It was the kind of full-throated critique of President Donald Trump familiar to MSNBC viewers, yet transplanted to the heart of Fox News: Tucker Carlson, the network’s conservative 8 p.m. host, upbraiding the White House for its attempts to justify the killing of a top military commander in Iran.
“It’s hard to remember now, but as recently as last week, most people didn’t consider Iran an imminent threat,” Carlson said at the start of his Monday show, going on to mock Trump’s secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, for saying intelligence agencies had identified an undefined Iranian threat.
“Seems like about 20 minutes ago, we were denouncing these people as the ‘deep state’ and pledging never to trust them again without verification,” Carlson told viewers, eyebrow arched. “Now, for some reason, we do trust them — implicitly and completely.”
At 9 p.m., Fox News made way for the pro-Trump commentary of Sean Hannity, who declared “the world is safer” after the death of the commander, Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
But Carlson’s dissent showed how a right-wing media world that typically moves in lock step with the president has struggled to reconcile Trump’s surprise escalation with his prior denunciations of open-ended conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an interview, Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist, said that he and other supporters of the president were still hunting for an effective defense.
“This is a very complicated issue, and the people who support President Trump, from Tucker Carlson all the way to Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham, are really trying to work through this,” Bannon said Monday. “What you’re seeing now — live on television, live on radio — is people working through what this means.”
Just as the political world was caught off-guard by the killing of Soleimani, so too was the conservative media complex.
As reports emerged last Thursday of the missile strike in Baghdad that killed the general, Hannity phoned into his Fox News show from vacation to offer vociferous praise. That same night, Carlson warned his viewers that “America appears to be lumbering toward a new Middle East war.”
On “Fox & Friends” the next morning, co-host Brian Kilmeade said he was “elated” by the news, only to be scolded by Geraldo Rivera, who pointed to false intelligence peddled by the George W. Bush administration to justify the Iraq War. “Don’t for a minute start cheering this on,” Rivera, a Fox News correspondent, told the hosts.
Bannon, the former chief of Breitbart News, now runs a pro-Trump podcast, “War Room: Impeachment.” In the interview, he said he was concerned that a burgeoning conflict in Iran could threaten Trump’s support among “working-class, middle-class people, particularly people whose sons and daughters actually fight in these wars,” a group that believed the president opposed significant foreign intervention.
“Why was it necessary to kill this guy and to kill him now and to exacerbate the military issues, given the fact that President Trump looks to us as someone who’s not trigger-happy?” Bannon said, paraphrasing a question he said he was hearing from independent voters.
“That still has to be explained,” Bannon continued. “I don’t know if it’s the president addressing the nation. I don’t know if it’s the president getting on ‘Fox & Friends.’ But clearly, at some point and time, the president’s got to walk through not just what his logic was, but also where he wants to take this.”
Indeed, part of the problem for conservative media commentators was the lack of guidance from the White House, which has been slow to settle on a public narrative around Soleimani’s death. In 2003, as the Bush administration prepared for a conflict in Iraq, White House officials took pains to build support among allies and media commentators for an invasion. In 2020, the Trump administration seems to be attempting the reverse: retroactively arguing its case even as the world grapples with the consequences of a provocative military strike.
Without providing specifics, Trump aides have referred to evidence from intelligence agencies about an imminent threat from Iran — the same intelligence agencies that Trump and his media surrogates have attacked for three years as biased and prone to fabricating evidence.
White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham is virtually unknown to the public, because she has not held a briefing in her six months on the job and rarely agrees to interviews outside of Fox News. An attempt on Twitter by Vice President Mike Pence to connect Soleimani to the 9/11 attacks was quickly proved wrong.
Pompeo, dispatched to the major political talk shows Sunday, argued that “appeasement” of Iran would increase the risk of a terror attack, even as Soleimani’s death set off enormous anti-American protests in Tehran. That prompted an on-air rebuke from Carlson, who showed a clip of Pompeo on his Monday Fox News show.
“The risk of terror is also increased by bombing other people’s countries,” Carlson said.
Carlson, a longtime opponent of American involvement in the Middle East, has been more willing than Hannity to criticize Trump, though he has not called out the president by name in his recent commentary on Iran. After his Monday segment on Soleimani, he introduced a five-part series, “American Dystopia,” chronicling urban decay in San Francisco. (The president later retweeted a Twitter post by Carlson promoting the series.)
Trump, for his part, has done relatively little to persuade the public. Aside from a brief and hastily convened TV statement from his Palm Beach resort, he has kept to Twitter, initially posting a caption-less picture of an American flag on the day of the Baghdad strike. On Tuesday afternoon, the president spoke informally to reporters at the White House about the strike.
On Monday, he granted his first interview on the matter to the radio show of conservative host Rush Limbaugh, a Trump safe space with a direct line to the president’s political base.
“I hope this is the greatest year of your life, sir,” Limbaugh cooed to Trump at one point, while also venturing that the Soleimani killing had many Americans on edge. “People are being scared to death, their kids are being scared to death, out of their minds, that somehow this is going to start World War III,” he said.
Trump responded haltingly, as if testing out ideas for his message. “This should have been done for the last 15 to 20 years,” the president said, calling Soleimani “a terrorist” and declaring that “our country is a lot safer.” Soon, he had veered into complaints about House Democrats and their views on Israel.
Charlie Sykes, a longtime right-wing talk-radio host and a critic of Trump, said in an interview that the president could still draw on a reservoir of support among his conservative supporters.
“Killing terrorists has always been a great talking point for Republican presidents,” Sykes said. Trump’s campaign-trail opposition to the Iraq War, though, complicates matters.
“Trumpism is both isolationist and highly militaristic at the same time,” said Sykes, who is also a MSNBC contributor. “It’s not dovish — it’s highly militaristic, but it’s selectively militaristic. Being strong is not inconsistent with appeasing the North Koreans or Vladimir Putin.” He paused to laugh. “My head is hurting just thinking about this.” On Monday night, Hannity previewed a potential new talking point for the president. “We can’t and won’t be going with boots on the ground in Iran,” he told viewers. “That’s not gonna happen, and frankly, it’s not necessary.”
Still, the situation in Iran remains fluid. On Monday, Bannon used his podcast to point out the contradictions of the president’s approach, noting, “One of the central building blocks of why he was elected president was to get out of these foreign wars.”
A co-host, former Trump campaign aide Jason Miller, leaped to the president’s defense, but Bannon interrupted. “You’re thinking like Republicans,” he said. “Where’s the populist nationalist movement in this? This is supposed to be a new day.”