How an interview with an American conspiracy theorist could help Putin

The Kremlin doesn’t roll out the red carpet for visiting Americans at the best of times. However, since populist firebrand U.S. broadcaster Tucker Carlson arrived a week ago, he’s been treated like a major celebrity.

As he and his team have been chauffeured around town in a blacked-out Mercedes, Russian state media has breathlessly covered his every move — snapping him breakfasting at his smart hotel restaurant, attending the ballet Spartacus at the Bolshoi and even visiting a supermarket.

His VIP treatment is particularly shocking because, until a year ago, Carlson was one of the biggest stars on US cable news as a presenter on Fox News. And Vladimir Putin tends to take a dim view of journalists with their unhelpful questions about his brutal invasion of Ukraine and myriad human rights abuses.

To his critics, though, Carlson isn’t a journalist at all — he’s a propagandist whose fawning support for the Putin regime and contempt for Ukraine could have devastating consequences as Republicans hold up aid for Kyiv’s embattled forces.

Yesterday, the Russian government confirmed that Putin had generously overcome his misgivings about the Western media and granted Carlson an interview. It was the first the Russian president has given to the American media since ordering the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

For his part, Carlson insisted it’s his duty to tell the truth about Ukraine: ‘Two years into a war that’s reshaping the world, most Americans are not informed.’

He then went on to say that they particularly need to know that the conflict is not good for the U.S., as it has ‘upended’ the world economy and threatened the dominance of the U.S. dollar. Carlson said he was in Russia because ‘I wanted to talk to people and look around and see how it’s doing — and it’s doing very well’.

The interview could be aired as soon as today on Carlson’s show on the social network X (formerly Twitter), where he has 11.6 million followers, and probably on Russian state media, too.

Ever since Carlson, 54, arrived in Russia and dropped heavy hints he’d be meeting Putin, the howls of fury back home have been deafening. Some, including former Republican congressman Adam Kinzinger, have called him a ‘traitor’, while Bill Kristol, former chief of staff to Dan Quayle when he was George W. Bush’s vice president, declared he should be barred from re-entering the U.S.

A long-term stay in icy Moscow wouldn’t appeal to Carlson, the privileged son of a journalist father who became one of Ronald Reagan’s Cold War propaganda chiefs and an heiress stepmother. But being held up at the border would play right into his hands.

For years, Carlson has boosted his media following — most of them Trump diehards — by endlessly peddling conspiracy theories and shameless misinformation, first on Fox News and then on his X show. Covering everything from Covid-19 (he’s an anti-vaxxer) to the 2020 election, the January 6 Capitol riots and the Ukraine war, they often revolve around sinister ‘deep state’ machinations by the American establishment.

One Carlson conspiracy is that his beloved Donald Trump will be the target of an assassination attempt. In return, Trump has mooted the idea of Carlson being his running mate in this year’s presidential election. Shortly before he was sacked from Fox, Carlson referred to Ukraine as a ‘primitive’ country where — he claimed — the U.S. government operated ‘secret biolabs’ and kept sensitive nuclear technology.

Little wonder it was reported last year that Russia’s information and telecommunications ministry advises state-run media outlets to use as many clips from Carlson’s broadcasts as possible, so useful are they to Putin’s cause.

A measure of Carlson’s disdain for accuracy can be gleaned from the fact that he insisted this week that no other Western journalist had ‘bothered’ to interview the Russian leader and get his perspective on the Ukraine invasion.

CNN’s Christiane Amanpour dismissed his claim as ‘absurd’ as her colleagues had been trying to interview Putin ‘every day since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine’.

The BBC’s Russia editor Steve Rosenberg said they had ‘lodged several requests with the Kremlin in the last 18 months — always a “no” for us’, while Wall Street Journal chief foreign affairs correspondent Yaroslav Trofimov scoffed: ‘Poor, poor Vladimir Putin. Until now, nobody in the West has had the chance to hear him explain all the excellent reasons for why he had to invade Ukraine.’

Even the Kremlin corrected him: ‘Mr Carlson is wrong. We receive many requests for interviews with the president.’ A spokesman said Putin chose Carlson because ‘his position is different’.

It certainly is. And for the Putin regime, Carlson’s appearance in Russia and his popularity among Trump supporters couldn’t have come at a better time as resistance grows in America to the provision of military aid for Ukraine.

Only this week, Trump and his Republican Party followers were blamed by President Biden for sinking a Bill that should have delivered billions of desperately needed dollars to the country.

So concerned is Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell about Carlson’s influence over his party — both in Congress and in the wider population — that he declared it ‘disturbing’.

His cosy chat with Putin is also important to Carlson as he struggles to rebuild his brand as America’s most influential conservative commentator after being shown the door at Fox News last April.

Insiders say the channel’s owners, the Murdoch family, tired of his high-handed behaviour and his increasingly extreme positions that, say critics, marked him out as a white supremacist. It’s claimed the last straw came when he sent a text to a colleague bemoaning a video of three Trump supporters attacking a Left-wing agitator because three-against-one was ‘not how white men fight’.

Carlson and the company were also sued by former Fox producer Abby Grossberg, alleging that Carlson — who regularly liked to refer to people using the ‘c’ word — presided over misogynistic working conditions on his show. Her lawyer said Grossberg settled the lawsuits for £9.5 million.

Putin’s macho image, as well as the way the president portrays himself as a true guardian of traditional conservative values — he passed a law in December increasing restrictions on what he called ‘LGBT propaganda’, for example — is one reason Carlson and his Make America Great Again fans admire the Russian leader.

Another, perhaps, is Carlson’s moneyed but eccentric upbringing in California by his father which gave him a lack of respect for convention. Dick Carlson divorced his mother, an artist, when Tucker was five, winning full custody after citing her ‘alcohol, marijuana, and cocaine abuse’ that ‘left her incapable of properly caring’ for the children. Tucker and his younger brother, whose father went on to marry a frozen food heiress who lived next door, never saw their mother again.

Dick’s idea of childcare was also sometimes questionable: he would take the two boys with him in his work as a reporter, even once showing them a bloodied corpse at a murder scene and bringing them for Sunday lunch to the home of a notorious mobster accused of a killing.

Carlson Sr later became President Reagan’s director of Voice Of America, a radio station pumping out the U.S. line around the world, and became the U.S. ambassador to the Seychelles.

Tucker Carlson was sent to a boarding school in Switzerland but was expelled, so went to another in Rhode Island, where he met his future wife, Susan, the headmaster’s daughter. It was there that he picked up an often-mocked penchant for wearing bow ties, a habit he only dropped on air in 2006. After university, he tried to join the CIA, but opted for journalism when his father told him ‘they’ll take anybody’.

Opponents cite Carlson’s early journalistic years working for Left-wing publications and broadcasters as proof that he’s just an opportunistic dilettante whose politics shift with the wind.

Although people close to him insist he’s always been a conservative at heart, they still have to explain the current loyalties of a man who once described Trump as ‘the single most repulsive person on the planet’.

But that’s all in the past. ‘Carlson is smart and his agenda is clear,’ Russia analyst Janis Kluge told the Washington Post. ‘He and Putin will work together brilliantly to reinforce the false narrative about Ukraine, weaken Biden, and strengthen Trump.

‘This co-production of theirs may be the most effective and toxic propaganda clip yet created.’