Tucker Carlson Talks Fox, His Ex-Writer Blake Neff and How Republicans ‘Hate Trump’s Ideas’ in Premiere Episode of The Interview

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Tucker Carlson joined The Interview, Mediaite’s new podcast, for a conversation about his Fox News show, the presidency of Donald Trump, the future of the Republican Party and the coronavirus pandemic. Listen to the full podcast here, and read a report of the interview below, including transcripts of certain exchanges.

Tucker Carlson is one of the most influential people in media right now. He was the most watched person in the history of cable news for the second quarter of 2020. He often draws 4 million viewers a night. President Donald Trump frequently watches Tucker Carlson Tonight, and in February Carlson traveled to Mar-a-Lago to urge him to take the coronavirus seriously (mixed results).

If you’re not one of his many viewers, you might also know Carlson for the controversies he generates. He prompted almost universal outcry when he called white supremacy a hoax last year, and more recently questioned the patriotism of Senator Tammy Duckworth — a combat veteran who lost her legs in Iraq. A top writer on the show resigned last month after CNN discovered he had for years been posting racist and sexist comments online.

That tendency for stoking outrage — along with the efforts of organizations to drive him off the air — has scared away advertisers, but certainly not viewers. And, according to Fox, it hasn’t had much of an effect on revenue.

The timing of his latest show’s arrival can, in part, explain its success: Carlson had a long and varied career in media — with stops at all three cable news outlets — before landing in the 9 p.m. slot at Fox News during something of a harmonic convergence between the political climate and his evolving political views. Tucker Carlson Tonight launched just after the election of Donald Trump, who ran on a platform most closely resembling (if anything) right-wing populism, just as the Fox News host leaned hard into a more articulate version of that ideology.

Now, nearly four years later, he has reaped the rewards — in viewership and influence. Tucker Carlson Tonight far eclipses the ratings of the programs he replaced, including Bill O’Reilly’s wildly successful prime time hour. Meanwhile, as Carlson’s show has tracked Trumpism, the Republican Party has fallen in line.

But when I asked Carlson if he thinks the evolution of the GOP into the Trump Party has benefitted his show, he rejected the premise. “I mean, I don’t think the Republican Party has embraced Trumpism, that’s for certain. I think they’re afraid of Trump,” Carlson said.

He went on to argue that Republicans “hate” the ideas that Trump ran on in 2016. Here is a partial transcript of that exchange:

Mediaite: The Republican Party has been forced into some pretty radical changes since 2015. I think a lot of orthodoxies, on issues from foreign policy to economics, have been overturned. There was a pretty huge rift in the party and it has almost entirely embraced Trumpism from what I can tell. Do you think that your show, which launched just after the election of Donald Trump, has benefited from that shift or has tracked it in any way?

Carlson: Well, for sure. I mean, I don’t think the Republican Party has embraced Trumpism, that’s for certain. I think they’re afraid of Trump. And so they don’t want to tangle with Trump or get crossways with Trump, but I certainly don’t think they’ve embraced populism or Trumpism, whatever that is. I don’t even think it’s been clearly articulated, but no no no, they hate Trump’s ideas. They hate what Trump ran on in 2016. They really hate it in DC, I can promise you that, and I’m including in the ‘they’ people who work for the Republican Party, people who work for the White House. They’re not on board at all, of course, with the idea that the wages of middle class workers are like a key priority, that pointless wars are destructive to the country. You know, just the basic five ideas, four ideas, that he articulated in 2016. They hate those ideas, and they hate them every bit as much now as they ever did. The reason Trump got elected is because the public likes those ideas, and in fact, if Trump was able to get out of the way of his own ideas or explain them with clarity, he’d be at 65 percent. There’s always been as huge and avid audience for, I mean just to reduce it to the most basic terms, economic populism and social conservatism.

[…]

And so a candidate who stands up and says, ‘You know, we’re not going to like overturn the existing order tomorrow, actually, and what we are going to do is make certain that we don’t have these massive wealth disparities…’ because that’s clearly not good. You don’t need to be Bernie Sanders to see that. It’s not good when, you know, the country goes bankrupt and Jeff Bezos makes 15 billion dollars in the same period. That’s a sign of un-health, that’s a sign that something’s really wrong, and it causes your society to become volatile. And people understand that intuitively, and that was essentially Trump’s pitch. He didn’t say that quite the way I just did but that’s really what he was saying, and that’s a very popular platform because it’s true. And as I said, Trump has gotten in the way of that. Trump the man has gotten in the way of that idea, those ideas, but it doesn’t change the fact that those are really popular and always have been.

I also asked Carlson about Blake Neff, the Tucker Carlson Tonight writer who resigned after bigoted comments he’d been making anonymously for years on an online forum were reported by CNN.

Fox News, in an internal memo, called Neff’s posts “deeply offensive racist, sexist and homophobic,” but Carlson struck a different tone on his show. While he said the comments were “wrong,” he also criticized people he felt were celebrating Neff’s ouster.

I asked him about the entire episode:

Now I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Blake Neff. He was the head writer of your show for more than three years, and then he resigned.

He was the head writer?

That’s what CNN reported.

He was a writer on the show. I write a lot of the show. We don’t have a head writer, but whatever. He worked on the show for three years-ish.

CNN reported that he was posting racist and sexist comments anonymously online. You addressed the resignation on your show and your comments were, I’d say, more defiant than contrite. Obviously you didn’t write these things, but what did you make of the ordeal.

What should I have been contrite for?

Well I think people were expecting you to perhaps apologize for the things that your writer was writing online.

Why would I apologize for something that someone else wrote that I didn’t know about?

Well. I’m the editor of Mediaite, I would probably apologize if it turned out that one of my writers was posting horrifically racist and sexist things under a pseudonym online.

Well that’s up to you. I mean I said what I believe, as always, which is, I didn’t agree with what Blake wrote, I told him that, he left the show as a result of it, he lost his job, and what he wrote had no effect at any level on the show. It had nothing to do with the show. It was wholly distinct from the show.

If I had an employee that was doing something criminal, for example. I would be horrified by them on many levels. I would be upset because I know the person, I’d be upset because I disagree with what the person did, I’d be embarrassed for him and personally. These are all things you would feel, but I don’t think anyone would think that that person’s, you know, armed robbery had anything to do with the product of the show because I think it’s pretty clear, and if it wasn’t clear then it’s clear now, because Blake’s been gone a month, and I don’t think the tone has changed because I write the open. Like I always have.

And every word on the show that comes out of my mouth is my view, and my views are totally — you may hate them, doubtless you do — but they’re transparent. Like I don’t hide what I think. I don’t lie about what I think, I try not to lie at all, I probably do sometimes, I try not to.

But it’s wholly unrelated to the show. I’m responsible for the show. If you don’t like the show, don’t blame Blake Neff, it’s not his fault, it’s my fault. It’s one hundred percent my fault what’s on the show. So, you know, if you’ve got a problem with it, blame me. Don’t blame some kid in his twenties who’s now unemployed.

You seem to feel bad for him to a certain extent.

I mean I made it pretty clear what I thought. I didn’t like what he said, I didn’t agree with it, I told him that, and I said this on the air, and I guess it offended the normal… the self-righteous muppets jumping up and down, those kids at CNN, unhappiest people maybe in the world, you know who got for a moment to feel like they were morally superior to somebody else, and that’s what they get off on, or whatever.

I just reject that whole way of looking at the world, that whole way of living, where you jump up and down like, ‘I’m a good person, Unlike like this person!’ and then you denounce someone. And like, I read The Crucible. Like I know this is a feature of human nature, but I’m not participating in that crap. You know what I mean?

And by the way, I couldn’t get over this, it’s like here’s a kid nobody’s ever heard of, he doesn’t have a byline unlike you, and he did something wrong. I wouldn’t defend it, and I didn’t, he did something wrong. I said it plainly, I’ll say it again now, but like people pound on it. Okay, that’s fine, he did something wrong, I get it, but there are people in positions of like power and authority, of great wealth, and they can do basically anything.

I followed up on Carlson’s claim, which he made on his show as well as in our interview, that Neff’s postings online had nothing to do with the show.

You said that his comments online had nothing to do with the show, but he did say once in an interview that he wrote the first draft of everything you read from a prompter. Now, I don’t know if that’s true, he could’ve been boasting. But I think it strains credulity for a lot of people when you say that the personal beliefs of your writer had nothing to do with the content of the show he was writing. These were political, cultural views. He wasn’t a chef.

No. Again, the show has my name on it. It’s live. I don’t tape my show so it’s always live, five days a week, and I’m the one doing the talking. So if you don’t like what’s on the show, you can blame me.

I also have, as I said, thirty years of output. I mean that’s all publicly available. I was a writer, I’ve written some books, I’ve written hundreds of magazine pieces, I’ve written scripts every day for decades, and it’s all available on Nexis. So you can find out what I think, it’s like I’m not hiding it at all, and I don’t really understand.

I get why people don’t like what Blake wrote. I didn’t like what Blake wrote on the internet, okay? But my show is my responsibility. I did it, and if you don’t like it, don’t blame him, blame me. And do it to my face. That’s how I feel about it. The show reflects my views. Period.

I think what happened was a lot of people traced a through line between these kind of things he was writing and segments like the controversial one about white supremacy being a hoax.

My position night after night has been really clear. It was my position I articulated to you a minute ago and I’ve said it a hundred times on the show. It is immoral for the government to punish people, or reward people on the basis of immutable characteristics. On the basis of their genes. The way they look, their skin color. That is immoral. I make — and I think I’m the only host who does this — I make an affirmative case against racism virtually every night.

We also spoke about the coronavirus pandemic, a crisis that Carlson pointed out he was one of the first in media to focus on. Carlson, as noted, delivered a warning to Trump at the president’s Florida resort about the spread of the virus, and interviewed Dr. Anthony Fauci of the Coronavirus Task Force on his show in March.

But he has since soured on the veteran government scientist, last week calling him an “oily politician on an ego trip.”

Carlson said he has no “animus against Fauci,” and that his main gripe is not with the scientist but with the lockdowns, which the Fox host argued started in good faith but are no longer based in science. A debate about those lockdowns has raged as cases and deaths have continued their rise in the United States while other countries have slowed the spread thanks to lockdowns.

When I ask if he thinks the Trump administration has done a good job handling the pandemic, Carlson offered some mild criticism:

Do you think the administration has done a good job in handling it?

I don’t know. I mean they certainly haven’t communicated very well. I would say that about a lot of different things. I think there’s overwhelming scientific evidence that the damage done to kids… by closing schools is far more serious, measurably, than the potential damage of the virus on those kids. Like I don’t know anybody who’s looked at the numbers who has come to a different conclusion. So if I were the administration, you know, I would do all I could to keep kids from being punished for political — it’s just clear this is political.

At the end of the interview, I asked Carlson about a report that Republicans want him to run for president in 2024. He gave a lengthy answer that included scoffing at the notion that he would be considered a serious candidate, promising to stay at Fox for a while, and praising Elizabeth Warren for her views on economics, calling them “smart and true.” I noted he didn’t deny he was open to a run.

“No I’m not running for anything — come on,” he replied.

Listen to the full podcast below.