Don’t Fall for the Tucker Carlson Apology Tour
The man telling the New York Times he’s sorry he supported Trump is the same man telling his brother last week that white Americans are the real victims.
The cover of this weekend’s New York Times Magazine asks: “What Does Tucker Carlson Really Believe?”
It’s not a new question. In 2019, The Atlantic ran a Carlson profile titled “What Does Tucker Carlson Believe?” Seven years later, the Times has added a “Really” and a road trip. Otherwise it’s the same swing the Atlantic took, the swings the Atlantic took twice before that, the swing the New Yorker took, and the ones Vox and Playboy each took. I wrote about all of them back in 2021, in a piece about how mainstream journalism keeps trying and failing to pin this guy down.
The interview itself, by Lulu Garcia-Navarro, is better than the 2017-era profiles that just let him talk. She pushes him. She catches him denying things he plainly said. The bracketed fact-checks are real journalism. The framing question, though, is the same question that’s been failing for almost a decade. And there’s a reason for that.
Tucker Carlson has spent his entire career running the same rhetorical move. He identifies a real, legitimate problem. He builds the reader’s trust through the diagnosis. Then he uses that trust to deliver an extremist payload. In the Fox era, the bait was economic populism: the ruling class, the working class, capital taxed at half the rate of labor. The payload was that immigrants and trans people and feminists were why your life was bad. In 2026, the bait is the Iran war and Israel’s influence on American foreign policy. Both are real. Both are held by serious people. The payload is something different. He’s planning something, even if we don’t know what just yet.
The technique hasn’t changed. The audience has. He spent a decade running this on the right. He’s running it on the left now.
I’ve watched an unhealthy amount of Tucker Carlson over the years and I know the moves. I’d rather not be writing this piece. But the people congratulating him this week for getting Trump and Iran “right” are about to learn what the people who congratulated him in 2017 for getting the working class “right” learned later. He’s very good at this. That’s the problem.
I wrote about this in 2019
The mechanic isn’t subtle once you’ve watched enough of his work. In 2019, while reviewing his book Ship of Fools for Media Matters, I worked through a specific example that’s worth revisiting because Carlson still uses it. In the book, he asks why the United States taxes capital at half the rate of labor. It’s a defensible question. The tax code is unfair. Working people pay more on their paychecks than rich people pay on their stock gains. The left-wing critique here is real.
His answer to that question, in the book, is identity politics. He writes that “elite attacks on working-class whites,” by which he means feminism, anti-racism, and trans visibility, have distracted Americans from noticing how rigged the tax code is. The tax code stays where it is, the corporate interests stay where they are, and the people you should be mad at, in Tucker’s account, turn out to be the same people you were already mad at.
The question is real. The swerve is the whole point.
I’m not the only person who clocked this. Lyz Lenz, in a 2018 CJR profile, quoted the Emerson communications professor Richard West calling Carlson’s approach “change-the-subject conservatism.” Same observation, academic name. Once you see the move, you see it everywhere.
In the Garcia-Navarro interview, the capital gains line shows up again. Nearly verbatim. The question is still useful. He just needs a new thing to swerve toward.
Same week, two Tuckers
Carlson sat with Garcia-Navarro for the Times Magazine interview over two conversations, the first in Maine and a follow-up by phone. The piece dropped on May 2. In the same window, he recorded a podcast conversation with his brother Buckley, a former Trump speechwriter, that ran on Carlson’s own show.
The Times got one Tucker. Buckley got another.
In the Times version, Carlson is theological and measured. He turns Garcia-Navarro’s questions about Trump’s morality into meditations on the universal human capacity for evil. Asked about the antisemitism allegations, he gives the principled answer: he’s against hatred and discrimination based on heritage, no matter who the target is. Nobody, in his telling, should be punished for the circumstances of their birth. It’s a careful performance.
In the Buckley version, days earlier, his brother asked him about Barack Obama. Tucker’s answer: “He really hates white people.”
That’s a… well, it’s a different position.
The pattern holds across the podcast. Carlson tells his brother the COVID vaccine killed enormous numbers of people. He compares the shots to a biological weapon. He tells Buckley the protests after George Floyd’s murder were really a campaign to drive white officers off the force. When Buckley describes the January 6 rioters as representative of the country at its best, Tucker lets it pass. None of this material makes it into the New York Times.
But the most revealing exchange in the whole podcast is the one Garcia-Navarro never got. She asks Carlson, more than once, what his breaking point with Trump actually was. The Times answer is the Easter Truth Social post and the Iran war. Moral, theological, anti-war. Buckley got the real answer. Buckley laid out the brothers’ actual list of grievances, all of which centered on Trump’s failures to punish his political enemies hard enough. The list was long. COVID vaccines. January 6. The George Floyd protests. Biden’s preemptive pardons. The Biden family. The Russia probe. The autopen. Obama, whom Buckley accused of treason. Tucker did not push back. Tucker agreed.
The Times got a man whose breaking point was Easter morning. Buckley got a man whose breaking point was Trump’s failure to put more political enemies in cages. Both versions came from the same Tucker, in the same week. Both are real. Only one was prepared for the audience he’s currently trying to recruit.
About that Fuentes interview
Last October, Carlson sat down for a long, friendly conversation with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist influencer who has praised Hitler and denied the Holocaust. Carlson treated him like a curiosity. Asked him about his upbringing. Walked him through his views without ever really pressing on what those views actually are. Garcia-Navarro asked Carlson about that interview. He didn’t like the question.
Carlson’s first move was to minimize Fuentes. He’s just a kid, Carlson told her. He’s twenty-seven. He has no power. He just said some “naughty things.” That’s the framing for a man who has built his platform on Holocaust denial and overt white supremacy: a kid who said naughty things.
Garcia-Navarro pressed. Carlson swerved. When she reminded him that Fuentes is a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust, Carlson asked: “Is that worse than killing kids?”
This is the move.
The “kids” Carlson is referring to are Palestinian children killed in Gaza, and the people he’s accusing of supporting their deaths are Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee. The accusation is not crazy. American political support for the war in Gaza has been disastrous, and U.S. senators and ambassadors who have waved away civilian deaths deserve scrutiny. There is a real, defensible critique buried in there.
That is the bait. Fuentes is the payload. By the time Carlson is done with the answer, the Holocaust denier is unmentioned, Ted Cruz is the bigger threat, and Garcia-Navarro is left trying to reorient the conversation to her original question. He runs the same play several times in the section. When she suggests Fuentes is influential, Carlson demands she name a member of Congress who has cited him. When she keeps pressing, he pivots to the foreign policy views of the people who fund the Republican Party. Capital gains taxes. Donor class. The real problems.
In 2019, when I worked through this technique for the first time, The Daily Stormer was openly delighted that Carlson was running their talking points on Fox. They could see what he was doing because they were the ones whose ideas he was laundering. The audience he is now courting on the left has a harder time clocking the move because his cover story is better: anti-war, anti-corporate, anti-establishment, all of it true on the surface. The mark moved. The con didn’t.
About that headline, again
A word about Garcia-Navarro, because she deserves it. Her interview is genuinely sharper than what the Atlantic and the New Yorker put out in 2017. She presses Carlson on his interview with Fuentes. She presses him on his old comments about Iraqis. When Carlson denies on the record that he ever asked on his show whether Trump might be the Antichrist, Garcia-Navarro inserts a bracketed correction noting that he did. When Carlson’s representatives respond to her follow-up about Cruz and Huckabee with a single word, she prints the single word. None of that is sycophancy. None of it is the 2017 model.
But the headline is the headline. And the headline is the same swing the genre has been taking for nine years.
When Garcia-Navarro asks Carlson about his break with Trump, she calls it a “rupture.” Carlson stops her. He doesn’t accept that framing, he tells her. Trump betrayed his promises. The contract was breached by Trump, not by him. He’s the consistent one. Trump is the apostate. Garcia-Navarro doesn’t fight him on it. The conversation continues under his framing.
That’s the structural problem with the genre, and it’s not Garcia-Navarro’s fault. A profile that asks “what does Tucker really believe?” has already accepted the premise that there’s a real Tucker buried somewhere who could be located if only the right questions were asked. The premise is the trap. There is no hidden Tucker. The trick is the belief.
Lyz Lenz figured this out in 2018. Her CJR profile spent forty hours of footage and a phone call with Carlson trying to answer a version of the same question, and the most useful thing she got was the moment Carlson insisted he wasn’t shouting while shouting at her. The mystery is the man. The man is the act. The act is what you’re watching. Garcia-Navarro got the same insight in a different form: a Carlson who denies on the record that he said something he plainly said, while the bracketed correction sits next to the denial, both on the page, both true. That isn’t a man who can be pinned down. That’s a man who has chosen the format he can’t be pinned down in.
Years of trying. The interviewers got smarter. He didn’t get harder to read. The genre is just the wrong shape.
Who pays when this works
The cost of getting Carlson wrong is not theoretical. It is happening right now.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has already endorsed Carlson for a presidential run. Democratic operatives are floating a bipartisan alliance with him. Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks asked what more anyone could possibly want from Carlson after he rejected Trump and joined the anti-war side. The apology video is circulating with applause. Some of it is coming from people whose work I respect.
I want to take that argument seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. The case for welcoming Carlson goes like this: the Iran war is a catastrophe. Gaza is a catastrophe. Anyone willing to say so loudly, especially anyone with a large right-coded audience, is doing useful work. Demanding ideological purity from your allies in a coalition is a luxury you cannot afford when people are dying. That argument is not stupid. It is wrong, but it is not stupid.
For those who would like to financially support The Present Age on a non-Substack platform, please be aware that I also publish these pieces to my Patreon.
The reason it is wrong is the Buckley conversation. The man telling Garcia-Navarro he was radicalized by a Truth Social post on Easter morning is the same man telling his brother that the actual problem is Trump didn’t put more political enemies in cages. That is not anti-war. That is “we wanted a different kind of authoritarian.” There is no coalition there to join. There is an audience he is building, and that audience will follow him to whatever he says next. Based on a decade of evidence, what he says next will sound like what he was saying to his brother last week. White Americans as the real victims. Vaccines as a bioweapon. Civil rights protests as an attack on cops. That’s the album he’s still in the middle of recording.
Nicole Hemmer made this point two weeks ago at MS NOW, more concisely than I’m making it here: shining a sympathetic spotlight on Carlson now does the work of laundering his reputation for the next time he attacks immigrants or trans people or whoever the next target turns out to be. The infighting on the right is genuinely useful. Boosting the people doing it is not.
I have been writing about Tucker Carlson for almost a decade. I have not enjoyed it. I wrote about the misdirection technique in 2019. I wrote about the profile genre in 2021. This piece is the latest entry in a stupid running series I would prefer not to be writing.
He is very good at this. The Fox audience that fell for him for ten years was the easy mark. The harder mark is the audience that just spent ten years watching what he did to the easy mark, and is now being told he has changed. He has not. He has just found people who have not been watching as carefully.
That’s the trick. That’s always been the trick.
Tucker Carlson pretending to move left is even less believable than that like 6 weeks Megyn Kelly tried that.
I don't get the impulse to grab on to Tucker and hold him up as some kind of shining example because he says he's against the war. Most Americans are against the war. We don't lack for people who are against the war. You want to build an antiwar alliance, how about looking to the tens of millions of people who are truly sincere about it?
But as an old lefty with decades of antwar experience (unfortunately) this is always the way it goes. The people who are already with us are never enough, are they? They're in the streets in their millions, they represent an actual majority of the population, but instead we imagine we're just one repentant Republican away from success.