Victor Davis Hanson: Tucker Carlson Is Playing a Dangerous Game

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Tucker Carlson recently assembled a group of like-minded apostate MAGA conservatives for a meeting to discuss apparently a possible third-party run in 2028. I think a lot of us were mystified for a lot of reasons. One of them was that third parties in American political history really have had no record in the modern era of ever winning. 

They do affect the election in some cases, but that’s only to hurt the party that is more ideologically akin to the third-party run. For example, in 1912, William Howard Taft, the incumbent president, was challenged by his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who didn’t like the first term of Taft. He created the Bull Moose third party. 

What was the effect of that? He split the conservative Republican vote, and thereby, he elected one of the most liberal progressives in the history of the United States, contrary to both his views and Taft’s, Woodrow Wilson. 

Ross Perot was a conservative. He said he was from Texas. So was George H.W. Bush, up for reelection in 1992 against Bill Clinton. What did Perot do? He ran a third-party ticket. He was angry at the Bushes. He felt they were not correct on some conservative issues, debt and other things. And he succeeded in ensuring that Bill Clinton, a Democrat, would win the election with less than 50% of the vote. 

He did it again in 1996. He may have had an effect even on that election when Bob Dole lost the election, but Bill Clinton, once again, didn’t win 50% of the vote, given the 10% that Ross Perot won. 

And of course, most famously in 2000, Al Gore ran against George W. Bush. It was a very close election. It was contested in Florida. And as you remember, after the vote was counted and George W. Bush won, Al Gore contested it. He lost that vote. But the margin was almost minuscule in Florida, which determined the entire election. 

You could argue that the 1% or 2% of the vote that third-party candidate Ralph Nader got ensured that Gore lost that election. 

So, I don’t know the purpose of what the Tucker Carlson group is, because historically it would suggest that all they want to do is make sure that Donald Trump’s successor, JD Vance or Marco Rubio, loses the 2028 election. 

What is their agenda? 

Well, they’ve said that they have 10 points if they really are going to form a third party. I looked at them. I could say confidently that 80%, 8 out of 10, are what they’re getting right now with Donald Trump. 

They’re worried about a porous border. They’re worried about crime. They’re worried about DEI. They’re worried about the family. They’re worried about all of these things. 

But who’s giving them relief? Who’s offering a remedy to their anxieties? Donald Trump is. Do they really think the Left has a better idea that will better fit their agenda on the border that saw 12 million people come in under Joe Biden, or defund the police, or the DEI chauvinism that came in under the Democrats? 

So, their agenda is very similar to what they’re getting now, except on two issues on which they differ. They do not want wars abroad, and they feel if we have collateral damage, we had it in World War II, we had it in Korea, we had it in Vietnam, we’ve had it in every war we’ve fought, especially now in the Middle East, where the enemy uses human shields on the premise that the United States doesn’t deliberately hit civilians, and therefore, they’re willing to expose their own civilians’ lives to protect their combatants. 

Tucker would have us pay cash reparations to any civilian who was killed in a war. You can imagine how that would work in the real world. 

So, given all of this, the agenda they’re getting pretty much dovetails with what we have in Washington. And given the record that third parties don’t work too well, other than to hurt the similarly ideologically akin party, why are they doing this? 

And I think you could argue that they have two concerns. 

One of them is their careers had once been rather spectacular. Tucker Carlson had the largest audience on Fox News. He was getting paid $20 million a year. And then, for a variety of reasons, not all his fault, that career blew up, and he was summarily fired on a Friday afternoon without warning. 

And now he’s had some success, but not quite the audience that he had or the influence, and he’s become kind of bitter about it. 

Marjorie Taylor-Greene was an intimate of the MAGA movement. She was camped out at Mar-a-Lago. She was on the phone with Donald Trump. Tucker crossed Donald Trump on the Iran war. Marjorie Taylor Greene crossed him on the Epstein files, even though Trump released over a million files and the previous administration released none. 

And yet, she now is out. She didn’t even run for office because she wouldn’t have even been nominated by her own party in her congressional district in Georgia. 

Thomas Massie was sort of famous as the ultra-pure MAGA philosopher, intellectual, doctrinaire pro-Trump, and he started to criticize Donald Trump on the Iran war, like Tucker, and support for Israel, like Tucker, and he felt he was invulnerable. 

He was an incumbent. He had a national profile. He didn’t even win the nomination of the Republican Party. His career is over. 

Joe Kent ran, as I recall, for Congress on two occasions in Oregon. He came close, but he asked for the endorsement of Donald Trump. He gave it to him. He still failed. 

He wanted an appointment. He had military and intelligence expertise. They appointed him. I think Tulsi Gabbard came to work. 

In other words, he was lifted out of obscurity by Donald Trump, and then he started to disagree, and he saw that Tulsi Gabbard was going to leave [as director of national intelligence]. There was going to be a shake-up in personnel, and he wanted to preempt that and quit, and with a Parthian shot, he blasted Donald Trump. 

My point is that all of them have personal grievances. 

Finally, there is another issue that has come up, and it’s more controversial. 

Of those 10 points, as I said, they agree with Donald Trump on almost all of them. They even agree that RFK and his food agenda are exactly what they feel as well. Who would ever have appointed RFK except Donald Trump? 

But there are two areas where, of their 10 points, they disagree apparently. 

One of them is conducting wars in the Middle East or foreign wars they feel are at the expense of America. 

You could make the argument that they might be logical, except Iran, we know now, had the ability to produce a nuclear weapon probably within a year, and it had rockets, unlike what it had pledged under prior treaties, that could reach every European capital, and within four or five years would have reached the United States. 

And given their nihilist, almost suicidal ideology, it would be very dangerous to have that country with that type of weaponry threatening our Western allies and ourselves. 

But nevertheless, that was one area of disagreement. 

And the other is they felt that the Israeli government was conducting undue influence in the United States and, by association, I think you can read between the lines, the Jewish lobby. 

All of them have gone after AIPAC. 

But that’s not just the end of it. They have said things, and they have had hosts or people with views like Darryl Cooper, who really blamed World War II, the U.S. intervention into World War II, on Jewish influence, and has downplayed the deaths of Jews in World War II in various subtle ways, but nonetheless, he has. 

And Nick Fuentes, who makes no apologies, is forthright and candid that he’s very critical of Jewish people in general, and their support of Israel is secondary to that. He feels Jews don’t represent the Christian tradition, that they have too much money, and they’re too vocal, and we know the whole story. 

And so, really, to sum up, the third-party movement, if that’s what we want to call it, has no historical precedent that it works. 

It seems kind of incoherent because its ideology is 80% to 85% identical to the Trump administration. 

Most of the people who are guiding this movement owe allegiance to Donald Trump, who has helped them in the past. They turned on him, they had fights, so much of their zeal is personal angst. 

And finally, there is an element of anti-Israelism and antisemitic anger that also fuels it. 

It’s not going to go anywhere, but it may, as it’s designed, as spoilers, try to hurt someone that they once and very recently assured us was essential to the United States, that is the Trump MAGA agenda and Donald Trump as president. 

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