The Senate fundraising arm of the Republican Party send blood pressure spiking on Christmas Eve in an attempt to juice a few more dollars out of the MAGA base.
“Could Tucker Carlson be President Trump’s running mate?” read the subject line of a fundraising blast shortly after 3 p.m. on Sunday.
The body of the email boasted of “TWO MAJOR announcements” coming from the ex-Fox News star. Nothing in the email answered the question posed in the subject line—a GOP curiosity gap, holiday edition—instead touting Carlson’s rebrand under “The Tucker Carlson Network,” or TCN.
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Earlier in the day, Carlson released a seven-minute interview with disgraced actor Kevin Spacey. Coincidentally, the pair discussed a 2024 ticket with Carlson serving as VP.
It’s unclear if this fundraising ploy from the National Republican Senatorial Committee should be taken any more seriously.
Officials from the NRSC did not return a request for comment. Carlson also did not respond when reached by text message.
In a November podcast interview, Donald Trump said he would consider picking Carlson as his VP.
Carlson, who still holds the record for the most viewed cable news show in American history, responded to Trump’s speculation by indicating he wouldn’t necessarily love the vetting process involved.
The 54-year-old heir to a TV dinner and frozen poultry product fortune said at the time he’s “a total sucker for Trump,” but also might have some things in his past he’d prefer to hide.
“I haven’t led a life that prepares a person for politics,” Carlson, a Beltway fixture and still a highly influential voice in the modern GOP, told fellow Fox News expatriate Megyn Kelly on her podcast. “I don’t think I have any, like, horrible skeletons or anything. It’s not that. It’s just that that’s not how my brain works. I’ve never done anything like that. I can’t imagine spending time with politicians.”
Carlson said he also gets along with Trump “really well,” and “[the] closer I am physically to Trump, like if I’m with him in the room, I always love Trump and I think it’s impossible not to, and you know the experience,” he told Kelly, whom Trump once called “highly overrated” (he also infamously insinuated she was menstruating during the first GOP debate of the 2016 campaign). “He’s just charming,” Carlson added.
For his part, Carlson privately called Trump “a demonic force” and “a destroyer,” said he hated him “passionately,” and was “very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights” following the Jan. 6 insurrection, according to text messages unearthed in discovery for Dominion Voting Systems’ $787 million lawsuit against Fox News.
“I’m really grateful for what I have, but I don’t think, like, America needs me,” Carlson told Kelly, rounding out the discussion around the previous VP speculation, “and I don’t want to become an egomaniac or a solipsist, and that’s what you become when you start thinking that way.”
Roger Sollenberger contributed reporting for this story.
