Carlson shows two sides in his views on Trump, supporters

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Fox News host Tucker Carlson’s conflicted feelings about former President Trump and his supporters were on full display this week amid headlines over his controversial Jan. 6 coverage and unearthed private emails as part of a lawsuit.

Carlson devoted two nights of his widely-watched prime-time opinion program to defending the Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, downplaying the incident as “mostly a peaceful riot,” — comments that sparked of widespread political opposition.

But privately, communications revealed by the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit show Carlson offering a sneer at the GOP’s default standard bearer.

“We are so close to being able to ignore Trump almost every night. I really can’t wait,” Carlson wrote in a text to an anonymous Fox employee on January 4, 2021, just two days before supporters of former president at the Capitol, according to a recent court filing.

In another, she said, “I hate him passionately.”

What emerges is a media personality who wants to unite with the common man who supports the former president, but has deep doubts about the former commander in chief.

Dominion sued Fox for defamation and is seeking $1.6 billion in damages. The company’s lawsuit alleges that Fox hosts and executives deliberately floated conspiracy theories that they did not believe Dominion was part of an electoral fraud effort in the 2020 presidential election.

Fox defended itself on First Amendment grounds, arguing that it had a journalistic duty to cover Trump’s newsworthy remarks and accused the company of “cherry-picking” quotes from top hosts like Carlson to drive high-profile press coverage and bolster its case.

“Thanks to today’s filings, Dominion has been caught using more distortions and misinformation in its PR campaign to discredit Fox News and trample on free speech and freedom of the press,” the network said in its latest statement on the filings. of the Dominion. “We already know they will say and do anything to try to win this case, but to twist and even misrepresent quotes at the highest levels of our company is truly beyond the pale.”

As the suit plays out, Fox is now dealing with a separate controversy surrounding Carlson’s take on the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6. Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) gave the Fox News host thousands of thousands of hours of tape as an exclusive, which Carlson used Monday and Tuesday to paint a more peaceful picture of the unrest in the Capitol.

There is a close connection between conspiracy theories about voter fraud costing Trump the presidential election and the unrest in the Capitol.

On the day of Jan. 6, 2021, Trump gave a speech about voter fraud near the White House. His

Supporters then stormed the Capitol to prevent Congress from certifying the results of the presidential election. The count was restarted and ended hours after the Capitol was removed.

Messages released in the Dominion case suggest that Carlson does not believe in voter fraud theories.

“Turns out Sidney Powell is lying. I caught him. Crazy,” Carlson wrote to fellow prime-time host Laura Ingraham on Nov. 18, according to another filing. Powell at the time was pro-Trump that lawyer pushing baseless theories about the Dominion.

In other messages, Carlson told Powell: “You keep telling our viewers that millions of votes were altered by software. I hope you can prove that soon. You have convinced them that Trump will win. If you have no evidence of fraud on that scale, a cruel and reckless thing to keep saying.”

But this week, on his nightly prime-time program, Carlson took a different tone about the election and January 6.

Many of the people who entered the Capitol that day, Carlson said on his Monday night show, “believe that the election they voted in was unfairly conducted.”

“They are right. In retrospect, it is clear that the 2020 election was a gross betrayal of American democracy, given the facts that have since emerged about that election,” the host said. “No honest person can deny that. However, those beneficiary of that election continues to lie about what is seen today.”

Carlson offered no new evidence to support the allegation of fraud.

Carlson, since launching his Fox show in 2016, has not shied away from knocking Republicans and Trump, though his public criticism is less sharp than in private texts.

“Many others are saying that Donald Trump is the reason the Republicans didn’t do what they thought they were going to do. That’s a more complicated question,” Carlson said in one of his broadcasts shortly after last year’s midterm elections. autumn “The truth is we’re not going to see the whole picture this early … The truth is Trump has always been a mixed blessing in politics. The downsides are marbled in the upsides, but in this case he’s definitely not the sole cause of anything.

Trump promoted Carlson’s show earlier this week, which experienced a 20 percent surge in viewers on Monday, thanking him for airing additional footage from Jan. 6 and calling assertions the host was making that “unanswerable.”

Trump’s opponents in the GOP are critical of Carlson.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said Tuesday that “this is a mistake, in my view, [for] Fox News to describe it in a way that is the complete opposite of what our chief law enforcement officer described here at the Capitol.

Carlson seemed to revel in the bipartisan criticism on his show Tuesday, saying members of both parties engaged in “hysteria” over the release of new footage from Jan. 6 while doubling down on his framing of the attack.

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“They are all on the same side. So it’s really not about left and right. It’s not about Republicans and Democrats. Here, you have people with common interests ….People who, underneath it all, have everything in common are all lined up against everyone else,” Carlson said. “They expect themselves and show their membership cards at any of these clubs.”

“So keep a list,” he told his audience. “If you wanted to know who was actually aligned despite the illusion of partisanship, we found out today.”

Zach Schonfeld contributed.

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