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Among the politerati, there’s been much cogitating about what happens to Trumpism and MAGA once Donald Trump is gone. (The assumption is that, yes, one day he will not be here.) What might be next for this cultish movement without its godhead, especially given the cleavages that have emerged over the Iran war, the Epstein files, Israel, and other matters? Can any of Trump’s craven lieutenants win the support and devotion of Trump’s following? JD Vance? Marco Rubio?

Some watchers of the right have speculated that Tucker Carlson might be the natural leader of post-Trump Trumpism. He has broken with Trump over the Iran war, but he remains perhaps the top influencer on the right, leading a rump group of conservatives (which includes former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and soon-to-be-former Rep. Thomas Massie) who once were full MAGA and Trump loyalists but now are…something else. Perhaps we could flatter them by calling this group America First conservatives, though that doesn’t truly capture their nativism and extremism.

So it’s important to pay attention to Carlson’s peregrinations and associations. And he made a major move a few weeks ago, appearing for an hour on RT, the Russian state-controlled media outfit.

RT is more than just Vladimir Putin’s propaganda mill. It runs disinformation operations, one of which was exposed two years ago when the Justice Department indicted two RT employees for funneling at least $10 million to pro-Trump media figures in the United States, including Benny Johnson and Tim Pool. (Johnson, Pool, and the others claimed they didn’t know the extravagant amounts they were paid originated in Moscow.) After that indictment was disclosed, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT, went on Russian state television and boasted that RT worked “undercover” and engaged in “partisan warfare, guerrilla warfare,” and she claimed it had created in America a network of “bloggers with unbelievable audiences” that had “an electorally significant influence.” (For more on this RT operation, see my forthcoming book, How Russia Won: Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and the Fight for America.)

“I’m a podcaster. I’ve never run anything,” Carlson told Rick Sanchez on RT. “I’m not planning to run for president, for sure.”

Carlson showed up on RT earlier this month as a guest on a show hosted by Rick Sanchez, a former CNN anchor who was fired in 2010 after making comments criticized as antisemitic. Subsequently, Sanchez put in a short stint at Fox News, and in 2019 he joined RT America, which shut down after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Three years later, he moved to Moscow and became the anchor of RT........

© Mother Jones