Tucker Carlson wants everyone to know that he loves Donald Trump now and always has. Appearing on Bo Snerdley’s WABC radio program Monday, the Fox talk show host expressed outrage that his private text messages were made public as a result of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox and insisted that his January 4th, 2021 text that said “I hate him passionately,” referring to the former president, has been taken out of context.
“The key word there is passion,” Carlson explained. “I’m passionate about Trump like in a Sid and Nancy way. If we were a couple, we’d be fucking in fleabag hotels while shooting up with dirty needles until one of us stabbed the other. And that little bit of hate flared up in me in that text—but it was just a tiny piece of my overall passionate adoration of Donald Trump, or Big Scrumptious Boss-Daddy as I like to call him.”
Carlson also explained the circumstances that prompted the angry message. “Some idiot on the Trump campaign sent us the names of these dead voters who had voted. And we went and repeated them on air, and it turns out some of them were alive. So I just felt humiliated.”
So naturally after airing dubious allegations of voter fraud provided by an “idiot” without bothering to check their accuracy, what would be more natural than saying “I hate him passionately” when you actually meant to say “I’m very fond of him but he does tend to hire idiots.”
Carlson didn’t offer any context for other messages he sent which could be construed as negative. In another January 4th text, Carlson said “There really isn’t an upside to Trump,” and in a January 7th text the Fox host fumed “He’s a demonic force, a destroyer.”
Carlson wanted to emphasize that he was not appearing on the show to do damage control for having been exposed as someone who tells his audience one thing while clearly believing precisely the opposite or for airing completely false allegations without any sort of fact-checking or corrections. “My audience will never hear about those texts in the first place, and even if they did, they wouldn’t care. I mean, the point we were all making in those texts, over and over again, is that they want to be lied to.”