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| Ken Cedeno, Cheney Orr, Jonathan Ernst/Reuters, NR Illustration |
Sooner or later, the ambitious vice president will need to decide which he values more.
JD Vance wants very much to be president. The further we get into Donald Trump’s second term, the more Vance’s ambitions to succeed him become the dominant story in our politics. Which means that it’s time to start thinking about what he might do to advance — or derail — those ambitions.
Whether Vance has a realistic prospect of winning the presidency in 2028 (assuming that Trump serves out his term) depends heavily on the unusual place we inhabit in the political cycle, after Trump became only the second man to return to the presidency after being voted out of it. Only one man — Martin Van Buren — has previously made the transition Vance seeks, from new second-term vice president to election in his own right without the president dying in office. As of now, Vance still has pole position for the 2028 Republican nomination. He is likely to keep the upper hand unless one of two things happens in the next 26 months: he falls out with Donald Trump, or (far less likely) Trump suffers a dramatic loss of credibility with Republican voters.
But one very large question still looms over Vance’s presidential ambitions: Does he want to be president more than he wants to be a loyal friend to Tucker Carlson? Because sooner or later, he will have to choose.
The Trouble with Tucker
Carlson, once a prime-time TV personality on Fox News, CNN, MSNBC, and PBS, columnist for New York, and cofounder of the Daily Caller, has been spiraling ever further into conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and propaganda for America’s enemies ever since he was let go by Fox in April 2023 amid the fallout from Carlson’s role in the network’s colossal defamation settlement with Dominion Voting Machines. That was apparently the last straw atop Rupert Murdoch’s mounting concerns with Carlson’s January 6 conspiracy theories, among other things.
Space does not even begin to permit a full recounting here of the ways in which Carlson, since moving his program to X/Twitter, has become steadily more extreme, paranoid, and detached from reality. This includes flacking for Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Hamas, and Qatar; hysterically predicting world war if the Trump administration hit Iran’s nuclear program; obsessing over Jews; arguing that we’d be better off as feudal peasants; and promoting World War II revisionism in which Churchill, not Hitler, was the real villain. But the provocation that really proved the tipping point in public attention to Carlson’s moral and intellectual descent was his choice to hold a sycophantic softball interview with notorious white nationalist and Hitler-loving and Stalin-praising antisemite Nick Fuentes a little over a week before Election Day 2025.
This was too much for many on the right to ignore. Ted Cruz and Ben Shapiro tore into Carlson. Conventional Republicans such as House Speaker Mike Johnson criticized him. The Heritage Foundation found itself plunged into months of wrenching controversy and resignations when its president, Kevin Roberts, blasted Carlson’s critics as a “venomous coalition,” a statement he only partly and grudgingly walked back. Carlson’s presence as an increasingly visible speaker for Turning Point USA after the assassination of Charlie Kirk led to a divisive split at the group’s events.
It’s bad enough for Carlson’s friends and allies that he has become increasingly toxic. But he’s getting worse — and he seems to revel in doing ever more provocative things to see how far he can push the people in his corner. This is the opposite of how a faithful ally or a good friend operates — especially an ally or friend of a man positioning himself to run for president. Even if JD Vance thinks he can survive his connection to what Carlson is doing now, there’s no way for him to predict how much further the man will go by 2028. What does it say about Vance’s judgment if he decides that he’s willing to write a blank check with his own political future to a man this unstable? --->READ MORE HERE (or HERE)
Tucker Carlson is not a good friend.
Just a few years ago, when the podcaster was pretending to be friends with President Trump, Carlson was caught privately saying of Trump: “I hate him passionately.”
In September, another person whom Carlson claimed to be friends with — Charlie Kirk — was shot dead. Carlson used the aftermath of his friend’s assassination not to demand that the suspect in the shooting be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. He didn’t seize the moment to insist that perhaps the radical left dial down its hateful rhetoric against conservatives and Republicans. Nor did he keep attention focused on the trans-extremist links of the alleged shooter.
No — Carlson chose to use the occasion to deflect attention from the perpetrator seized by the FBI and return to his pet obsession: the Jews.
In the wake of the assassination, Carlson was one of a number of kooky online influencers who suggested that Kirk’s views on Israel had been changing and that perhaps for this reason, the state of Israel had something to do with his murder.
It was a crazy conspiracy theory, but Carlson was happy to push it. What a way to honor a friend.
Then this past week, Carlson proved again what an appalling person he has become. He invited onto his show an avowed Holocaust denier and racist, Nick Fuentes.
We don’t need to linger here over all the horrifying bile that Fuentes has spewed out to his online followers. It is enough to say that he is so toxic, he could almost have been invented by the radical left as a way to delegitimize the political right in this country.
Any normal person would want to keep a million miles away from such a snarling, ugly actor. But if anyone was to sit down and give Fuentes one of the largest audiences of his career, you would have thought that there would be some hostile questions. The kind of relentlessly hostile questioning Carlson can do — such as in his recent astoundingly hostile interview with Ted Cruz.
But no — Carlson used his hours with Fuentes to simply launder Fuentes’ reputation and try to give him a veneer of reasonableness and respectability.
Which brings me back to what an appalling friend Tucker Carlson is.
Carlson might have used the opportunity to put to Fuentes some of the disgusting things Fuentes had said about the assassinated Kirk. He might have raised the way in which Fuentes and his “groyper” followers promised to hound and torment Kirk while he was alive. Carlson might also have asked Fuentes why he had seen fit to use the weeks after Kirk’s assassination not only to push the claim that the Jews murdered Kirk, but to also attack Kirk’s widow. --->READ MORE HERE
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