The US journalist has been an outspoken critic of the Biden administration and has repeatedly justified Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Former prime time Fox News host Tucker Carlson – long known as a public cheerleader for Donald Trump – has conducted a wide-ranging two-hour interview with the Russian president, Vladimir Putin. Carlson, who has consistently argued Russia’s case for its invasion of Ukraine, posted his interview on both his own site and on Elon Musk’s X . There – according to Kremlin mouthpiece Pravda – it chalked up more than 90 million views within hours of being posted.
The interview was wide-ranging: Ukraine, China, multi-polarity, Putin’s opinion of several former US presidents as well as his predecessors Lenin, Stalin and Yeltsin. Discussing US politics, Putin touched on Elon Musk, Donald Trump and what he called the warlike “mindsets” of US foreign policy elites.
But Putin chose not to dwell at length on what a Trump presidency could do for him. Instead he took a shot at US policy on Ukraine as a distraction from America’s domestic woes, zeroing in on what is a sore point for many swing voters – immigration. Carlson filled in the gap, echoing another of Trump’s key themes – the power of the “deep state”: “So, twice you’ve described US presidents making decisions and then being undercut by their agency heads. So, it sounds like you’re describing a system that is not run by the people who are elected, in your telling.”
Although he is likely to win the Republican presidential nomination, Trump faces a primary challenge from Nikki Haley, who now represents an important focal point of opposition to Trump the personality rather than to Trumpism the idea. Haley, former governor of South Carolina and Trump’s ambassador to the UN, is also a champion of US support for Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s military might – as is Joe Biden.
So while Carlson and Trump are partisan Republicans, their stances on Russia, Putin and the Ukraine war reflect a broader mood among much of the US public.