Tucker Carlson is not leaving the GOP. He wants to take it over

Tucker Carlson knows how to get attention. The former Fox News host-turned-powerhouse podcaster got explosive headlines after telling a Canadian podcast “Can’t Be Censored” last week that “there’s no chance I would support the Republican Party” in the upcoming midterms.

Mainstream news outlets portrayed this move in laudatory terms. Carlson is an opponent of the Iran war, so the coverage made it seem like he’s moderating his politics. Words like “disillusioned” were invoked, along with his criticisms of Donald Trump for ignoring the economic woes caused by the war.

This is a lovely fable of a longtime Republican loyalist breaking with his party because it’s grown too extreme and out-of-touch. Add a hopeful note about how this could demobilize conservative voters for the midterms, and watch the views and clicks roll in.

Carlson isn’t interested in bringing Republicans to the light. His goal is to push them deeper into the darkness.

While factually accurate, stories about Carlson’s departure from the GOP didn’t quite capture the dark realities of the situation. Readers walked away with a sense that he’s trying to be a voice of reason in a party that’s too Trump-drunk to recognize they are driving off a cliff. But while Carlson is right that the Iran war is a folly, the bigger story here is not one of moderation, but extremism. Carlson isn’t interested in bringing Republicans to the light. His goal is to push them deeper into the darkness. He’s almost certainly not leaving the Republican Party so much as plotting to take it over — with the goal of making it even more radical, racist and authoritarian than it already is under Trump.

Carlson’s manuever here isn’t complex. As pollster G. Elliott Morris shows data collected in the June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, only 8% of Americans are happy with the current state of politics. A full half believe “major, disruptive changes are needed to get the country back on course.” In other words, portraying one’s self as an outsider without a party is the move right now, whether someone is running for office or trying to gain power through influence. Trump used to present as the outsider who could shake things up, but his age, lame duck status and mounting failures are creating an opportunity for someone else to steal that mantle. Carlson is stepping up, either to run for president himself in 2028 or to be the kingmaker who anoints the next contender.

He is also taking canny advantage of the war in Iran, which is shaping up to be a symbol for the failures of insider politics. According to YouGov, only a quarter of voters say they believe Trump won a war he obviously lost. This figure is significant: Normally, the president can get around 35-37% of voters, the most loyal Republicans, to back even his dumbest lies. For someone like Carlson who wants to position himself as an outsider speaking common sense to a party that’s lost its way, opposing the war is a smart move.

But while Carlson is taking a more mainstream, moderate-seeming view on the war, closer observation shows that most of his gripes with the Trump-led GOP is that it’s not right-wing enough. This week, Matthew Taylor, a religious studies visiting scholar at Georgetown, noted that Carlson has removed the American flag from his show’s set and replaced it with the Appeal to Heaven flag that was popular with Jan. 6 rioters.

This flag “should be understood as a dog whistle” for Christian nationalism, Taylor correctly observed. Christian nationalists reject religious freedom and pluralism, instead imagining a nation where, at bare minimum, people are forced to live under theocratic laws. It’s tangled up in white nationalism, with embracing a Christian identity that is intertwined with whiteness.

Carlson has been leaning more in this direction for years. He pushes racist falsehoods, such as the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory that frames immigration as a deliberate effort by “elites” — though many just now openly blame Jews — to “replace” the white, Christian population with non-white minorities. He also touts increasingly bizarre religious views, — even saying that demons physically attacked him — that are common with Christian nationalists.

Carlson has also been buddying up with some of the nastiest characters on the far-right fringe. He gave a softball interview to Nick Fuentes, a Hitler-admiring white nationalist who argued that women are the “number one political enemy” and should be imprisoned in “breeding gulags.” He recently hosted Owen Benjamin, who uses the n-word to refer to former president Barack Obama, calls the Holocaust a “hoax,” and said “gays and Jews,” if allowed any power, “will destroy your entire civilization.” This week, Carlson teased an interview with podcasters Joel Webbon and J.D. Hall, who oppose women’s suffrage and argue that the 19th Amendment was a “calculated assault on Christian culture, orchestrated by forces steeped in the occult, demonism, and nascent New Age ideologies.”

Carlson has denied he wants to run for president in 2028. But traditionally, such disavowals are standard right up until a candidate announces their run. As I argued on YouTube, however, he is well aware that the GOP’s presumed contenders, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, are not exactly setting hearts aflame with Republican primary voters. Carlson, on the other hand, is wildly popular with the MAGA base, even as his criticisms of Trump grow more strident. As they look for a way to separate themselves from Trump after his presidency fizzles out, these voters could choose to turn to Carlson as their new cult leader.

Some remain skeptical. The Bulwark’s Tim Miller doubts that Carlson will run for president himself, especially as he’s very close to Vance. Instead, Miller has suggested Carlson “wants to provide outsider air cover for JD and have JD be his vassal.” That may be true, especially since Carlson seems to be quite the homebody these days, which isn’t conducive to running a national campaign. And Vance is certainly winking at the same extremists as Carlson. He’s also been talking up his belief in demons and drawing attention to how he pushed his wife out of her job as a high-powered lawyer so she could have a fourth baby instead. Vance has also gone out of his way to define anti-semitism only as the explicit hatred of Jews. This distinction allows Christian nationalists to deny they are anti-semitic, so long as they deny that hatred is their motive in wishing to pass laws that marginalize non-Christians, including Jews.

But it’s unlikely that Carlson can simply transmit an outsider glow to Vance, even if they are friends. Vance may use backchannels to generate mainstream media stories painting him as a closet skeptic on the Iran war, but publicly, he has allowed the White House to make him the face of the failed efforts to get a favorable “deal” from the obvious victors, the Iranians.

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It’s challenging to play the “outsider” card when you’re the vice president in charge of a policy that has swiftly become the symbol of the party’s recent failures. Vance’s recent book tour, in which has attempted to escape his vitriolic reputation by claiming Christianity has remade him, won’t help, either. It smacks too much of the empty posturing about “compassionate conservativism” that became a joke during George W. Bush’s presidency. What the MAGA base wants from Christianity is cover for white nationalist politics, not all that peace-and-charity talk. It’s why they love Trump, who doesn’t even bother to convincingly pretend to believe in the teachings of Jesus.

Whatever path he takes, whether running for office himself or simply hitching his wagon to a candidate, Carlson is not leaving the GOP. His attacks on the party are a pretext to take it over. If he runs in 2028, he can win over Republican primary voters who may not understand his Christian nationalist politics, but who are nonetheless enraptured by a charismatic leader who deems himself an “outsider” — just like Trump once was for them.

But even short of that, Carlson is using this moment of frustration within the MAGA ranks to push for a GOP that’s even more extreme, and especially more Christian nationalist, than what Trump is offering. There’s nothing moderate or reasonable about Carlson’s maneuver — even if he happens to be right that the Iran war was a mistake.

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