Tucker Carlson's "Interview" With Vladimir Putin

This is not journalism. It's Kremlin propaganda.

I felt morally obligated to watch some of Tucker Carlson’s “interview” with Vladimir Putin, which dropped yesterday. I put “interview” in quotes because it’s mostly Putin lecturing while Tucker makes those strange, tortured faces of his.

Here are some takeaways:

The backdrop, all white and gilt, is both hideous and disorienting. The room is cavernous, too big for this purpose, but most of it is shrouded in darkness. The ceilings are impossibly high; the white grandfather clock in the background is dwarfed by the room. There is an ugly rug that clashes with the ugly floor. Two chairs are set up on the edge of the rug, so the legs of both chairs are half on the rug, half off—perhaps symbolizing Putin’s tendency to push the boundaries, to set up shop where shop should not be set up. On the small, fragile table between host and subject are what appears to be Putin’s phone and car keys.

Almost immediately, the Russian strongman commandeers the interview. I watched 43 minutes of it, and Putin spoke for 40 of those minutes. Poor Tucker just sat there, trying vainly to follow the rambling, incomplete survey of Russian history. Every time he butted in to ask, “And what year was that?” Putin appeared irritated, like it was taking all of his inner strength not to have Tucker defenestrated. (The Defenestration of Prague, incidentally, is one of the many key 17th century events Putin does not mention in his lecture.)

Putin seems to be trying hard to appear calm, patient, benevolent. But there are flashes throughout where his inner fury rises to the surface, and I found myself worrying for Tucker’s safety. That homicidal twerp has a temper. It’s not hard to imagine him losing his shit, Downfall style, when some unfortunate lackey has to bring him bad news from Ukraine.

As for his history lecture, Putin doesn’t say anything wildly incorrect—he doesn’t make up events—but he omits anything that doesn’t serve his purpose. His narrative is that Ukraine was always Russia, that “Ukraine” just means “land on the outskirts,” that there is no Ukrainian national identity. Even if that were true—and it isn’t—that doesn’t give him the right to invade Ukraine, any more than Germany could justify invading France next week because the Franks were a Germanic tribe.

And Putin’s application of ethnicity is inconsistent. He goes on and on about Novgorod and the Kievan Rus’ and the Rurik Dynasty, but fails to mention that the actual rulers of said dynasty were Varangians—Vikings. Swedes. Should we then hand Russia over to Sweden? (During the Time of Troubles, the Swedish king could have crowned himself tsar of Russia, but decided, wisely, that it wasn’t worth the headache. The succession at the turn of the 17th century was such a chaos that the Russian throne was held briefly by a guy who showed up one day claiming to be Dmitri, a son of Ivan the Terrible. Turns out, he was just some rando from Poland. This actually happened!) In his discussion about Crimea, Putin notes, correctly, that Russia seized the peninsula during the reign of Catherine the Great. He fails to mention that she was German. Why? Because this inconvenient truth pokes holes in his flimsy argument.

After about 15 minutes of this thrill-ride, Tucker finally interjects, asking what all of this fascinating history has to do with the events of two years ago. Putin gets visibly irked, as if wondering how exactly he will have this fat-headed American put to death. “I am coming to that,” he assures him; “I know this is boring for you,” and then talks about 1651.

When he finally gets to the 20th century—it’s amusing to watch Tucker fidget—Putin bends over backwards to equate Poland with Hitler—as if the Poles were super excited to collaborate with the Nazis. He whines incessantly about other countries violating treaties, as if Russia doesn’t do that on the reg. He conveniently forgets about the Budapest Memorandum, the 1994 agreement by which Ukraine gave up its nuclear weapons to Russia. Which, you know, seems more relevant to the here and now than what Yaroslav the Wise said literally a thousand years ago.

And of course Putin accuses all the U.S. presidents of lying to him, or having their desires countermanded by the Deep State—a dangerous lie Tucker emphasizes on Putin’s behalf. Putin also says that Boris Yeltsin was “accused of being an alcoholic,” as if this were some slander, as if his former boss didn’t stumble around shitfaced. And he implies that he promised his underling and Tucker’s favorite European fascist, Viktor Orbán, a slice of Western Ukraine, where Hungarian is spoken, if Russia wins the war.

That’s about when I turned it off—right before Putin insulted his interviewer by bringing up Tucker’s failure to land a job with the CIA. What I watched was a Kremlin Festivus: Putin’s airing of grievances, mostly imagined. In this way, he is just like the American trolls, the Catturds and the Trumps and the Tuckers, who can’t stop their delusional grousing about some perceived slight.¹

I know all the Tucker apologists think that this is real journalism, that their bloviating champion got a scoop the “mainstream media” failed to land. But here’s the thing: Putin won’t talk to the legitimate press because he won’t answer tough questions. He agreed to let Tucker do the job because he was confident that Tucker would let him babble on. Which Tucker did. (Watching this shitshow, we understand how Putin menaces world leaders in the Russian sphere of influence.)

And that’s my issue with this “interview.” Although it wasn’t a live broadcast, it may as well have been. Tucker does very little editing. There are no cutaways to explain that Putin is lying, or omitting a key detail. Moreover, this is different than past Western media interviews with Putin because it took place after the invasion of Ukraine. It’s like platforming Hitler in 1943 and asking his thoughts about the Jews. That’s why there was talk in the E.U.—mostly unfounded, alas—of Tucker being sanctioned.

In short, Tucker Carlson turned over his show to a wanted war criminal, a bloodthirsty dictator who invaded a neighboring country for no good reason, the author of death, destruction, rape, and pillage on a scale not seen in Europe since 1945. That’s not courageous journalism. It’s Kremlin propaganda.

And it’s not even effective. Seriously—how many Fox News viewers will sit through a half-hour lecture about the Princes of Novgorod? Plus, it’s not like we don’t know Putin is full of shit. As Peter Stano, EU Commission spokesman for foreign affairs, told reporters, “[E]veryone knows track record of Putin remarks.”

Stano added, “The only surprise might be [if] Putin starts to cry and say that ‘I was complete failure because I failed in everything I declared in February 2022, and I apologize to the Ukrainian people.’ Then we would thank M. Carlson for conducting this interview.”

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PROGRAMMING NOTES

The PREVAIL podcast returns one week from today!

I am back from Berlin and will be LIVE on The Five 8 tonight:

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Photo credit: Screen shot of the “interview.”

1. LB has been saying for years that Putin is just a troll. As usual, she’s right.