On Sept. 21, JD Vance — U.S. senator and Republican vice-presidential nominee — is scheduled to appear with Tucker Carlson on the former cable host’s live tour at the Giant Center in Hershey, Pa.
By Jim Geraghty
Really? The chief villain? You can’t think of any other figure who might have earned that title?
Let’s see whether Vance finally draws the line at hanging with the guy who hosts a revisionist historian with a blind spot for Adolf Hitler. Then again, Carlson does have a lot of fans, and there’s an election coming up.
It’s not like hanging around Carlson hasn’t led to headaches for Vance before; the senator made his infamous statement that America is run “by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too” on Carlson’s Fox News program in 2021.
The MAGA movement has a lot of loyal podcast hosts, but Carlson might be Donald Trump’s favorite; Carlson got a prime-time speaking slot at July’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee.
An ordinary campaign might not want the vice-presidential nominee talking onstage with a television host who brings out his most incendiary, obnoxious side. There’s a serious discussion worth having about the U.S. birth rate and obstacles to marriage and parenthood. Sneering about “childless cat ladies” isn’t how you get there.
No self-respecting pollster, focus-group conductor or campaign strategist would recommend the GOP nominee for vice president laugh it up with a Putin-adoring nutjob conspiracy theorist in a key swing state about six weeks before Election Day. No, Vance clearly will be hanging out with Carlson simply because he wants to, because he thinks it’s a good idea. (Perhaps there’s an element of gratitude, as well. Carlson reportedly lobbied Trump hard for Vance to be his running mate, warning that if Trump picked a “neocon,” as the New York Times put it, “then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.”)
But this is campaigning in 2024, where Trump and Vance just can’t get around to campaigning with Nikki Haley — hey, all she did was win 4.3 million votes in the primary! — but will find time to hang out with Carlson. And with the brain worm guy who called Trump “a terrible president” all the way back on, er … July 2. And with the former Democratic congresswoman who endorsed Bernie Sanders four years ago and dabbled in propaganda for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad.
This new all-fringe, no-vanilla GOP is a big tent, you see. Much like a circus.
Vance’s planned appearance with Carlson meshes well with Trump’s approach to campaigning: No matter what the data says, the former president goes with what he likes and what enthralls his MAGA loyalists. This is how you end up with a rambling, meandering convention speech that would have had Fidel Castro checking his watch.
Trump and Vance sure seem like they’re taking foolhardy gambles. But those seven swing states— Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all still look like a jump ball or pretty close to one. Trump’s erratic, scattershot, personal attacks on Kamala Harris — “I didn’t know she was Black,” fabricating a story about former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown telling him “terrible things” about Harris during a near-crash in a helicopter, etc. — shouldn’t work. And they probably won’t work. Right?
Right? Or is this Tucker Carlson’s America after all?
