When Tucker met Steve

I don’t know whether or not Tucker Carlson is on Putin’s payroll, but if he isn’t he certainly deserves to be.

He isn’t the only Western hack who admires Russian fascism and its leader, but he’s the one with the greatest following. And his millions of viewers are consistently fed lies concocted in the Kremlin.

Also, Carlson treats Trump with unremitting sycophancy and canine devotion, which makes him a reliable source in the president’s eyes. No man who loves him can ever be wrong, no man who doesn’t love him can ever be right – such seems to be the guiding principle of Trump’s life.

Still, Carlson can only affect US policy at several removes. Steve Witkoff, on other hand, is very much hands on. He is the US envoy at all negotiations involving Russia and the Ukraine, and what he says or does can literally be a matter of life or death.

Witkoff is Trump’s colleague and friend of long standing, having made a fortune in property development. Such credentials are seen as ample qualifications for perhaps today’s most vital diplomatic post, something Witkoff proved during his interview with Carlson the other day.

One seldom finds such congenial similarity between interviewer and interviewee, this side of totalitarian regimes at any rate. Both men are equally sycophantic to Trump, admiring of Putin, contemptuous of Zelensky and ignorant about the issue discussed.

It was a long if illiterate conversation, and I can only give you a few snippets, with some parenthetic comments from me. The two men set their stall at the beginning:

SW: I think we’ve made more progress again. Look, Tucker, I’m not just saying it – every solution comes as a result of President Trump. And I don’t get paid to say that. [Yes he is.] I say it because it is the absolute truth. Putin’s got a huge respect for the President. And, you know, you saw what happened in the Oval Office with Zelensky and the President. [Yes, that uppity Ukie meekly suggested that some peace terms are worse than others.] Disrespecting him is not a healthy way to have a good relationship.

TC: The arrogance of small countries. It’s like, get some perspective. I mean, come on, how can you imagine acting like that? [Quite. Small countries should just shut up and do as Trump tells them.]

SW: And they’re dependent on us. [True.]… And we’ve been so good to them. [False.]

TC: Do you think Zelensky, the question of Zelensky. I think there are good things to say about Zelensky. I think he’s got a kind of bravery which I admire. I think the Ukrainian military is legit, brave, doomed because they’re just fighting a much bigger country. He’s not going to win. But I think they’ve behaved with valiance. [It’s ‘valour’, Tucker.] But the Russian position is he’s not elected and so we can’t sign any kind of treaty with him. [Zelensky was elected, but Tucker has sympathy with the Russian position anyway.]

[Then the two men exchanged their views on the nature of the conflict, competing with each other in who is more ignorant and mendacious. Thus]:

SW: Well, first of all, I think the largest issue in that conflict are these so-called four regions. Donbas, Crimea. You know the names. [He doesn’t really, and neither does Witkoff.]

TC: Lugansk.

SW: Yeah, Lugansk. And there’s two others. They’re Russian speaking. There have been referendums where the overwhelming majority of the people have indicated that they want to be under Russian rule.

TC: Yes.

SW: I think that’s the key issue in the conflict. So that’s the first thing that, when that gets settled – and we’re having very, very positive conversations – and Russia controls that.

TC: In fact, some of those territories are now, from the Russian perspective, part of Russia, correct?

SW: That’s correct. But this has always been the issue.

TC: Right.

[Wrong. That many people in those regions speak Russian doesn’t necessarily mean they are dying to become part of Russia. In fact, they are dying not to.

At the last general elections in those areas, the pro-Russian party only got between 18 and 20 per cent of the vote. Nor are the people there as universally Russophone as all that. For example, in one of the five regions, Kherson, only about 25 per cent of the population list Russian as their mother tongue. In the other areas, that proportion is higher, but still under 50 per cent.

Second, Russia doesn’t really control these areas. The Ukraine still controls a great part of the Donetsk region, along with the other regions’ cities and towns to the west of the Dnieper.

As for the referendums, it’s stupid and crass even to mention them in this context. Most countries in the world, along with international organisations, declare them illegitimate because they were conducted at gun point in territories occupied by the Russians. Documents proving this are in the public domain, but the two propagandists don’t care about such details.]

SW: The question is will they be, will the world acknowledge that those are Russian territories? Will Zelensky survive politically if he acknowledges this? This is the central issue in the conflict. Absolutely.

[It’s not, not even relatively. The central issue is that Putin has dedicated his political life to rebuilding the Soviet empire. That’s why he committed a blatant aggression against the Ukraine, and that’s why he’ll never be satisfied with merely any chunk of Ukrainian territory. Nothing short of turning the country into a Russian satellite will do.]

SW: I hear people describe this last conversation that the President had with President Putin as unsuccessful. It’s preposterous. [Of course it is. Trump’s conversations with anyone can only ever be epoch-making. That much is a given.]… And there are conditions that the Russians will need for an ultimate ceasefire, because an ultimate ceasefire is complicated. There’s Kursk where Ukrainian troops are surrounded. Fact. [It isn’t. They aren’t surrounded, according to US intelligence data.] And the Russians…

TC: Kursk is within Russia. [Well-done, Tucker. Brilliant erudition.]

SW: Kursk is within Russia. The Russians have taken it back. [False. Since the Ukrainians never took Kursk, the Russians haven’t had to take it back.]

[No such dialogue would be complete without an exchange of frank opinions about the Europeans, those vermin Witkoff’s colleagues call “pathetic freeloaders”. Hence]:

TC: Then what is? If I can just say, like, what the hell is going on with European League? [Does he mean Union?] Keir Starmer saying, we’re going to send British troops. Their entire military is smaller than the U.S. Marine Corps. The country is dying economically. All those countries are dying economically. Like, what are they thinking? What is that? Is that a posture? Is it a pose? [Perhaps I should find my out-of-date US passport. Who wants to live in a dying country?]

SW: Well, I think it’s a combination of a posture and a pose and a combination of also being simplistic. I think there’s this, you know, this sort of notion of we’ve all got to be like Winston Churchill, the Russians are gonna march across Europe. I think that’s preposterous. By the way, we have something called NATO that we did not have in World War II. [You mean that US alliance with dying, pathetic, freeloading countries? The one Trump seems to want to dismantle?]

TC: Do you think the Russians want to march across Europe?

SW: 100% not. [You could see me wiping my brow. If Steve says they aren’t, I can sleep peacefully.]

TC: Why would they want that? I wouldn’t want those countries. [If Tucker doesn’t want those dying countries, then it follows logically that Putin doesn’t either. Right?]

SW: First of all, why would they want to absorb Ukraine? For what purpose, exactly? [And for what purpose, exactly, did they invade the Ukraine? Could it be the same purpose?] They don’t need to absorb Ukraine… They’ve gotten – they’ve reclaimed these five regions. They have Crimea, and they’ve gotten what they want. So why do they need more? [They annexed the Crimea in 2014 and still invaded the Ukraine in 2022.]

[Then the conversation veered to Putin’s sterling personality, so much in synch with Trump’s.]

SW: I was talking to someone in the administration. They said, well, you got to watch it, because he’s an ex-KGB guy. So I said, okay, what’s the inference? Well, he’s an ex-KGB guy. He could be looking to manipulate you.

TC: Says the ex-CIA guy to you.

SW: This was not an ex-CIA guy. Well, they all are, quite effectively. [Effectively, the whole administration works for the CIA. Do they know it?] And I said, look, here’s how I see it. In the old days, the only people who went into the KGB were the smartest people in the nation. That’s who went into the KGB. He’s a super smart guy. Okay. You don’t want to give him the credit for it. That’s okay. I give him the credit for it.

[Funny, my own recollection is that “the only people who went into the KGB” were scum of the earth. But Steve knows better – after all, he is a New York property developer.]

TC: But he [Putin] did meet with you for a long time. What did you think of him?

SW: I liked him. [Who wouldn’t? Well, perhaps the families of the dissidents murdered or imprisoned by Putin, or else those of the hundreds of thousands killed in the Ukraine. There’s just no pleasing some people.]

TC: Yep.

SW: I thought he was straight up with me…

TC: Every American president until Biden has said that. Every single one.

SW: Yeah.

TC: Bill Clinton said that. George W. Bush said that. Barack Obama said that. Every president around the world I’ve ever spoken to is like, they may disagree with what Russia’s doing or whatever, but they’re like, you know, Putin’s a straightforward guy… It takes balls to say that… Well, he is a good guy.

SW: So in the last conversation, [Putin and Trump] agreed to an energy infrastructure ceasefire, which means Russia is not going to target Ukraine’s energy infrastructure and Ukraine will not target Russia’s energy infrastructure. [The Russians violated that agreement within hours.]… reinstituting the Black Sea moratorium on maritime hits – Ukrainian firing on Russian ships, Russia firing on Ukrainian ships. Now that’s going to be implemented over the next week or so… That’s big stuff, really big stuff. [Especially for Russia, whose fleet can now leave the Novorossiysk harbour where it has been bottled up for months.]

SW: And I am saying to you, not because of me, because this was President Trump sending a signal to President Putin that he wanted to resume his relationship together and that they were going to be two great leaders figuring out this conflict… And President Putin, to his credit, sent all kinds of signals back to the president that this is the path that he wanted to be on, including statements that he made.

[But enough of this dry stuff. Witkoff explained that “the two great leaders will figure out this conflict” without asking the Ukraine or those pathetic freeloaders in Europe. And you know why? Because Donald and Vlad are in love.]

SW: In the second visit that I had, it got personal. President Putin had commissioned a beautiful portrait of President Trump from the leading Russian artist and actually gave it to me and asked me to take it home to President Trump, which I brought home and delivered to him. It… was such a gracious moment. [The portrait wasn’t beautiful, and it was painted by a giftless hack, not a leading artist.]

And told me a story, Tucker, about how when the president was shot, he went to his local church and met with his priest and prayed for the president, not because he was the President of the United States or could become the President of the United States, but because he had a friendship with him and he was praying for his friend. I mean, can you imagine sitting there and listening to these kind of conversations?

And I came home and delivered that message to our president and delivered the painting, and he was clearly touched by it. So this is the kind of connection that we’ve been able to reestablish through, by the way, a simple word called communication, which many people would say, you know, I shouldn’t have had, because Putin is a bad guy. I don’t regard Putin as a bad guy.

TC: It’s like a marriage.

[I wish I could continue, but I can’t. My eyes are misting over because one seldom sees two world leaders so much in love. I don’t know if they are going to consummate this relationship, but one way or the other it’s the Ukraine that’ll get screwed.]