How Tucker Carlson Becomes President

by Rick Wilson - May 4

The New York Times piece this weekend, the one everyone in your group chat forwarded with “WTF ????”, is being read wrong. People are reacting to the spell-bound Trump stuff, the Antichrist business, the Fuentes regret-that-isn't. All worth reacting to.

None of it gets to the underlying why of Tucker Carlson’s very public apostasy.

Tucker Carlson just broke with a God-Emperor of the MAGA party a few weeks ago, all echoed in this piece, loudly defended the vice president as a personal friend, and called the Secretary of State's people treacherous, all in the pages of the New York Times Magazine, not Breitbart or the Daily Wire.

This isn't an interview. It's a soft campaign launch with some explicable stages and milestones, the same kind we’d whiteboard in the first steps of a campaign:

Get out from under Trump’s shadow

Tucker is doing this in plain sight. The little jabs at the administration, the “I love the President, but…” framing on Iran, on Israel, on tariffs, on the cabinet. The careful distance from Vance. Sorry, the very public friendship with Vance, which everyone is supposed to read as proof he isn’t running. That smells…tactical.

Tucker is smart enough to know two things about Vance: first, Vance will inherit all

the negatives of Trump’s term, and also that Vance utterly lacks quicksilver mendacity and brazen skill to rouse the seething hatreds of the MAGA base to his side.

Tucker sees the damage Trump has done to himself, to Vance, and to the MAGA GOP, understands no better than the rest of the prospective field that Trump’s self-destructive tear is a political disaster: he’s just getting out there early, saying it.

Sure, Trump will hold a cultlike faction for a hundred years, but he’s term-limited, eighty, and is polling in the teens. He’ll try to keep his claws in MAGA to sustain the family grift, but with numbers like his, it’s a grim race against time.

The 2028 field will be fifteen or twenty Republicans, all of them auditioning for the same MAGA inheritance. Tucker’s bet, and it’s a smart one, is that being the guy who said the quiet parts loud before it was permission-slipped is worth more than being the next loyal soldier in line or some yokel Congressman Trumpalike clone.

People forget that Tucker is not stupid.

He is not naive. He has lived and breathed media and politics his entire life. His father ran the Voice of America. He has been a magazine writer, a cable host on three networks, a podcast operator, and a wildly successful streaming experiment. He is looking a couple of years ahead, not at today.

He knows the field will fracture, knows Vance will be wounded by association with whatever Trump’s last four years look like, knows Ron DeSantis is a charisma repellent and a spent force, knows Nikki Haley has no constituency, knows Ted Cruz is, well, Ted Cruz. He’s got his eye on Marco, clearly seeing Rubio as his main competition.

He knows one of the Senators who wants to run is deep in the closet (not Lindsey), and another is routinely humiliated by a dominatrix. He laughs off the Governors who will try the “I was chief executive of the state of Blahblah” line, where even their most edge-case policies are in Tucker’s extremist rearview. He knows the Trump spawn are waiting for Donald to Logan Roy one of them into the Designated Heir position.

He knows a couple of Never Trumpers will jump in, pulling a few points off the tiny sane faction that remains in the dying GOP wing of the MAGA GOP. He knows the Silicon Valley crowd will send one of their own into the fray. At least one MAGA influencer will give it a shot.

There’s a very real scenario where over 20 semi-serious people are in the race. In a crowded primary in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, you don’t need forty percent. You need 15% percent and a good narrative of your case.

The media parallel that should scare you

In 2015, every serious person in Washington explained to me that Donald Trump couldn’t win because he wasn’t a politician. Hell, I believed it myself until a terrifying December focus group in Orlando, Florida, where a woman tried to convince the moderator that Trump was the richest man in the world, owned hundreds of buildings in Manhattan, and turned everything he touched into pure gold. That was not a great Christmas.

We all tried these lines to break his momentum: He was a television personality. He didn’t know policy. He didn’t have a ground game. He couldn’t debate. He was a liar, a cheat, a conman, a business failure in everything from steaks to paint-thinner vodka. He was a jackass, a fool, a stooge. He insulted war heroes and the disabled.

Every one of those assumptions turned out to be wrong, wrong, wrong.

What Trump had was thirty years of feral understanding of how cameras work, how attention works, and how to be the loudest voice in any room without seeming to try. The “amateur” was the most professional communicator in the field by an order of magnitude.

Tucker is that, plus decades in cable, including, for a time, the highest-rated show in cable news history, plus a post-Fox second act on streaming and Twitter that pulls numbers no other GOP figure can touch. He has done thousands of hours of live television.

He knows exactly how long a soundbite needs to be. He knows which line in his stump speech becomes the chyron. He knows how to make a debate moderator look ridiculous. He has been training for the format his entire adult life, and he is not stupid. There’s a solid argument that Tucker is better than anyone else in the field, including Marco Rubio.

This is the part that should keep Democratic strategists up at night. A populist who is also a professional broadcaster is a different animal from a populist real-estate developer who got lucky.

How it plays out, in the room

Here is the scenario I keep running. He announces summer 2027, which feels late but isn’t, because he doesn’t need to introduce himself to anyone. He skips most of the cattle calls and runs a media campaign: his own show, friendly podcasts, a few set-piece rallies.

Iowa is built for him. Evangelical-populist crossover, an anti-Wall Street, anti-war, anti-big business, anti-big ag message that lands with farmers tired of being collateral damage in trade fights, a base that has been listening to him for ten years. He doesn’t have to win Iowa. He has to come in a strong second, ideally beating whichever establishment-coded candidate the donor class has anointed. He does. Just after Iowa, Elon Musk ratchets the Twitter algorithm for Tucker in the same way he did for Trump.

Then New Hampshire, where independents can pull a Republican ballot and where his mix of post-Trump isolationism, social conservatism, and anti-establishment mojo plays like nothing else in the field.

He wins it. Not by much. He doesn’t need much.

Now the dynamic flips. He walks into South Carolina with two top-two finishes, and South Carolina, for all the talk about it being Trump country, is fundamentally a state that votes for the perceived winner. The MAGA base, watching him beat the establishment twice, decides he is the heir. The Hate Machine, the right-wing media ecosystem in which he’s a superstar, turns its full weight behind him.

Vance, sensing the wave, finds a graceful exit and retreats to a think tank to write Republican Elegy. The donor class, which has nowhere else to go because there is no establishment lane left in the GOP, holds its nose and writes the checks, just as they did for Trump in 2024, after all his sins.

By Super Tuesday, it’s effectively over.

This is not a fantasy. This is the same script Trump ran in 2016, with one decisive upgrade: Tucker Carlson, for all his vile beliefs, is not stupid.

But sure, laugh him off.

It worked out so well with Trump.

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Why the racism coverage actually helps him

Ah, you whisper…but the racism.

To which I ask…have you met today’s GOP?

The mainstream press will run the racism story for the entire primary, and an endless, tireless cavalcade of “We’ve got him now!” Replacement theory, the comments about immigrants, the warm interviews with figures that even Trump kept at arm’s length. They will treat each new clip as the one that finally ends him.

They will be wrong every time, for the same reason they were wrong about Trump: every front-page attack from the Times is read by his voters as proof he is the only one telling the truth. The coverage doesn’t bury him. It anoints him.

Meanwhile, the populist message, the one actually built to win a general, does its quiet work underneath. Anti-war. Anti-monopoly. Anti-bank. Anti-AI. Anti-Silicon Valley elites. Pro-family. Skeptical of pharma, of foreign aid, of the security state.

Here’s another thing on which Tucker is making a pretty smart gamble: that the Democrats will blow it.

Imagine, and I know you can, the Democrats’ brief time controlling Congress leads them to believe the country wanted a hard pivot to trans athlete protections, climate change legislation, and gun control, and so they ignore holding the corrupt MAGA enterprise from Trump on down accountable, snippily tell farmers and families, “Just buy an EV” in response to high gas prices, and do nothing about making life more affordable.

Silicon Valley’s division of the Hate Machine floods the Democrats with trivial money for them (say, $50 million, which is couch-cushion money), and Chuck Schumer and Jeffries do nothing on AI, privacy, or the scourge of data centers.

That’s not just likely…it’s almost inevitable. The usual pollster-addicted Democrat leadership will believe America is crying out for 800-page policy binders, not Trump and his cronies going to jail, and taxing Wall Street and Silicon Valley and forcing them to play by any rules.

They’ll be wrong.

Tucker won’t. That message peels off enough disaffected working-class voters across every demographic that a Tucker ticket clears 270 in a country where Democrats keep losing the union vote.

The racism gets the headlines. Populism gets the votes. The Hate Machine knows the difference and swings in behind him, pumping the racial animus and conspiracy nonsense to 11, every day.

You don’t have to like any of this to see it coming. You just have to take him seriously a little earlier than the rest of the press and political class is going to.

That’s the rough cut outline on the whiteboard.

It starts now.