Jay Weber Show transcript 7-17-23 7:10am
So... the biggest political news of the weekend was the big, evangelical summit in Iowa-the family leadership summit-
and more specifically-Tucker Carlson’s Friday town hall with most of the candidates.
Tucker made headlines by going after mike pence, Tim Scott, and Asa Hutchinson with some tough questions- and getting major social media reaction to their answers, afterward.
Many Trump and Tucker fans giggly insisted that tucker had ‘ended mike pence’s campaign’, in the biggest example.
Well- Pence was never going to get this nomination anyway.
I think you know my take on Mike Pence: he’s a very good and decent man and he has all of the qualifications to be a good-to-great president, but most GOP voters won’t give him a second look because of the controversy over January sixth and the fact that Mike Pence stepped up and defended the constitution and the peaceful, timely, transfer of power....as he did.
Trump has trashed him since. Trump diehards have trashed him since. His political career is already over. But did Carlson quote...’end his campaign’ on Friday?
No. Not unless a true, silly ‘gotcha moment’ that Tucker wanted to manufacture is enough to do it. Pence uttered a phrase that Carlson and pence’s haters latched onto as ‘a huge gaffe. The campaign killer’...
But it really wasn’t-unless you want to intentionally ‘misunderstand’ what Pence was clearly saying.
The moment involved Tucker offering a false premise: that we shouldn’t be involved in the Ukraine war when we’ve got so many problems at home-
As if we as a nation, can’t do both. Tucker Carlson, somehow, thinks all street crime, inflation, and all other domestic problems need to be solved before we can defend democracy and our western allies by helping in foreign wars.
That’s a stupid premise.
We can-and should-be doing both. The fact that we aren’t is Biden and the dem’s problem.
So- pence was rejecting this premise. But he in artfully reacted by saying ‘that’s not my concern’...meaning....’I've heard your schtick on Ukraine before, and I’m not buying it. We need to do both.
But oh. Oh. Those words put together. It sounds like Mike Pence doesn’t care about America, or crime, or the border.
This was the silly ‘gotcha’. Listen.
Now-clips on social media largely end with pence saying ‘that’s not my concern’ ...but if you listen to the fuller answer, Pence was clearly suggesting what it is that i have just suggested: Tucker’s premise. This cheap, mindless isolationist’s premise that ‘we just got to only focus on America’...is silly. It’s neither correct, nor serious.... the world is more complicated than that. And Pence’s full answer is impressive.
Pence-did-have a terrible answer related to the Ukrainian government’s alleged persecution of orthodox Christians...which pence denied was going on. It’s going on-but it’s related to blocking a church that answers to Putin and Moscow. So that, too, is more complicated.
The point is: Tucker Carlson seemed to come to the conference with one mission: to make mike pence look foolish.
And in the eyes of the Tucker and Trump fans -he did.
He also made Asa Hutchinson look foolish with some covid-related challenges.... Not that Asa can’t do that on his own.
No one knows why he’s in this race. He’s struggling to get -any-donors. He held a town hall last week that got six. Six. People to show up.
He’s got no money. He should drop out, already.
But- tucker went after him-
And he went after senator Tim Scott- by trying to get Scott to commit to deporting a bunch of Biden-era illegals. When Donald Trump didn’t round up and deport Obama-era illegals...and neither party is going to do that.
And so- that, too, was a stupid tucker ‘gotcha’ that his and trump’s fans thought was great. It wasn’t. It was another stupid premise.
Then-get this- tucker did completely soft-ball interviews with Nikki Haley and Vivek Ramaswamy.
Why?
Because they are no threat to trump.
That’s how I viewed this town hall: it’s almost as if Trump’s team had orchestrated it, with Tucker only going after the two or three men who might challenge trump for the nom.
And hey- Tucker bashes Trump behind the scenes, we know. And so why would Tucker do it?
He wasn’t doing it on the orders of the Trump campaign: they just happen to have similar goals.
I guarantee you Tucker Carlson wants to prove he still matters. He’s still a kingmaker. He’s still a powerful voice in media. And what better way to prove that than to ‘holding the candidate’s feet to the fire’.
But why was he helping Trump?
He wasn't. He was engaged in his mission of ‘being tough on the candidates’...and trump didn’t show up to field the questions. Right?
I assume that Donald Trump missed out on his own false-premise gotcha questions from Tucker- simply because he didn’t show up. It was smart to stay away.
The result is-it looked like Tucker was doing his bidding-and he avoided any embarrassing moments, himself.
And by the way-Ron DeSantis was stellar. Just-FYI-Tucker tried to ask him a few ‘false premise’ questions, too and DeSantis shot them right down or rolled right thru them.
And this audience knows that I favor DeSantis for the 24 nominations. I’m biased. But do some googling: every pundit who watched it said DeSantis was stellar, including Mark Levin.
Levin has been defending Trump a lot, lately, but said afterward- DeSantis is the ‘real deal’.
He is.
The man is a policy wonk’s policy wonk-and he can explain complex things in very easy-to-understand ways. He knows what the voters care about and are focused on.
Ron DeSantis is impressive. Donald Trump these days-simply is not- and so, we’ll see if any of it matters to voters as we get closer to Iowa.
I’m also watching to see whether this isolationism on Ukraine that Tucker Carlson, Donald trump, and some others share-becomes the dominant belief among GOP voters.
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