Tucker Carlson — swinging for the fences these days, apparently in the midst of some mid-career crisis, released from the confines of corporate state media after many long decades adjacent to, if not a bona fide member of, the establishment — had some fighting words for online DeSantis supporters.
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Via Yahoo! News:
Tucker Carlson has ripped in to Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign team as the “nastiest, stupidest” political operation he has ever seen.
Mr Carlson also blamed the Florida Governor’s flip-flop on opposition to Ukraine funding after being pressured by top GOP donor Ken Griffin during a live debate with podcaster Tim Pool at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest.
“You really get the sense that Ron DeSantis – who I liked as governor – the people who represent him online are the nastiest, the stupidest, and the most zero-sum people I’ve ever seen in my life,” Carlson said.
“And I don’t think that reflects him, but it’s like, this is kind of small ball.”
Tucker Carlson calls out DeSantis' campaign:
— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) December 19, 2023
“The people who represent him online are the nastiest, the stupidest, and the most zero-sum people I’ve ever seen in my life.” pic.twitter.com/GAE1okdnsQ
I’m not sure where the DeSantis people touched him — maybe he can show us on the doll — but it’s unclear why attacking not just DeSantis, who is definitely fair game, but his online supporters (many of whom are likely to be trolls anyway) would seem like a good idea to him.
Despite his caveat that he likes DeSantis personally, there does appear to be a personal, unseen angle here, perhaps stemming from a reportedly ill-fated courtship between the two earlier this year.
Via New York Magazine:
There had been quiet urgings at Fox for Carlson to be open-minded about Murdoch’s favored candidate. By early spring 2023, this had culminated in the DeSantises coming to lunch at the Carlsons’ home in Boca Grande, an exclusive community on Florida’s Gasparilla Island. And certainly, for DeSantis, this was a significant moment — an opportunity to reach out, to break bread, to make nice, to suck up to a plausible kingmaker. The DeSantis strategy, to the degree that he had one other than embodying the media dream of any alternative to Trump, was to make quick proof-of-product inroads into the MAGA base, for which he was heavily dependent on Fox. Winning Carlson over would be an important part of making good use of the network.
Carlson put DeSantis’s fate to a focus group of one: his wife. When they lived in Washington, Susie Carlson wouldn’t even see politicians. Carlson himself may have known everyone, dirtied himself for a paycheck, but not his wife. In her heart, it was 1985 and still a Wasp world, absent people, in Susie Carlson’s description and worldview, who were “impolite, hyperambitious, fraudulent.” She had no idea what was happening in the news and no interest in it. Her world was her children, her dogs, and the books she was reading. So the DeSantises were put to the Susie Carlson test.
They failed it miserably. They had a total inability to read the room — one with a genteel, stay-at-home woman, here in her own house. For two hours, Ron DeSantis sat at her table talking in an outdoor voice indoors, failing to observe any basics of conversational ritual or propriety, reeling off an unself-conscious list of his programs and initiatives and political accomplishments. Impersonal, cold, uninterested in anything outside of himself. The Carlsons are dog people with four spaniels, the progeny of other spaniels they have had before, who sleep in their bed. DeSantis pushed the dog under the table. Had he kicked the dog? Susie Carlson’s judgment was clear: She did not ever want to be anywhere near anybody like that ever again. Her husband agreed. DeSantis, in Carlson’s view, was a “fascist.” Forget Ron DeSantis.
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