Confused Defenders
By Kelefa Sanneh
11:27 A.M.
Tucker Carlson ... is a former magazine writer who now spends his nights on Fox News, where he can be found arguing that, regardless of what President Trump has done recently, his political opponents have done something worse. On Tuesday night, hours after Trump declared that there had been "very fine people on both sides" of the Charlottesville protests, Carlson’s job became particularly difficult. For most of the media, the story of the day was that Trump seemed to regard the Charlottesville ralliers, at least some of them, as valuable political allies, even though the rally had been organized as a "pro-white demonstration." But Carlson wanted to talk, instead, about slavery and statuary. “One thing the President said today deserves more attention than it will likely get,” he said. He noted that protesters had recently pulled down a statue of Robert E. Lee in Durham, North Carolina. And he paraphrased a question that Trump had posed at the press conference: “Which statues are next?”
What followed was a short seminar on .. human bondage, which produced a singularly unflattering screenshot: Carlson, midsentence, next to a series of bullet points. The first one said, "SLAVERY IS EVIL." The third one said, "PLATO, MUHAMMAD, AZTECS ALL OWNED SLAVES." Bill Kristol, who had once been Carlson’s boss, at The Weekly Standard, retweeted the screenshot, and added a grim judgment: "They started by rationalizing Trump. They ended by rationalizing slavery" ...
... although Trump evidently cares a great deal about his media coverage, he makes life difficult for his defenders in the media. The cleverest .. often conclude .. that the safest course of action is to change the subject. But .. as Carlson was telling viewers about the long and wide-reaching history of slavery, there were signs that some .. defenders were beginning to wonder what .. they were defending ...
... partisan lines are not .. easily redrawn. Indeed, with Bannon gone, it is .. possible that the .. White House will be more .. likely to follow the Republican Party line ... His voters may not mind; even Bannon may find that, no matter what Trump does or fails to do, most Breitbart readers remain supportive of the President. But it seems fitting that, after only seven disastrous months, Trump, who promised to scramble the ideological map, seems to be inspiring a different kind of confusion ...
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/tucker-carlson-and-trumps-confused-defenders
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