Tucker Carlson's Post-MAGA Challenge: Is He Capable of Building a Movement? | Vanity Fair

“A fixed stare at this thing that might be the end of everything. Who acts like that?”

Tucker Carlson, dressed in a gingham shirt against the rustic background of his Maine cabin, smiled slightly as he shared his characteristically apocalyptic view of Donald Trump’s America. In a 90-minute monologue broadcast from his livestream video platform Wednesday night, the former Fox News host offered a vision for a post-MAGA world that included his big-picture aspirations for a third party without committing to any concrete plan for it.

“Will [a third party] be enough?” Carlson asked, more intrigued than deflated. “The hard answer is no.”

Despite announcing the day before that he would explain how “we can still rebuild the America we were promised” after the “great betrayal” of Trump’s war in Iran, Wednesday’s manifesto offered little more in the way of specifics than his recent press appearances. Carlson has been teasing a need for a new political movement while throwing some lukewarm water on his own long-rumored presidential run. (Not that such promises are ironclad: In May, Carlson said he would “absolutely not” build a third party.) Over the weekend, he met with fellow Trump defectors Marjorie Taylor Greene, lame duck congressman Thomas Massie, and former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent, who resigned in protest of the Iran war, at the Maine cabin where he’s refashioned himself as an of-the-moment video podcaster. Greene said on social media that their movement to unwind Trump’s foreign entanglements had begun, and Carlson soon announced that he would expand on their efforts in video remarks.

Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie have positioned themselves as the faces of the post-MAGA vanguard.

“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.”

“Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” former National Counterterrorism Center director Joe Kent recently said.

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.”

Among their other goals, Carlson and his band of MAGA renegades have set out to test that proposition—that their sway could never rival Trump’s. Greene and Massie broke with the president over his support of Israel and handling of the Epstein files, and though they found common cause with Kent and Carlson over those issues and Iran, “there’s a lot more nuts-and-bolts work that needs to be done” on their new party, Kent said in an interview following their cabin summit. Chief of mind: They still need a leader, and Carlson hasn’t agreed to the rest of the group’s pleas. “Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” Kent said.

By the second hour of his remarks on Wednesday, Carlson’s ambitions for a third party remained similarly elusive: He closed his list of its tenets with “united,” and signed off for the evening fairly abruptly. The stream had been made available live only to subscribers of the Tucker Carlson Network, the company Carlson founded after he left Fox. His freewheeling style made for a lively chat section of the video, but as viewers came to accept that no further clarity on any political intentions was forthcoming, some of the enthusiasm seemed to fade.

“Huge tease!” wrote one subscriber. “Such a tease!” another seconded, though they understood that Carlson “knows what hes doing.” A third suggested Carlson had given his followers just enough to hold them over through the end of Trump’s White House term.

“There’s 2 more years lol..” the subscriber wrote. “They gotta spread this out.”

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