivan
They are the Real Americans™. Just ask them. Some carry pocket constitutions the way preachers carry bibles. See? They believe in America, the red, white and blue bunting, county-fair version, just not in the messy, multiethnic, democratic one. And especially not in any democratic one in which people who look and believe like them are not firmly in control. By popular majority, if possible; by election-rigging, if necessary. Just as the presidency of Donald Trump has exposed design flaws in our system of government, it has also exposed Republican patriotic posturing as flag-hugging jingoism at its core. [Insert #notallrepublicans here.]
Oh, they love their country. The one they believe is theirs and theirs alone. Their birthright. Unchallenged by lesser-thans.
Certainly, Donald Trump is the perfect phony patriot for phony patriots. He’s spent his life as front man for a phony business empire propped up for decades by tax fraud and daddy’s money. After daddy left the scene, reportage suggests, Trump’s Potemkin empire has been propped up by money and launderers.
But most of that was before he took office in 2017. David Leonhardt lists a bill of particulars against Trump-the-president not so unlike those against George III in the Declaration of Independence:
He has pressured a foreign leader to interfere in the 2020 American presidential election.
He urged a foreign country to intervene in the 2016 presidential election.
He divulged classified information to foreign officials.
He publicly undermined American intelligence agents while standing next to a hostile foreign autocrat.
He hired a national security adviser whom he knew had secretly worked as a foreign lobbyist.
He encourages foreign leaders to enrich him and his family by staying at his hotels.
You get the picture. “Just the facts, in 40 sentences,” reads the online subhead.
Leonhardt sums up, “He is the president of the United States, and he is a threat to virtually everything that the United States should stand for.” Yet doesn’t.
Phony piety flies off the shelves in Trump’s America. What we know from the percentage of phony patriots who follow the phony business genius is with this crowd integrity is not a big seller. If GOP leaders in Washington had any, they would have moved to remove Trump long ago. Had Hillary Clinton prevailed in 2016, they would have had impeachment plans prepared by the day of her inauguration and damn the facts.
“But the Democrats” echoes around the left Twittersphere daily. Fingers point to Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Is her coolness to moving now against Trump political cowardice or some combination of reading the waters and waiting to fire until she sees the whites of his eye sockets?
Activists as frustrated as I am with the interminably slow pace of congressional investigations and by the Democrats’ seeming inability to counter Trump’s sue, delay, and defy tactics are understandably alarmed. Who should be and is not? Republican leaders. They are already seeing members abandon ship for new opportunities for plunder. They should take the hint.
If the Party of Trump had any integrity, it would have moved to remove Trump already. That Republicans have not is its own bill of particulars. Against them.
Nebraska Sen. Deb Fischer Wants to Put Constituent in Jail For Posting A Note
By Spocko
Today’s right wing politicians have adopted Trump’s method of intimidation and attack. They use them on the press and critics. Even critics who are their constituents. First, it is important to acknowledge politicians on the right aren’t satisfied with silencing their critics, they keep attacking. They want to put them in jail. From Seeing Red, a website which self identifies as “Nebraska politics from the left.”
On Monday, September 23, Lincoln resident Patricia Wonch Hill is scheduled to go to court. Her “crime”? She allegedly taped a note onto the office door of U.S. Senator Deb Fischer in October of last year. The note was not threatening, and the tape was not some kind of unusual industrial glass-destroying tape. It was, according to the police report, a paper that read “Deb ♥s Rapists” affixed to the glass door with a piece of packing tape and two stickers. The staffer who called the police upon discovering the note claimed it had caused $1 worth of damage, though how a piece of tape could cause $1 worth of damage to a glass door was not specified. Presumably $1 is the labor value the staffer placed on the time it took her to peel the note off.
The message “Deb ♥s Rapists” appeared on the door shortly after Senator Fischer voted to confirm alleged drunken sexual assaulter and habitual dick-in-facer Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court of the United States. If Hill is the one who taped the note on the door, this clearly political message was a communication from a constituent to the office of a seated elected representative on a matter of public interest.
It is shocking enough that a U.S. Senator is so willing to violate a constituent’s First Amendment rights, but it’s even more shocking that the city prosecutor is doing her bidding.
Patricia Wonch Hill holds a message for Sen. Deb Fischer as Fischer met with constituents during a listening session in Lincoln in 2017. Wonch Hill has been ticketed for vandalizing Fischer’s office and campaign signs for Rep. Jeff Fortenberry. Journal Star file photo and caption.
Why do they do this? I wrote several thousand words explaining the authoritarian mindset, but I recommend The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer if you are interested in the theory. But what I always want to know is, “How do we defeat them when they are in power?”
The Seeing Red article titled U.S. Senator Deb Fischer Wants to Put You in Jail if You Leave Her a Note, goes into detail how the city ordinance was used to go after a critic. People can be “fined up to $500 and be imprisoned for up to six months for allegedly taping a non-threatening note about politics on her office door”
I’ve been following this story for months because it also includes Senator Jeff “Googly Eyes” Fortenberry. After the trial tomorrow I’ll talk about his attacks on critics.
What is frustrating is watching the mainstream media in Nebraska cover the GOP politicians attacking their critics in this fashion. They are locked into the “he said, she said,” format, where the person in power portrays themselves as the victim. This story shows how Republicans in government have been taking their cues from Donald Trump. Fischer could have just let this go, but instead she and Fortenberry doubled down and went on the attack.
Whether Fischer wins or loses this case there should be a follow up investigation to find out how much money and resources were allocated for this. Who was pressured to move forward on this? This could then be compared to cases of actual crimes in the city of Lincoln that were pushed aside for this case.
(Whenever I mention crime lab costs and priorities someone always asks about rape kits in the city in question. Here is a story about Lincoln’s rape kit testing backlog) I don’t know the priorities of the Lincoln police and city attorney, but I would think that using the crime lab to track down the 148 guns stolen out of cars and homes in Lincoln would be a good start. But when a sitting US Senator tells you to pull fingerprints off a non-threatening sticky note on an office door, the police do as they are told. They don’t have a choice, but the city attorney could have decided not to move forward.
We live in an age of bullies. Political bullies. Today’s GOP bullies don’t back down when someone stands up to them, they double down–then go on the attack. Some use the power of their office to carry out the attacks. When the elected officials over react to criticism it shows both critics and supporters how weak they actually are.
Trump likes to say that it’s stupid for any president to be “predictable,” apparently thinking that a superpower being incoherent and erratic makes the world respect your leadership. But when he says he “cocked and loaded” in one breath and then pretends he just wants peace in our time, it actually has the effect of giving hostile nations an excuse to “defend” themselves against his threats knowing that he’s really a paper tiger.
for Trump, this is a self-inflicted wound. As the confrontation escalates, it’s important to remember that it was entirely unnecessary.
Trump chose to abandon the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, against the advice of most of his allies and many of his senior aides, and despite Iran’s compliance with the deal. He apparently wanted a bigger, better deal that would outdo President Barack Obama’s version. And he seemed certain that if he applied “maximum pressure” through economic sanctions, Iran would come to the table.
Some national security officials worried that this reticence might weaken deterrence, but Trump wanted to avoid war. He understood that another major conflict in the Middle East would be a political disaster, especially in defense of a Saudi Arabia that’s unpopular with many in Congress.
Trump has continued to seek talks with Iran, despite warnings from some analysts that Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, would refuse. Trump encouraged mediation efforts by Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and French President Emmanuel Macron, but those were spurned by Tehran, as was Trump’s suggestion of a meeting this month in New York with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani.
Against a cocky Iran, the Trump administration continues its relatively soft line. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said this week that last Saturday’s attacks were an “act of war.” But Thursday, he blandly countered Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s threat of “all-out war” against any retaliation with the assurance that his goal was “achieving peace and peaceful resolution.”
The Iran confrontation converges on three painful realities: Iran is now a full-fledged menace to security and oil shipments in the region; any military action against Iran must include some Saudi forces for it to be politically acceptable in the United States; Saudis and Emiratis, seeing anew their vulnerability, are wary of open conflict.
This dangerous chain of events was predictable — and indeed, predicted. Now Trump must decide whether to fight a war he and the country don’t want, or to accommodate an Iran whose truculence he helped create. Welcome to the Middle East, Mr. President.
So far, we have managed by hook or by crook to avoid major casualties as a result of his ineptitude. (That’s not to say that far too many Afghans, Syrians, Yemenis and others haven’t been caught in the crossfire in conflicts for which we are at least partially responsible these past few years.) But one can easily imagine when Trump’s ignorant chickens will come home to roost. All it will take is someone’s miscalculation for this whole thing to go sideways in the worst way imaginable.
“The conversation I had was largely congratulatory, was largely corruption, all of the corruption taking place. It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”
I suppose members of his brainwashed his cult might buy his insistence that this isn’t clear cut evidence of Trump attempting to conspire with the Ukrainian government to smear his political rival, but no normal sentient person would, particularly with all the other evidence of his lunatic henchman Rudy Giuliani making it very clear what they were up to.
Farhad Manjoo of the NY Times infiltrates my nightmares. He pictures the natural heir to Trumpism and it’s much worse than Trump:
Come, take a stroll with me through my recurrent nightmare: It’s the sweltering summer of 2029, and the man in charge is Tucker Carlson — that is, President Tucker Carlson, the one-time Fox News talker turned righteous, white nationalist economic populist, now in his triumphant second term, after having defeated the incumbent Joseph “Recession Joe” Biden back in 2024.
Like Trump, President Carlson spends his first term refashioning America along racial lines. But unlike Trump, whose one term is now regarded by much of the right as a best-forgotten political disaster, Carlson advances an ethnonationalist populism that succeeds in a wild, frightening fashion. His secret: competence, a commitment to true political realignment, and a brutal online political machine that represents the full flowering of the tactics and ideology first displayed during 2014’s Gamergate movement.
Where Trump was a chaotic, undisciplined narcissist, the Carlson who wins in 2024 is a canny political strategist who makes good on Trump’s forgotten promise to embrace anti-corporate economic policies. On paper, parts of Carlson’s agenda seem ripped from the former liberal firebrand Sen. Elizabeth Warren (now in exile in Toronto): His chief enemies are Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft, the megacorporations owned and staffed by wealthy liberals.
It’s a winning electoral formula: A large minority of Americans are willing to forgive Carlson’s authoritarian, nativist impulses if they see it as part of a war against the out-of-touch, culture-destroying corporations that are automating our jobs; killing every other industry; and exercising complete control over what we watch, read, listen to, buy and believe. And in America, thanks to the Electoral College, winning over a large minority is good enough to regularly win the presidency.
Obviously I am making all of this up. But my premonition is based on months of research — this is what you might call an educated nightmare. My education: Carlson’s own nightly Fox News show, which I’ve been watching obsessively since January. I began tuning in because Carlson — who, with nearly three million viewers a night, is the second most popular host on cable, after Sean Hannity — has become one of the most fascinatingly terrifying men in conservative media.
There are two things that terrify and fascinate me about Carlson. First, unlike most Republican lawmakers today, Carlson is sketching an economic vision of a post-Trump America that departs in key ways from Trumpism, especially in its muscular anti-corporate, populist zeal.
In January, in a commentary that went viral on the right, Carlson excoriated American political leaders for their commitment to empty capitalism: “For our ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer,” he said. “They teach us it’s more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to raise your own kids.”
He regularly criticizes the tech giants, whom he argues are censoring his and his followers’ views. But he also hates corporations more generally for what he calls their attempts to influence culture and politics (including by boycotting his show): His critics, he said in May, “believe democracy is when a tiny group of rich people imposes its values on everyone else by force.”
In June, Carlson praised Elizabeth Warren’s plan for “economic patriotism”: “Many of Warren’s policy prescriptions make obvious sense,” he said, wondering why Republicans, including Trump, didn’t join her vision. “What if the Republican leadership here in Washington had bothered to learn the lessons of the 2016 election?”
The second thing that scares me about Carlson is his racism, which is both more extreme and more cannily packaged for a digital audience than is Trump’s.
While Trump is a creature of cable television, Carlson’s segments look like extended YouTube clips, and they’re designed to play to an audience that is extremely online. His critics and white supremacists themselves point out that, more than anyone else on television, Carlson functions as a kind of laundromat for white identity movements: Several times a week, he’ll lift ideas, story lines and troll-based narratives directly from the fetid swamp of online hatred. Then he’ll clean these theories up and wrap them in a bow for his mainstream audience, usually to advance an overarching idea that he mentions constantly: that, thanks to an “invasion” of immigrants, white people in America and Europe face economic and cultural calamity, and that the political, corporate and media establishments are abetting their destruction.
“No one covers white identity more consistently than Tucker,” said Madeline Peltz, who watches Carlson’s show every night as a researcher for Media Matters for America, a liberal advocacy group that tracks conservative outlets. “I cannot remember a single episode in the last two years that didn’t include these ideas.”
I’d known all this before I started watching, but actually watching blew my mind: Carlson’s propaganda was so constant, and the sleight of hand with which he inserted barely sanitized racist theories into his broadcast so swift, that I began to see the outlines of my nightmare — that Trump was only a prelude, and that even if he loses next year, someone far more sophisticated than our current president could come along to push digitally mediated politics in an even darker direction.
Carlson — who talks often with Trump, and was reportedly instrumental in advising Trump against attacking Iran in June — recently disclaimed any interest in running for president. He has been a nimble shape-shifter over the course of his career (a decade ago, he was a libertarian), so it’s possible that his latest critiques of capitalism are just an act.
But he may also have noticed that there are lots of conservative voters in America who don’t care for the Republican Party’s giveaways to corporations. Hence the outlines of a political vision: Carlson is aiming to mix a lefty-sounding economic agenda with a white nationalist-inspired cultural agenda — and to muddy the marriage by arguing that his and his followers’ ideas are being stifled by the tech giants that he’s fighting.
This is Carlson’s entire schtick. He uses the cover of capitalist hardship to advance theories of white oppression, often while summoning further harassment of his critics. He’s taking it to television, five nights a week. And where it ends up could be hellish.
I’ve been writing this for a while. Carlson represents something very threatening to our system. Very. But Manjoo fails to make the important connection that explains where Carlson sits in the political ecosystem. I wrote this back in Februar, and this in June about Carlson’s sneaky patriarchal neo-fascism. This was the latest, from about a month ago:
After several days of controversy over his insistence that white supremacy in America is a hoax, Fox News superstar Tucker Carlson is tired. He announced on Wednesday night that he’d be going fishing for a few days. Fox News insists that this was a scheduled vacation but as CNN’s Oliver Darcy notes, Fox News hosts who start dumpster fires often “take a few days off” when advertisers’ customers feel they’ve gone too far and the boys in the boardroom start to feel too much heat. In the case of Bill O’Reilly, he abruptly went away on “vacation” one day and never returned.
It’s unknown whether Carlson will be back next week. According to the Hollywood Reporter, after he said last December that immigrants made America “dirtier” he lost 26 sponsors. They speculate that he won’t lose his job over this latest controversy because his show now depends upon smaller direct-marketing companies which are unlikely to flee. We’ll know soon enough.
But it’s possible that part of the reason he was sent off to the woods is something that goes beyond his insistence that White Supremacy is a hoax. As much as people are rightly laying responsibility for much of the philosophy and rhetoric that clearly motivated the El Paso killer at the feet of the president, it’s important to remember where Trump gets many of his talking points: Fox News.
Anyone who has tuned into their evening lineup over the past couple of years knows that the language in the shooter’s online screed could have come from the mouths of any number of the network’s stars. But the only one who has been spouting the specific ideological mix that motivated the killer is Tucker Carlson.
Media Matters cataloged some of the xenophobic and racist rhetoric of the most vociferous anti-immigrant pundits on Fox News:
And USA Today analyzed the president’s speeches since 2017 and found that he has “used the words ‘predator,’ ‘invasion,’ ‘alien,’ ‘killer,’ ‘criminal’ and ‘animal’ at his rallies while discussing immigration more than 500 times. But for all of the degrading language he’s deployed against immigrants and people of color, Trump has failed to adopt a very specific term that seemed defined the thesis of the El Paso shooter’s screed: “replacement.” However, if you watched that video above, you’ll have noticed that it’s used frequently on Fox News, particularly by Carlson.
It stands to reason that Trump wouldn’t have picked that up. It’s much too cerebral for him. After all, he didn’t understand that when the Charlottesville Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us” they were talking about his own beloved daughter and son-in-law. He has no intellectual understanding of the white supremacist movement. He’s simply an old-school racist without any need for an underlying philosophy to justify it.
But the “Great Replacement” theory is a big deal among white nationalists worldwide. Essentially it comes down to two intersecting ideas. They believe that “the west” is threatened by immigrants from non-white countries resulting in white people being “replaced.” And the whole thing is part of a secret Jewish conspiracy to rule a one-race world. The Fox News “mainstream” American version doesn’t fully embrace the second idea, at least not publicly. But they are all-in on the first one, cleverly couching it in partisan political terms as a Democratic Party strategy to deny Republicans (who are, as we all know, nearly all white) their God-given right to be a majority of this country.
Since the massacre last weekend some people on the right have been saying the shooter couldn’t really be considered a person of the right because he criticized corporations and had concerns about the environment. They must not have been paying attention to Tucker Carlson. Of all the Fox News personalities who harp on immigration, he is the one with the most sophisticated white nationalist ideology. His ideas fall much more in line with the new strain of right-wing “populism” of Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon than David Duke (although the latter is a big fan.)
In a nutshell, they see anti-corporatism and environmentalism as necessary to save Western civilization, not because corporations are sucking the life from working people and killing the planet but because corporations and climate change are creating conditions that make brown and back people migrate to countries with predominantly white populations. And among the “ecofascist” alt-right and the neo-Nazis, environmentalism is based upon reverence for “the land of your people” which explains the Charlottesville marchers chanting the Nazi slogan “Blood and Soil.” Carlson hasn’t gone that far but these people are all walking in the same direction.
At the recent National Conservatism Conference, Carlson gave the keynote speech in which he made it clear that he believes the future of the Republican Party lies in adopting his right-wing populist agenda as a way to gain support for anti-immigration policies. He’s quite clever about it. He rails against the corporations for kowtowing to leftist advocacy:
Somewhere in the late 1990s, corporate America realized this. They learned that if they did the bidding of the left on social issues, they would get a pass on everything else. They could freeze wages. They could destroy the environment. They could strangle free speech. They can eliminate privacy. In general, they could make public life much worse.
And his agenda to have women leave the workforce and stay home to have more children is presented as an anti-corporate, big-government benefit proposed by Elizabeth Warren to allow women to throw off the yoke of corporate tyranny. In reality, it’s yet another Orbán policy designed to boost the native population so that immigrant labor is no longer necessary. We know this because Carlson has said as much:
[Y]ou are saying our low birthrates are a justification for immigration. I’m saying our low birthrates are a tragedy that say something awful about the economy and the selfish stupidity of our leaders. I’m not demonizing anybody. I’m not against the immigrants. I’m just, I’m for the Americans. Nobody cares about them. It’s like, shut up, you’re dying, we’re gonna replace you.
There have been no confirmed reports that the El Paso killer ever watched Fox News. Most young people don’t. And there is plenty of access to this extremist ideology online. But had he tuned in on any given night to Tucker Carlson’s show he could have heard all of the ideas he said in his screed were motivation for his deadly acts. Carlson has been mainstreaming that killer’s ideology for years now. The results speak for themselves:
