Tucker 2028?

(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

TUCKER CARLSON SPENT THE SUMMER in a fugue, talking with an alleged Russian spy and accusing Donald Trump of being the Antichrist, then claiming he never said that. Carlson’s visits to the White House earlier in the year had failed to avert the Iran war, and after the bombs started falling, Vice President JD Vance—once the voice of Carlson’s preferred brand of populist isolationism—came to look like another tool of the same hawkish Republican establishment that had scorned Carlson.

But in a much-hyped monologue on Wednesday night, Carlson suggested his plan to bounce back from the Vance disappointment: running for president himself in 2028. While he didn’t explicitly say he would run, Carlson spent ninety minutes laying out ten planks of what looks a lot like a populist campaign platform. Like Donald Trump after descending the golden escalator in 2015, Carlson depicts America as crisis-ridden and badly broken—but fixable, if voters choose the right candidate.

“You’re going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity,” Carlson said, as he finished his speech. “What does it mean to be an American? But it’s fixable. You just have to try. And we will be trying.”

Carlson’s speech hasn’t attracted much interest outside of the right because he didn’t explicitly say he’s a candidate. But it still bears looking at because it reveals how Carlson, a guy nowadays best known for talking about demons and ball-tanning and for cozying up to Vladimir Putin, might go about setting up a run for the White House—and get his revenge on Trump.

---

CARLSON’S SPEECH WAS PRECEDED by a meeting last weekend with other Trump friends-turned-enemies: former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterror chief Joe Kent. Ever since the private pow-wow, they’ve been on a media tour attacking Trump and promoting the idea of a third-party run against his chosen candidate in 2028.

Greene, for example, went on an online show hosted by conservative “Walkaway” activist Brandon Straka—himself increasingly critical of Trump—to claim the president said her son deserved to be killed by MAGA activists angry over her efforts to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Kent said in an appearance on the lefty show The Young Turks that they all urged Carlson to run for president at their get-together.

“Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” Kent said.

Carlson centered his speech on ten words for how he thought the country should be, including “fair,” “sovereign,” and “decent.” Each one led into more specific grievances—the idea that America should be “optimistic,” for example, was really about the declining birth rate.

“A country that doesn’t care about kids doesn’t care about the future,” Carlson said.

In his speech, Carlson positioned himself at the center of several populist concerns: opposition to AI data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, the sense that Epstein associates are getting away with it. Carlson even suggested some sort of debt forgiveness or other radical economic restructuring of consumer debt, saying the country could never be moral in a “society organized around debt.”

“Now the ‘fruited plain’ is just a place to build data centers and windmills, and make ethanol,” Carlson said, evoking a sense of a lost American heartland.

Like any good campaign speech, it was also pretty boring. Aside from calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “a deranged, bloodthirsty monkey,” Carlson hit his usual beats—criticism of Israel and Ukraine, and a sense that Trump has brought the country to the brink of nuclear war by attacking Iran.

Still, the import of Carlson’s video wasn’t lost on his enemies. Idiosyncratic conservative writer Rod Dreher, who recently announced a falling-out with Carlson over Carlson’s refusal to take seriously a potential case of demonic possession, said Carlson’s “fascinating” speech suggested he could launch a new “radical” party.

Jeremy Boreing, the former Daily Wire CEO now trying to build his own podcast empire, summoned a host of Carlson critics, including James “Conceptual James” Lindsay, to hash out exactly what Carlson meant. The panel’s conclusion, essentially, was that Carlson is a dupe following the orders of pro-Putin ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, albeit one who harbors real third party ambitions. Boreing added that Carlson “alluded” to a third party in his speech, and gave the camera “a slight grin” when he hinted at making a future announcement.

“Tucker has a political project, and that project is to create a new American majority out of a coalition formed from left-wing economic populists and right-wing social populists,” Boreing said.