Tucker Carlson Wins Iowa with Sharp Humor and Sharper Questions

Tucker Carlson speaks at the Turning Point Action conference on July 15, 2023 in West Palm
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Neil Munro

Tucker Carlson does not have the power to expose politicians’ hidden beliefs, but he can pressure politicians to briefly expose their hidden priorities.

“That’s not my concern,” former Vice President Mike Pence snapped when Carlson pressured him on growing aid for Ukraine as U.S. cities decline.

“Tucker, I hope we’ll be able to talk about some issues,” former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson complained when Carlson asked him about the government policy of pushing troubled children into “transgender” sterility and loneliness.

“That’s a very difficult task to deport them all at one time,” Sen. Tim Scott (R-SC) dodged when Carlson asked him about deporting Joe Biden’s new flood of several million job-seeking illegals. But he was very clear that illegals should not be allowed to get the citizenship status that enables them to vote on whether or not politicians keep their jobs.

Former President Donald Trump declined the opportunity to face Carlson, who has not always been complimentary about Trump’s ability to push popular reforms through the hostile D.C. swamp.

Trump’s exit left Carlson to dominate the July 14 Family Leadership Summit in Iowa.

But Carlson combined his tough questions with entertainment — because he’s spent decades watching his ratings rise and fall in various cable TV shows. So he wrapped the political drama in humor:

“Who blew up the Nord Stream Pipeline?” he asked former Gov. Nikki Haley.

“I don’t know … there are a lot of things strange with the Biden administration,” she replied.

“If they’re still classifying the JFK assassination docs 60 years later, they’re just mocking us, aren’t they?” he asked Haley.

“It’s the same thing with the UFOs,” she replied, adding:

They’re totally making everybody want to know what happened. You just need to release all of that. Release it all let us see it. There’s no reason to hold on to that. Now release it.

“What’s your guess on that?” Carlson asked Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis when DeSantis denounced the government’s tepid investigation into the discovery of a bag of cocaine in a White House lobby.

Carlson is free to ask difficult questions since he is not working for the establishment media. He lost his evening TV show because his populist questions prompted Fox’s establishment board to shut him down, despite the resulting huge loss of viewers.

In fact, Carlson has a pocketbook and a ratings incentive to keep the pressure on politicians. Millions of ordinary Americans have given up on the establishment’s media coverage of the establishment’s political priorities. That popularity was made clear the next day when Carlson spoke at the TPUSA Conference in Florida:

So Carlson kept the questions lively at the Iowa summit by jumping from subject to subject.

But that liveliness also makes it harder for viewers to compare each candidate.

For example, he asked Scott a question that should be asked of all politicians: “What are the big issues on which you disagree with your donors?”

Scott evaded the question, but Florida’s DeSantis made a point of directly answering the question without being asked:

[Abortion and life] is a critical issue, and it is one that I’m happy to have done, and oh, by the way, this is an issue where I had a lot of supporters who were averse to me on this. Donors saying they didn’t want to support me if I stood for life. It’s been written about how I lost a lot of really big supporters. Some of them just aren’t pro-life, some of them think it’s a political liability. And at the end of the day, you get into office to be able to do what’s right. And you’ve got to stand on principle and you’ve got to say, “Why am I here?” If you’re here to contort yourself into a pretzel, to try to not have to take on big issues, to take the political road that’s easier to travel, then you’re not somebody that’s dependable. So we stood up, we did what was right. We lost some support as a result of that. But if I had a chance to do it again, I do it every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Several of the politicians stared daggers at Carlson — and the leading candidate refused to sit in the hot seat.

“I’m going to appoint Tucker Carlson as my bye-bye ambassador, to figure this out,” Scott responded when Carlson asked him about the government’s ability to deport migrants.

All the more reason for Carlson to keep asking questions that reveal the true nature of the GOP’s polished, protected, and sometimes pompous politicians.

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