What Trump and Tucker Carlson Have in Common

Earlier this month, Tucker Carlson performed a miracle: In a podcast conversation with the United Kingdom politician Jacob Rees-Mogg, a hard-right figure who was one of the architects of Brexit and who has been outspoken in his criticism of immigration, Carlson made Rees-Mogg appear both reasonable and moderate.

The two began sparring first over support for Ukraine, with Carlson coming up with a series of rationales for Russia’s war that could have come straight from a Kremlin talking-points memo, ridiculing Western governments for their ongoing support of Ukraine. From there, he moved to defending Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, mocking the UK’s decision to go to war against the Third Reich, and declaring that it wouldn’t have been such a bad thing if the Germans had emerged victorious from the conflict. He argued that mass immigration today is a far bigger threat to the UK’s survival than were the Nazis and accused successive British governments of abandoning their obligations by not sending the military in to repel the “invasion” of immigrants arriving from across the English Channel.

One can, in this interview, see Rees-Mogg physically recoil in horror as Carlson picks up steam, and then gird himself to give the podcaster a history lesson and to issue what ended up being a quite stirring defense of the necessity to defeat Hitlerism.

Carlson has, these days, broken with his onetime BFF Trump, largely over the war in Iran. But on Ukraine and immigration, the two speak very much the same language. Both see immigrants as invaders and want to train military firepower on poor, non-white, non-Christian migrants who have the temerity to dream of a better life. In Trump’s case, he is presiding over ICE operations that, increasingly, resemble death squads—the weapons of choice being guns and cars. Day after day, stories emerge of ICE agents methodically mowing down immigrants and protesters with their SUVs, the most recent case in Woodland, California, where a man filming ICE agents was knocked down by a car in what looks like a deliberate hit and run (thankfully, he survived)

According to CNN, DHS has requested from the Pentagon nonlethal “heat rays” that can be aimed at migrants crossing the southern border to produce the sensation of being cooked alive. The methods of sadism being implemented as official government policy wouldn’t have been out of place in Nazi experimenter Josef Mengele’s tool kit of horrors. Trump has also lost no time in blaming the recent riots in France on “migrants, jihadists, and Communists who hate Christianity and Western civilization itself,” remarks that French President Macron felt compelled to denounce as “unacceptable and stupid.”

But it’s not only in their loathing of immigrants that Carlson and Trump are fascist birds of a feather. The duo also sees Ukraine as a duplicitous nation that has somehow conned the West into a futile battle with an ascendant Russia, and at the same time see Putin’s leadership as a template for the sort of illiberal, Christian-nationalist country, led by strongman leaders, that they intend America to become.

For years now, Carlson has gone out of his way to praise Putin, and, as detailed in a recent Mother Jones piece, over the past year he has resorted to increasingly shrill defenses of Russia’s arguments in favor of the invasion of Ukraine. Trump, too, no longer bothers to hide his pro-Russian sentiments. Over the past month, he has called for Zelensky to resign; demanded that Ukraine find new peace negotiators to replace the Ukrainian president and his team; withheld intelligence sharing, and military hardware, from Ukraine, leading to a huge increase in civilian casualties; purportedly asked Elon Musk to limit the provision of Starlink Internet services to Ukraine; suspended sanctions against Russia and allowed it to sell millions of tons of diesel on the open market; and, in a climactic act of betrayal, blathered on about Russia’s actions being “fine” vis-à-vis Ukraine, even as missiles and drones have killed scores of civilians this month. “They haven’t been doing much,” Trump blithely told reporters.

Amid all of the double-talk over Ukraine, Trump has decided to have a tête-à-tête-à-tête with Putin and Xi in China. Some reports suggest the triumvirate’s focus would be on “denuclearization,” which would, of course, be a very good thing for the world. (In that case, it would resemble the 1986 Reagan-Gorbachev Reykjavik summit, when the two leaders came surprisingly close to agreeing to abolish nuclear weapons.) But there’s not an iota of evidence that this is a carefully prepped summit, with serious, verifiable, mechanisms developed for a denuclearization push. Nor is there evidence that any of the three leaders has the slightest interest in enforceable international agreements aimed at curtailing their power. It’s all theatrics. Moreover, given Trump’s persona, and his vulnerability to shameless flattery, there’s every reason to believe both that he will be played like a fiddle by the other two autocrats in the room, each of them far more calculating and disciplined than is Trump, and that the agenda behind the agenda will actually be to delineate spheres of influence for each authoritarian to control.

With the Trump administration escalating its rhetoric on how Europe was wrong to abandon its colonial heritage and should embrace the value of conquest, and with Trump demanding huge military spending increases and a rapid militarization of space, the obvious conclusion is that a meeting of the Big Three would be little more than a souped up version of the 1884–85 Berlin Conference.

In January 2002, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks George Bush addressed Congress and warned of an “axis of evil,” threatening global peace and security. “States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world,” he announced. A generation on, we can, with horror, look at Trump’s efforts to reimagine America as Amerikkka and say, “We have looked in the mirror, and the evil is now us.”