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Last Thursday, one of the loudest voices in American right-wing media sat down for an interview on a little-known political podcast in Canada, and said something that would have been unthinkable not long ago. Almost nobody noticed.

The conversation came and went without headlines, outrage, and without much attention at all. It sat there for four days, buried beneath the endless chaos and manufactured crisis coming out of the Trump regime. Then this morning, the Associated Press picked it up, and within hours, Republicans, conservative media figures, and political operatives were scrambling to respond to what had been said. Because buried inside that otherwise forgettable interview was something few people expected to hear: Tucker Carlson declared he was leaving the party he spent years helping build.

Here is what he said, in his own words. “I would not support the Republican Party, there’s no chance. Not gonna support the Democratic Party. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” He went on: “How could I or any American voter support a political party that’s not loyal to the United States. That puts the interests of a foreign country above those of its own citizens. It’s not possible to vote for people like that, and I’m not going to.” And then came the line that got everyone’s attention: “I voted Republican my entire life, I worked at Fox News. I’ve been a consistent defender for 35 years of the Republican Party, but there’s no defending this because it’s immoral. I’m out. And if I’m out, then I think a lot of other people are out.”

We can’t pretend Tucker Carlson is some profile in courage. He isn’t a hero or a truth-teller. And he doesn’t get credit for finally noticing something the rest of us have been watching for years. He played a large role in getting us here. He campaigned for Donald Trump in 2024. Not just during the first term, when some could still claim ignorance about what Trump would become. Carlson endorsed him the second time around, after the insurrection, the indictments, classified documents, fraud conviction, and after the jury found Trump liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll. He knew exactly who Donald Trump was, because the whole world knew by then. And he chose to stand next to him anyway. He did not just quietly vote for him. He used his platform to persuade millions of other Americans to do the same.

And it goes deeper than that. During the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, Carlson’s own private text messages were released to the public. They showed us who he really was behind the camera. After January 6th, while he was still defending Trump on air every single night, he wrote privately to colleagues that he hated Trump “passionately” and called him “demonic.” He admitted, in writing, that the election fraud claims were baseless. “We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest,” he wrote. “But come on. There really isn’t an upside to Trump.”

He knew. He always knew. And he said it anyway, night after night, to millions of people who trusted him, because it was profitable to pretend. The only thing that has changed between then and now is that pretending is no longer profitable.

Carlson is framing his departure as a matter of principle, specifically his opposition to the Iran war and what he describes as the Republican Party prioritizing Israel over the United States. He apologized to his audience in April, saying, “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.” He called Trump’s threat to destroy Iranian civilian infrastructure “vile on every level” and “a war crime.” He suggested Trump might be the “Antichrist,” though he later denied using those exact words despite footage suggesting otherwise.

What we are watching is not an awakening. It is people jumping on lifeboats to save themselves. Tucker Carlson is not the first, and he will not be the last. More than thirty House Republicans have already announced they will not seek reelection. Marjorie Taylor Greene has posted publicly that she is “DONE with the America LAST Republican Party.” The influencers who helped brainwash a generation of young men into believing Trump was some kind of hero are walking it back, one by one, as the numbers turn against them.

This is exactly what happens when authoritarian coalitions begin to fail. We have seen this pattern before. When Mussolini’s own Grand Council of Fascism voted to remove him in July of 1943, it was not because those men had suddenly developed moral clarity about twenty years of fascism. It was because the war was being lost, and they wanted to survive what was coming. They had been complicit in everything. They had enabled the violence, the propaganda, the destruction of democratic institutions. And when it became clear that the project was collapsing, they turned on the man they had propped up for two decades, not to save their country, but to save themselves. The coalition does not fracture because the people inside it wake up to the evil. It fractures because the people inside it realize the evil is about to cost them personally.

And there is a real danger in what comes next. Carlson did not just leave the party. He left a door open. He said he would not support Democrats and that he did not know what he would do. He did not cross the aisle. He stepped away from the wreckage while keeping his options open. And the talk about his own political ambitions is ramping up. People who follow this closely have been watching him position himself for months, not as a commentator, but as a candidate. If Tucker Carlson runs for president, we need to understand what that actually means. He pushed the Great Replacement Theory to millions of viewers. He mainstreamed white nationalist talking points. He platformed Nick Fuentes and only expressed regret when it became politically inconvenient. He helped sow distrust in elections, vaccines, and in democratic institutions themselves. Long before Donald Trump became the face of the movement, Tucker Carlson was helping create the intellectual framework that made Trumpism possible. And unlike Trump, who stumbles through speeches and drifts from grievance to grievance, Carlson is articulate, strategic, and disciplined. He knows how to make extremism sound reasonable because that has been his job for twenty years. If Trump is the wrecking ball, Carlson is the architect who knows how to build something permanent on the rubble. A Carlson presidency would not be Trumpism falling apart. It would be Trumpism growing up.

But there is another side to this story, and for us, it matters. Movements like this rarely collapse all at once. They crack, splinter, and turn on each other. The people who once marched in lockstep start looking for exits, and the people who built their careers defending the movement start calculating how to survive what comes next. That is what makes moments like this important. Not because Tucker Carlson is suddenly on our side. He isn’t. Not because he deserves credit. He doesn’t. But because every public break weakens the illusion that this movement is united.

And that could matter a great deal in 2026. Elections are often decided at the margins. If even a small percentage of Republican voters decide to stay home, vote third party, or simply disengage because trusted voices are telling them the party has lost its way, that changes the landscape. It creates opportunities in races that might otherwise be out of reach. It gives us a wider path to taking back Congress and restoring some measure of accountability.

What happens after that is a different question. The same forces that could weaken Republicans in 2026 could produce something far more organized by 2028. If Carlson truly has political ambitions, he will not spend the next two years telling people to become Democrats. He will spend them trying to build something new. Something that carries forward the grievances, conspiracies, and the authoritarian instincts of Trumpism while packaging them in a more disciplined and articulate form. That is why we should not confuse today’s fracture with a final victory. It may help us in the short term. But in the long term, it may simply be the beginning of the next phase of the same movement.

And watching all of this unfold today made me think about something else. Not Tucker Carlson or the pundits and politicians suddenly looking for an exit. I found myself thinking about the people who got this right years ago.

I thought about those who have been here since the beginning. The ones who were called alarmists. The ones who were told they were overreacting. The ones who sat through uncomfortable Thanksgiving dinners and tense conversations with friends because they refused to pretend everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t. The ones who shared these posts knowing there would be consequences. Knowing they might lose friends and relationships. Knowing they would be mocked for saying what so many people were still afraid to admit.

I remember walking into Pete’s office before I ever wrote my first post and telling him I needed to start using my voice again, this time to fight for our country. I didn’t have a plan. I didn’t know what it might cost our family. I just knew I couldn’t keep watching what was happening and stay silent. And so many of you made that same choice in your own lives, knowing that speaking out was not popular, and not always safe, and long before people like Tucker Carlson decided there was a benefit to speaking up. That is the difference.

So what do we do? We watch the cracks widen, and we pour everything we have into November. We do not waste time trying to convince the Tucker Carlsons of the world to support Democrats. We focus on the voters who already know this is wrong but did not vote in 2024. The ones who are burned out, disillusioned, and do not think their voice matters. Those are the people who decide elections, and those are the people who need to hear from us right now. And we remind every single person in our lives that the midterms are not a suggestion. They are mandatory because they are how we take this back.

And if today showed us anything, it is that the system is not dead yet. Because while Tucker Carlson was making headlines for abandoning the party he helped build, three federal judges were making a different kind of statement. Three rulings, all on the same Monday, all going against this administration.

In Washington, Judge Sparkle Sooknanan struck down the administration’s centralized voter database, a system that combined Social Security numbers with citizenship data and was already being used by states to wrongly purge American citizens from their voter rolls. She wrote that the government “knowingly trampled on the privacy rights of American citizens in a manner that threatens the sacred right to vote.” Her ruling was seventy-five pages long. The Department of Justice has now sued thirty states trying to obtain their voter rolls for this system. They are zero for nine in court.

In Minnesota, Judge Patrick Schiltz quashed six grand jury subpoenas targeting Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other officials. The subpoenas were served during Operation Metro Surge, designed to force these officials into cooperating with immigration enforcement. Schiltz called it “a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process.” And here is the part that matters most: Judge Schiltz is a George W. Bush appointee and a former clerk for Justice Antonin Scalia. This was not a liberal judge. This was a conservative jurist looking at what this administration did and saying: this is not law. This is harassment.

And in Washington again, Judge Amy Berman Jackson blocked the administration’s SNAP restrictions, which had attempted to redefine what counts as food under federal law to prevent 42 million low-income Americans from purchasing certain items with their benefits. Twenty-three states had applied for waivers pushed by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” agenda. Jackson wrote that “Congress defined what ‘food’ is supposed to be, and it did not authorize the agency to amend or waive the definition it enacted.” That is three times the courts said the same thing in one day: you do not get to rewrite the law because it is inconvenient for your agenda.

That is the real story of today. Not that Tucker Carlson found his conscience, because he did not. The real story is that this regime is losing its grip on every front at once. The coalition is splintering from within. At the same time, the courts continue to stand between this administration and some of its most extreme abuses of power. And every single one of these cracks buys us time. Time to organize and to reach voters. Time to get to November. Even the people who helped build this machine now see that it cannot hold. And if they see it, the voters who follow them will begin to see it too. That is why I still have hope for America. And you should, too.

I’ll see you tomorrow,
Heather

It isn't just Trump, and it isn't just Israel. It's the GOP embracing bigotry as it's defining principle, and both parties selling USians out for special interest money. Former GOP Gov of Florida, Charlie Crist, left the GOP in disgust, when Trump was nothing but a huckster. It may have been Hillary's speech at AIPAC, using language so servile. that I twigged to Israel's excessive influence in the US. Where else, in "democratic" countries are bribery and kickbacks, to public officials, officially legal?

As I have been saying, since I offered the US was "becoming a big, heavily armed, aggressive, banana republic", more than 20 years ago, I don't know how this country gets off of the track it is on. The choices have already been made by November. As someone else said, the candidates on the ballot in November are two heads of the same snake.

Steve

As someone else said, the candidates on the ballot in November are two heads of the same snake.

No. No they are not. One is a hydra headed poisonous snake which will kill you, your family, your neighbors, and everything you know and love, and the other is a relatively benign, confused, mostly useless and harmless snake as you might find in your garden.

Neither is what we need right now, but get over the idea that they are the same. They may have a few similar qualities here and there, but below the surface lurks vast differences meaningful in making any evaluation.

Saying they are both the same is like saying a nuclear sub is the same as the rowboat I use to fish because they both go in the water. Please stop saying that, or at least qualify it in a serious way.

At the end of the day, Heather’s voice will be seen as the voice that documented (with footnotes) every single day of Trump’s depredations and threat to the Republic, as those days unfolded.

Except for the Sundays when she published pics of Maine sunrises over Penobscot Bay and took the night off, she has provided a day by day record, since 2019, of the growing threat, the threat at full tide, and now, hopefully, begins the tide’s receding.

Most importantly, she provided historical and Constitutional context that will help future historians place this chapter of America’s story in its proper light.

The chapter remains unfinished. It could get worse before it gets better. But Trump’s coalition is fragmenting, and more and more Americans see it for what it is.

I can't remember who compared politics to public transportation - maybe Pete Buttigieg.

Whoever it was, they were saying that no political candidate is perfect for anyone. Candidates are like busses. They all are driving to different destinations. As a voter, it is your choice to get on the bus, support the candidate, that is headed toward the destination you want. They may not take you all the way there, but in 2-4 years another bus will be coming by that may get you closer again.

If it was Mayor Pete, I am sure he said it more elegantly and clearly.

Adam Kinzinger provides a bit more on the subject of Tucker, as well as the parallel story of MTG:

Tucker Carlson has made more money, reached more people, and accumulated more cultural influence than almost any other figure in American media over the past decade. He did it by being permanently at war; with the mainstream media, with the left, with the Republican establishment, with the intelligence community, with whoever represented the acceptable enemy of the moment. The through-line across every position he has ever taken is not an ideology. It is opposition. When the opposition wins, Tucker needs a new thing to oppose. The Republican Party, now fully captured by the movement he helped build, is the new establishment. So he leaves it.

MTG is a simpler version of the same story. She came to Congress not to legislate but to perform. She understood before most of her colleagues that the institution was a stage and that the audience was not in the chamber but watching on their phones. She filed impeachment articles on her first day. She harassed colleagues in hallways. She said things designed to be repeated and condemned, because condemnation from the right people is the currency her political brand runs on. Governing (you know, the actual work of passing bills, building coalitions, managing the machinery of the state) has never been her goal and never will be. The Republican Party is now the governing party. That makes it, by definition, the enemy.

The person who understood this most clearly, long before either of them did, is Donald Trump. Trump has controlled the executive branch, bent the legislative branch to his will, reshaped the judiciary, and occupied the most powerful office in the history of the world. And he still talks about draining the swamp. He is the swamp. He built the swamp. Every cabinet secretary, every political appointee, every federal prosecutor doing his bidding is his swamp. And yet the language of the insurgent outsider, the lone fighter against a corrupt system, never goes away. Because without that language, the movement has to answer for what it has actually done with power. The machine keeps running because the enemy never disappears. You just find new ones.

This is not a sustainable politics, but it is a remarkably durable one. The grievance model does not require results. It does not require policy victories or improved conditions or evidence that the movement’s prescriptions are working. It requires only the continuous identification of enemies. And new enemies are easy, because in a complex society there is always someone to blame. The “genius” of it, and I use that word without admiration, is that winning actually strengthens it. Every victory can be reframed as incomplete, as stolen, as proof that the real enemy is still out there. The MAGA movement controls the White House, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress, and its most prominent media figures are still describing themselves as resistance fighters.

And I know something of suddenly being out step with your party. I walked away from my place in the Republican Party. I want to be honest about how different that departure was from this one. I let the party careen away from me and the principles I believed in because staying in the party’s good graces required a form of silence I was not willing to perform. I was not looking for a new enemy. I was trying, imperfectly and at real cost, to say what I actually believed.

Tucker and MTG are leaving to find a bigger stage. The Republican Party is no longer radical enough for the audience they are competing for. And more importantly, it is no longer oppositional enough to generate the conflict that drives their businesses. They need an establishment to fight. Their Republican Party has become one. So they go in search of a new one, taking their audiences with them, and the cycle begins again.

The question worth is what it means for the country that figures like this have become its most influential political communicators. A politics organized around permanent opposition cannot build anything. It can only tear things down and declare the tearing a victory. We have seen what that produces. And the people most responsible for producing it have now decided that even the ruins are not radical enough for their purposes.

They did not leave because they lost. They left because people who need an enemy can never afford to win.

It could get worse before it gets better.

There's not assurance it will get better. The Roman Empire never did, and no longer exists. For example.

I have seen the decay of the Republican Party. Out of high school, I registered Republican. My dad had no use for Democrats, thought they were the party of the lazy and shiftless. To his credit, if he fell on hard times, he refused to seek out government assistance. He hustled to get a job, any job. At one point he drove a taxi for a while (back in the mid-70s) when he couldn't get a sales job (which was his primary profession). So he walked the talk, so to speak.

Perhaps I was too young to see what the Party was, and it has decayed since then. Or maybe it was always like this, and I'm just more aware. I was NEVER comfortable with the influence religion had in the Party (Falwell, anyone?). I didn't like Bush Sr, but couldn't bring myself to vote for the lazy party, so I voted Perot. I left the Republicans when Bush II defeated McCain. I was unaffiliated for years. Voted for Obama in 2008 because (IMO) McCain had sold out, and was saying stuff I had never heard him say (he was my senator).

Was the Party decaying? Or did I just become more aware? Maybe both? The Felon, if he's really the future of the Party, tells me that there is a lot of decay. Sure, I later became aware of where Reagan kicked-off his first campaign (at the time I had no idea). I think it has metastacized since 2016. More religion (always a bad thing in politics), more racism and xenophobia, more nationalism and jingoism.

I hope it cracks and crumbles. A Republican future -as the Party currently stands- would be dystopian, and possibly the end of the Republic (Ben Franklin may have been prophetic). Frankly, I'm not optimistic. We are on a path to an Orwellian fate, IMO.

Voted for Obama in 2008 because (IMO) McCain had sold out, and was saying stuff I had never heard him say (he was my senator).

I remember McCain, alone among GOP candidates, speaking out forcefully against torture. On the other hand, I remember him singing "bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran". I remember Mitt Romney, alone, among the GOP candidates, speaking out against invading every country that comes to mind. McCain is now dead, and Romney is retiring.

In 2016, I had the hardest decision I ever made. I voted for Trump. I figured Trump and Hillary are both corrupt megalomaniacs. The difference was that Trump was such an oaf, he would be caught, (I was right, impeached twice), while Hillary would howl about how she was such a victim of sexist persecution, and might get away with it.

When Biden was in office, it was nice to hear a POTUS that, compared to Trump, at least sounded rational. How much did he hand out in subsidies in his "green new deal"? Trump's take: protecting US industry with tariffs, rather than paying them subsidies. And Biden never did anything but enable Israel's genocide in Gaza.

Ever look at the Senators who have pocketed the most money from the Israel lobby through 2024? Biden was number one. Bob Menemdez was second. He went to prison for taking bribes, not from Israel, but from Egypt. Third highest was Hillary, with Kamala Harris a close forth.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/summary?cyc...

One snake, two heads

Steve

There's not assurance it will get better.

There never is. Ever.

A better future can only be won by those who believe a better future is possible- and who act in accordance with that belief.

A people who no longer believe in a better future are doomed.

'i voted for trump 'cause _____'
'both parties\candidates are the same'

just because these admissions are not glaringly batshit-crazy doesnt exclude them from being the most intellectually laziest ever.
and no volume of posts and justifications here can offset that.

"As someone else said, the candidates on the ballot in November are two heads of the same snake."

Anyone who says this literally has had their head buried so far up their ass that they are intimate with their colon.

How can you compare a party that wants to bring healthcare to more people to one who wants to cut healthcare to poor people in order to give billionaires more tax breaks, then say they are the same?

How can you compare a party that wants to support Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East, but decries Israel's biggest human rights abuses and attempts to reign then in, versus the other party who has gone to war in the Middle East for Israel twice in the past generation and say those parties are the same?

How can you compare a party that wants to protect citizens by preventing the worst environmental abuses by corporations and the other that destroys all environmental protections whenever they can and say they are the same?

The list showing huge differences between the two can go on and on. How can you not see this?

"Adam Kinzinger provides a bit more on the subject of Tucker, as well as the parallel story of MTG:

Tucker Carlson has made more money, reached more people, and accumulated more cultural influence than almost any other figure in American media over the past decade. He did it by being permanently at war; with the mainstream media, with the left, with the Republican establishment, with the intelligence community, with whoever represented the acceptable enemy of the moment. The through-line across every position he has ever taken is not an ideology. It is opposition. When the opposition wins, Tucker needs a new thing to oppose. The Republican Party, now fully captured by the movement he helped build, is the new establishment. So he leaves it.

MTG is a simpler version of the same story. She came to Congress not to legislate but to perform. She understood before most of her colleagues that the institution was a stage and that the audience was not in the chamber but watching on their phones. She filed impeachment articles on her first day. She harassed colleagues in hallways. She said things designed to be repeated and condemned, because condemnation from the right people is the currency her political brand runs on. Governing (you know, the actual work of passing bills, building coalitions, managing the machinery of the state) has never been her goal and never will be. The Republican Party is now the governing party. That makes it, by definition, the enemy.

The person who understood this most clearly, long before either of them did, is Donald Trump. Trump has controlled the executive branch, bent the legislative branch to his will, reshaped the judiciary, and occupied the most powerful office in the history of the world. And he still talks about draining the swamp. He is the swamp. He built the swamp. Every cabinet secretary, every political appointee, every federal prosecutor doing his bidding is his swamp. And yet the language of the insurgent outsider, the lone fighter against a corrupt system, never goes away. Because without that language, the movement has to answer for what it has actually done with power. The machine keeps running because the enemy never disappears. You just find new ones.

This is not a sustainable politics, but it is a remarkably durable one. The grievance model does not require results. It does not require policy victories or improved conditions or evidence that the movement’s prescriptions are working. It requires only the continuous identification of enemies. And new enemies are easy, because in a complex society there is always someone to blame. The “genius” of it, and I use that word without admiration, is that winning actually strengthens it. Every victory can be reframed as incomplete, as stolen, as proof that the real enemy is still out there. The MAGA movement controls the White House, the Supreme Court, and both houses of Congress, and its most prominent media figures are still describing themselves as resistance fighters.

And I know something of suddenly being out step with your party. I walked away from my place in the Republican Party. I want to be honest about how different that departure was from this one. I let the party careen away from me and the principles I believed in because staying in the party’s good graces required a form of silence I was not willing to perform. I was not looking for a new enemy. I was trying, imperfectly and at real cost, to say what I actually believed.

Tucker and MTG are leaving to find a bigger stage. The Republican Party is no longer radical enough for the audience they are competing for. And more importantly, it is no longer oppositional enough to generate the conflict that drives their businesses. They need an establishment to fight. Their Republican Party has become one. So they go in search of a new one, taking their audiences with them, and the cycle begins again.

The question worth is what it means for the country that figures like this have become its most influential political communicators. A politics organized around permanent opposition cannot build anything. It can only tear things down and declare the tearing a victory. We have seen what that produces. And the people most responsible for producing it have now decided that even the ruins are not radical enough for their purposes.

They did not leave because they lost. They left because people who need an enemy can never afford to win."

To be fair, this type of opposition politics didn't come about because of Carlson, MTG, or Trump, and even MAGA. It goes much further back to at least Ronald Reagan. When Reagan made his mocking "The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help." he was engaging in the toxic opposition politics that Kinzinger talks about.

Before Trump took office, for 95% of the people on the earth, the phrase "I am from the U.S. government and I am here to help" was welcoming. If you were a poor person in Africa, a tsunami victim in Asia, a democracy in Europe facing a expansionist Russia, you welcomed the U.S. government. Even a poor rural person in Mississippi, Alabama, or Texas benefitted from the U.S. government in their lives but they just didn't appreciate it. Hate and bigotry easily feed into opposition politics.

Opposition politics is easy, it is all blame and no building. Furthermore, blame resonates with voters. However it is a toxic, unproductive type of politics that only destroys. Until voters wake up and see opposition politics for what it is the country is going to suffer.

As someone else said, the candidates on the ballot in November are two heads of the same snake.

Not even close...
More than 770,000 children are no longer receiving SNAP benefits thanks to Trump.
Read that again.
And yet we can afford UFC Events and Argentinian bailouts and Ballrooms and idiotic wars and $300 Billion payments to Iran to rebuild after the idiotic war
and no bid contracts for reflecting pools and endless golf outings and on and on.

Opposition politics is easy, it is all blame and no building. Furthermore, blame resonates with voters.

I would love to see someone add up all the claims of victimhood by Trump, vs Hillary. It would be close.

On that "equal opportunity" thing, chart of the Gini Coefficient, by year, since the late 60s. Regardless who is in power, wealth is concentrated in progressively fewer hands. The few dips correlate with recessions.

Now, putting this data into a historical perspective: as the 1967 – present chart above clearly shows, America has seen rising income inequality for decades. About the only thing that slows down this trend is recession, but once the US economy starts to grow again so does the Gini coefficient.

https://datatrekresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/20...

Manufacturing employment. Downtrend from 1980-2000, regardless who was in power. Then a crash under Bush 43, followed by a much smaller recovery, regardless if Obama or Trump was in office.

https://equitablegrowth.org/wp-content/uploads/202...

How many employees saw their company paid, defined benefit, retirement plans taken away? Did anyone, on either side of the aisle, stop the theft from working people?

https://www.napa-net.org/globalassets/sites/napa-n...

Steve

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