Former President Donald J. Trump has stirred the pot of potential 2024 running mates by expressing his openness to considering Tucker Carlson for Vice President.
During a conversation on “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” Trump responded to the suggestion with characteristic bravado, stating, “I like Tucker a lot. I guess I would consider him. He’s got great common sense.”
The hint comes as the political arena buzzes with questions about who will stand alongside Trump as the vice president candidate for the 2024 race. Trump’s praise of Carlson’s “common sense” echoes the sentiments of many conservatives who admire the commentator’s frank and sometimes controversial takes on current affairs.
The notion of a Tucker Carlson vice presidency is not as far-fetched as it once might have seemed. While discussing the idea, Trump reflected back on his decision to do an interview with Carlson during the first Republican debate—a move that resulted in record-breaking viewership figures.
Trump cited the ratings as evidence of the powerful draw of conservative media voices like Carlson’s. Hosted on Carlson’s show, “Debate Night with Donald J Trump” garnered a staggering 212.3 million impressions. To put this into perspective, when Fox News broke the debate ratings record back in 2015, largely attributed to Trump’s participation, the event peaked at 24 million viewers.
During the interview, Trump was asked whether he believed his political enemies would try to have him killed as his poll numbers continue to rise despite four indictments.
“Impeachment didn’t work, twice, obviously. The indictments are not working, your poll numbers go up. When they raided Mar-A-Lago in August of last year, your numbers went up,” Carlson asked back in August.
Trump replied. “I mean the four indictments, and maybe there’s more, I don’t know. These people are crazy,” he continued. “They’re savage animals,” Trump said of the radical left and the Biden Administration. “They are people that are sick, really sick.”
Fast-forward a couple of months, and Trump is now the favorite to win the presidency, despite the four indictments. According to the latest surveys, the former president is leading in five swing states and is on pace to secure upwards of 300 electoral votes, which would allow him to return to the White House.
The swing state poll, which was conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, found Trump leading in multiple states that were carried by Joe Biden in 2020. Trump currently leads his rival in Michigan, Nevada, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona, all of which were won by Biden in the previous presidential election.
Of the six swing states surveyed, Biden only leads Trump in Wisconsin. Perhaps most notably, the former president was found to be leading Nevada by 10 percentage points, a state that has not gone for a Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 2004.
As the country inches closer to the next election cycle, Trump’s musings are not merely idle chatter. They are strategic signals to his base and his potential rivals alike. Whether or not Tucker is seriously in the running for a vice-presidential slot remains to be seen, but in the age of Trump, it’s clear that the playbook for politics is still being written.