Donald Trump and maga Republicans must reject evilism spewed by Tucker Carlson and antisemite Nick Fuentes

"Tucker Carlson is fog," writes John Mac Ghlionn in this interesting political analysis published in the Boston Globe.

John Mac Ghlionn contributes regularly to US News & World Report, Spectator World, and The Hill.

Tucker Carlson recently chose to interview the evil Nazi

Nick Fuentes, a man loathed by most of the American left and by a substantial share of the American right. Fuentes is widely understood, across ideological lines, as toxic. 

Fuentes has spoken admiringly of figures like💢 Hitler and Stalin, flirted openly with antisemitic ✡️conspiracy theories, rejected the legitimacy of liberal democracy, argued that women shouldn’t have the right to vote, and spoken approvingly of political violence and ethnic nationalism. None of this is ambiguous. None of it requires interpretation. Fuentes has said disgraceful things. Full stop.💢❗

But, politically speaking, the evil Fuentes is a much easier problem for Republicans to handle than Carlson is. 

Fuentes is an threatening evil flare 🔥in the night sky. 

Evil, crude, and easy to track. Everyone knows where he stands. He doesn’t pretend to be a loyal party man. He has withheld support when it suited him, including refusing to back Trump in 2024. He attacks Trump directly, in plain language, without deflecting blame onto lower-level figures.

So, it allows the maga Republicans to say, “That’s not us,” 🤥and (sort of❓) mean it.🙄 Fuentes functions, in this sense, as a kind of ideological quarantine zone. He is visible, legible, and — crucially — containable.  (Except that Fuentes continues to attract attention making him dangerous. "Evil is as evil does". His evilism is like an evil magnet that catches metal nails.) 

Carlson is weirdly different. Not because he is “worse” in the moral-ranking sense people enjoy arguing about online, but because he is more structurally dangerous to the GOP. 

Fuentes is outside the house, shouting. Carlson is inside the house, rearranging furniture, insisting he is only “asking questions” while he does it.

Before going further, I should be explicit about where this criticism comes from.

I write this as a conservative who regularly watches Carlson — his YouTube clips, his long-form interviews, his podcasts. This is not the view of a drive-by critic or a partisan adversary. It comes from sustained exposure. And that exposure has become increasingly frustrating. 

Carlson says one thing and then does another. (Ugh❗ "who  knew"❓) He gestures toward restraint and then indulges provocation. He flirts with accountability and then retreats into ambiguity. When viewers notice the contradiction, he waves it away — cackles, shrugs, insists they’re imagining things. What he sells as misunderstanding is, in fact, gaslighting, and any attentive viewer can see it.👀

There’s an old principle here. The better enemy is often the one you can see. The threat you can name. The real trouble is the fog that rolls in quietly and convinces you it’s just “weather.”

Carlson is fog.

He is the kind of “dissident” who wants insider access and outsider swagger, Establishment proximity and anti-Establishment theatrics. He throws stones from behind the wall and then acts surprised when people notice his name etched into them.

This isn’t an abstract concern. In late December, more than a dozen senior staffers left the Heritage Foundation to join a new group founded by former vice president Mike Pence. Their exit followed internal turmoil sparked by the growing influence of right-wing media figures pushing antisemitic and extremist narratives. Carlson became a central flashpoint because he occupies a uniquely powerful position within conservative media — powerful enough to force institutions to choose sides.

The rupture was not really about Carlson alone. It was about what he represented, and what defending — or refusing to defend — him signaled. Editors, donors, board members, and allied organizations faced an uncomfortable choice: Was Carlson still an asset to be shielded or a liability to be contained? The fracture followed those answers. Some closed ranks around him, viewing criticism as Establishment overreach. Others stepped back from him, driven less by ideological disagreement than by their instinct for institutional survival.

The Heritage Foundation bombshell came shortly after Turning Point USA’s annual youth conference — intended as a unifying celebration honoring Charlie Kirk — devolved into a public brawl over the future of Trump’s movement. Ben Shapiro used the stage to deliver a scathing attack on Carlson and his allies, calling them “grifters and charlatans” trafficking in conspiracy theories and falsehoods. 

Carlson took the stage soon after and fired back, escalating the confrontation before thousands of young conservative activists. That moment mattered because it revealed real fault lines in the conservative coalition. Internal division creates opportunity, especially for figures like Carlson, who thrive on provocation and plausible deniability.

The pattern was evident in Carlson’s recent trip to Qatar, when he headlined the Doha Forum, interviewed Qatar’s prime minister, and then announced he was buying property in Qatar “to make a statement,” insisting he’s “an American and a free man” who will live wherever he wants. That’s a remarkable posture for a man whose brand is built on warning Americans about hostile ideologies, foreign money, and the slow-motion sabotage of the West.

Qatar is not some harmless foreign backdrop for a trolling gesture. Rather, Qatar is a hostile regime that has long operated as a banker, broker, and diplomatic shield for Islamist terror networks, including Hamas and Hezbollah. It hosts Hamas’s political leadership, funds aligned groups, and functions as a key back channel in conflicts that have spilled Western blood. Whatever one thinks about Israel, Gaza, or Middle Eastern politics more broadly, Qatar sits at the center of the reality being ignored.

The problem becomes clearer in Carlson’s treatment of Israel and Jews. This is not a defense of Israel or of Christian Zionism, both of which are legitimate subjects for debate and criticism. The issue is Carlson’s insistence on having it both ways. He regularly says he “likes Israel” even as he repeatedly singles it out for scorn, derides Christian Zionism, and peppers his commentary with remarks about Jews that are clearly designed to provoke. 

In the eulogy for Charlie Kirk, Carlson likened Kirk to Jesus and invoked shadowy “people in power” conspiring in lamplit rooms, “eating hummus,” to silence truth-tellers. 

The implication was unambiguous, even if it went unnamed. When challenged, Carlson retreats behind the claim that he isn’t antisemitic  ✡️. It’s a familiar routine: push the line, gauge the reaction, deny intent.

Fuentes, by contrast, dispenses with pretense. He calls himself an antisemite ✡️ and means it. 🤢 His views are abhorrent, 💢but they are unmistakable. He doesn’t hide behind irony or implication. Republicans don’t have to guess where he stands. With Carlson, they are invited to 

pretend there is nothing to see. This is why Fuentes is useful as a foil and why Carlson is the real bellwether. The test isn’t whether conservatives denounce a 27-year-old shock merchant. That part is easy. The real test is whether conservatives will confront Carlson’s far more consequential pattern of deception and evasion.

This is what makes Carlson dangerous in a way Fuentes isn’t. Fuentes doesn’t have institutional leverage. He can’t tilt committee staffers. He can’t normalize a new foreign-policy fashion among influencers who actually shape the party’s mood. He can’t blur the line between “America First” and “Qatar First” while still being treated, by many, as a serious man.

Tucker Carlson can. He has a second kind of leverage, too: family adjacency to real power. His son, Buckley, works for Vice President JD Vance.

That doesn’t mean Carlson dictates policy through his son. It means Carlson’s ecosystem overlaps with the governing ecosystem. The “outsider” is not outside. He is in the wiring. He is close enough to touch the current.

And what does Carlson do with that position? He almost never fires cleanly at the top. He rarely, if ever, says “Trump is wrong, and here is why.” Instead, he attacks the perimeter: appointees, advisers, agencies, “neocons,” “globalists,” nameless operators — anyone who can be blamed without forcing a direct break with the one man whose coalition he still wants to influence.

It’s how you remain “inside” and “against” at the same time. It’s how you get to market yourself as a martyr while still dining at court.

I have grown disillusioned with the right — fed up with evasions, with the Epstein nonanswers, with the reflexive closing of ranks whenever accountability might cost something. This isn’t the opposition talking; it’s disappointment from someone who once believed Trump could actually Make America Great Again. I was wrong. The second term has been more erratic, not less. The promised draining of the swamp never happened; power simply reorganized itself. Tucker Carlson didn’t oppose the marshy makeover. He learned how to thrive within it. And that is why he poses a greater danger to Republicans than Fuentes.

Liberals may be tempted to dismiss this as a family quarrel on the right. That is a mistake. Trump is already a volatile leader, and he still has three years left in office. Internal divisions within his coalition are widening, not narrowing. As Trump's political opposition pressure mounts, he lashes out more frequently, targets more erratically, and governs more impulsively.

Republicans will not win in the midterms in 2026 — and continue to govern after 2028 — when they  continue to blindly support Donald Trump like lemmings heading off a cliff.  Fuentes is an evil marginal figure who is easy to reject, but Carlson is ambitious, he aspires to be a powerful media figure who presents himself as a truth-teller while slowly expanding what the wrongminded Republican party is willing to accept, excuse, and blindly defend.

Donald Trump is irresponsibly destroying America as we knew it but why is he jealous about John and Jackie Kennedy?

One would like to think that RFKjr, (Rober F. Kennedy Jr.) would raise objections about this cruelty towards his family's heritage.  Although RFKjr is an  one of the incompetents in Trump's circus cabinet, he is still a Kennedy, and should express pride in his uncle's legacy, as a former and martyred president.

Trump’s (cruel and insane❗) War on John and Jackie Kennedy.

(IMO Trump is jealous about their lingering 90 percent positive popularity, even today.)

From ripping up the lovely White House Rose Garden to redoing Air Force One and the Kennedy Center, it’s Mar-a-Lago gilt versus Camelot taste. By Margaret Carlson published in the Washington Monthly.

John Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy

Obviously, Donald Trump never promised us a Rose Garden. 

Nor did he warn us that in his first 100 days, he would rip up the storied Jacqueline Kennedy Garden outside the White House’s West Wing and pave much of it for dancing, making it a glorified patio like the Mar-a-Lago one where he holds court. Nor did he divulge his intentions to force himself on the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He muted his obsession with painting over the robin's egg blue color scheme on Air Force One that the Kennedys had given the presidential plane, and that no commander-in-chief since has considered removing, what with its echoes of blue skies and Tiffany’s boxes.

The through line of Trump’s dark to-do list is blotting out the Camelot aesthetic of John and Jackie Kennedy, erasing the halcyon Jacqueline Kennedy years, when the then 31-year-old First Lady remade the White House long after it was due for a lift following the Depression and World War II. After such bleak days, First Ladies Bess Truman and Mamie Eisenhower concentrated on the country’s recovery. It took the young presidential spouse (née Bouvier) and mother of two to use her brief, shining moment to return the Executive Mansion to its former glory. She did it and won over the country.

The 47th president wants a White House with all the subtlety of a Russian oligarch’s yacht and a Qatari Sheikh’s palace. Gold tchotchkes abound, including two golden cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago. Trump’s aesthetics may prove to be as unpopular as his tariff-happy taxation of everything from coffee to Camrys. There’s a gulf (of America) between the public's impression of Trump’s first term and Kennedy's. According to Gallup in 2023, 90 percent of those polled held a favorable impression of JFK. A scant 46 percent felt the same way towards the first Floridian president.

That’s a lot of ground to make up, and Trump’s left no myth untouched. Erasing Jackie’s magic touch—ordering a coat of robin's egg blue on Air Force One–was high on his to-do list ever since his first term. He told CBS he wanted a paint job that “looks more like America” and “isn’t a Jackie Kennedy color.” Trump came up with a Democratic blue so dark it looks black, and a Republican red so bright it dominates. For their part, Democrats wanted no paint job at all, and neither did the Air Force generals who would be paying for it. He yearned for his long-awaited Boeing to arrive.

Then there is Qatar❗Last Sunday, the Qataris came dangling a fully tricked-out luxury 747, the likes of which no president has seen, including the well-to-do Kennedys with their dump of a Boeing 707. The deal had two parts: The plane would first go to the Department of Defense and then to Trump’s presidential library when he finishes his second (or third?) term. Eric and Don Jr. could then squabble over it when they weren’t collecting billions on their own digital currency and the myriad other businesses they’d hustled across the globe when Dad was in the Oval.

There should be a law, and there is. The Constitution strictly prohibits foreign gifts. But that’s never stopped Trump before who said he’d be “stupid” not to accept the Qatari plane, and so would the U.S. Treasury. “The maintenance we spend on those old planes, you wouldn’t even believe it.” That’s the Donald, always thinking of others, but not with his brain, if he believes a Middle Eastern sultan is spending $400 million for nothing in return.

The attached strings are hanging from every overhead bin. If this were Trump’s twist on the Harrison Ford movie, Air Force One, the president would be midair when the call came in advising him that the aircraft was under Qatari control with a course set for a NATO member with an extradition treaty if he didn’t do exactly as told. Trump actually walked onstage at the 2016 Republican convention to “The Parachutes,” part of the 1997 film’s soundtrack. Life doesn’t imitate art. It cuts and pastes it.

But, alas, Trump may not be getting a shiny new plane under the Christmas tree, after all, just a stocking with three pencils and two dolls. 😜A little due diligence and it turns out the Qataris were trying to dump this plane for years, lowering the price but finding no takers until they found a mark in the author of The Art of the Deal. The 747-8 was illiquid, and its decor appealed to a very small audience of other Qataris and the Donald. Even Middle Eastern oligarchs find millions of dollars in repairs, maintenance, and storage painful. This is why they were happy to unload it and insisted all gifts are final. There would be no returning the plane at the end of Trump’s second term (or third!). It would go to his presidential library and then, perhaps, to the Trump kids to squabble over who would keep it operable. Who’s the “stupid” one now❓

It was audacity, not fortune, when the 47th president pulled off a hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center this winter. Trump mowed down half its board, replacing them with MAGA loyalists, and its head, Deborah Rutter, with Richard Grenell, the director not of plays but of national intelligence, in his first term. 

Trump booted the Kennedy Center’s chair, the noted philanthropist and private equity mogul David Rubinstein, and installed himself. Almost immediately, Lin-Manuel Miranda canceled Hamilton's scheduled performance. To that, Trump huffed, so what, he didn’t like the first Treasury Secretary anyway, even if he was the founder of the New York Post, in 1801.

Maybe “My Shot” and “You’ll Be Back” isn’t the vibe of a septuagenarian whose taste runs to Cats, with its three full-blown renditions of his beloved “Memories.” 

Fortunately, another favorite, Les Misérables, was on the calendar before the hostilities. But in the time it takes to get a drink at intermission, ten members of the Les Miz cast went rogue. Hamilton, he could let pass, but fewer voices belting out “Do You Hear the Voices Sing?” Never! In a statement, Trump lamented the partisan politics; he just wants his Kennedy Center to be “a place where people of all political stripes sit next to each other and never ask who someone voted for.” Except at board meetings.

Trump has taken over a nationally beloved citadel he never set foot in during his first term, after several of the artists being honored criticized him. Chairing his first board meeting, he proposed that as a “king of ratings,” he should start emceeing the Honors because “every network will start bidding on it, going crazy.” Maybe, but CBS’s broadcast already wins the ratings as it is. Since his second coming, the Washington Post cites a 50 percent drop in ticket sales.

Never mind that. On opening night next month, June 11, Trump will debut as chair of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, which could be the Donald J. Trump Center by then. A box seat costs only $2 million, not that much if you consider it includes a VIP reception.

Occasionally, Trump has to go home to eat, pray, sleep, and love—three of those anyway, maybe only two—in a house that Jackie restored to its historically correct state and incidentally invades Trump’s workspace. She traced the Resolute Desk, a gift from Queen Victoria made from wood salvaged from one of Her Majesty’s ships, to a storage room in the basement, refinished it, and installed it in the Oval Office, where Trump signs Executive Orders of dubious legality. Jackie’s prime time tour of the White House, broadcast on two networks and syndicated to 50 countries, was watched by 56 million people.

As every president does, Trump gets to add some personal touches to his surroundings: choose which of the Founding Fathers' wigged heads will hang in the Oval Office, the design of the carpet, the material of the drapes, and the placement of family photos. 

But Trumps' gone wild, encrusting anything that doesn’t move with gold lamé, on the fireplace mantel, the ceiling, the Rococo mirrors, gold frames around the portraits (he bumped Obama’s to make room for his), and gold eagles nesting on side tables. There were so many yellow objets behind the president as he called President Voldomyr Zelensky a big loser, it wasn’t farfetched to assume one of them was a trophy Trump collected for being a big winner.

The Oval Office weighed down with metal, Trump moved out of doors to finish Melania’s stripmining of the Rose Garden, which the Kennedys had installed. The main objective was upgrading its slow-draining irrigation system, but Jackie’s crabapple trees somehow disappeared to an undisclosed location in the process. Michael Beschloss, the historian, called Melania’s landscaping an “evisceration” that erased “decades of American history.” He suspected one reason was to clear a better camera angle for her speech at the Republican convention held there due to COVID in 2020.

She fired back that he’d misjudged her landscaping: “His misleading information is dishonorable & he should never be trusted as a professional historian."

Starting any day now, Trump will finish the job unless a curator stops him, ripping out the manicured space to pave it over for a terrace (so womens’ Jimmy Choo stilettos won’t sink in the soft ground), adjoining a ballroom he intends to build (like Mar a Lago’s) so that after dinner he can curl his fingers into a ball and fist dance the night away to “YMCA,” once a gay anthem and now a MAGA hymn.

Melania isn't around enough to help Trump’s crusade, only 14 days in the last four months, and her jacket back in the first term was a warning that “she really doesn’t care.” The former model is reclusive, largely emerging to collect hundreds of thousands of dollars for speaking and showing up. She’ll get a cut of the $40 million documentary about her life produced by Bruce Ratner and streamed by Jeff Bezos’s Amazon. Inside the White House, she was not keen on her official duties. 

While Jackie formalized Christmas at the White House with a “Nutcracker” theme her first year and a “Children’s Tree” her second, complete with tours, in 2018, Melania featured 40 blood red trees flanking each side of a hall, spooking the children. A viral meme of white Handmaid’s Tale hats atop the trees spooked the parents, and no tours. About the criticism she should have expected, and may have welcomed, she told her long-time friend and a manager of the 2017, inaugural, who by then was taping her, “What the f**k do I care about Christmas decorations?”

The worst thing Trump could do to the Kennedy legacy was give an outlet to a member of the troubled second generation beset by drugs, alcohol, divorces, and suicides. Over a thousand new cases of measles this month, and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is still saying from his position of authority, “There are problems with the vaccines.” At Congressional hearings last week, the 71-year-old wouldn’t give a straight answer to a repeated question about whether he’d vaccinate his own children. After a few more grillings like this, he won’t have the credibility to reduce the additives in Cocoa Puffs.

Kennedy isn’t the worst Trump appointee, but the worst Kennedy ever appointed to a post of such urgency. When the opponent of Vax Americana goes dancing on what was once his aunt’s Rose Garden, and watches Kennedy Center board member Lee Greenwood crooning “Proud to Be an American” at the arts center named for his slain uncle, we will have achieved full Trump. The saving grace is that Jackie, who would be 96 this summer, didn’t live to see it.

Margaret Carlson is a Washington Monthly contributing writer.