Conservative strategist Rick Wilson has outlined how former Fox News darling Tucker Carlson could take out the competition in the 2028 Republican primary.
In a detailed post on his Substack on Monday, Wilson, a Republican ad-man turned pundit, called attention to Carlson’s interview in the New York Times on Saturday, saying it was the jumping-off point for a presidential run.
“This isn’t an interview. It’s a soft campaign launch with some explicable stages and milestones,” he wrote.
Carlson has been putting distance between himself and the president for some time now. That’s a deliberate ploy to create space and to be seen as a leader, Wilson argues.
“Tucker sees the damage Trump has done to himself, to [Vice President JD] Vance, and to the MAGA GOP, understands no better than the rest of the prospective field that Trump’s self-destructive tear is a political disaster: he’s just getting out there early, saying it.”
The piece pulls no punches in its brutal assessment of not just President Trump, who turns 80 in June, but also the likely GOP primary field.
“Sure, Trump will hold a cultlike faction for a hundred years, but he’s term-limited, eighty, and is polling in the teens. He’ll try to keep his claws in MAGA to sustain the family grift, but with numbers like his, it’s a grim race against time,” Wilson wrote.
Speaking on Monday afternoon, Trump again hinted at an ambition to hold onto the presidency beyond his term limit.
“When I get out of office in, let’s say, eight or nine years from now, I’ll be able to use it. I’ll be able to use it myself,” Trump said, speaking about the small business initiatives he was promoting.
But the president is ineligible to be on the ballot, having already been elected twice.
That means there will be a cattle call of conservatives seeking the nomination, Wilson says, and Carlson will be well-placed to step over them all.
Describing Vance as tainted by Trump-association, Ron DeSantis as “charisma repellent and a spent force” and Nikki Haley as a candidate with no constituency, Wilson argues Carlson’s main competition will be Marco Rubio.
“There’s a very real scenario where over 20 semi-serious people are in the race. In a crowded primary in Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, you don’t need forty percent. You need 15 percent and a good narrative of your case.”
He highlights Carlson’s decades of experience in media and broadcasting and says that a “populist who is also a professional broadcaster” should “keep Democratic strategists up at night.
Carlson, he says, "is a different animal from a populist real-estate developer who got lucky."
