When asked Monday about potentially being Donald Trump’s running mate should he win the Republican nomination, former Fox News host Tucker Carlson told Megyn Kelly he doesn’t see himself as “really suited” for the role.
Trump, in a podcast interview a month ago, said he would “consider” Carlson for the role, complimenting him as someone with “great common sense.” According to an Axios report last week, Melania Trump also happens to favor Carlson’s addition to the ticket.
Such a notion was “unimaginable,” Carlson said on Megyn Kelly’s SiriusXM radio show,
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“I haven’t led a life that prepares a person for politics,” said Carlson, who has spent more than twenty years talking politics on television, often with people in government. “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’s recent on-camera interactions with politicians include lengthy sit-downs with the likes of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), newly elected Argentinian President Javier Milei, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, whom he has met multiple times—in Hungary.
In any event, Carlson didn’t pass up the chance to declare his admiration for Trump, even if he was non-committal about a potential opportunity to join forces.
“I’m a total sucker for Trump. I think he’s—you know, personally I get along with Trump really well. 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’s just charming,” said Carlson, who wrote in a text message during Trump’s final days in office that he “hate[d] him passionately,” and who days later called him a “destroyer” and a “demonic force.”
To Kelly, though, Carlson continued:
“And he’s funny as hell, and he’s brave in his way, I think. So I really appreciate that and I agree fundamentally with his views, you know: maybe fewer wars, maybe have a border. Like, those are not crazy things and I support them, and I’m appalled and terrified by the use of the DOJ to rig an election, which is what’s happening now. So all those factors make me kind of psyched to vote for Trump,” he said.
“But serving in politics with anybody,” he explained, “it’s a lot for me to think about because I just don’t think I’m really suited for that. I mean, would anyone want to see a guy like me run for office?”
“Yes!” Kelly replied enthusiastically.
But Carlson continued to express his reservations by saying that blackmail “is real.”
“I’ve seen that happen. So if you suspect that it’s kind of rigged by people with more power than the candidates, you’re absolutely right,” he said. “And so, I don’t know. That whole world is repugnant to me.”
“I’m really grateful for what I have, but I don’t think, like, America needs me, and I don’t want to become an egomaniac or a solipsist, and that’s what you become when you start thinking that way,” he concluded. “So I’m not thinking that way at all.”
