Web video host Tucker Carlson has been rather busy since joining Elon Musk on X. In his quest to remain relevant and kick his former employers in the shins, he’s taken his paranoid style global, jetting around the world to foment various populist revolts: Over the past several weeks, he’s taped interviews with rising far-right politicians in Buenos Aires, Budapest, the U.K. and Romania. At the moment, I’m told, he’s traveling in the Middle East, scheduling interviews with world leaders.
Among the interviews that have already been published are Carlson’s dialogues with accused sex trafficker and men’s rights influencer Andrew Tate in Romania over the summer, and his conversation with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, which went live last week. Coming up is Carlson’s interview with Javier Milei, a right-wing presidential candidate in Argentina with distinctly Trumpian vibes, which will go live in the coming weeks. As for his appearances in the Middle East, a source close to Carlson told me: “All I can say is every world leader over that way… literally all of them… are very interested in speaking with Tucker.” (Netanyahu? Assad? The source declined to push back when I asked if Mohammed bin Salman was on the schedule.)
Carlson’s interviews with foreign dignitaries and heads of state would appear to contrast with his domestic concerns, which have increasingly veered into National Enquirer, and sometimes Infowars, territory. Shortly after suggesting on a podcast that the U.S. is “speeding toward” the assassination of Donald Trump, Carlson published a nearly hour-long interview with a convicted fraudster who claimed that he’d had coke-fueled gay sex with Barack Obama while Obama was first running for president. From the outside, it’s been quite a brand transformation for Carlson over the past several years, from a mediocre trust-fund-assisted Weekly Standard magazine writer and D.C. cocktail party jester, to a conspiracy-slinging internet content creator, with a stop as Fox News’s most popular primetime host along the way.
