This legislation was a life changer for Americans. Those of you too young to remember the before time, imagine what it was like for parents who lost their jobs if they took time off to give birth or take care of their newborn babies. Men just didn’t do it at all. It was uncivilized.
He really has no idea what he’s doing. He’s just vamping to get through the day. Eric Levitz at NY Magazine:
Hostage taking is, traditionally, a means to an end. A criminal organization wants to earn fast cash, so it kidnaps the child of a business tycoon. Or a militant group wants some of its members released from prison, so it seizes a government building. Maybe some of the individuals involved are sadists or psychopaths who get a kick out of threatening people’s lives. But their ultimate aim isn’t to terrorize; the ransom is the point.
House Republicans, however, appear to be nontraditional hostage takers. Instead of formulating demands and then contriving a hostage situation in order to get them met, Kevin McCarthy’s caucus has formulated a hostage situation and is now scrambling to come up with some demands. The party knows it wants to threaten to trigger a global financial crisis unless Joe Biden gives them something. But they don’t actually know what that thing is.
In recent days, the White House has reiterated its unwillingness to negotiate over a debt-ceiling hike. Its reasoning is simple: Everyone involved recognizes that raising the debt ceiling merely authorizes the executive branch to honor spending commitments that Congress has already made, and that failing to do so would have disastrous consequences for the American people. So neither party should try to coerce the other into passing policies antithetical to its ideology by threatening to torpedo the full faith and credit of the United States.
At the same time, the Biden administration has expressed a general willingness to negotiate with Republicans over fiscal policy outside the context of a debt-ceiling standoff. But before entering into such discussions, the president would like McCarthy to honor a simple request: “Show me your budget and I’ll show you mine” was Biden’s message for the Speaker Monday afternoon.
But McCarthy won’t take him up on that offer. Even as Republicans insist that their fiscal plans are so urgently necessary and democratically mandated that they’re justified in coercing a coequal branch of government into enacting them, they have refused to reveal what those plans actually are.
Their lack of candor isn’t hard to understand. There is simply no way to reconcile Republican activists’ fiscal pretensions with Republican electeds’ political imperatives.
Conservative true believers are committed to simultaneously balancing the federal budget within a decade and slashing tax rates. In order to win his bid for House Speaker, McCarthy had to commit to adopting a “Budget Resolution balancing within 10 years.” The Republican Study Committee, the largest House GOP caucus, released a plan to achieve that goal last year. But it included sweeping cuts to Medicare and Social Security, which a large majority of voters oppose.
Last month, Donald Trump warned his party that “Under no circumstances should Republicans vote to cut a single penny from Medicare or Social Security.” And GOP lawmakers have heeded that call, with McCarthy telling CBS on Sunday that Medicare and Social Security cuts were “off the table.”
Meanwhile, the chair of the House Appropriations Committee, Texas Republican Kay Granger, has sworn that House Republicans do not “support cutting our national defense.”
The GOP’s position on Medicaid is less clear. Under Donald Trump, Republicans tried and failed to slash Medicaid spending by more than $1 trillion. And Republicans have pointedly avoided forswearing cuts to that program. Given that Medicaid finances long-term care for millions of seniors and keeps many rural hospitals afloat, however, gutting it presents many of the same coalitional problems as slashing Medicare and Social Security. The GOP’s disproportionately old and rural-dwelling voters disproportionately benefit from all three programs.
In any case, Republican lawmakers have recently sworn off cuts to “entitlements” altogether, insisting “their plan will only focus on the discretionary side of spending,” according to CNN.
But balancing the budget in ten years without cutting entitlements or defense would require slashing discretionary spending on everything else by 85 percent, the New York Times reports. And that is before the cost of the GOP’s desired tax cuts are factored in. Such draconian spending reductions would upend myriad services that Republican constituencies rely on and countless projects that bring investment and jobs to red districts.
Thus, any set of fiscal demands that McCarthy releases will either betray conservative true believers by failing to balance the federal budget or generate propaganda for Biden’s reelection by aligning the Republican Party with gargantuan cuts to popular programs, all while antagonizing Donald Trump, national security hawks, Biden-district GOP representatives, or some combination of the three.
Complicating matters further, if McCarthy wanted to tie a debt-ceiling hike to a partisan austerity bill and then pass it through the House, he would have virtually no margin for error. The GOP has a scant five-vote majority in the chamber, and three House Republicans are so delusional and/or nihilistic that they have committed to opposing a debt-ceiling increase “under any circumstances.” Which is to say: These lawmakers officially see forcing the United States into default as an end in itself.
That means that any GOP bill to raise the debt limit could afford to lose only a single additional Republican. Given that many Republicans in deep-red districts more or less exist to engage in politically toxic ideological posturing, while several GOP lawmakers in purple districts do not want to make de facto in-kind contributions to their Democratic challengers, it seems possible that there is no debt-ceiling bill that can pass the House with only Republican votes.
All this said, there are surely some modest spending cuts on which all Republicans can agree. But if your objective is merely to pare back spending on the margins, then you have no rationale for picking an apocalyptic fight over the debt limit; you can just press the issue during the negotiations over next year’s budget. The whole premise of obstructing a debt-ceiling hike is that the deficit has become a national emergency requiring extraordinary measures. Proposing mere tweaks to the federal budget belies that premise.
So why have Republicans picked this fight? After all, in contrast to the Obama era, the conservative base is no longer animated by deficit concerns. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn notes, in March 2021, more Republicans had “heard a lot” about the Seuss estate canceling six problematic children’s books than had heard about Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion stimulus package. And when the Times/Sienna poll asked midterm voters to name the most important problem facing America, only one of the survey’s 1,641 respondents mentioned the debt, the deficit, or federal spending.
In truth, Republicans aren’t fighting to win anything in particular; they’re fighting to fight. Senate Republicans agreed to pass an omnibus spending bill in December despite the fact that their party would have more leverage over the budget after it took control of the House in January. That bill authorized large increases in domestic spending. Right-wing media went apoplectic at this demonstration of weakness and bipartisan comity. The incoming GOP majority therefore felt compelled to perform its own commitment to the conservative cause by taking the debt ceiling hostage. Pursuing extreme tactics was the imperative. Actual policy goals were an afterthought.
So McCarthy does not want to show Biden his budget. He wants the president to give him an off-ramp — some way of saving face with his die-hards without jeopardizing his frontliners’ reelection campaigns. Alas, for the moment, Biden has no interest in doing the Speaker’s job for him.
One hopes he never does. McCarthy wanted the job so badly he sold his soul (what little there was) to get it. It is nobody’s job to bail him out.
Biden’s job as president is to keep the economy going and the country safe and his job as the leader of the Democratic Party is to let the Republicans blow themselves up if that’s what they are intent upon doing.
Via the Puck newsletter, the stuff of nightmares.
This weekend, No Labels is having its annual donor conference in Miami, and, naturally, the event presents a complicated decision for eager-beaver Republican ’24 candidates who would love to hobnob with mega-donors, like Dallas billionaire Harlan Crow, a supporter of Mike Pompeo, but don’t want to be showered with Ross Perot-style criticism. No Labels, of course, doesn’t see itself as a pesky third party spoiler vehicle, but rather an insurance policy against a Joe Biden and Donald Trump rematch—and they’re putting $50 million to work to get onto the ballot in all 50 states as they poll test for their ideal franken-party fusion candidate. So far they’ve been hyping a Joe Manchin and Larry Hogan ticket to donors. Manchin, Hogan and Susan Collins are all on panels at the retreat this weekend.
So they’re putting No-Labels on the ballot in all 50 states? I wonder if anyone can then run on the No Labels line? By anyone, I mean a disgruntled primary sore-loser who likes to threaten to run as an independent if he doesn’t get what he wants, of course.
Mike Pompeo is giving interviews showing once again just what a smarmy, arrogant prick he is:
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who has cast doubt on President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, repeatedly praised Jan. 6 as an example of a “peaceful transition” of power in an interview Thursday.
“We delivered a peaceful transition on January 6, 2021, exactly as our Constitution requires,” Pompeo, a potential 2024 presidential candidate, told Sky News.
Pompeo was responding to questions about why his new book — “Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love” — does not focus more on the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and former President Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, because it reflects on his four years working in the Trump administration.
Pompeo, who said the book was centered on “how we delivered security abroad,” condemned the violent aspects of Jan. 6 but defended the outcome in speaking with Sky News.
“It’s terrible when folks commit these kinds of acts of violence, and I hope they’ll be prosecuted appropriately for doing that. But make no mistake about it, that night America also showed its strength. Vice President Pence finished the election. We had a peaceful transition of power,” Pompeo said.
He blamed security officials, and not Trump, for the violence at the Capitol. “There was a bad day at the Capitol. The security team there failed to prevent these guys from rioting there,” Pompeo said.
Pompeo was also asked about his comments days after the 2020 election that there would be a smooth transition to “a second Trump administration.” In a Fox News interview at the time, Pompeo made no mention of handing over power to Biden.
Pompeo argued Thursday that his remarks were taken out of context.
“To read the whole statement I made that day, I spoke decently about the United States of America,” Pompeo said. “And I don’t describe it as being stolen. But there are lots of anomalies in our election. And we can’t have that in the United States.”
You’ll note that he doesn’t blame Trump for gathering those violent freaks and inciting them to storm the Capitol. If he thinks that’s going to keep Trump from verbally assaulting him, he’s got another thing coming. Semafor reports (subscription required)
Republicans opposed to Donald Trump are complaining that a massive pile-up in the 2024 presidential field is set to hand him the nomination. But you won’t see Trump, who has publicly and privately groused about the many onetime allies now challenging his hold on the party, celebrating the news.
For Trump, the expectation was that he’d face a largely uncontested path back to the nomination after “six years of people sucking up to him,” one source familiar with the campaign said, “because all the people who are likely to contest him have been saying that he was the greatest president ever.”
Trump said last year “it would be very disloyal” if former Vice President Mike Pence as well as former cabinet members like former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo entered the race. On Thursday, he told Hugh Hewitt that Haley was “overly ambitious,” that he “took Mike out of nothing,” and that both had reneged on claims they would not run against him (Pompeo said on the same program last year that Trump wouldn’t affect his decision).
As for Ron DeSantis, who Trump keeps arguing was a nobody until he endorsed him in a competitive primary for governor, a run would be “a great act of disloyalty,” he told the Associated Press over the weekend.
He also complained last month that many of his high-profile evangelical supporters have shown “great disloyalty” by refusing to endorse his campaign this time.
Trump has been told by advisers that voters are unlikely to care about his rivals’ personal fealty, another source close to the former president said. But he’s continued anyway, which suggests his message isn’t primarily for voters.
“From my perspective, the loyalty message is a personal one,” the source said. “It’s the one that the president is saying directly to the potential candidate.”
Meanwhile, polls continue to suggest Trump benefits from a divided field given his strong base of support. There’s little sign he or his campaign aides are concerned about a real challenge from the non-DeSantis candidates and, until proven otherwise, anyone who gets into the race is considered unlikely to draw many votes from his base.
Morning Consult’s 2024 GOP Primary Tracker has Trump with a comfortable 48% of the vote, if the election were held today. DeSantis sits behind him at 31%, with other votes divided between potential candidates like Pence and Haley.
“I would view a crowded primary to be much like a repeat of 2016. I think the worst case for the Trump team would be if everyone else coalesced around one candidate,” one GOP strategist told Semafor.
SHELBY’S VIEW
Trump famously prized loyalty within his inner circle before coming to Washington (even if it wasn’t expected of him in return) and has taken onetime allies considering runs more personally as a result, sources say.
“It’s just a little surprising for someone like that, who isn’t necessarily a traditional politician, to see people being disloyal,” another source close to Trump said.
It’s a problem that’s followed him into his political career. Since his early days in the White House, he has disowned — or been disowned by — numerous senior officials from his own administration, fueling a sense of betrayal. It’s only gotten worse since his failed attempt to overturn the 2020 election, which led the famously loyal Pence to break with him and additional cabinet members to resign in protest or publicly condemn his behavior.
Some of his closest current supporters were also once brutal critics and even presidential rivals in 2016, which means there’s always suspicion over who might be the next to turn.
ROOM FOR DISAGREEMENT
While he’s not happy about it, some Republicans close to Trump believe he is aware that more candidates splitting the opposition is a net benefit and is capable of using it to his advantage.
The tension between head and heart has also been visible in Trump’s reaction to Haley, an on-again/off-again critic who is planning a presidential campaign. Trump told reporters on his plane over the weekend that he gave her his blessing to run in a phone call — an uncharacteristically generous response that perhaps suggested the campaign was happy to see her in the race.
At the same time, he reminded the press she had previously said in 2021 she’d stand aside if he ran again. Later, he shared a clip of the moment on Truth Social after news broke of her impending announcement.
“Nikki has to follow her heart, not her honor,” Trump wrote. “She should definitely run!”
He said that. And then he did this:
Lol:
I believe it. This is the desperate ad DeSantis ran and it garnered him just enough votes to win in 2018:
Headlines at the New York Times and Washington Post trumpet 25 straight months of job growth. Unexpected jobs numbers Friday show the unemplyment rate falling to 3.4 percent, a rate not seen since 1969.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the economy added 517,000 jobs last month. The labor force participation rate remained stable at 62.4 percent but below pre-pandemic levels. But wage growth is slowing with inflation.
Despite claims that employers cannot find workers because “nobody wants to work these days,” restaurants cannot find workers because many have found better jobs with “increased flexibility, stability and often better pay” (Washington Post):
Nearly three years since the coronavirus pandemic upended the labor market, restaurants, bars, hotels and casinos remain short-staffed, with nearly 2 million unfilled openings. The leisure and hospitality industry, which before the pandemic accounted for much of the country’s job growth, is still short roughly 500,000 employees from 2020 levels, even as many other sectors have recovered.
Direct customer-contact jobs (you may have noticed) are understaffed since the pandemic.
“There’s been a shift away from the sectors where we have the most person-to-person contact,” said Nick Bunker, economic research director at the jobs site Indeed. “It feels like no one’s working, even though we can tell from government statistics that they are.”
In such a market, workers may shun low-pay jobs with volatile work schedules and limited hours. Perhaps the gloss has dimmed on the supposed “gig economy” sold as entrepreneurship by employers looking to minimize labor costs and avoid paying benefits.
“The people who used to work in restaurants have gotten new jobs,” the manager of Atwood’s Tavern in Cambridge, Mass., tells the Post. “They’ve all moved on.”
The numbers won’t change the partisan lean of opinions on the economy. See here.
UPDATE: That wage growth slowing with inflation? Timothy Noah notes that that’s nominal, not adjusted for inflation: “In 2022, real private wages declined 1.2 percent, even though inflation was coming down during the second half of that year. The only good news is that since September, inflation has been falling much faster than quarterly wage growth.” Power is shifting back to employers.
“I knew there were some crazies out there. But I underestimated how many,” a friend said at an event last night.
“Our culture is so sick…” Digby wrote in her last Thursday post.
Scanning through Twitter every morning reinforces that assessment. Couldn’t it have just been a dancing fever?
Police in Huntington Park, Calif. on Saturday shot and killed a knife-wielding suspect, a double amputee who dismounted his wheelchair to flee on his stumps.
The Telegraph reports:
Police said they got a call on Saturday that a man was stabbed by another man in a wheelchair. Officers said when they arrived on the scene they found Mr Lowe with a butcher knife.
Video footage taken by a passerby which was released online on Monday shows Mr Lowe out of his wheelchair, trying to get away from two officers using his arms to propel himself along the ground.
When a third officer arrived, they shot Lowe “around ten times,” killing him, said Lt. Hugo Reynaga.
‘He tried to run away, and every time he turned around and did the motion like he was gonna throw the knife at him, they Tased him,’ said Reynaga. ‘They were trying to give this guy the less-lethal Taser shock. And because it was ineffective, they had to go to something that was more effective.’
“The suspect attempted to throw the butcher knife at the officers again, at which time an officer involved shooting occurred,” the sheriff’s office statement said.
“Attempted”? “Again”? Might the cops have boxed him in or followed him until he wore himself out? Were they late for an appointment?
Ed Obayashi, a national policing expert specializing in use-of-force investigations, who has watched the video on social media, said that to justify a shooting, officers must show they had been under immediate threat and had considered reasonable alternatives, including using a Taser.
“But here we see an individual that, by definition, appears to be physically incapable of resisting officers,” he said.” Even if he is armed with a knife, his mobility is severely restricted.
“He’s an amputee. He appears to be at a distinct physical disadvantage, lessening the apparent threat to officers.”
High-profile police shootings and Memphis police beating to death an unarmed Black man seems not to have given police in Huntington Park reason to consider something less effective than death for subduing a double amputee.
A selection follows of other recent insanity:
The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper continues to document the mass insanity.
MAGA believers insist that Donald Trump is the real president today despite losing to Joe Biden in 2020 by seven million votes. Trump is in charge of the military, they tell Klepper, except for any arms sent to Ukraine.
They believe Trump is serving his second term from Mar-a-Lago and planning for a third. Klepper does not point out that that would violate the 22nd Amendment. That would go over their heads.
We are so screwed.
A federal law that prohibits people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from possessing firearms is unconstitutional, a conservative-leaning appeals court ruled Thursday.
The ruling is the latest significant decision dismantling a gun restriction in the wake of the Supreme Court’s expansion of Second Amendment rights last year in the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen decision.
The 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals said that the federal law targeting those believed to pose a domestic violence threat could not stand under the Bruen test, which requires that gun laws have a historical analogy to the firearm regulations in place at the time of the Constitution’s framing.
“Through that lens, we conclude that (the law’s) ban on possession of firearms is an ‘outlier’ that our ancestors would never have accepted,” the 5th Circuit said.
The court’s opinion was written by Judge Cory Todd Wilson, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump. He was joined by Reagan-appointee Judge Edith Jones and Judge James Ho, another Trump appointee who also wrote a concurrence.
The 5th Circuit panel was not persuaded by the historical parallels put forward by the US Justice Department, which was defending the conviction of a person who possessed a firearm while under a domestic violence restraining order that had been imposed after he was accused of assaulting his ex-girlfriend. The Justice Department argued that the domestic violence law was analogous to 17th-and 18th century regulations that disarmed “dangerous” persons.
“The purpose of these ‘dangerousness’ laws was the preservation of political and social order, not the protection of an identified person from the specific threat posed by another,” the 5th Circuit opinion read. “Therefore, laws disarming ‘dangerous’ classes of people are not ‘relevantly similar’” to “serve as historical analogues.”
A spokesperson for the Justice Department did not immediately respond to a CNN inquiry. If the 5th Circuit’s ruling is appealed, it could set up another showdown over gun rights at the Supreme Court.
Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and professor at the University of Texas School of Law, said clarity from the court is necessary.
“One of two things is true: Either this kind of blind, rigid, context-free, and common-sense-defying assessment of history is exactly what the Supreme Court intended in its landmark ruling last June in Bruen, or it isn’t,” Vladeck said.
“Either way, it’s incumbent upon the justices in the Bruen majority to clarify which one they meant – and to either endorse or reject the rather terrifying idea that individuals under an active domestic violence-related restraining order are nevertheless constitutionally entitled to possess firearms,” he added.
The defendant challenging his conviction, Zackey Rahimi, had lost in an earlier round before the 5th Circuit, before the Supreme Court issued its Bruen ruling last year. The previous 5th Circuit opinion was withdrawn after the Bruen decision was handed down, and the appeals court did another round of briefing directed at the new test.
There was also a big debate about allowing Representatives to carry loaded guns into committee meetings. The gun fanatics won.
Our culture is so sick…
Our newly minted “independent” Kyrsten Sinema making friends.
The good news is that she’s no longer attending any Democratic strategy meetings. It’s pretty clear that she doesn’t have the party’s best interests at heart.
I know I’m probably paying way to much attention to Tucker Carlson lately but he’s an especially dangerous force in our politics and half the time he’s an Orbanesque white nationalist and the rest of the time he’s just nuts. I don’t know quite what to make of it but I feel instinctively that we shouldn’t look away. There’s something going on here and it’s not good.
Philip Bump looked at the numbers and it’s worth taking note:
In the right-wing media universe, the 500-pound gorilla is now and has long been Fox News. There have been challengers, certainly, including some robust ones. Breitbart’s effectiveness in pulling rhetoric from the fringe into the mainstream conversation about a decade ago, for example, and cable news start-ups like One America and Newsmax more recently. But Fox News has weathered such challenges through co-option, heft, institutional support and combinations of the three. So, when Republicans are asked where they get their news, they are most likely to say Fox.
And within the Fox News universe, the 500-pound gorilla is Tucker Carlson.
It used to be the case that the most-watched host on the network was Sean Hannity. His prime-time opinion show (using Fox’s gauzy differentiation from its purportedly objective news programming) was not only the top show on Fox but, from 2017 to 2020, the most-watched show on cable news overall.
But that was the era of Donald Trump, who operated in symbiosis with Hannity. After running neck-and-neck with Hannity in 2020, Carlson passed Hannity in annual average viewers the following year, a lead he held in 2022.
Carlson also generates more attention in general. In 2020, Carlson started generating more search interest on Google than Hannity, a lead he has maintained every month of President Biden’s tenure in office.
Carlson achieved this position in large part because he retains credibility as someone who wants to tear down the establishment. Hannity’s loyalty to Trump ensnared him in the new GOP firmament, leading the Fox host to line up behind Trump’s endorsed candidates for office and to reflexively defend the president (and former president) as needed. His effort to cater to his audience meant Trump loyalty. Carlson’s approach is different, picking up the rhetoric that propelled Trump to the White House — the entire system is corrupt and the elites are trying to destroy you — and deploying it against all comers.
His disparagement of the powers-that-be is often starkly — or obnoxiously — articulated in service of his us-vs.-them framework. He’s taken to describing a loosely aggregated group of international business and political leaders — the sorts of people who attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, for example — as “lizard overlords.” On Wednesday night, he suggested that this vague group was for some reason trying to limit the ability of people to access cash, a discussion that occurred over on-screen text reading: “IT’S LOOKING MORE LIKELY THAT WE WILL SEE THE DAY WHEN OUR LIZARD OVERLORDS BAN CASH.”
Carlson has a track record of incorrect predictions (like his recent insistence that there would be violent protests after the release of video showing the police beating of Tyre Nichols), but he never allows that to encumber him.
This reflexive opposition to the elites in power, and his willingness to move individuals into and out of that group as it becomes useful, has led Carlson to some unusual positions. His autocratic sympathies are unsubtle; he’s offered fawning interviews to leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, people who contest the Western leaders Carlson disdains. He has explicitly rationalized the Russian invasion of Ukraine on multiple occasions, making his commentary a regular feature of state-run programming in Russia.
It’s hard to disentangle his support for Russia: Is it enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s autocratic approach to governance? Is it that Russia is fiercely committed to kneecapping the same group of Western elites as Carlson? The trigger isn’t obvious, but the effect is. Carlson is a nexus of skepticism about Ukraine, and that has drawn him closer to politicians on the right-most fringe of the Republican Party who echo or share his position. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (Ga.), who parlayed her large platform of support to ally closely with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), is a frequent Carlson guest and a vocal opponent of funding for Ukraine’s military.
This week, former British prime minister Boris Johnson, a member of that country’s Conservative Party, came to Washington. During an event Wednesday at the Atlantic Council about the war in Ukraine, Johnson called out Carlson specifically for both his position on the invasion — and for his grip on the American right.
“I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson. Has anybody heard of somebody called — has anybody heard of Tucker Carlson?” Johnson joked in response to a question about responding to Russian aggression. “What is it with this guy? All these wonderful Republicans seem somehow intimidated by his — by his perspective.”
“I haven’t watched anything that he’s said,” Johnson continued. “But I I’m struck by how often this comes up. Some bad ideas are getting into — starting to infect some of the thinking around the world about what Putin stands for, what he believes in. It’s a disaster. He stands for war, aggression, systematic murder, rape and destruction. That’s what he stands for.”
Carlson, of course, seized upon the comments in his show later that night.
“Former British prime minister Boris Johnson rolled, sashayed into Washington yesterday,” Carlson began. He said that he’d invited Johnson on the program only to learn, a few hours beforehand, that Johnson was going to pass. Carlson framed this as: “Boris Johnson, reputed to be the smartest leader of any English-speaking country in the world, did not want to publicly defend his position on Ukraine. He was afraid to take questions about it.”
Then he showed a clip of Johnson’s comments.
“All these cowards in Washington are afraid of this show, Boris Johnson said derisively,” Carlson said. “Yet somehow he never mentioned that he is one of them.”
Carlson, understandably, framed this as being a function of timidity, instead of a function of dismissiveness. And to support the idea that Johnson was afraid, he suggested that Johnson was “trying to sell lawmakers on a new world war.”
“Millions would die in the war that Boris Johnson is promoting,” Carlson claimed at one point. “The public has a right to know. Why are we doing this before it starts? And as you can probably tell, it looks like it’s starting very soon.” He added that there’s “no popular support in this country or in any country in Europe for what Boris Johnson is now pushing.”
This is how it works. Carlson casts Johnson as part of The Elite and, specifically, as someone who wants a full-scale conflict between Russia and the West. There’s no validity to this; it’s just Carlson extrapolating out from a consensus position — we should support Ukraine militarily — to an imagined one.
He’s been offering similar warnings since the earliest days of the war. He or his guests warned that the conflict could lead to World War III on March 4, March 10, March 15, March 16, March 22, March 25 and March 28 of last year — and that was just March.
Johnson’s message was clear, even if off the cuff: There’s no reason to fear this guy. But Carlson’s response shows why so many people do. Carlson will claim that the worst possible thing will happen and that his opponents are participants in schemes that seek to ensure the worst possible outcomes for average Americans. He has invested years in stoking a sense among his viewers that wealthy political and business leaders are not only indifferent to them but actively hostile, and it’s trivial to simply slot new characters into this cabal. It’s a Ship of Theseus approach to fearmongering: The constituent elements aren’t even the point.
It’s made him the biggest force on the cable news channel that’s the biggest force in his political universe. And while Johnson is obviously right, it’s hard to imagine that his comments about Carlson will have the desired effect. Carlson’s talking to millions of people a night. Republicans are therefore more worried about what he might say than what Johnson already did.
Are they really worried? I don’t know. He hob-b=mobs with Trump and DeSantis has been on his show many, many times. Cui bono?