James Carville Floats Surprising Culprit Behind Trump’s Nominations: ‘It’s Tucker Carlson’
Democratic strategist James Carville claimed that Tucker Carlson is the person who has had the most influence regarding President-elect Donald Trump’s nominations.
Trump has made a slew of nominations for various posts in his looming administration, some of which have been highly controversial. These include the aborted nomination of former Rep. Matt Gaetz for attorney general, the fraught selection of former Fox News host Pete Hegseth to lead the Pentagon, and the nomination of Kash Patel as FBI director.
On Tuesday’s episode of The Beat on MSNBC, host Ari Melber welcomed Carville to the program and played a clip of Jonathan Lemire on the network earlier in the day. Lemire said the selection of Patel has former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s fingerprints all over it.
“People I’ve talked to say this pick was a nod to the extreme right-wing portions of the Trump base, the Steve Bannon, ultra-MAGA sector here, who had been disappointed by some of Trump’s more conventional picks like, say, Treasury secretary and Secretary of State,” Lemire said. “So, this is Trump throwing them red meat because he knows he needs to keep them happy.”
The clip ended and Carville declared, “Steve Bannon does not drive this.” He then offered a different theory and called back to his time co-hosting CNN’s Crossfire with Carlson in the early 2000s:
CARVILLE: One person is driving this, I promise you. And it’s Tucker Carlson. Tucker’s an old friend of mine. There’s nothing that I see-
MELBER: Still friends?
CARVILLE: We haven’t talked to each other in a while. But we were friends. But everything that I see is the same thing I heard in the green room in 2002. Ok? And J.D. Vance, Don Jr., Kash Patel was Tucker’s business partner. I’m just telling you what’s out there. And Tucker is 40 times more clever than Steve Bannon. He’s 40 times more connected. He’s also very connected with Elon Musk and everything else. And he’s a very bright man who should not be underrated. But I think he has more influence in this current administration, way more than Vernon Jordan had in the Clinton administration or any of the kind of wise men that were around. But Tucker is very, very, very powerful. And the Kash Patel pick proves that beyond any doubt at all.
Carlson has publicly supported Trump despite having been revealed to be quite the hater previously. In a text to his Fox News producer in 2021, he called Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer.” In a text to another staffer in 2021, Carlson stated of Trump, “I hate him passionately.”
“There really isn’t an upside to Trump,” he added.
Watch above via MSNBC.
