President Donald Trump posted an insult-packed screed on Truth Social on Thursday, aimed at a chorus of right-wing critics of his war on Iran. His targets included conspiracy podcasters Alex Jones and Candace Owens; former Fox News host Megyn Kelly; and, most prominently, another former Fox host, Tucker Carlson.
Right-wing attacks on Trump have not only caught the attention of the president, but also of liberals and progressives, who have applauded these blistering criticisms. During the first round of attacks on Iran last June, Jon Stewart marveled at Carlson’s criticisms, saying, “We’re in such a bizarro world, you’ve got me nodding my head to Tucker Carlson videos.” Just this week, Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., heaped praise on the right-wing critics of the war, musing that they could be part of “a broad, populist social movement” to save democracy.
Right-wing media personalities can be divided into two groups: loyalists and opportunists.
Nor is Iran the only issue on which Carlson has won such praise from his left. His criticism of housing prices and stagnant wages won plaudits from affordability advocates, with some contemplating a left-right populist economic alliance. His embrace of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s, D-Mass., argument in her book, “The Two-Income Trap,” led the Brookings Institute to admit, “Tucker Carlson has a point.”
But progressives do not, under any circumstances, have to hand it to Carlson or other far-right critics of the Iran war. Such praise does not bolster the case for constraining Trump’s lawless presidency. Rather, it amplifies voices who will use their support to further degrade U.S. democracy.
Right-wing media personalities can be divided into two groups: loyalists and opportunists. The first category, which includes many long-time radio and television broadcasters, such as Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck, need Trump and the Republican Party to stay relevant. They can tolerate very little daylight with the administration and will pretzel themselves into any shape to retain that closeness.
The opportunists on the right, such as Carlson and Jones, find Trump valuable but not indispensable. They have much bigger goals in mind — for Jones, enabling a conspiratorial white nationalism; for Carlson, creating an American version of Hungary. The president is a useful ally, until he is not. They draft on Trump’s power to consolidate their own.
The difference between these two groups, then, is less about underlying values and more about strategy. The result, as Trump has grown even more erratic and aggressive in his second term, has been a noticeable wedge between the two groups. When faced with issues such as the administration’s obstinance around the Jeffrey Epstein emails or its war on Iran, Trump loyalists have to play along, concocting ever more baroque excuses for the president’s actions. The opportunists can set their allegiances aside, saying plainly what was obvious to everyone watching: that Trump’s actions were corrupt, unlawful and immoral.
That ability to talk honestly about contentious events is a powerful tool for the opportunists.
Trump’s expletive-laden post threatening Iran on Easter morning offered a clear example of this divide. Glenn Beck spent a good deal of time on his show the next day breaking down Trump’s “crazy ass tweet,” assuring listeners the president was intentionally acting erratic as a diplomatic ploy. He admitted the president’s language was not Christ-like, but then, “Christ never fought a war with an actual military.” Carlson, who does not need Trump the way Beck does, denounced his “desecration of Easter,” calling the post “vile on every level” and “a mockery of Christianity.”
Then he took apart Trump’s foreign policy, arguing it was “not acceptable for Americans or any civilized people.”
That ability to talk honestly about contentious events is a powerful tool for the opportunists. Trump acolytes have to deny what is in front of their faces; far-right activists can point out that the emperor wears no clothes and draw more followers to their side.
But while these far-right opportunists might sound like potential progressive allies in these moments — after all, progressives also denounce Trump’s ties to Epstein and his war on Iran — their goals are much different. Podcasters such as Carlson want to grow their audiences and their power to further far-right politics, pulling listeners, and hopefully voters, into their anti-democratic movement. Carlson may echo Warren’s claims about, say, the housing crisis, but he also blames immigrants for making housing unaffordable and unavailable, suggesting mass deportations as the solution. And while he may agree with Warren in lamenting that a middle-class family can no longer survive on one income, his ideal solution involves women being forced out of the workforce.
The road to war in Iraq is instructive in this case. In 2002, then-MSNBC hired Pat Buchanan, a right-wing nativist populist, to join its network. The channel had not yet settled on a consistent voice: Notably, around the same time, it fired liberal host Phil Donahue, believing that having a liberal criticize the war would cause headaches for the network. Because Buchanan staunchly opposed the Bush administration and the Iraq war, he provided the network a conservative who would denounce a popular Republican president.
But Buchanan was no progressive ally: just as he had done throughout his career, he lamented the end of white America, called for limits to nonwhite immigration and criticized democracy. Elevating him did not fracture the conservative coalition — the Bush administration managed that quite well on its own. But it did legitimate his racism and authoritarianism.
This is why progressives should not promote Carlson to burnish arguments against the Trump administration. It may be fun to watch and share a bit of right-on-right violence that suggests the MAGA base is hopelessly splintered (though polls show the base still retains significant loyalty to Trump). But for one thing, the Trump-bashing clips usually omit important context. In the same episode where Carlson denounced Trump’s actions as “evil,” he insisted he’s still “grateful” for Trump, even saying, “I’d maybe vote for him again.” Likewise, Megyn Kelly, who has been attacking Trump over Iran, nevertheless said this week, “Trump could drop a nuke and I’d still vote Republican.”
More than that, though, shining a laudatory spotlight on Carlson, Kelly and their ilk does their work for them, lending their reputations new legitimacy the next time they attack immigrants or promote authoritarians. Infighting among voices on the right is welcome, but it’s often best to let them fight amongst themselves.
Nicole Hemmer
Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and author of "Partisans: The Conservative Revolutionaries Who Remade American Politics in the 1990s."