When J. D. Vance was asked at a press conference on Thursday about his relationship with Tucker Carlson, the media personality and ultra-right-wing conspiracy theorist, he displayed a surprising side of himself: human, vulnerable, almost touchingly naive.
“Tucker is a friend, despite the fact that we disagree on a number of things,” the vice president said. “And I’m not going to play the game where I throw friends under the bus because I have political disagreements with them. I think that is a terrible place for the United States to go. And if you have a disagreement with somebody politically, even over a deeply held issue, you should still be friends with that person, because the whole republic depends on people of different perspectives being able to talk to one another.”
This was a matter not of politics, Vance was at pains to emphasize, but of friendship. If Vance were to renounce Carlson over a matter as trivial as, say, Carlson’s oddly positive assessment of Adolf Hitler, what hope is there for society? The bonds of affection between Vance and Carlson are the very glue holding together the American experiment.
And yet, tempting though it might be to imagine Vance clasping hands with the children of the world and teaching them to sing in perfect harmony, some notes of skepticism are warranted. Perhaps Vance’s affection for Carlson has more to do with holding the loyalty of his friend’s enormous audience.
[Peter Wehner: What J. D. Vance once knew]
For one, Vance is not known for cordially disagreeing with people. He has accumulated an unusual number of bitter enemies by flinging insults at people—including Senate Democrats (“You’re full of shit, and everyone knows it”), reporters (“scumbags”), and “childless cat ladies.” Last month, Vance hurled himself into an obscure debate over burrito prices to make a gratuitous swipe at a conservative Washington Post columnist’s weight.
At the very same press conference where he waxed so earnestly about open dialogue, Vance mocked the idea that he would talk to former President Biden at the 9/11 ceremony (“I’m really looking forward to hanging out with Joe Biden. I’m sure that we’ll have many, many intense intellectual conversations, and it’ll be great”) and dismissed the Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as “a crazy person.”
Vance’s dig at El-Sayed, and the context in which he made it, revealed a lot more about his reasons for maintaining the alliance with Carlson than did his encomium to friendship. Vance was trying to illustrate that he and Carlson do not agree on everything. Carlson had recently praised El-Sayed as “America First” and “literally Trumpian,” apparently calculating that the candidate’s anti-Zionism outweighs his many left-wing positions.
That view was the one Vance chose to highlight as his point of disagreement, rather than several other controversial remarks Carlson has made. Examples include but are not limited to his endorsement of “Great Replacement” and other conspiracy theories, his expressions of sympathy for Russia and its war against Ukraine, and his sympathetic interviews with figures such as Nick Fuentes, Alex Jones, and the World War II–revisionist historian Darryl Cooper, who called Winston Churchill “the chief villain of the Second World War” and described much of the Holocaust as mistaken deaths resulting from poor planning.
All of these statements have left Carlson teetering at the edge of respectability within the Republican Party. He has become one of the most prominent exponents of a strain of right-wing populism that flirts with and in some cases embraces isolationism, anti-Semitism, and general crackpottery. Vance has courted this faction of the right. He and Carlson have a partnership that has lasted nearly a decade and has yielded dozens of interviews.
In the course of this partnership, they may well have formed a genuine friendship. But Vance has discarded plenty of friends as he has cycled through various political identities. The difference between Vance’s ex-friends and Carlson is that Carlson is still a useful ally in a Republican factional conflict. When Carlson upset Fox News in 2021 by endorsing the Great Replacement theory, which holds that Democrats are using illegal immigration to replace the current electorate and cement power, Vance wrote on social media, “Tucker Carlson is the only powerful figure who consistently challenges elite dogma—on both cultural and economic questions. That is why they try to destroy him. Don’t fall for it this time, or any other.”
Vance went on to endorse the same theory in advance of the next midterm elections. “Democrat politicians who have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring in a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here” are orchestrating lax border enforcement, he said on Carlson’s show that year.
The Carlson-Vance partnership has generated more conservative blowback over the past few years as Carlson has progressed from skepticism of Israel into anti-Semitism, which Carlson denies. Traditional Republicans who have supported, or at least gone along with, the party’s attacks on Muslims and immigrants and its rejection of democratic norms have spoken out against cracking the door open for anti-Semites. Building an authoritarian, ultranationalist party that marinates in populist conspiracy theories but that abhors anti-Semitism turns out to be tricky.
[Helen Lewis: Carlson and Vance—two smart guys who play dumb for power]
Vance, heading into his expected 2028 presidential campaign, has a strong incentive to try to harness this right-wing energy. His political interests would be served if Republicans were to stop attacking Carlson and if Carlson were to tone down his criticism of the GOP. Hence, he seemed less concerned that Carlson had crossed a moral line than that, in the Michigan Senate race, he had crossed party lines. Carlson praising a member of the Democratic Party is more threatening to Vance than Carlson praising an apologist for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party.
At this week’s press conference, the reporter asked Vance, “What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Carlson and claim that you’re avoiding addressing a lot of these issues, which may be causing divisions within the GOP?”
“What a travesty it is that in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be,” Vance said. “So, yeah, Tucker is a friend of mine.”
Suppose Carlson decided to support someone other than Vance for president in 2028. Does anybody think their friendship would survive?
The post J. D. Vance’s Disingenuous Defense of Tucker Carlson appeared first on The Atlantic.
