President Donald Trump's MAGA movement is splintering, as far-right commentator Tucker Carlson unveils his own 10-point plan for America that, despite being ultranationalist and isolationist, repudiates certain elements of the Trump agenda.
But at the end of the day, former GOP strategist Rick Wilson told MS NOW anchor Eugene Daniels, it's all still just the same old slop that the GOP has shoveled ever since Trump took office.
Daniels asked Wilson whether he thinks Tucker made "some good points," noting that there are rumors he could run a third-party campaign for president and fracture the right further. "How do you think Republicans would deal with this?"
Wilson said that "ifthat manifesto had come outfrom anyone else," it might have had at least a few points people took seriously even if they don't agree with the entire thing. "Butthere's an old thing inadvertising called the dog foodrule. And no matter how prettythe package is, if the dog foodtastes bad, you're not going tobuy it."
The upshot, he continued, is that Carlson is "trying to packageup some other dog food herethat most Americans won'taccept, and even mostRepublicans are going to havesome variation on."
It's certainly a populist agenda, Wilson noted, touching on things like ending war, lifting farmers and factory workers, and reining in White House corruption. But "while this touches some of thatpopulism in the Trump era, italso runs into the reality that this party has been transformed by Donald Trump in ways that make it a cult of personality in ways that make it much meaner and much, much more prone to cruelty and conspiracy theories."
And the Carlson manifesto, he added, "sounds like it came out of a focus group designed to get center-right voters. But what's behind it ... may not be the same dog food."