Fox News host Tucker Carlson said the Republican Party rejects President Trump’s 2016 campaign messages to its detriment.
On the premiere episode of Mediaite’s podcast The Interview, Carlson said the emergence of populist conservatism after Trump’s election gives the Republican Party an opportunity to soar in popularity but that major figures in the White House and GOP are unwilling to embrace it because they “hate those ideas.”
“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,” Carlson said when asked if the ideological shift has benefited his show.
“They really hate it in D.C., I can promise you that, and I’m including in the ‘they’ people who work for the Republican Party, people who work at the White House,” he continued.
Carlson said if Trump was more of an effective communicator, which he believes isn’t his strongest skill, that his approval ratings would climb to around 65%.
“There’s always been, because it comports with human nature, a huge and avid audience for, I mean, just to reduce it to the most basic terms, economic populism and social conservatism,” he said.
On his show Tucker Carlson Tonight, Carlson has not hesitated to criticize Republican leaders and White House officials he says don’t line up with populist conservatism. In June, he blasted Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and Vice President Mike Pence. Carlson’s criticisms were amid civil unrest across the country following the death of George Floyd.
“The president’s famously sharp instincts, the ones that won the presidency almost four years ago, have been since subverted at every level by Jared Kushner. This is true on immigration, on foreign policy, and especially on law enforcement,” Carlson said then.
Though some Trump supporters fired back at Carlson for criticizing a few of Trump’s closest confidants, the Fox host has remained steadfast that the ideas Trump ran on in 2016, such as opposition to “massive wealth disparities” and opposition to “pointless wars,” would enable the president to grow in popularity.
“People understand that intuitively,” Carlson said of the public’s position on those issues. “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.”
