For years, far-Right Fox News host Tucker Carlson has used his primetime slot to spread conspiracy theories, embark on racist diatribes, and to give so-called experts a platform to perpetuate misinformation.
But in his show's Tuesday night monologue, Carlson offered a much different—almost conciliatory—tone. He criticized the direction the Republican party has taken, along with its emphasis on retaliation over concern for the working class.
He even offered an apology.
Watch below.
Carlson said:
"Middle class families are the core of this country...and yet both parties have shamelessly abandoned them. Middle class families have no national spokesman. They have no lobby in Washington. Republicans pretend to be their champion. You know by now that they are not. Instead of improving the lives of their voters, the party feeds them a steady diet of mindless symbolic victories, partisan junk food designed to make them feel full even as they waste away."
He continued:
"Who cares how many Benghazi hearings we have? We're supposed to care. Why should we? How did Peter Strzok's text messages become more important than saving American jobs from foreign nationals who are taking them? It is lunacy. We fall for it every time, and to the extent this show has participated in it, we apologize with deepest sincerity."
Carlson invoked the personal text messages between FBI agent Peter Strzok and coworker Lisa Page in which they mocked then-candidate Donald Trump. Republicans used these messages to claim that the entire investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election—and the ways it benefitted the Trump campaign—were baseless.
Carlson's dismissal of these messages is a stark reversal from previous segments of his and a diversion from the priorities of Donald Trump, who has tweeted or retweeted about Strzok and Page nearly 100 times.
Trump also used the tragedy in Benghazi, which left American soldiers and a diplomat dead, as a reason to "lock up" his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. After hours and hours of testimony on the matter, officials can find no cause for locking Hillary Clinton up. Trump has tweeted or retweeted about Benghazi as recently as June 19—nearly eight years later.
Carlson's contrition comes as potential cracks are beginning to form in the support of Trump's once-reliable Republican base. A Fox News poll found Trump narrowly trailing Democratic nominee Joe Biden in reliably red states like Texas and Georgia. A Pew Research Center survey found that Republican satisfaction in the direction of the United States plummeted from 55 percent in April to 19 percent in June. A recent Gallup poll found that, for the first time since 1965, more Americans want expanded immigration than less—directly opposing a pillar of Trump's campaign platform.
Some people think Carlson is saving face because he thinks the jig is up.
Others think he's trying to coax back advertisers who jumped ship after Carlson's racist monologues in response to protests against police brutality.
Some even think he's planning to run for office himself.
For better or worse, it's no longer unheard of for a television host to win a presidential election.
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