Scientists recently revealed that they revived a worm that was frozen in the Siberian permafrost 46,000 years ago. This was obviously a totally unnecessary and reckless exercise.
Because barely a month later Tucker Carlson would revive the semi-frozen carcass of an ex-president from the Twitter permafrost that is now weirdly known as X. Anyone who has watched a Jeff Goldblum movie knows how badly these experiments can turn out.
Cryogenic revivals are a relatively new medical procedure, which might explain Carlson’s sitting in what looked like a pine-lined Swedish sauna at the Trump golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey.
Then again, Donald Trump did not exactly find himself in a hot seat beside the former primetime star of the Fox “News” Channel.
“Why aren’t you at the Fox News debate tonight in Milwaukee?” probed Carlson.
“Well, you know, a lot of people have been asking me that,” began the semi-conscious Siberian worm, “and many people said you shouldn’t do it, but you see the polls have come out and I’m leading by 50 and 60 points, and you know some of [the other candidates] are at one and zero and two, and I’m saying, do I sit there for an hour or two hours whatever it’s going to be and get harassed by people that shouldn’t even be running for president, should I be doing that, and a network that isn’t particularly friendly to me, frankly …”
We can all seem groggy after a long sleep, but this so-called populist was positively Jeb Bushy in his energy levels during the slobbering snoozefest that tried to rival the first Republican debate of the 2024 cycle.
In this episode of Good Night America With Tucker and Donald, the only risk he faced was sending the Maga movement to sleep.
“It’s interesting because you spent a lot of your career in television,” Tucker the Torquemada continued, “but you don’t feel the need now running for president to do television obviously. Do you think television is declining?”
If anything captures the core burning resentment of the Maga mob, it’s surely their hatred of immigrants, the loss of economic security and the decline of television as we know it. Who among us does not hanker for the days of smoke-pumping steel mills, full church pews and endless reruns of Little House on the Prairie?
Trump answered with all the gusto he could muster. “Well, according to a poll that I guess we just saw, it just came out, where it’s down like 30, 35% but I think they were talking, referring to cable, I think cable is down because it’s lost credibility. MSNBC, or as they say, MS-DNC, is so bad. It’s so wrong what they write and what they do and what they say. You know, it’s fake news, as I said. I think I came up with that term. I hope I did, because it’s a good one. It’s not tough enough any more. It’s corrupt news.”
This was a strange way to rally the rioting crowds that Trump hopes will keep him out of jail for the rest of his living days.
But surely a twinge of irony crossed Tucker’s permanently furrowed brow as Donald talked about fake news to the anchor who lost his Fox News gig in part for lying about a stolen election and a voting machine company that led to a $787m settlement.
Surely not.
“The good old days are long ago,” lamented Trump as he continued to shed fake tears for Fox’s declining ratings. “I will say this. It could come back but they just don’t have a lot of credibility, Tucker, you know that perhaps better than anybody. I think it was a terrible move getting rid of you. You were number one on television and all of a sudden we’re doing this interview, but we’ll get bigger ratings using this crazy forum that you’re using than probably, probably the debate, our competition.”
You know your career is circling the drain when your big interview guest spends his time reminiscing about the good old days when you were number one, long before you ended up on this crazy website, whatever it’s called nowadays, where we maybe, possibly, probably will do better than the debate.
For what it’s worth, despite all the incoherent blather that spills out of Trump’s mouth like endless rain into a paper cup, his fans believe. They truly, deeply believe every morsel of moronic nonsense that he plucks out of the ether that separates his brain cells.
A recent CBS News poll revealed that Trump voters trust the twice-impeached, quadruple-indicted ex-president more than their own friends, family, religious leaders, and even (gulp) conservative media figures like Tucker Carlson.
Listening to the two of them talk on Thursday night, you can understand why.
Tucker asked Trump not once but twice why his attorney general Bill Barr thought that the notorious rapist Jeffrey Epstein had killed himself in prison. Donald tried to pivot to Barr’s real crime: his failure to “investigate” the 2020 election. But Tucker persisted, like the rottweiler interviewer he is.
“I think he probably committed suicide,” said Trump.
Tucker asked Donald not once but twice if he thought that after impeachment and indictment, the left was surely going to try to kill him. As in, literally assassinate him.
Donald just said they were savage animals and left it there, hanging in the Twitter/X space like the promise of self-driving Teslas.
Sure, sure. There was plenty of weird stuff from Donald. He called Asa Hutchinson, the former Arkansas governor, “Ada”, and described Hutchinson as a seriously nasty thing that was so nasty he couldn’t explain why. He called Chris Christie a lunatic. He said Joe Biden couldn’t walk on grass or sand.
He even claimed to have saved the Tokyo Olympics by getting North Korean athletes to take part. Which is the kind of thing that can haunt you, late at night, if you try too hard to understand what he’s saying.
But then Tucker said Biden had skinny legs, and Kamala Harris was senile too, and that one of his old Fox News co-workers was a small man. He even claimed that Trump’s indictments weren’t “working” because Trump’s poll numbers were going up. Which isn’t how indictments are supposed to work – at least not in the criminal justice system.
Elon Musk likes to say that he is protecting the digital town square by destroying Twitter as we knew it. But the corner of this square that is populated by Tucker and Donald needs a little more protection.
Some things are best left unthawed, buried deep in the crevasses of the internet with all the other frozen worms, lamenting the decline of cable television and the death of Jeffrey Epstein.
Richard Wolffe is a Guardian US columnist
