Oh, how the mighty have fallen. This time last time year Tucker Carlson had a primetime spot on Fox News where his hate-heavy, fact-light sputtering drew an audience of over 4 million. Then, in April, he was summarily fired. Fox didn’t explicitly say why. Carlson has claimed that it was a condition of the media company’s $787.5m settlement with Dominion Voting Systems relating to the broadcast of Donald Trump’s lies about election fraud; both Fox and Dominion have denied that Carlson’s firing had any relation to the settlement.
Once cock of the walk, a humiliated Carlson quickly revived his show on the social network formerly known as Twitter, calling it Tucker on Twitter. (Elon Musk’s rebrand to X really messed with his alliteration.) Over the last few months he’s resorted to increasingly cheap tactics in order to keep himself relevant. If someone’s controversial, Carlson wants them on his show.
While everything about Carlson is in bad taste, he really outdid himself this week. Clearly desperate for ratings, he interviewed a man called Larry Sinclair who claims he took drugs and had sex with Barack Obama while the young politician was working in the Illinois government, just before his meteoric rise. According to Sinclair, he wasn’t the only man to have drug-fueled dalliances with Obama but no one else is around to speak up about it because they were all murdered by Obama’s campaign.
Sinclair, who has a substantial criminal record and seems to specialise in cons, has been making these claims for 15 years now. Nobody has ever been able to verify them and, one imagines, many news outlet have deployed considerable resources attempting to do so. Despite the fact that Sinclair claims Obama was running all around Chicago doing crack and powder cocaine, making stops at the Comfort Inn to do oral sex, nobody else seems to know anything about it. Which is strange because, at the time all this supposedly took place, Obama had a public profile as an Illinois politician. These claims are either unverifiable because all the witnesses have been murdered or because the whole thing is complete nonsense. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion it’s the latter.
Why did Carlson feel the need to dredge up a discredited conspiracy theory about Obama? Had he come across new information that substantiated Sinclair’s claims? Had some evidence finally been unearthed?
No, of course not. Carlson clearly just wanted to spend 40 minutes being racist, homophobic and trying to humiliate Obama. The segment, which aired on Monday night, was full of racist dog whistles (at one point, for example, Carlson claimed nobody could pronounce Obama’s name despite it being really very easy to pronounce) and barely veiled homophobia. Carlson made sure he signaled to his audience that he was very, very heterosexual and if a man ever attempted to try it on with him he’d break his hand. Following the interview, Twitter was awash with rightwingers spreading homophobic jokes about Obama.
Did Carlson believe any of what he was broadcasting? “We’re not claiming [Sinclair’s claims] are true, but they were certainly credible,” he said at the beginning of his conversation. It seems unlikely he actually thinks this. Certainly there was nothing remotely persuasive in the broadcast. The most compelling thing Carlson could find to say about Sinclair’s credibility was that the convicted conman would happily sign an affidavit stating everything he had said was true.
During the interview – if you can call it that – Carlson didn’t challenge Sinclair in any way, or demand evidence. He just pushed Sinclair to dwell on sordid details (“so you started rubbing his leg …”) and made a lot of astonished faces. “Interesting, interesting,” Carlson kept repeating. “Amazing, amazing.” I’m not sure anyone else found the segment interesting and amazing. The interview wasn’t just ridiculous; it was boring. The ramblings of fantasists tend to be.
Even Musk, who enjoys spreading homophobic conspiracy theories (remember his thoughts on Paul Pelosi?) seemed a little taken aback by the interview. “Of course, the probability that [Sinclair’s] claims are true would have to rest on objective evidence, rather than claims made by someone with a dubious history,” he wrote on Twitter on Wednesday after the segment ran. Which is a very diplomatic way of Musk saying that the whole thing was inflammatory – and possibly defamatory – rubbish.
There is a real story in all of this, but it’s not about Obama. Rather it’s about how low both Carlson and Twitter have sunk. It was clear from that episode that Carlson has now given up any pretense of being a journalist and has taken on a full-time job as a troll. Twitter, meanwhile, has gone from being a valuable source of breaking news to a cesspit of misinformation.
As for Obama? He’s writing bestselling books, kitesurfing and generally living his best life. Carlson may have been trying to humiliate the former president, but in the end he only humiliated himself.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
This article was amended on 7 September 2023 to reflect that both Fox and Dominion deny that Carlson’s firing had any relation to their legal settlement
