The departure of a right-wing star subtly hides a darker statement, according to a former Republican insider.
Steve Schmidt, a long-time GOP strategist, spoke on his podcast The Warning about right-winger Tucker Carlson's announcement that he's leaving the Republican Party. He dissected Carlson's move but put it in a context that Schmidt said revealed a deeper motive.
"Tucker Carlson has left because of the Jews," Schmidt said. "That's what he's saying."
Schmidt noted that he left the Republican Party in 2018, and that he at one time expected "Tucker Carlson would be the Republican nominee for president in 2028, beating the two lamos, Marco Rubio and the pathetic J.D. Vance," towards the end of Trump's term.
"But Tucker Carlson has bigger ambitions," Schmidt continued. "What he sees ahead is a fracturing of the two major political parties into a democratic socialist party on the democratic left and a right-wing party on the right, both of them hostile to the state of Israel, and both of them teeming with antisemitism."
However, "Tucker Carlson's antisemitism is not crude like so many practitioners of the vile art on social media," according to Schmidt. "He is not talking about the Jews poisoning the food supply of the world. He is not talking about conspiracies. Tucker Carlson is much more subtle."
Carlson's declaration that he's leaving the GOP amounts to saying "Donald Trump has failed," and what Carlson has done is to "declare that MAGA was a lie because it did not put the country first, it put Israel first," Schmidt argued.
Schmidt also warned that "we're going to have many consequences because of Donald Trump, but one of them may well be the crack-up of the two-party political system that produced the presidency so vile."
