This week Tucker Carlson dusted off an old favorite of his: downplaying the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. This time he had 40,000 hours of security footage in his mitts, and he did what everyone knew he did, namely cherry-pick the most boring segments from it to make the outlandish claim that the violent attempt to overturn democracy was a mostly peaceful affair populated by mere “sightseers.” He’s doing it out of love for Trump, right? Wrong, at least if you go by some newly publicized texts he exchanged with a staffer two days before that fateful day.
Lots of big revelations coming out tonight in the exhibits to Dominion’s lawsuit against Fox News.
Days before Jan. 6, Tucker Carlson wrote in a text message exchange about Trump: “I hate him passionately” and “I truly can’t wait” to ignore him. pic.twitter.com/ykk5s4jvLo
— Will Sommer (@willsommer) March 8, 2023
“We are very very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” Carlson texted an unknown Fox News employee. “I hate him passionately,” he soon confessed, adding that he “blew up at [ex-Trump staffer] Peter Navarro today in frustration. I actually like Peter. But I can’t handle much more of this.”
Wow, Tucker sure seems pretty exasperated, huh? It’s almost as though he wants to go back to the old days, when he wore a bow-tie on the air and got shredded by Jon Stewart, who all but ended his tenure at CNN. (That’s right, Tucker Carlson was once on CNN. Crazy to think.)
The leaked texts are the latest treasure trove from Dominion’s pricey lawsuit against Fox News, which claims — with lots of evidence — that the network’s brass and stars knew all the 2020 voter fraud nonsense they were peddling was bull.
Does Tucker still hate Trump “passionately”? Is it all a schtick to Hoover up fame and money and a sense of power? It sure seems like it. As it happens, him admitting in private that he despises the big guy jibes interestingly with comments he said about non-far right media some two months prior: “Reporters hate Trump with an all-consuming mania. They hate him so intensely that at times it’s been amusing to watch.”
Tucker Carlson on October 30, 2020: “Reporters hate Trump with an all-consuming mania. They hate him so intensely that at times it’s been amusing to watch.”
Tucker Carlson on Trump in private on January 4, 2021: “I hate him passionately.” https://t.co/4Icc3BgOxp pic.twitter.com/smrQzceMop
— Eric Hananoki (@ehananoki) March 8, 2023
It’s almost as though Republicans like Tucker often trade in projection: accusing others of the very thing of which they’re guilty.
