Senior Biden Aides: Fox News Advertisers More ‘Effective’ Than WH to Challenge Tucker Carlson on Replacement Theory

Senior White House aides suggest that Fox News host Tucker Carlson‘s advertisers would be more “effective” than President Joe Biden at pushing him over the racist “Great Replacement Theory” that inspired the Buffalo mass murder.

Politico’s Jonathan Lemire and Eugene Daniels performed a deep dive on the president’s decision not to name and shame people — like Carlson and Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik and others — who espoused replacement theory in the months and years before Saturday’s terrifying racist attack. The suspect, an 18-year-old White man named Payton Gendron, said in an online manifesto that he was motivated by replacement theory.

The White House has given a series of explanations for not naming names, including a tantalizing notion from unidentified senior aides who put the onus on Carlson’s advertisers, among others:

Senior aides have felt that pressure from fellow Republicans and, importantly, advertisers would be more effective in pushing individuals like Fox News host Tucker Carlson to distance themselves from replacement theory. As one senior aide put it, there was no desire to give Carlson a clip of a presidential attack that the host could “use in his A-block every night.”

“[We] totally understand the desire to call people out who have been pushing this disgusting rhetoric, but I also think it’s worth remembering that many of these demagogues would love nothing more than the oxygen and attention that comes from the president blasting them,” a person familiar with the White House’s thinking said. “And in turn, that attention and notoriety may help them further spread these lies.”

“Doesn’t mean you never call them out, but I think it means you need to be very judicious about doing so and cognizant that it may have unintended consequences,” the person added.

The decision not to name and shame has not been well-received, as Daniels and Lemire note. Both, Lemire and Daniels work at Fox’s rival network MSNBC — Lemire as a host and Daniels as a contributor. Rev. Al Sharpton told the pair ” I would certainly support him calling individual names, but the least he could do is calling the networks out.”

Indeed, if some groundswell of pressure were to move Carlson’s advertisers, it certainly wouldn’t be hurt by a boost from The White House. And Carlson is the top-rated host in all of cable news; being called out wouldn’t likely increase his reach.

The fears expressed by those aides are the sort you often hear from a White House comms team, that feuding with Fox News or its hosts would serve as a “distraction” or the like.

There is some wisdom in this, as such interactions are tricky. Biden was asked about Carlson by name on Tuesday, and threaded the needle by not drawing a direct connection between Carlson and the shooting, but denouncing the replacement theory rhetoric:

Q Mr. President, do you believe that certain members of Congress, the Republican Party, as well as Tucker Carlson, who have echoed the replacement theory, deserve some blame for violent acts like this?

THE PRESIDENT: I believe anybody who echoes a replacement is to blame — not for this particular crime. But it’s if for no purpose — no purpose except for profit and/or political benefit. And it’s wrong. It’s just simply wrong.

Now if Biden had been less careful, he would have risked being drawn into a feud with Fox News that would absolutely have been a distraction. The exchange still made it into Laura Ingraham‘s A-block.

Biden has not been well-served on this issue by his team, which has rolled out a series of explanations that don’t make a whole lot of sense. As a longtime White House and Biden reporter, it appears to me that this began with a clear directive from Biden — that the days following the attack should be about the lives lost and the families that remain, and not about elevating the proponents of the ideology that undergirded the attack.

From there, it seems the White House advisers took turns throwing their own ingredients into a gumbo that just wound up confusing the issue.

It is the case that President Biden feuding with Tucker Carlson in the A-block the week these families are mourning would be a genuinely bad thing, in pretty much every way. But eventually, the White House will need to decide whether a continued refusal to engage the proponents of replacement theory by name is a wise move, or an abdication of leadership.