Trump ignores Tucker Carlson’s texts saying he ‘passionately hates’ him in January 6 diatribe

Donald Trump avoided commenting on the revelation that Fox News host Tucker Carlson once wrote that he “passionately” hates the former president, while praising Mr. Carlson for his misleading coverage of the January 6, 2021 uprising.

“GREAT WORK BY TUCKER CARLSON TONIGHT,” Trump wrote on Truth Social Tuesday night. “The Unselect Committee of political Hacks & Thugs has been totally discredited. They knowingly refused to show the videos that mattered. They should be tried for fraud and treason, and those imprisoned and prosecuted should be acquitted and released NOW!

Mr. Carlson used his Monday-Tuesday primetime schedule to temporarily pick peaceful parts of the U.S. Capitol uprising from the more than 40,000 hours of surveillance footage handed to him by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

It was an attempt to falsely portray the violent siege of Congress as largely “peaceful chaos”. Mr. Trump has praised Mr. Carlson for the inaccurate broadcasts.

New reports revealed in a $1.6 billion libel suit against Fox News by Dominion Voting Systems show that just two days before the attempt to overthrow democracy, Mr. Calrson texted a Fox News employee: “We are very , very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights.”

“I really can’t wait,” he added. “I hate him passionately.”

Despite slamming Mr. Trump and his repeated lies that the 2020 election was stolen from him in private conversations, Mr. Carlson has continued the baseless voter fraud story on his Fox News program.

The lawsuit also revealed that Mr Carlson has called Mr Trump “a demonic force, a destroyer” and that Trump allies who spread the election conspiracies were “abusive”.

“It’s incredibly insulting to me,” Mr Carlson said at one point. “Our viewers are good people and they believe it.”

Media magnate and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch seemed concerned that hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham might have gone too far in their coverage.

“Maybe Sean and Laura went too far. All very well for Sean to tell you he was desperate about Trump, but what was he telling his viewers? Fox Corp. chairman Suzanne Scott, CEO of Fox News, wrote in an email dated Jan. 21, 2021, according to the documents.

Court documents have also shown that Mr Murdoch admitted that presenters such as Maria Bartiromo, Lou Dobbs, Mr Hannity and Jeanine Pirro “sometimes endorsed this false idea of ​​a stolen election”.

“I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it afterwards,” he said in a statement.

Washington’s former editor-in-chief at Fox News, Bill Sammon, texted a colleague, “In my 22 years at Fox, this is the closest I’ve come to an existential crisis — journalism, at least,” according to legal documents. associated with the lawsuit.

Former Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt told Mr. Sammon, “What I see us doing is losing the silent majority of viewers as we chase the nuts off a cliff.”

On Tuesday night, Mr. Carlson came out swinging at members of both the Republican and Democratic parties who had criticized him after his Monday night broadcast.

“We should also tell you that Chuck Schumer, the Senate Majority Leader, was joined in this outcry by the Senate Minority Leader, and that would be a Republican, Mitch McConnell. And they were joined by a cascade of other Republicans, Thom Tillis of North Carolina. Mitt Romney of Utah, all sharing the same outrage. And from this we learn two things. First, you get close to what they really care about. And you must be wondering why? Why is it so important that they should humiliate themselves by telling such blatant lies and calling for censorship?” he claimed.

“The second thing we learned from this is that they are on the same side… so it’s not really about left and right. It’s not about Republican and Democrat. Here you have people with shared interests. The people with open borders…the people like Mitch McConnell who live in splendor on Chinese money. The people who all have everything in common underneath are all on a par with everyone else and that would include almost all news organizations in this country,” he added.