Last month, Tucker Carlson announced that he would no longer support the Republican Party. It was the end of a long journey. Just a few years ago, he was the biggest star on Fox News, the preferred television network of the American right. He departed from the network in 2023, but he maintained a close relationship with Donald Trump. Carlson even reportedly had a hand in the decision to pick then-senator JD Vance as Trump’s running mate.

Now, he says that the administration’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran makes it impossible for him to consider supporting Republicans in this fall’s midterm elections. “I would not support the Republican Party. There’s no chance I would support the Republican Party.” How, he asked, could he support a party that is “not loyal to the United States” and “puts the interests of a foreign country over that of its own citizens”? The President, who by all accounts used to regularly call and text Carlson, has more recently dismissed him as a “low IQ” person.

Of course, even if Carlson is no longer a Republican, that hardly means he’s become left wing. Carlson tends to attribute the sins of American foreign policy not to any sort of homegrown imperialism but to the influence of insidious foreigners (in this case, Israelis). Where emphasising the role of our own military-industrial complex would force Carlson to accept the uncomfortable reality of class conflict within American society, where different Americans have different interests, blaming it all on foreign influence allows him to cling to the same nationalistic assumptions that once led Carlson to the opposite conclusions.

Decades ago, he was a bowtie-wearing co-host of CNN’s Crossfire, a show where liberal and conservative co-hosts would clash about whatever was in that day’s news. At the time, Carlson was a loyal defender of George W Bush’s wars in the Middle East.

A few years after that, he experienced his first........

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