OPINION
FRANK BRUNI
The New Trump? Easy. It’s Tucker.
May 1, 2021
Frank Bruni
By Frank
Bruni
Opinion
Columnist
The lead
item in Politico’s signature morning newsletter asked if a certain public
figure was “losing his mind.” His rants made him seem ever “more unhinged.”
Then again, they might be theatrical, a way to “keep you guessing as to whether
he’s just putting you on.”
Those
words, or their rough equivalents, were used scores if not hundreds of times to
describe Donald Trump.
But they
were written last Tuesday about … Tucker Carlson. And they settled the matter:
He’s the new Trump. Not Ron DeSantis. Not Josh Hawley. Not Rick Scott.
Certainly not Ted Cruz.
Those other
men are vying merely for Trump’s political mantle, with the occasional side
trip to Cancún.
Moving to
fill the empty space created by Trump’s ejection from the White House, his
banishment from social media and his petulant quasi-hibernation, Carlson is
triggering the libs like Trump triggered the libs. He’s animating the pundits
like Trump animated the pundits.
Case in
point: Carlson’s endlessly denounced, exhaustively parsed jeremiad against
masks on his Fox News show on Monday night.
“Your
response when you see children wearing masks as they play should be no
different from your response to seeing someone beat a kid at Walmart,” Carlson
railed. “Call the police immediately. Contact child protective services. Keep
calling until someone arrives. What you’re looking at is abuse. It’s child
abuse.”
What
lunatic hyperbole. What ludicrous histrionics. And what timing. Carlson shares
Trump’s knack for that — for figuring out precisely when, for maximum effect,
to pour salt into a civic wound.
His
free-the-children bunk played on the weariness of more than a year of
coronavirus vigilance. It came just as Americans were puzzling over the need
for masks once they’re vaccinated or when they’re outdoors. It was juiced by
arguments about what degree of caution remains necessary and what’s just muscle
memory or virtue signaling.
And it was
helpfully succinct and tidily packaged so that other commentators could tee off
on it. Carlson understands what Trump always has and what every practiced
provocateur does: You don’t just give your detractors agita. You give them
material. That way, everything you say has a lengthy half-life and durable
shelf life.
Several
shows on MSNBC covered Carlson’s rant. Several shows on CNN, too. “The View”
waded in. So did Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. When you’re the subject of
late-night comedians’ monologues, you’ve really made it.
Just two
and a half weeks earlier, another of Carlson’s soliloquies — in which he
peddled the far-right paranoia about a Democratic Party scheme to have
dark-skinned invaders from developing countries supplant white Christian
Americans — became its own news story, making him more of an actor in our
national drama than a chronicler of it.
It was
hardly his first lament about immigration, and he had dabbled in the “great
replacement theory” before. But this time around it was more helpfully
succinct, more tidily packaged, more honed. “Every time they import a new
voter, I become disenfranchised as a current voter,” he fumed. “I have less
political power because they are importing a brand-new electorate.”
He made
voters sound like Mazdas and America like a car lot.
Like Trump,
he has decided that virality is its own reward. And he’s being amply rewarded,
as exemplified in this very column. I’d prefer to ignore him, but I face the
same irreconcilable considerations that all the others who aren’t ignoring him
do.
To give him
attention is to play into his hands, but to do the opposite is to play ostrich.
In April, his 8 p.m. Eastern show drew an average nightly audience of about
three million viewers. That made him the most-watched of any cable news host —
ahead of Sean Hannity, ahead of Rachel Maddow — and it meant that he was both
capturing and coloring how many Americans felt about current events. His
outbursts, no matter how ugly, are relevant.
Remind you
of anyone now clomping through the sand traps near Mar-a-Loco?
The amount
of real estate that Carlson occupies in political newsletters that I subscribe
to seems to have grown in proportion to the amount that Trump has lost. (That’s
my own replacement theory.) And it proves that we need not just villains but also
certain kinds of villains: ones whose unabashed smugness, unfettered cruelty
and undisguised sense of superiority allow us to return fire unsparingly and
work out our own rage. Carlson, again like Trump, is cathartic.
Trump’s
dominance was so profound from early 2016 through early 2021 that there’s now
something of an obsession with naming his successor, even though it’s not at
all clear that he’s willing to be succeeded. All the men I mentioned earlier
covet that crown. But not all of them fully understand that Trump’s métier
wasn’t politics. It was performance.
Carlson
gets that. If advancing arguments was his exclusive or primary goal, he
wouldn’t allow for so much confusion regarding the flavor of his invective. But
debates about whether he’s genuinely making points or disingenuously pressing
buttons might well be a ratings boon. To keep people guessing is to keep people
tuned in.
I’m not
saying that he’s Trump’s doppelgänger. He’s neither orange nor ostentatious
enough. He can be as verbally dexterous as Trump is oratorically incontinent,
as brimming with information as Trump is barren of it. Carlson reminds you of a
prep school debate team captain all puffed up at his lectern. Trump reminds you
of a puffy reality-show ham — what he was before he rode that escalator
downward, a harbinger of the country’s trajectory under him.
But both
barge through the contradictions of being both populists and plutocrats. Both
pretend to be bad boys while living like good old boys. Both market bullying as
bravery.
“Part of
the appeal of Carlson’s show is its tendency to generate knockouts rather than
split decisions,” Kelefa Sanneh wrote in an excellent profile of Carlson in The
New Yorker in 2017. “His unofficial Reddit page features pictures of guests
judged to have performed especially poorly; over each face is written
‘wasted.’”
That
“wasted” reminds me of Trump’s “loser.” It’s the vocabulary of mockery, a sport
in which Carlson is a champion. But it’s stranger when played by him than when
played by Trump, who never pretended to be thoughtful. Carlson was thoughtful,
back in the days when he was writing long articles for ambitious magazines.
Then came
television and then high-decibel duels on television and then Trump, the shark
to Carlson’s pilot fish. Carlson, who flattered him, got the time slot on Fox
News that had belonged to Megyn Kelly, who feuded with Trump.
And now?
The pilot fish has grown his own mighty jaws, and the ocean’s only a little bit
safer.
Frank Bruni
has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs — including White
House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic — before becoming
a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @FrankBruni • Facebook
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