CARLSON WAS EXPOSED AS A FOOL BY AGEING AUTOCRAT PUTIN

IN the end it was no contest. Tucker Carlson, bloviating broadcaster for the pro-Trump MAGA movement, was blown out of the water by President Putin.

Right from the get-go, Putin hijacked the interview with an interminable discourse on Russian history which started in the 9th century and took over half an hour to get to the 20th century, much less Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, which took almost another half-hour.

Carlson, bar a couple of feeble interjections, just sat there with an increasingly pained expression as he realised that what was meant to be his great broadcasting coup – Putin’s first interview with Western media since the invasion of Ukraine – was disappearing down the Swanee.

Far from being a great meeting of minds between Kremlin leader and Kremlin lover, it looked as if Carlson, whose pain was turning to panic as he realised he couldn’t stop Putin pontificating, had been taken hostage by a lugubrious and deranged Russian uncle, forced to listen forever to his ramblings.

Those of us diligently watching this two-hour snooze-fest (so you don’t have to) were rapidly losing the will to live.

In the end it was Carlson who brought the encounter to a close. Putin offered to keep talking. But an exhausted Carlson could clearly not take any more.

As a broadcast interviewer who’s interrogated leading politicians on both sides of the Atlantic for several decades, with a reputation for being well-briefed and robust (I prefer ‘fair but forensic’), I readily concede this was not an easy gig for Carlson.

Surely no self-respecting interviewer, however, would have let Putin away with the claim that it wasn’t Hitler but the Poles who started the Second World War.

Carlson was equally unchallenging when it came to Putin’s more bizarre claims and outright lies. Putin claimed he withdrew Russian troops from north of Kyiv at the start of the invasion in 2022, as part of a peace deal on which Ukraine then reneged.

This is nonsense. Russia retreated with its tail between its legs because of unexpectedly fierce Ukrainian resistance.

Putin said the purpose of the invasion was the denazification of Ukraine. Carlson might have pointed out that if there’s anything that needs to be ‘denazified’ it’s Putin’s increasingly totalitarian regime. But that would have spoiled the mood.

Another well-worn piece of Kremlin propaganda – that the invasion was in response to Nato’s eastward expansion – was repeated several times by Putin. And each time he said it, Carlson nodded in agreement.

He never once pointed out that the eastward expansion had stopped long before the invasion.

Even more remarkable than the lies Putin was allowed to tell unchallenged were the questions Carlson didn’t ask.

Nothing about Russia’s barbaric war crimes in Ukraine, the forced removal of Ukrainian children to Russia, the constant aerial attacks on civilian areas, the killing of thousands of innocents, the internal reign of terror over which Putin now presides in Russia, the locking up and assassination of opponents, the return of the gulag and forced labour.

On all of this, not a word. It was if Carlson had interviewed Hitler in 1944 and not bothered to ask about the concentration camps. But then Carlson had his own agenda – to feed Putin with the red meat so beloved of his MAGA crowd back home for the Russian autocrat to chew on and regurgitate for their delectation.

Putin was encouraged to claim that the CIA had tried to overthrow the Russian government and was behind the blowing up of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. No evidence was presented for either assertion but Carlson accepted them at face value – pressing Putin only on why he wasn’t making more of these claims – because they play into the Carlson/MAGA conspiracy theory that America is secretly run by a deep state.

Perhaps the most bonkers moment was when Carlson asked: ‘So do you see the supernatural at work as you look out across what’s happening in the world now? So do you see God at work?’

But there is method to this madness. The otherwise curious appeal of this Russian autocrat among the hard right in America is because they see him – however ludicrously – as the world’s last, unstinting defender of Christian values.

There were two possible scoops (if true) in this turgid stew: that Bill Clinton once told him it was possible Russia could join Nato, only to be knocked back by his ‘advisers’ (that deep state again); and that Boris Johnson, when British prime minister, had thwarted a peace deal – with President Biden’s connivance – by urging Ukraine to carry on fighting.

And Carlson did at least have the grace to lobby Putin about releasing Evan Gershkovich, the young Wall Street Journal reporter jailed by the Kremlin on trumped-up charges of spying. Putin would not budge but there was no harm in trying.

Risible and boring as this interview was, social media is awash with paeans of praise for Putin from the Carlson/MAGA cult. Thus has Ukraine’s President Zelensky been further undermined.

Steamrollered by an ageing autocrat, Tucker Carlson has been confirmed as a fool.

‘Taken hostage by a lugubrious and deranged Russian uncle’