Tucker Carlson’s Vladimir Putin stunt was like interviewing Hitler without asking about the concentration camps. It confirmed the Russian President is mad, bad and dangerous… and his interlocutor is a fool, writes ANDREW NEIL

In the end it wasn’t a competition. Tucker Carlson, the rousing host of the pro-Trump MAGA movement, was blown out of the water by President Putin, dictator of all Russians. Carlson thought he was doing the Russian leader a favor by going to Moscow to give him a platform to explain why he invaded Ukraine and the many conspiracy theories that came with it, which Carlson and the MAGA sect picked up uncritically. But Putin has done Carlson a disservice.

From the start, Putin hijacked the interview with an endless discourse on Russian history, which started in the 9th century and took more than half an hour to get to the 20th century, let alone Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which is still lasted almost half an hour. half hour. If Putin treats his friends like this, you can understand why his enemies fear him. He even teased Carlson when he tried to join the CIA.

Carlson sat there, save for a few feeble interjections, with an increasingly pained look on his face as he realized that what was to be his great broadcast coup—Putin’s first interview with the Western media since the invasion—was disappearing down the Swanee.

Instead of being a great meeting between Kremlin leader and Kremlin lover, it seemed that Carlson, whose pain turned to panic when he realized he couldn’t stop Putin’s pontification, had been held hostage by a lurid and crazy Russian uncle. forced to listen to his ramblings forever. It must have been torture (something the Putin regime is particularly adept at). Those of us who diligently watched this two-hour snooze-fest (so you don’t have to) quickly lost the will to live.

At a time when it’s fashionable to discredit traditional broadcasting, this Cecil B de Mille interview, which aired on X, the digital platform formerly known as Twitter, and Carlson’s own website, made me feel nostalgic to the old-fashioned, well-researched, closely curated, focused inquisitions of established broadcasters at their best. Ultimately, it was Carlson who brought the meeting to a close (in my experience, it’s usually the politician who wants to end it, especially when they’re in trouble). Putin offered to continue talking. But an exhausted Carlson clearly couldn’t take any more. He surrendered. It’s hard to blame him.

As a radio interviewer who has spent decades questioning leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, with a reputation for being well informed and robust (I prefer ‘fair but forensic’), I readily admit that this is not an easy job. was for Carlson. even though he had caused it himself.

Putin’s endless history lesson was revisionist, reviving Russian nationalist myths long dismissed by real historians, which he used to argue that Ukraine had always really been part of Russia. But if Carlson had challenged him on this, we might still be stuck parsing the 9th century and Putin would still be speaking. However, no self-respecting interviewer would have let Putin off the hook with the claim that it was not Hitler but the Poles who started the Second World War. Yet Carlson left that unchallenged.

Again, you could argue that there is nothing to be gained by getting bogged down in history. But Carlson was equally unchallenged when it came to Putin’s more outlandish claims and outright lies about contemporary events. He claimed to have withdrawn Russian troops from northern Kiev at the start of the 2022 invasion as part of a peace deal, which Ukraine subsequently reneged on. This is nonsense. Russia withdrew with its tail between its legs due to unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance. But Carlson let it go.

“We did not start this war,” Putin claimed without batting an eyelid, “(the 2022 invasion) was an attempt to stop it.” It is a claim similar to what George Orwell called the ministry of propaganda in his 1984 novel about totalitarianism: the Ministry of Truth. Carlson didn’t say a word against the lie.

Putin said the aim of the invasion was the “denazification” of Ukraine. This is an oft-repeated Kremlin talking point. Once again it went unchallenged. Carlson could have pointed out that if there is anything that needs to be “denazified,” it is Putin’s increasingly totalitarian regime. But that would have ruined the mood.

Another threadbare piece of Kremlin propaganda – that the invasion was a response to NATO’s eastern expansion – was repeated several times by Putin. Each time, Carlson nodded in agreement. He never pointed out that eastern expansion had stopped long before the invasion. Putin was even allowed to get away with the absurd claim that the invasion was provoked by Ukraine’s removal of a pro-Kremlin henchman as leader in 2014. That could explain why he annexed Crimea shortly afterwards. But he didn’t invade Ukraine until 2022.

Carlson was unchallenged when it came to Putin’s more outlandish claims and outright lies about contemporary events

Putin claimed that Russia “didn’t start” the war with Ukraine in his interview with Carlson, who did not dispute his view

Even more remarkable than the lies Putin was allowed to tell unchallenged were the questions Carlson asked it didn’t to ask. Nothing about Russia’s barbaric war crimes in Ukraine, the forcible removal of Ukrainian children to Russia, the continued airstrikes on civilian areas killing thousands, the internal reign of terror that Putin now presides over in Russia, the long prison sentences for peaceful demonstrators, the detention and killing of opponents, the return of the gulag and forced labor.

Not a word about all this. It was as if Carlson had interviewed Hitler in 1944 and not bothered to ask about the concentration camps.

But then Carlson had his own agenda: feeding Putin the red meat so beloved by his MAGA crowd back home so the Russian autocrat could chew and regurgitate it to their delight. Putin was encouraged to claim that the CIA had tried to overthrow the Russian government and was behind the blowing up of the Nordstream gas pipeline.

No evidence was provided for either claim, but Carlson accepted them at face value – only pressing Putin on why he didn’t make more of these claims – because they play into the Carlson/MAGA conspiracy theory that America is secretly run by a deep state. in which the CIA plays a key role and which only Donald Trump can unravel.

Carlson couldn’t get enough of Putin about this seemingly ubiquitous American deep state: “Twice you described American presidents making decisions and then being undermined by the heads of their agencies. So it seems like you’re describing a system that is not run by the elected people, as you say.” At this stage, even Putin was embarrassed by the soft balls lobbed at him.

At no point has Putin had to adopt his propaganda position that at least parts of Ukraine are his. Carlson did that for him: Eastern Ukraine is “actually your country,” he helpfully tells Putin.

Perhaps the craziest question was when Carlson asked, “So do you see the supernatural at work as you look over what’s happening in the world right now?” Do you see God at work?’ But there is a method to this madness.

The otherwise strange appeal of this Russian autocrat among America’s far right is that they see him, however ridiculous, as the world’s last, unyielding defender of Christian values ​​against everything they hate or fear – migrants (especially Muslim migrants), gays, transgenders, secret forces bent on thwarting them, the ‘global elites’.

There were two possible firsts (if true) in this turgid stew: that Bill Clinton once told him it was possible that Russia could join NATO, only to be pushed back by his “advisers” (that deep state again); and that Boris Johnson, then British Prime Minister, had thwarted a peace deal, with the connivance of President Biden, by urging Ukraine to continue fighting.

Clearly, Carlson wouldn’t recognize a scoop if it hit him on the head because, instead of telling more about these intriguing Putin stories, he just continued, strangely incurious. We’ll see what Clinton and Johnson have to say about them.

But Carlson did have the grace and common sense to lobby Putin for the release of Evan Gershkovich, the young Wall Street Journal reporter whom Putin jailed on trumped-up espionage charges. Putin didn’t want to give in, but there was no harm in trying, and he didn’t completely slam the door in Carlson’s face.

As ridiculous and boring as this interview was, it will have its intended damaging effect on America, where MAGA Republicans in Congress are already blocking more military aid to Ukraine. Social media is already flooded with praise for Putin from the Carlson/MAGA cult. In this way, Ukrainian President Zelensky has been further undermined. Job done, Tucker.

The interview was also illuminating in a way that it wasn’t intended to be. It confirmed that President Putin is eerily isolated, crazy, evil and dangerous, increasingly living in an ethno-nationalist Russian world of his own. As for his interrogator, once the doyenne of Fox News’ primetime setup, he was unceremoniously fired last April, and has since retreated, bereft of even Fox’s loose editorial standards, to the outer reaches of the madness of the conspiracy theory. Now, overrun by an aging autocrat, Tucker Carlson has been confirmed as a fool.