Tucker Carlson Dared Question a Trump Lawyer. The Backlash Was Quick.
The president’s allies quickly closed ranks behind
Sidney Powell and her pro-Trump conspiracy theory, accusing the Fox host of
betrayal.
Sidney Powell, an election lawyer for President Trump,
has laid out a conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked and millions
of votes were stolen from the president.
By Jeremy
W. Peters
Nov. 20,
2020
For more
than a week, a plain-spoken former federal prosecutor named Sidney Powell made
the rounds on right-wing talk radio and cable news, facing little pushback as
she laid out a conspiracy theory that Venezuela, Cuba and other “communist”
interests had used a secret algorithm to hack into voting machines and steal
millions of votes from President Trump.
She spoke
mostly uninterrupted for nearly 20 minutes on Monday on the “Rush Limbaugh
Show,” the No. 1 program on talk radio. Hosts like Mark Levin, who has the
fourth-largest talk radio audience, and Lou Dobbs of Fox Business praised her
patriotism and courage.
So it came
as most unwelcome news to the president’s defenders when Tucker Carlson, host
of an 8 p.m. Fox News show and a confidant of Mr. Trump, dissected Ms. Powell’s
claims as unreliable and unproven.
“What
Powell was describing would amount to the single greatest crime in American
history,” Mr. Carlson said on Thursday night, his voice ringing with
incredulity in a 10-minute monologue at the top of his show. “Millions of votes
stolen in a day. Democracy destroyed. The end of our centuries-old system of
government.” But, he said, when he invited Ms. Powell on his show to share her
evidence, she became “angry and told us to stop contacting her.”
The
response was immediate, and hostile. The president’s allies in conservative
media and their legions of devoted Trump fans quickly closed ranks behind Ms.
Powell and her case on behalf of the president, accusing the Fox host of
betrayal.
“How
quickly we turn on our own,” said Bo Snerdley, Mr. Limbaugh’s producer, in a
Twitter post that was indicative of the backlash against Mr. Carlson. “Where is
the ‘evidence’ the election was fair?”
The
backlash against Mr. Carlson and Fox for daring to exert even a moment of
independence underscores how little willingness exists among Republicans to
challenge the president and his false narrative about the election he insists
was stolen. Among conservative media voices and outlets, there’s generally not
just a lack of willingness — they have proved this month to be Mr. Trump’s most
reflexive defenders.
For months
before the election, as Mr. Trump spread disinformation about the reliability
of mail-in ballots, Republicans largely avoided contradicting him and insisted
that his concerns about fraud were not entirely unreasonable. And in the weeks
since election night, when Mr. Trump falsely declared himself the winner and
then refused to accept President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory, the
acknowledgments that the race is settled have come mostly from former officials
like President George W. Bush, or from a few current office holders, like
Senator Mitt Romney, who have not been afraid to air their differences with Mr.
Trump.
The same
fear that grips elected Republicans — getting on the wrong side of voters who
adore Mr. Trump but have little affection for the Republican Party — has kept
conservative media largely in line. And that has created a right-wing media
bubble that has grown increasingly disconnected from the most basic facts about
American government in recent weeks, including who will be inaugurated as
president on Jan. 20, 2021.
In the
hours after Mr. Carlson’s monologue, word of which spread quickly across social
media, Mr. Trump’s supporters not only went after Mr. Carlson but also Fox
News. The network has become a source of particular frustration with many on
the right after taking a more skeptical view of Mr. Trump’s claims about voter
fraud and refusing to reconsider its call on election night that Mr. Biden
would win Arizona.
That decision,
which proved correct, deeply angered the president and led him to start
promoting some of Fox’s smaller competitors on cable like Newsmax and One
America News Network as more suitable alternatives for his large and loyal
following.
Roosh
Valizadeh, a writer and podcast host who supports the president, summed up the
anger aimed at Fox by many on the right, saying, “As long as Tucker Carlson
works for Fox News, he can’t be fully trusted.”
All week on
networks like Newsmax and OANN and talk radio programs, the president’s
supporters have been given a steady diet of interviews with Trump allies,
campaign officials and news stories that promote allegations of fraud with
little or no context.
One lawyer
who is assisting the Trump campaign in its efforts, Lin Wood, went unquestioned
this week on Mr. Levin’s show when he made the fantastical claim that Mr. Trump
had won the election with 70 percent of the vote. A story that OANN broadcast
on Friday afternoon falsely declared, “The state of Michigan is back in play,”
giving credence to Mr. Trump’s extraordinary but almost certainly unsuccessful
efforts to delay certification of the vote in Detroit.
Republican
officials have remained mostly measured and muted in their response, even after
the conspiratorial and unsubstantiated claims floated by Ms. Powell, Rudolph W.
Giuliani and other members of Mr. Trump’s legal team at a news conference on
Thursday. Republicans like Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, who said that Ms.
Powell’s accusations were “absolutely outrageous,” were the exception.
Rich Lowry,
the editor of National Review and sometimes critic of the president who called
his refusal to concede “absurd and sophomoric,” said that whether it was a
Republican politician or a talk-show host, breaking the will that many Trump
supporters have to believe he is the rightful winner was extremely difficult.
“They want
it to be true,” Mr. Lowry said. “On top of that, there’s an enormous
credibility gap and radical distrust of other sources of information. And
that’s compounded by the fact that the president has no standards and is
surrounded by these clownish people who will say anything. It’s a toxic stew.”
Mr. Lowry
added that he thought Mr. Carlson’s words were “admirable” and had told the Fox
host so himself. “It’s one thing for people who’ve been opposed to Trump all
along, or mixed, to say something like that,” Mr. Lowry said. “It’s another
thing for a leader of the populist wing of the conservative movement to call it
out.”
A question
for conservative media that are more independent of Mr. Trump is how much of
the market the unabashedly pro-Trump media dominates in the future. Some
scholars said they expected that audience to be substantial.
“Drudge and
Fox can try to pull back from the abyss,” said Yochai Benkler, a professor at
Harvard Law School who studies conservative media. “But the audience is going
to get what it wants and reward those who give it to them.”
Mr. Carlson
is no ordinary Trump critic. He has been one of the president’s most aggressive
defenders in prime time, especially when it came to standing up for Mr. Trump
as he attacked African-American politicians, athletes and the racial justice
activists in the Black Lives Matter movement. He has also generally bought into
the disproved notion that voter fraud is a widespread problem — a popular
position with Mr. Trump and on Mr. Carlson’s network.
He has not
been shy in criticizing aspects of the president’s policies he disagrees with,
whether the bombing raid in Iraq that killed Iran’s top general, Qassim
Suleimani, or Mr. Trump’s failure to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously
when it started spreading last winter. But he has never gone out on a limb like
this, with the president and his followers so besieged.
Mr.
Carlson, no doubt aware that many in his audience, including possibly the
president himself, would not like what they were hearing, walked a fine line on
Thursday night. He insisted that he and his producers “took Sidney Powell
seriously,” and that he had invited her on the show to present her evidence.
He also
tried to reassure his audience that he was on their side after all, explaining
how he always kept an open mind about alleged cover-ups like the one Ms. Powell
has promoted. “We don’t dismiss anything,” he said. “We literally do U.F.O.
segments.”
Correction:
Nov. 20, 2020
An earlier
version of this article referred incorrectly to the location of the bombing
raid that killed Iran’s top general, Qassim Suleimani. The raid was in Iraq,
not Iran.
Jeremy W. Peters covers national politics. His other assignments in his decade at The Times have included covering the financial markets, the media, New York politics and two presidential campaigns. He is also an MSNBC contributor. @jw
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário