Donald Trump’s political rhetoric has long been riddled with hypocrisies and unintentionally ironic comments. It’s a function of his pathway to running for office: He’s a salesman, and he’ll say what he thinks his customers want to hear in the moment. Sure, he might be pitching you on the opposite of what he said last week, but he can explain that away, too. Just let him talk a bit longer.
Even with that baseline, though, one might be hard-pressed to find a more ironic comment than the criticism he offered of a question posed to President Biden by NBC’s Al Roker.
“You can’t get a softer question than that,” Trump said of the question Roker asked Biden at the White House Easter Egg Roll. “That was a long answer,” Trump continued, criticizing the man who defeated him in 2020 for “talking about the eggs and this and that” before getting to the point.
The context for this commentary? Trump was in the middle of a fundamentally obsequious interview with Tucker Carlson at the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home. The Roker bit came in the middle of a two-minute-long, rambling response from Trump that included mentions of the founder of Home Depot, Biden’s trip to Ireland and World War III.
The piercing question Carlson had asked?
“Do you think Biden will stay in the race?”
It’s nice to see that Trump doesn’t hold grudges, anyway. After all, it was only last month that we learned Carlson had told his Fox News colleagues that he hates Trump “passionately.” That came in January 2021, shortly before the riot at the U.S. Capitol, as Fox News was still trying to balance its years of Trump sycophancy with his rejection of the reality that he lost the 2020 election. Fox executives wanted to move on from Trump after the riot, but here, too, Trump prevailed over the long term.
So on Tuesday night, a wind-buffeted Carlson proudly welcomed viewers to his interview with the former president as he stood in the dark outside Mar-a-Lago. Everything prior was water under the bridge.
You’ll note that we’re using the term “interview” loosely. Typically, one might expect a television host conducting an interview with a former president to press on critical issues, challenge obvious, established falsehoods and elicit some new thoughts or comments from the interview subject. But that’s not the tack Carlson took. While Carlson was once unusually willing to challenge Trump (for a Fox News host, anyway), in Carlson’s most recent conversation with the former president, Trump was simply allowed to prattle on at will.
He chattered for more than a minute about how court staff and police officers were in tears and apologizing as he was arraigned on criminal charges in Manhattan. For more than five minutes, he riffed on the various “hoax” investigations to which he’d been subjected and his false assertions about the cease-fire in Afghanistan and the classified documents recovered from Mar-a-Lago by the FBI.
Well, really, he rambled for more than six minutes because Carlson’s only interjection was to reply to Trump’s inaccurate assertions about materiel left behind by the U.S. military with a sycophantic, “Of course.”
That offering from Carlson is marked as point “A” below, one of only a few times in which Trump’s lengthy riffs actually met with commentary from his ostensible interviewer.
The other labeled Carlson interjections are as follows:
“B”: Carlson replies to Trump’s insistence that “nuclear warming” is more of a problem than global warming with “what you’re saying is demonstrably true.”“C”: After Trump says that Carlson’s accompanying him on a trip to Korea must have been one of the most incredible experiences of the Fox News host’s life, Carlson replied, “For sure.”“D”: Carlson began one of his scattered questions by laughing at Trump’s describing his arrest as “the old Soviet process” of charging people with crimes.
Not exactly speaking truth to power.
But, of course, that isn’t what Carlson does. He marveled at one point that the interview was supposed to be about Trump’s arrest but that they “wound up talking mostly about foreign policy.” That’s because what little steering Carlson did pushed Trump in that direction, asking him, for example, about Russia on multiple occasions. This is what Carlson uses his show for of late: to reshape Republican orthodoxy on foreign policy to be less friendly to Ukraine. It’s an offshoot of his general efforts to reframe American politics broadly to better reflect his own right-wing worldview.
Perhaps the most telling part of the conversation came during one of the interludes in which Carlson set up segments of the edited conversation.
“For a man who is caricatured as an extremist,” Carlson said of Trump, “we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, sensible and wise.”
This was sharply reminiscent of how Carlson described Ye, the musician formerly known as Kanye West, when he interviewed him in October.
“The enemies of his ideas dismissed West, as they have for years, as mentally ill,” Carlson said then. “Too crazy to take seriously. Look away. Ignore him. He’s a mental patient.” But, he added later, “we’ve rarely heard a man speak so honestly and so movingly about what he believes” — but he invited viewers to judge for themselves.
The only problem, it turned out, was that Carlson and his team had edited out much of Ye’s most bizarre and disconcerting commentary. Carlson wanted to present Ye as a wise, sober opponent of the American elite, so he trimmed away the parts that undercut that idea.
Raising an obvious question: What might he have left out of his interview with Trump to present the former president as favorably as possible?