Tucker Carlson

The uproar over Tucker Carlson’s interview with white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes has sparked yet another round of MAGA civil war talk.

Full disclosure: I previously worked for Carlson at the Daily Caller, so I’ve had a front-row seat for this ongoing battle for a long time now.

In case you missed the latest: Carlson invited Fuentes onto his podcast. What followed wasn’t an interview so much as a warm bubble bath of mutual validation — the kind of “conversation” that helps launder extremist ideas.

Enter Kevin Roberts, president of the Heritage Foundation — once the intellectual vanguard of conservatism, now something closer to an emotional support group for people who think President Reagan was too soft. Responding to whispers that Heritage might distance itself from Carlson, Roberts rushed out a video to reassure the faithful: Heritage will have no enemies to its right.

Roberts disagreed with Fuentes (good for him) but insisted Heritage didn’t become the top conservative think tank by “canceling our own people or policing the consciences of Christians.” He also called Carlson’s critics a “venomous coalition” who “serve someone else’s agenda” — which echoes one of the oldest antisemitic tropes in the book.

And then something surprising happened: People inside Heritage actually pushed back (a brave move, given Heritage’s Orwellian “one voice” policy). Some even resigned.

The broader right-wing commentariat weighed in, too. Ben Shapiro called Carlson an “intellectual coward.” Ted Cruz made some noise. The Wall Street Journal editorial board huffed. And talk radio host Mark Levin criticized Fuentes and Carlson during a speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition. For a brief moment, it looked like accountability was actually trending.

But … why this moment? Why now?

Keep in mind: Then-former President Trump dined with Fuentes in 2022 and wrongly claimed immigrants were eating pets in 2024. As president, he told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by” in 2020. And of course he launched his political career by questioning President Obama’s birth certificate. I could go on.

Despite all of this, Trump’s grip on the conservative movement only grew firmer.

Meanwhile, right-wing antisemitism has metastasized on Trump’s watch — despite his support for Israel.

Charlottesville, anyone?

The “alt-right” has shed its “alt.” They’re just “right” now.

This is especially observable when it comes to young conservatives who came of age during the Trump era. Indeed, one Heritage staffer told the New York Post that “a growing number” of Heritage interns “actually agree” with Fuentes.

And here’s the irony: The same conservative media figures now sounding the alarm helped build the machine.

Take Levin. Fuentes recently admitted that it was Levin’s radio show that first radicalized him. “He planted the seed, at least,” Fuentes told Carlson.

Likewise, aside from endorsing Trump in 2024, Shapiro made conspiracy theorist Candace Owens famous when his Daily Wire hired her to host a podcast on its platform after she became buddies with Kanye West and after she suggested the only problem with Adolf Hitler was that “he had dreams outside of Germany.”

So if these more mainstream Trumpers are horrified now, it’s probably because they helped create monsters — and those monsters are now coming to devour their creators, as monsters always do.

Rest assured, though, this rot is not limited solely to antisemitism. In recent months, MAGA figures such as Vivek Ramaswamy, FBI Director Kash Patel and even Vice President JD Vance (who is married to an Indian American woman) have all been targets of racist abuse online.

It’s important to note that none of these folks are considered “Never Trump” or Reagan conservatives. They are Trump allies. The revolution devours itself. (First they came for the Never Trumpers.…)

Again, this is far from the first skirmish in the MAGA civil war. But all of these internecine fights obscure the root cause of the problem: Trump. And yet, the orange emperor himself? Off-limits.

The fever won’t break while Trump’s still around, serving as a magnet for the worst people and cultivating the toxic ecosystem that made all of this right-wing racism possible, if not inevitable.

So by all means, conservatives: Condemn Carlson, denounce Fuentes and scold Heritage for failing to police the right and only punching left.

But as long as you avert your eyes from Trumpism, your righteous outrage is just theater — the political equivalent of aggressively mopping the floor while the pipes keep bursting.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”

Donald Trump’s coalition has always been a Frankenstein’s monster — stitched together from parts that were never meant to coexist.

Consider the contradictions: fast-food fanatics hanging out with juice-cleanse truthers chanting “Make America Healthy Again” between ivermectin doses, immigration hardliners mixing with business elites who are “tough on the border” until they need someone to clean their toilets or pick their strawberries, and hawkish interventionists spooning with America Firsters.

Dogs and cats living together — mass hysteria — you know the bit.

Navigating these differences was always going to be tricky. But in recent days — particularly following Israel’s bombing of Iran, an operation widely believed to have been greenlit by Trump — the tension has reached new highs.

Signs of strain were already emerging earlier this year. We got early hints of discord during the “Liberation Day” tariff fiasco — where Trump declared an “emergency” and imposed steep tariffs, only to suspend them after they riled markets and spooked his business-friendly backers.

The tariff blunder was a harbinger of things to come. But it was the House’s passage of Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” — a budgetary monstrosity that self-respecting Freedom Caucus deficit hawks should’ve torched on principle — that truly exposed the rift.

Enter Elon Musk, the billionaire tech bro and MAGA ally, who publicly trashed both the bill and Trump in a flurry of posts. He even referenced Trump’s name reportedly appearing in Jeffrey Epstein’s files — a claim that, though unverified, was tantamount to “going nuclear.”

But before there was enough time to say “Republican civil war,” Musk deleted his mean tweets, adding to the evidence that this is still Trump’s party; that modern Republicans view deficits the way the rest of us view library late fees — technically real, but nothing to lose sleep over; and that ketamine is a hell of a drug.

The next internecine squabble was over immigration. Trump proudly ran on rounding ’em all up. Mass deportations! Load up the buses! But then it turned out that his rich buddies in Big Ag and Big Hospitality weren’t so keen on losing some of their best employees.

So Trump floated a carve out to protect some “very good, long time workers” in those particular industries.

It even started to look like some exemptions were coming — until his Department of Homeland Security said “no mas.” (The raids will presumably continue until the next time a farmer or hotelier complains to Trump in a meeting.)

But the real fissure involves some prominent America First non-interventionists who thought Trump was elected to end the “forever wars.”

In case you missed it, Israel has been going after Iran’s nuclear capabilities with the same gusto that Trump aide Stephen Miller applies to deporting Guatemalan landscapers, and Trump is all in, calling for an “unconditional surrender” of the Iranian regime.

This didn’t sit well with everyone in the MAGA coalition.

“I think we’re going to see the end of American empire,” warned Tucker Carlson on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast. “But it’s also going to end, I believe, Trump’s presidency — effectively end it — and so that’s why I’m saying this.”

And Carlson (co-founder of the Daily Caller, where I worked) didn’t stop there. “The real divide isn’t between people who support Israel and those who support Iran or the Palestinians,” he tweeted. “It’s between warmongers and peacemakers.”

Then he named names, alleging that Fox’s Sean Hannity, radio firebrand Mark Levin, media titan Rupert Murdoch and billionaire Trump donors Ike Perlmutter and Miriam Adelson were among the warmongers.

Trump hit back, calling Tucker “kooky” and repeating his new mantra: “IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON.”

It’s tempting to see this spat as the beginning of a schism — a break that might finally yield a coherent Trump Doctrine, at least, as it pertains to foreign policy (possibly returning the GOP to a more Reaganite or internationalist party). But that misunderstands the nature of Trump and his coalition.

These coalitional disagreements over public policy are real and important. But they mostly exist at the elite level. The actual Trump voter base? They care about only one thing: Donald Trump.

And Trump resists ideological straitjackets.

If Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu rubs him the wrong way next week (as he did by congratulating Joe Biden in 2020), or if Israel’s military campaign starts slipping in the polls, Trump could flip faster than a gymnast on Red Bull.

There is no coherent philosophy. No durable ideology. What we’re watching is a guy making it up as he goes along — often basing decisions on his “gut” or the opinion of the last guy who bent his ear.

So if you’re looking for a Trump Doctrine to explain it all — keep looking. There isn’t one.

There’s only Trump.

Matt K. Lewis is the author of “Filthy Rich Politicians” and “Too Dumb to Fail.”