Tucker Carlson gave Donald Trump one hour to say what he wanted

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Donald Trump’s political rhetoric has long been full of hypocrisy and unintentionally ironic comments. It’s a function of his path to running for office: He’s a salesman, and hell-bent on saying what he thinks his customers want to hear at the moment. Sure, he might be contradicting you about what he said last week, but he might as well explain that. Just let him talk longer.

Even with that baseline, however, one might be hard-pressed to find a more ironic comment than the one he offered on a question put to President Biden by NBC’s Al Roker.

You can’t get a softer question than that, Trump said of Roker’s question to Biden at the White House Easter Egg Roll. That’s a long answer, Trump continued, criticizing the man who beat him in 2020 for talking about eggs and this and that before getting to the point.

The context for this comment? Trump was in the middle of an initially obsequious interview with Tucker Carlson at the presidents’ former Mar-a-Lago home. The Roker bit came amid a two-minute-long response from Trump that included mentions of the Home Depot founder, the Bidens’ trip to Ireland and World War III.

Carlson’s burning question?

Do you think Biden will stay in the race?

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Good to see that Trump isn’t harboring a grudge. After all, it was only last month that we learned that Carlson told his colleagues at Fox News that he was furious with Trump. That came in January 2021, shortly before the riots in the US Capitol, as Fox News was still trying to balance its years of Trump sycophancy with his denial of the fact that he had lost the 2020 election. Executives of Fox moved away from Trump after the uproar, but here, too, Trump prevailed for a long time.

Presidents and vice presidents regularly deal with classified documents, but strict guidelines from various laws have clear guidelines on the subject. (Video: Adriana Usero/The Washington Post)

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. All of the above is water under the bridge.

You will notice that the term interview is used loosely. Typically, a television host conducting an interview with a former president can be expected to highlight critical issues, challenge obvious, established lies and elicit some new thoughts or comments from the interview subject. But that wasn’t the tactic Carlson took. While Carlson has previously been 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 play along at will.

He chatted for more than a minute about how court staff and police officers were crying and apologizing as he was arraigned on criminal charges in Manhattan. For more than five minutes, he lashed out at the various fraudulent investigations under which he was subjected and his false statements about the ceasefire in Afghanistan and the classified documents obtained by the FBI from Mar- a-Lago.

Well, actually, he rambled on for more than six minutes because Carlsons only interjection was responding to Trump’s inaccurate statements about material left behind by the US military with a sycophantic, Of course.

That offer from Carlson is marked as point A below, just one of the few times where Trumps lengthy riffs actually meet commentary from his pretend interviewer.

Other labeled Carlson interjections are as follows:

B: Carlson responded to Trump’s insistence that nuclear warming is more of a problem than global warming that what you say is true. the Fox News hosts life, Carlson replied, For sure.D: Carlson started one of his scattered questions by laughing at Trumps describing his arrest as the old Soviet process of charging people of crimes.

Not exactly speaking truth to power.

But, of course, that’s not what Carlson does. He marveled at one point that the interview was supposed to be about Trump’s arrest but they ended up talking about foreign policy. That’s because Carlson’s little steering has pushed Trump in that direction, asking him, for example, about Russia on multiple occasions. This is what Carlson has been using on his show lately: to reshape Republican foreign policy orthodoxy to be less friendly toward Ukraine. It was an offshoot of his general efforts to reframe American politics broadly to better reflect his own worldview on the right.

Perhaps the most telling part of the conversation came during one of the interludes where Carlson set up segments of edited conversation.

For a man who has been caricatured as an extremist, Carlson said of Trump, we think you’ll find what he has to say moderate, smart and intelligent.

This is clearly reminiscent of how Carlson described Ye, the musician formerly known as Kanye West, when he interviewed him in October.

Enemies of his ideas dismissed West, as they had for years, as mentally ill, Carlson said then. Too crazy to take seriously. Look away. Ignore him. He is a mental patient. But, he added later, we rarely hear someone who speaks honestly and so movingly about what he believes but he invited the audience to judge for themselves.

The only problem, it turns out, is that Carlson and his team edited out most of Yes’s most outlandish and disturbing commentary. Carlson wanted to portray Ye as a smart, sensible opponent of America’s elite, so he cut parts that undermined that idea.

Raising an obvious question: What could he have left out of his interview with Trump to present the former president as favorably as possible?

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