“We are going to wind up, inevitably, with the use of weapons of mass destruction,” Carlson warned. “And you have one participant, president of the United States, openly threatening that already on Truth Social on the internet for everyone to see.”
As a Fox News host, Carlson’s star ascended in parallel with the president’s, but since leaving the network under acrimonious and still-mysterious circumstances in 2023, his drift from MAGA has culminated in a full-fledged split from Trump. After retreating from Washington, DC, to Maine a few years ago, he now painted a picture of American decay that was grim, even by the standards of his cable news days, coupled with throwaway barbs like “we’re human beings who need beauty…you don’t have to be a liberal arts major from Bennington to believe that.” He called for a return to a lost and more bucolic past, when the threats of AI, nuclear war, and national debt didn’t loom so large. The subjects ran a true gamut of political interest, ranging from MAHA-style food concerns to addiction to Epstein to immigration fearmongering, and it would be tough to pinpoint the essence of any potential presidential platform that could emerge from them. In Carlson’s telling, he only wanted to “set down the goals of whatever it is” that comes next, which he then enumerated under 10 lofty banners including “fair,” “productive,” and “beautiful.”
“That was, if you’re old enough to remember, always one of the great appeals of this country,” Carlson explained. “Whatever the political system, whoever was running it at the time, it didn’t matter because America was fundamentally a beautiful place with handsome people—attractive people, by the way.”
And while some of his concerns, particularly those about the country’s aesthetics, had a distinctly Trumpian quality to them, both the president and Carlson have made their break sound irreversible. “President Trump created the greatest political movement in the history of politics with the MAGA movement, and he remains the unequivocal leader of the Republican Party,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle tells Vanity Fair. “The president is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress and continuing to lower costs for working families. Meanwhile, this group represents an embarrassing collection of mostly whiny turncoats who dramatically overestimate their influence and relevance.”
