63 search results for "Carlson Orban"

Kim Jong Un says he likes Trump because he isn’t moral and doesn’t judge. He’s must love Tucker Carlson

by digby

Tucker Carlson is now literally defending mass murder😳

"You've got to be honest about what it means to lead a country, it means killing people. A lot of countries commit atrocities, including our allies. It's silly & stupid to point out KJU is 'so mean''pic.twitter.com/k5PwASgELP— Qasim Rashid, Esq. (@QasimRashid) June 30, 2019

TPM:

President Donald Trump brought Fox News host Tucker Carlson to North Korea on Sunday instead of his own national security adviser, John Bolton.

Several journalists reported seeing Carlson on the sidelines of Trump’s historic visitto the the demilitarized zone separating North and South Korea, and the hosts of “Fox & Friends” confirmed Carlson was there during a phone interview with him.

Meanwhile, Bolton was shipped off to Mongolia over the weekend.

While speaking to his Fox colleagues, Carlson defended Trump’s friendliness with the brutal North Korean dictator.

“[North Korea]’s a disgusting place, obviously. So there’s no defending it,” Carlson said. “On the other hand, you’ve got to be honest about what it means to lead a country. It means killing people.”

“Not on the scale that the North Koreans do, but a lot of countries commit atrocities, including a number that we’re closely allied with,” he continued.

You have to love “there’s no defending” North Korea followed by a sickeningly cynical defense of North Korea.

I’m not a Bolton fan, to say the least, but Tucker’s “anything goes” attitude toward totalitarian violence is not any better. I know Trump doesn’t know any history but surely Carlson does. This sort of thing tends to lead to very, very, very bad things that you end up being drawn into whether you like it or not.

Carlson is a wily opportunist who is clearly enjoying his brush with power. But beware of thinking he’s some kind of moderating influence on Trump. He’s this guy.

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Tucker goes full Orbán

by digby

Tucker Carlson: “I think people don’t really understand the degree to which George Soros is successfully remaking this country” pic.twitter.com/8oUn1CaE3v

— Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) June 11, 2019

If you want to understand Tucker Carlson you have to read about Viktor Orbán:

Like Pol Pot or Josef Stalin, Orbán dreams of liquidating the intelligentsia, draining the public of education, and molding a more pliant nation. But he is a state-of-the-art autocrat; he understands that he need not resort to the truncheon or the midnight knock at the door. His assault on civil society arrives in the guise of legalisms subverting the institutions that might challenge his authority.

CEU is a private university, accredited in both the United States and Hungary, and for that reason it has posed a particular challenge to the regime. The school was founded by the Budapest-born financier George Soros, whom Orbán has vilified as a nefarious interloper in Hungary’s affairs. Soros had conceived the school during the dying days of communism to train a generation of technocrats who would write new constitutions, privatize state enterprises, and lead the post-Soviet world into a cosmopolitan future. The university, he declared, would “become a prototype of an open society.”

But open society is exactly what Orbán hopes to roll back; illiberal democracy is the euphemism he uses to describe the state he is building. The prime minister and his allies did their best to make life unpleasant for CEU. Then, in April 2017, Parliament passed a law setting conditions that threatened to render CEU’s continued presence in the country illegal. All of Ignatieff’s hopes of settling into a placid academic life dissipated. Eighty thousand protesters filled the streets.

The effort to evict CEU rattled liberals across the world. Academic freedom—a bloodless term, but a concept at the core of all that the West professes to treasure—seemed to be slipping away in a country where it had looked firmly established. Universities rushed to declare their solidarity; 17 Nobel Prize winners signed a letter of support. Even the United States, run by a president who is no fan of George Soros, offered to help the university.

And so, for much of the past two years, CEU has been the barricades of a civilizational struggle, where liberalism would mount a defense against right-wing populism. The fate of the university was a test of whether liberalism had the tactical savvy and emotional fortitude to beat back its new ideological foe.

Here’s more on Orbán. I would bet money this is where Carlson is getting his newfound “populism” rap. I have no idea if he really believes it. He’s a right wing performer without any discernable authentic philosophy.

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JD Vance and Project 2025 are all over his latest “I am your protector” rhetoric

As a politician, Donald Trump has always exhibited a very creepy form of paternalism. He often says things like “No one has done as much for the Black community as I did” or “I’ve been better for Jews than anyone in history.” It’s as if he’s bestowing on the people a special gift from the king and they should be grateful to him personally. Of course his boasts are always lies so they tend to fall on deaf ears, but it reveals how he sees himself as president.

Although he’s long exhibited this rhetorical tic, in recent days he’s really outdone himself. Sounding much more like a cult leader than a politician in a modern democracy, the passages in his speeches about women are downright disturbing. It started with a weird Truth Social post on September 20th:

The womenfolk are depressed but Big Daddy Trump is going to fix all that and they’ll be so happy they won’t even think about abortion. “THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY BEAUTIFUL AND GREAT AGAIN.” All that’s missing is “OR ELSE!”

You’ll note that he said he will “protect women at a level never seen before” as if women are abandoned children who are desperate for him to come and rescue them from all their travails. When is the last time you heard a major politician in America infantilize women like this? It sounds like something out of the 19th century.

He took this all a step further in his speeches over the weekend making it clear that this is an official campaign message delivered from the teleprompter (with a few off-the-cuff embellishments.) In this rendition, women are complete basketcases, barely able to function which, for some bizarre reason, is why they care about abortion rights.

It truly does have the tenor of a patriarchal cult leader speaking to his followers.

He went on like this for a while, complaining that all women are talking about is abortion (because they are so unhappy, unhealthy and depressed) but he’s going to make it all better. It’s beyond condescending, but as my colleague Amanda Marcotte points out [INSERT LINK] it betrays Trump’s frustration that women aren’t falling in line as they are supposed to do so he’s resorted to speaking to them as if they’re children.

It’s profoundly insulting although you cannot help but notice the wild cheering from the women in his audience ecstatic at the idea of Dear Leader “protecting” them. (Why anyone would believe that a man who is on tape bragging about assaulting women and has been found liable for it in a court of law is some kind of “protector” is beyond me.)

But at one point in the speech as he was defending the GOP’s record on IVF (even though the congressional Republicans just voted unanimously against a bill that would protect the right to the procedure) he made this comment:

We want beautiful babies in our country! We want you to have your beautiful, beautiful, perfect baby. We want those babies and we need them.

We want those babies and we need them? Who is we? And why do we need them?

Has he been chatting with JD Vance? Because while Trump may just be clumsily trying to finesse the abortion issue and shrink the massive gender gap with his creepy rhetoric, Vance has some very well developed thoughts on that issue.

As we all know, Vance has extreme contempt for childless women. In fact, in his view they are to blame for many of the problems in modern life because they are, you guessed it, so unhappy:

That wasn’t a one-off comment. This is something he has thought deeply about and (at least for the moment, until he changes his identity again) it’s something that very much informs his political philosophy. He believes that women who don’t bear children should not be full citizens and perhaps aren’t even fully human. Like his close pals at the Heritage Foundation who put together Project 2025, his platform is one which would give massive government incentives only to heterosexual couples with large families while also discouraging outside child care. (Who needs it when mom stays home and the otherwise useless post-menopausal grandma is forced to help?)

Vance’s contempt has caught on big in GOP circles. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Arkansas’ Aunt Lydia from the Handmaid’s Tale, made a snide comment the other day about Kamala Harris not having birthed her own children. (She’s a stepmother to two kids.) And Ohio Senate candidate Bernie Moreno whined over the weekend about suburban women wanting to have abortion all the time — and wondering why any woman over 50 would care. It’s catching on.

Much of this is just good old fashioned sexism and patriarchal yearning but there is more to it than that. Vance has been pushing pronatalism for some time, which gets us back to Trump’s blathering about how he wants women to be happy and content so they can have beautiful babies because “we need babies.”

A couple of months ago the New Yorker’s Margaret Talbot wrote a long, definitive piece on Vance’s pronatalist views which she defined this way:

Pronatalism typically combines concerns about falling birth rates with anti-immigration and anti-feminist ideas. It champions not just having children but having many—large families for the sake of large families, reproduction for reproduction’s sake. Except that, in this world view, not all reproduction is equal. Pronatalism favors native-born baby makers.

Now it makes more sense, doesn’t it? Vance’s hostility to women who haven’t given birth fits right in with the rest of this pronatalist agenda, particularly when it comes to immigration and the Great Replacement Theory which pushes for native-born women to have more children to alleviate the need for immigrant labor which pollutes the culture. It also keeps women in their place which is just as important as keeping the bloodlines pure.

This is yet another example of the influence of Hungary’s Viktor Orbán on the politics of the far right in America. Vance is a big fan and has endorsed Orbán’s policies to raise Hungary’s birth rate (and marginalize non-traditional families, particularly those that are blended and LGBTQ+.) Vance may not be the only influential member of the far right pushing these views (Tucker Carlson is another) but he’s probably the most powerful elected politician in America to make it a central part if his philosophy.

I doubt seriously that Donald Trump has even the slightest awareness of the ideological underpinnings of the speeches he’s giving about being women’s “protector” and saying “we need babies.” He’s not exactly an intellectual. But whoever is writing them certainly is and that person is pushing a JD Vance/Project 2025 agenda whether Trump knows it or not.

Salon

I’ve been belatedly listening to the Rachel Maddow podcast “Ultra” which is about a far right, Nazi-sympathizing, authoritarian plot to overthrow the FDR administration during the late 30s and early 40s. I knew about the German Bund, of course, and I’ve written about the big Nazi rally at Madison Square Garden. But I confess I was not aware of the massive investigation and trial to put Nazi spies and collaborators on trial. The echoes of today are overwhelming which is why Maddow dug into the story, I assume. (She never mentions it in the podcast, though, which is very effective.)

Being in that mindset, I guess it’s not surprising that I love the lede of this piece in The New Republic:

In his book In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, Erik Larson cites a cable sent to the State Department in June 1933 by a U.S. diplomat posted in Germany that provided a far more candid assessment of the Nazi leadership than the one that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration was then conveying to the public. “With few exceptions, the men who are running this Government are of a mentality that you and I cannot understand,” read the cable, which was written five months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. “Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.”

The article isn’t about that, however. It’s about a secret communications back channel among current American right wing players. There is documentary evidence and it’s chilling:

I’ve thought about that passage from the cable many times over the past several weeks as I’ve been reading excerpts from a private WhatsApp group chat established last December by Erik Prince, the founder of the military contractor Blackwater and younger brother of Betsy DeVos, the secretary of education during President Donald Trump’s administration, who invited around 650 of his contacts in the United States and around the world to join. Prince, who has a long track record of financing conservative candidates and causes and extensive ties to right-wing regimes around the world, named the group—which currently has around 400 members—“Off Leash,” the same name as the new podcast that he’d launched the month before.

Among the topics are the “Biden Regime” which they think is in an alliance with Islamic terrorists, hostility to democracy, hatred for Palestinians, Iran among other things, all of which are expressed in especially violent, nihilistic terms.

The author points out that while there are many conspiracy nuts (such as Lara Logan) there are also a lot of people who you might ordinarily consider to be establishment players:

All of which makes Off Leash arguably more concerning, because the group can’t be dismissed as merely a collection of harmless cranks. Many of the participants, though not all household names, are wealthy and politically wired—which makes their incessant whining in the group chat about being crushed under the bootheel of the deep state particularly grating—and they will collectively become wealthier and more influential if Trump wins the November election. That’s especially true of the Americans in the group, but the same holds for the international figures because the global right will become immensely more powerful and emboldened if the former president returns to the White House. That prospect is a source of great hope to Off Leash participants. “Trump, Orban, Milei, it’s happening,” former Blackwater executive John LaDelfa posted to the group during a trip to Argentina on December 4, two days after Prince created it. “Around the Globe, we are the sensible, the rational, the majority. Don’t give in to fear. We will defeat the Marxists.”

Collectively, Off Leash provides an informal virtual gathering place for current and former political officials, national security operatives, activists, journalists, soldiers of fortune, weapons brokers, black bag operators, grifters, convicted criminals, and other elements in the U.S. and global far right. The roster of invitees includes:

-Icons of the MAGA ecosphere such as Tucker Carlson, the most revered figure among group chat participants, with the exception of the Supreme Leader himself; Kimberly Guilfoyle, the longtime fiancée of Donald Trump Jr.; and retired Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s convicted-then-pardoned first national security adviser. Flynn has participated, Carlson only minimally, and Guilfoyle not at all.

-Current and former lawmakers and aides, such as Tennessee Congressman Mark Green of the House Freedom Caucus; Vish Burra, who was director of operations for Congressman George Santos; and Stuart Seldowitz, a national security adviser to Barack Obama from 2009 to 2011 who was arrested last November after harassing an Egyptian halal street cart vendor in New York City for two weeks, during which time he called him a “terrorist” and said, “If we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.”

These are not harmless cranks. They are “of a mentality that you and I cannot understand. Some of them are psychopathic cases and would ordinarily be receiving treatment somewhere.” Many of them will be influential in a new Trump administration.

Read the whole thing if you can.

Thank goodness Trump’s going to build a big dome over the whole country so we won’t need any

As we all, know, the biggest story in the world is the breaking news that President Joe Biden is old. Sure 9/11 was something of a big deal and the war in Iraq and the global pandemic required all of our attention for a time, but this is the most important news of our lifetime, maybe anyone’s lifetime and there’s no telling when, or if, the nation will ever recover. Still, it’s probably important to at least pay a tiny bit of attention to other things that are happening in the world just in case they might also be affected by Biden’s age in some way.

In fact, we probably should be just a little bit curious about what the former Fox News celebrity Tucker Carlson was doing in Moscow last week interviewing Russian president Vladimir Putin. Carlson has demonstrated his affinity for Putin for years now and is commonly extolled on the Russian state television channels as a model American with all the right ideas. Back in March of 2022, Mother Jones obtained a copy of a Kremlin memo with talking points for the media:

“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”

(People like Carlson used to be called “useful idiots.”) Russian state media has followed those instructions and for the past two years has featured Carlson’s commentary regularly. It’s therefore not all that surprising that he would be granted the coveted interview with Putin.

As it turns out the interview ended up mostly being a twisted history lesson from Putin with Carlson sitting there like a potted plant with a feigned fascinated expression on his face. The point of Putin’s tutorial was to explain why Russia has every right to invade Ukraine and anywhere else he might fancy.

Putin went to great pains to explain why it was the victims in WWII who made Hitler do what he did, specifically the people of Poland whom he blamed for balking at Hitler’s invasion of its country. The entire thrust of the conversation was a very thinly veiled threat to invade Poland. The Polish government certainly heard it that way. The foreign minister posted this on Friday:

He’s right. It isn’t the first time. He’s been saying it for years now and it’s one reason why the NATO alliance has not only been more unified than ever, they’ve welcomed in Finland — another country that shares a border with Russia and is definitely on Putin’s wish list. Sweden has also applied for membership but is still being held up by Russia-friendly Hungary under the leadership of authoritarian dreamboat, Viktor Orban. (There is some hope that this last impediment will be lifted in the near future.) These are countries which had long resisted joining the alliance but moved quickly to do it when Putin expanded his invasion of Ukraine in 2022. They see the writing on the wall.

There’s been a ton written about the right’s attraction to Putin for reasons that range from affinity with his macho whiteness and adherence to “traditional values” (homophobia and misogyny) to an appreciation of his willingness to crack down on dissent. He’s their kind of guy. And we know that the man who leads their party, Donald Trump, admires him greatly because he says so all the time. When Putin invaded Ukraine in 2022, Trump was very impressed:

Here’s a guy who’s very savvy … I know him very well. Very, very well. By the way, this never would have happened with us. Had I been in office, not even thinkable. This would never have happened. But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace.’ You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

He pays lip service to the idea that Putin is so afraid of Trump that he would never make a move without his permission but the truth is that Trump not only doesn’t care that Putin invaded a sovereign country, he is actively hostile to Ukraine, which he has been persuaded to hate for a variety of reasons many of which were likely put in his head by Putin himself. And as we know, he’s even more hostile to the NATO countries at least partly for the same reason.

He’s been opposed to the alliance for years, mainly because he never understood what it does and why the US should be a part of it. He even admitted it on the trail once back in 2016, saying “I said here’s the problem with NATO: it’s obsolete. Big statement to make when you don’t know that much about it, but I learn quickly.”

Whatever he may have learned came up against his unwillingness to ever admit he was wrong so he transformed his critique to the only thing he understands: money. He has repeatedly threatened to pull out of NATO because the other countries aren’t “making their payments” as if they’re members of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago beach club in arrears on their membership dues rather than a mutual defense alliance in which each country has agreed to spend a certain amount on its national defense.

Over the weekend he went further,however, and said something truly dangerous and unhinged:

This kind of loose talk is dangerous and stupid coming from a man who was once president of he United States and is running again. People believe him when he says something like that, not because they can’t take a joke or don’t know that he’s full of hot air, but because it’s entirely believable that he would do exactly that. Everyone knows he doesn’t care about America’s allies and he has made it clear over and over again that he sees no real benefit to them beyond a possible pay out. He posted this on Sunday:

That’s a completely meaningless demand which indicates that even after four years as president, Trump is still as shallow and vacuous as he was the day he was inaugurated.

It’s no doubt a coincidence that he made these comments within days of the Carlson interview with Putin. I find it hard to believe that Trump slogged through that tedious conversation or understood what Putin was talking about. But you can bet that Putin heard Trump and rubbed his hands together with glee. If only the American people heard him just as clearly.

Salon

Get real, people

An online acquaintance once belonged to the Democracy Alliance, a gaggle of liberal millionaire/billionaires formed in 2005 as a lefty counterpart to the Koch donor network. Yes, they’ve done some things to advance the cause, as Michael Tomasky notes below. But conservative moneybags are long-term political investors willing to sink hundreds of millions in media outlets to bend the country’s will over time to theirs. Rich liberals tend to eschew deferring gratification in favor of near-term electoral wins. They want trophies they they can show off to friends the way congressman pose for photos in front of new destroyers. IIRC, my friend left Democracy Alliance in frustration over that, and later the country.

Michael Tomasky opines on David Smith’s purchase of The Baltimore Sun at The New Republic:

But this column isn’t about the Sun and Smith. In fact, I applaud Smith and Sinclair in one, and only one, respect. They get it. They understand how important media ownership is. They are hardly alone among right-wing megawealthy types. Of course there’s Rupert Murdoch, but there are more. There’s the late Reverend Sun Myung Moon, who, after he got rich from his Unification Church, sprouted media properties, most notably The Washington Times, still owned by the church’s News World Communications (once upon a quaint old time, it was shocking that the conservative newspaper in the nation’s capital was started by a cult). And Philip Anschutz, whose Clarity Media Group started the tabloid newspaper The Washington Examiner in 2005. These days, the list includes Elon Musk with X/Twitter, Peter Thiel and Senator J.D. Vance with Rumble (a right-wing YouTube alternative), Ye with his attempted purchase of the now-defunct Parler, and, of course, Donald Trump, with Truth Social. They all understand what Viktor Orbán told the Conservative Political Action Conference in 2022: “Have your own media.” Shows like Tucker Carlson’s old Fox show, the Hungarian strongman said, “should be broadcast day and night.”

I’ve been watching this develop for decades. The right-wing media was a thing long ago, but it was still easily drowned out by the mainstream media. If the mainstream media was a beach ball, the right-wing media was a table tennis ball.

Today? The mainstream media, with cuts like those endured by the Sun, is maybe a volleyball, and the right-wing media is a basketball—a little bigger. And it’s on its way to beach-ball-hood. The right-wing media is now the agenda-setting media in this country, and it’s only getting bigger and more influential every year.

And how have the country’s politically engaged liberal billionaires responded to this? By doing roughly nothing.

The right plays a long game. Read “Democracy in Chains.”

Nonprofit media such as ProPublica do impressive work, but as nonprofits IRS rules require they be nonpartisan at a time when money-losing media outlets owned by right-wing ideologues labor under no such limits. The right’s media machine is loud and proud. We once called it The Mighty Wurlitzer.

The Democracy Alliance was started to grow a countervailing progressive infrastructure, Tomasky explains:

It helped seed the Center for American Progress, designed as liberalism’s answer to the Heritage Foundation. It helped grow groups like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. On the media front, it funded Media Matters for America, the broad left’s leading media watchdog outfit.

But there is one job liberal benefactors have refused to take on (with a few exceptions, starting with the owner of this very magazine). The cost has been enormous. And by the way—this story isn’t over. By a long shot. I’m certain David Smith wants to buy more struggling newspapers and turn them into MAGA sheets. And there are surely mini-Sinclairs in formation. Prager University’s right-wing misinformation videos are gaining a foothold in some public schools. Right-wing outlets have zero interest in sharing the “media space” with the mainstream media. They want to crush it.

[…]

What will the result be 20 years from now? Will we be raising a generation of children in two-thirds of the country who believe that fossil fuels are great and trees cause pollution, that slavery wasn’t the cause of the Civil War, that tax cuts always raise revenue, and that the “Democrat” Party stole the 2020 election? Yes, we will. And it will happen because too many people on the liberal side refused to grasp what Murdoch, Anschutz, Smith, and Viktor Orbán see so clearly. Have your own media.

Digby founded Hullabaloo. Josh Marshall has Talking Point Memo. Markos and Co. still have Daily Kos. None of us own daily newspapers or TV channels or have the means for buying any. Air America (March 2004) began as a broadcast alternative to right-wing talk that dominates radio across red states. Funding was always tenuous. Competing for broadcast space against conservative networks with more powerful stations, it lasted barely six years before folding. * Conservative ideologues don’t expect their partisan ventures to make money. And they offset their losses by purchasing networks of stations that do.

The left cannot give up the Enlightenment notion that the truth will set us free, that truths are self-evident, as the Declaration says. Give people the facts and, as rational beings, they’ll reach the same conclusions as ours. Uh-huh. Or the notion that people [grinds teeth] should vote their best interests as the left defines them. Or that our self-evident ideas sell themselves. They don’t. There’s an entire industry named for a street in Manhattan that spends billions to market consumer products. Democrats resist spending to sell their ideas.

*Some friends and I once produced and ran progressive 30-second radio commercials in our rural-ish market for diddly-squat just to demonstrate that that could be done for small money. Just because we couldn’t compete with the Limbaughs minute for minute and hour for hour was no reason to forfeit the airwaves to them.

Nothing else matters

Philip Bump takes on the age old question of whether Trump is pushing fascism because he believes it or if he’s just a sadistic narcissist who gravitates to it like a moth to flame without understanding any of it. I vote for the latter:

There’s a forgotten moment from Donald Trump’s history that I think about with some regularity. About two decades ago, Trump got into a fight with the town of Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., over a flagpole he installed at his golf course there. The pole was installed without a permit and the height violated local codes. This was not the fight he had centered on an oversized flag installed at Mar-a-Lago — a story that became part of the Trump-as-patriot lore of his followers, with details exaggerated in service to the idea that he put the display of the flag above all else.

What lingers for me about the California iteration is an interaction Trump had with Stephen Colbert, then host of “The Colbert Report.” Colbert’s shtick on the show was that he was an uncomplicated, jingoistic voice of the right, so he recorded a segment offering fake enthusiasm for the future president’s tussle. Then, at the end, he exposed Trump’s insincerity.

“What’s important is this flag,” Colbert says, with his character’s trademark bravado, “and its message of freedom — a message as important to Donald Trump as it was to the 13 original colonies.”

Cut to Trump.

“I don’t know what the 13 stripes represent,” Trump says.

This isn’t surprising, in either the specifics or the broad strokes. The story of Trump’s tenure in national politics has been that he — often coarsely — seizes on symbols of American patriotism while showing little understanding of what they represent or the traditions they embody.

It’s true of the flag, the 13 stripes of which he has formed a habit of hugging during the past eight years. It’s true of the presidency itself, which by all outward appearances he entered while believing that it operated something like being the CEO of a private company. At no point did Trump indicate that he viewed the office as something he was entrusted to hold for four years, as his response to the 2020 election shows. At no point did he indicate that he viewed the presidency as a coequal branch of government with Congress and the Supreme Court.

This haphazard approach to American institutions and history is useful to consider, given Trump’s declaration over the weekend that he would target his perceived opponents as though they were disease-carrying animals.

“In honor of our great Veterans on Veteran’s Day,” he wrote on social media, “we pledge to you that we will root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our Country, lie, steal, and cheat on Elections, and will do anything possible, whether legally or illegally, to destroy America, and the American Dream.”

“The threat from outside forces,” he added, “is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within.”

In 2015 and 2016, Trump’s rhetoric focused heavily on the purported threats from outside the country, including immigrants and terrorists (groups he often conflated). But those targets were not personally annoying to him in the way that his political opponents — and those he claims are aligned with his opponents, such as federal prosecutors and media members — are annoying. So he has shifted.

As soon as Trump offered these comments, historians (both professional and amateur) noted that they echoed the rhetoric of fascist leaders like Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. This raises a new question: Is Trump doing so knowingly — or is he simply following the same path those dictators walked?

The distinction here is admittedly subtle. It seems important to distinguish between a potential president whose clumsy anger at his opponents has him using language deployed by some of history’s worst actors and a potential president who is willfully modeling himself in their mold.

Stories about Trump’s flirtations with Hitler — or, at least, with some narrowly constructed vision of the mass murderer — have been around for decades. In 1990, Vanity Fair reported an allegation made by his wife as they were going through a divorce.

“Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, ‘My New Order,’ which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed,” Marie Brenner reported. Asked about it, Trump claimed that he was given Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” as a gift and that, “if I had these speeches, and I am not saying that I do, I would never read them.”

Books released after Trump’s presidency contained anecdotes in which Trump offered words of praise for Nazi Germany to White House chief of staff John Kelly.

“Well, Hitler did a lot of good things,” Trump told Kelly according to Michael Bender’s “Frankly, We Did Win This Election.” At a moment when he was frustrated by pushback from military leaders, Trump reportedly complained to Kelly that he wished his officers could “be like the German generals” during World War II.

“You do know that they tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off?” Kelly replied, according to Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s “The Divider.”

This is true. But Trump’s familiarity with Hitler didn’t extend so far as to understanding that there was internal dissension even given the iron fist with which he controlled the country. By all appearances, Trump just sees the fist.

Over the past eight years, this has become obvious. Trump offers praise to a range of autocrats and dictators: Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. These are leaders who don’t share an ideology or a system of government but share an approach to the wielding of power and a popular response that Trump finds appealing.

Jonathan Karl’s new book, “Tired of Winning,” documents a conversation between Trump and another Republican politician that gets to this point, according to an excerpt obtained by Politico.

“Trump gloated to a prominent member of Congress that [former German chancellor Angela] Merkel — who detested the 45th president privately and had trouble hiding her scorn publicly — told him she was ‘amazed’ by the number of people who came to see him speak,” Karl writes, according to Politico, “and Trump said ‘she told me that there was only one other political leader who ever got crowds as big as mine.’ The Trump-allied congressman knew who Merkel was comparing Trump to, but couldn’t tell if Trump, who took Merkel’s words as a compliment, himself understood.”

“Which would be more unsettling,” Karl continues, “that he didn’t or that he did?”

That, again, is the question. Is it more alarming if Trump knows very well that Hitler used rhetoric comparing his opponents to rats that needed to be eradicated or if he simply got to the same place by himself? Is it better if Trump doesn’t know how Hitler’s story ends — taking his own life as his grotesque empire collapsed having earned a reviled position in world history — or if he does? Which possibility offers a less disconcerting set of possibilities for the post-2024 future?

And, of course, how does that distinction color other reports about what Trump has planned, that he wants to scour the federal bureaucracy of disagreement, turn federal law enforcement against opponents and imprison asylum seekers in camps?

Trump didn’t spend a lot of time lingering over his “vermin” comments on social media this weekend. He was too busy sharing and resharing video clips of his applause-drenched entrance to an Ultimate Fighting Championship event at New York’s Madison Square Garden, accompanied by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and musician Kid Rock. That’s what he enjoys: the applause and the adoration of people who came to the famous entertainment venue to see two people beat each other senseless.

In 1939, Madison Square Garden also hosted a pro-Hitler rally that disparaged the media and Jewish people. The event was soaked in just the sort of patriotic iconography that Trump adores, with only a slightly elevated level of contradiction.

If you have some time today, take a look at this video from a leading activist in Hungary about the growing ties between Viktor Orbán and the Republican Party. It’s not good:

This is the story of how has the far right ruling party of Hungary been building its connections with the Trumpist wing of the American Republicans. In our video, we show that Orbán’s party, the Fidesz, and its publicly funded political machinery have been consciously working for years on developing a network of lobby groups, think tanks and media organizations that creates and nurtures the international comradery between the hardline nationalists of Hungary and America. It is not a coincidence that former Fox News host Tucker Carlson visited Orbán and had been presenting Hungary in his interviews as the Trumpian Utopia Country, nor that the Hungarian PM was invited to speak at the CPAC Texas and Hungary hosted the first Conservative Political Action Conference held in Europe, nor that Florida’s infamous “Don’t Say Gay Bill” has a striking similarity to Hungary’s anti gay law passed in 2021 – two years before Ron DeSantis had built up the courage to copy it in the US.

The last time Trump skipped a debate was January 28, 2016. Remember this?

Those were the days. I’m going to guess that won’t happen this time. Ron DeSantis has been admonished not to go after Trump and instead take on Vivek Ramaswamy and he’s already sinking like a rock in the polls. Chris Christie will likely be the lone Trump critic and he’ll probably be pretty harsh. But what difference does it make? This debate is basically a death watch pageant to determine who will be in position to step in if Trump is unable to run?

Nothing will ever beat this moment, however.

He’s so dignified.

The good news for Trump lovers is that he’ll be with Tucker Carlson on his Xitter show:

The interview between Carlson and Trumpalmost didn’t happen, according to two people familiar with its planning.The men had been talking informally for two months about possibly setting up an event to draw attention away from the Fox-hosted debate.

But Carlson was scheduled to be out of the country this week for interviews with Hungary’s autocratic Prime Minister Viktor Orban and with Aleksandar Vucic, the president of Serbia, making it difficult to schedule the interview.

Trump had been going back and forth about whether he would show up onstage for the Wednesday RNC debate, or any other. He had dined with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott and the network’s president, Jay Wallace, at his Bedminster Club earlier this summer and left them with the impression that he may participate in the event,according to three people familiar with the dinner.

But Trump has long complained that the network appears to have turned on him,with Foxgiving at-times favorable coverage to rivals such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and tech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. Fox co-founder Rupert Murdoch has encouraged Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin to enter the primary.

Two weeks ago, Trump and Carlson fixed a date for the interview andCarlson’s team made the last-minute decision to “bang it out” right before heading to Europe, according to someone familiar with the discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private deliberations.

Carlson began posting his shows to his account on Twitter in June.Elon Musk, X’s owner, has been personally involved in developing features that Carlson’steam believes will make their videos more accessible, including making it possible to play X videos on television sets using Apple’s Airplay feature,according to a person close to Carlson.Carlson’s team also pushed X to develop a “picture in picture” feature that allows users to continue watching an X video while using other features on their phone, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

X did not respond to a request for comment.

Trump did not want it to become public that he had taped the interview and instructed his team to keep it a secret, advisers said. Trump’s team tried to keep signaling he might still attend the Fox debate, with aides refusing to confirm he was considering sitting for a Carlson interview that he had already recorded. Even then, he kept polling people on whether he should attend the debate.

For its part, Carlson’s team did not see the Bedminster sit-down as a guarantee that Trump wouldn’t also decide to attend the debate this week.

Trump did not officially tell RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel of his decision to not appear onstage until Sunday, even after word of the Carlson interview had become public. Trump toldMcDaniel that the decision was not meant to spite her, according to people familiar with his calls.

Trump told advisers he didn’t want Carlson’s interview to appear on X because it is a competitor to Truth Social, Trump’s social media network. But Carlson and his team have been building a relationship with Musk for months and told Trump that they did not think Trump’s own platform had the necessary reach.

Carlson has echoed and amplified Trump’s “America First” rhetoric, while also advancing a theory that the “Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.”

But Trump has long accepted a level of criticism from Carlson that he didn’t from most of the other Fox hosts, according to people familiar with the dynamic between the two men.

While at Fox, Carlson interviewed Trump multiple times but maintained a more independent posture than some of his fellow hosts, such as Sean Hannity or Jeanine Pirro.

After Carlson’s texts excoriating Trump were released as part of Dominion’s litigation against Fox, Carlsonattempted to assure the former president that he had been blowing off steam afterhaving been misled by Trump aides.

In one such incident, Carlson had to correct an error in a segment about dead people supposedlyvoting in the 2020 election in Georgia. The information had come to one of Carlson’s producers from a Trump aide purporting to have proof of voting irregularities in the state, and has been widely debunked. Carlson railed privately against the unreliability of the information peddled by Trump’s team.

But Carlson’s show has always carried enough Trump-friendly commentaryto remain in the former president’s good graces.

Even after Carlson’s texts became public in March, Trump signaled that he was happy with Carlson’s special that was running on the network’s digital streaming service. The program argued that the Jan. 6 attack was not a “deadly insurrection” and that the violence of the day had been overblown. Multiple people have been convicted in federal court of seditious conspiracy in connection with the attack. Four people in the crowd died, a Capitol Police officer died after being beaten by rioters and four Capitol Police officers who served on Jan. 6 died by suicide in the days and months after.

Trump shared an article about Carlson’s special and wrote, “he doesn’t hate me, or at least, not anymore!”

Soon after, Carlson invited Trump to come on his Foxshow and Trump agreed. Carlson and his production team traveled to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club in Florida to conduct the interview. “For a man who is caricatured as an extremist,” Carlson said of Trump, in his introduction to the interview, “we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise.”

After Fox canceled Carlson’s show, the network’s ratings took a hit. In the four weeks before Carlson’s exit, Fox averaged 2.6 million viewers in prime time; in the four weeks after, Fox averaged just 1.6 million — still at the top in cable news but down 39 percent. The network has recovered some of those viewers with a new prime-time lineup, which has boosted its average total viewers in prime time to 2.2 million.

Trump has complained to his aides that Carlson was not friendly enough to him at times during his presidency. But he also maintained a respect for Carlson’s high ratings, later telling advisers he couldn’t believe Fox fired Carlson.

Fox has not yet released Carlson from his contract, which expires in December 2024. The company has informed Carlson he is in breach of his contract by releasing videos on X. Carlson’s attorney, Bryan Freedman, has in turn accused Fox of violating Carlson’s right to freely express his views on current events.

The two men don’t have additional events planned together. While Carlson is at work trying to stand up a new company, rebuilding studios in Maine and Florida, he wants to maintain some distance from Trump, whose false denial of the results of the 2020 election frustrated Carlson and helped make Fox the target of costly legal battles.

But Carlson continues to enjoy Trump’s company, to a point. “Do I like Trump? I love him. But there are many levels to Trump,” Carlson told his authorized biographer Chadwick Moore. “He was a completely ineffectual president. He couldn’t manage my household. He’s not a manager, and that’s very frustrating to watch.”

“But Trump on the level of guy? To have dinner with Trump is one of the great joys in the world. If you were to assemble a list of people to have dinner with, Trump would be in the top spot,” Carlson said.

“In the end, Trump is just the maitre’d, a wonderful host. Funny, outrageous, absolutely on his own planet.”

I’m pretty sure that’s not really a compliment. Not that Trump cares. He just wants to stick it to Fox and going on Tucker to be broadcast during the debate is the perfect way to do it.

Really????

Dreher is a big fan of modern fascist Viktor Orban, so I’m not surprised.

In case you don’t know, Nate Hochman was fired from the Desantis campaign this week after surreptitiously creating and disseminating two highly offensive videos, the first attacking transgender people (and Trump) and the second extolling DeSantis’ leadership using Nazi imagery:

DeSantis was warned and so was Dreher. They didn’t care. Tim Miller wrote about the hiring months ago:

There is no role in which the old maxim “personnel is policy” is more apt than that of presidential speechwriter. And there is good reason for that role to hold its exalted place in the mythos of the office.

Trump’s “American Carnage” was no doubt shaped by the dark, nativist views of his Gollum-like muse. Obama’s West Wing–era hopey-changey optimism was colored by the earnest and youthful pod-bros who wrote for him. And Bush’s Chesterton-infused evangelizing was sculpted by the faith of Michael Gerson and Matthew Scully. To say nothing of the last century’s legendary scribes for Reagan, JFK, and FDR (whose speechwriters included a multi-Pulitzer-winning playwright).

So I perked up when I heard scuttlebutt a few weeks ago that Ron DeSantis had chosen a speechwriter not from the ranks of the GOP’s classically liberal old order, but from the brash online “new right” that is more animated by culture wars and MAGA identity politics than by free markets and free people.

This week the writer, Nate Hochman, revealed himself in the very online way one might expect of a Gen Z wannabe power staffer—by updating his Twitter bio:

Earlier this month, it was reported that Hochman had gone to work for the Republican Party of Florida; his updated bio indicates that he won’t be just on the comms team, but will be crafting the words that come out of the governor’s mouth. (I reached out to DeSantis’s office for comment on the hire but have not heard back by the time of publication.)

Hochman, a conservative writer who has earned more ink by the age of 25 than anyone this side of Justin Bieber, has garnered a reputation as a young MAGA whisperer. The New Republic tagged him as one of “the radical young intellectuals who want to take over the American right.” He’s written for the Dispatch, National Review (where he was on staff), the Claremont Institute’s American Mind (where he interned), and more. Heck, even the Gray Lady turned to Hochman for a think piece about the secular culture war.

But like every MAGA intellectual (or “intellectual”) before him, Hochman, has found it necessary to cozy up to the movement’s gutter-dwelling racists in order to climb the ladder of influence.

As first reported by the Dispatch last year, Hochman participated in a Twitter Space with white nationalist virgin Nick Fuentes—and lavishly praised him. “We were just talking about your influence and we were saying, like, you’ve gotten a lot of kids ‘based’ and we respect that for sure,” Hochman said. “I literally said, I think Nick’s probably a better influence than Ben Shapiro on young men who might otherwise be conservative.”

The presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor wants to take the Republican Party in the…

He went on to discuss the merits and demerits of one of America’s most vile humans, saying the fact that he has said “super edgy things means that there’s a pretty strong ceiling to what you can actually accomplish in politics.”

“Edgy” is definitely one way to describe Holocaust denial!

When the Dispatch asked him about his Fuentes remarks, Hochman acknowledged that he said some “really stupid things, which I don’t actually believe”—but did not apologize.

In the intervening time The Bulwark was provided with the audio from the Twitter space—and it turns out that complimenting a white nationalist was not the only stupid thing Hochman uttered that day.

During his naked attempt to get Fuentes to think he was also based, Hochman says “when the man’s right, he’s right” in response to Fuentes’s claim that “women are goofy, okay, they should have no authority, they should have no authority over men.” Then, after Fuentes says that women “just really have no business in politics,” Hochman repeats his response: “When the man’s right, he’s right.”

Hochman later asked Fuentes how he plans to deal with the fact that “50 percent of American whites are, like, shitlibs now” if he wants to be successful in advancing white identity politics.

Women are goofy and shouldn’t be allowed in politics.

Half of white people are shitlibs.

Ron 2024.

Wanting to see if it’s true that Hochman “didn’t believe” the things he said in 2021 and was instead just trying to impress a racist douchebag, I listened to another longform interview from this past August during which the MAGA wunderkind laid out his ideology.

In this sitdown with the MAGA nonprofit American Moment, Hochman says, “I would just describe myself as a culture warrior first and foremost. I think that’s the easiest way to really think of it.” He believes that “at the forefront of what conservatism means” is “putting whatever it takes to resist the cultural revolution” brought on by the left. He says he hopes that the “Republican party agenda is going to cohere around the culture war as its organizing, totalizing force.”

As part of that #war, he offers a statement that echoes the message being put out by former President Trump saying that America’s “enemies are domestic not foreign.” Hochman says that it’s a “tragedy” that the debate around the “definition of marriage” is over and claims that we “wouldn’t be talking about transgenderism if we hadn’t first destroyed the meaning of marriage.”

With someone like Hochman aboard, it’s not a surprise that DeSantis’s first foray into foreign policy was a Tucker-approved written statement in which he tilted hard toward the party’s MAGA isolationist wing. Or that he backtracked from that in his first interview following the statement.

This will be one of the defining questions of the DeSantis campaign: Will pre-MAGA Ron re-emerge and bring aboard the GOP old guard? Or will he keep leaning toward the groypers and Orbánists and culture warriors on the nationalist “new right”?

The answer will depend on DeSantis himself—and on the staffers and advisers he chooses to surround himself with. Hochman’s hire is an early sign of which way it will go.

I totally see why DeSanbtis wanted this guy on his team. His entire campaign has been based on culture war tropes, including neo-fascist ideology. He knew. He liked it. Until it became obvious that his shitshow of a campaign strategy wasn’t working he was all in.

I guess Dreher is either a liar or a fool if he doesn’t understand the relationship between fascism and Orbanism.