Tucker Carlson isn't fooling anyone

Tucker Carlson told the 2024 Republican National Convention in Milwaukee that Trump is “a wonderful person. I know him well. By the way, the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life, actually. You can’t be funny without perspective or without empathy, which is true.”

But on Tuesday, Carlson admitted that he’ll be “tormented” for a long time by his support for Trump in the 2024 presidential election and that “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people.”

Well, thank you, Tucker. I — and I’m sure many others — appreciate your apology.

And we hope your torment continues.

By the way, I’ve got to ask: Are you also tormented by — and apologetic for — supporting Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen?

And what about your minimizing the presence of white nationalists among those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021? And your claim that the attack on the Capitol “barely rates as a footnote?”

Are you now tormented and apologetic for any of this?

And while we’re at it, Tucker, what about your racist screeds? Does any of the filth you’ve spewed for years make you ashamed?

You pushed the “great replacement theory,” claiming that immigrants made America “poorer and dirtier.”

You said a Black Democratic politician spoke like a “sharecropper.”

You told your viewers that America is a “civilization under siege” — by violent Black Lives Matter protesters, by diseased migrants from south of the U.S.-Mexico border, and by refugees importing alien cultures.

When hundreds of refugees from Africa began crossing into Texas from Mexico during the first Trump administration, you warned that Africa’s high birthrates meant the new arrivals might soon “overwhelm our country and change it completely and forever.”

Amid the nation’s outrage over George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, you called those who protested the murder “criminal mobs.”

When Kyle Rittenhouse murdered two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, you asked rhetorically, “Are we really surprised that looting and arson accelerated to murder?” And: “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would?”

Are you troubled by any of this, Tucker? Are you apologetic? Ashamed?

And if not, why the hell not?

Why should anybody believe you when you say you’re now “tormented” and “sorry” for misleading people about Trump if you express no remorse for supporting his blatant lies about the 2020 election, for backing the rioters at the Capitol, for justifying the murders of protesters, and for poisoning America with your bigoted screeds?

Tucker, we know you’d like to be the Republican candidate for president in 2028 and you think distancing yourself from Trump on his idiotic war is the way to do it — especially with JD Vance as your likely opponent in the primaries.

Well, I have news for you, Tuck. You’re not fooling anyone with your newfound conversion. You’re the same intolerant, dogmatic, puerile fanatic you always were. And just as dangerous for this country and the world as ever.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.