After he was caught privately admitting he hates Trump “passionately,” Tucker Carlson is now claiming, “I love Trump.” It’s further proof that Carlson is a charlatan.

Recent filings by Dominion Voting Systems in its $1.6 billion defamation case against Fox News included several text messages revealing Tucker Carlson’s complete revulsion for Donald Trump. Some examples:

All of [Trump’s business ventures] fail. What he’s good at is destroying things. He’s the undisputed world champion of that. (Nov. 6, 2020)

We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. … I hate him passionately. (Jan. 4, 2021)

He’s a demonic force, a destroyer. (Jan. 7, 2021)

Rather than admit the truth, Carlson has decided to engage in more deceit. On March 20, 2023, Carlson made a big attempt to rewrite history when he visited Bo Snerdley’s Rush Hour radio show.

Media Matters caught Carlson’s pathetic effort:

CARLSON: Let's see. I spent four years defending [Trump's] policies and I -- I'm going to defend them again tonight. And actually, and I'm pretty straight forward, I'm -- I love Trump. Like, as a person, I think Trump is funny and insightful. And, and I said this to Trump when he called me, you know, all wounded about those texts. That was a moment in time where I was absolutely infuriated.

And I think this is in the text -- and those were all grabbed  completely illegitimately, in my opinion, in this court case, which I guess I'm not allowed to talk about, but I'm enraged that my private texts were pulled.

But those -- those particular texts were pulled at exactly -- at the moment where I was texting with one of my producers because some idiot on the Trump campaign had sent us the name of these dead voters who had voted. And we went and I repeated them on air, and it turns out some of them were alive.

I remember well those “dead voters” Carlson promoted. It speaks volumes that Carlson is blaming the Trump campaign for what was aired on Carlson’s own show, apparently without doing any fact checking. Memo to Tuckums: You’re lucky those voters didn’t sue you and Fox, too.

Furthermore, the Carlson texts revealed in the lawsuit were not “a moment in time” but spread out over several weeks. But it has been clear for years that Carlson is no Trump fan, he just plays one on TV. Oh, sure, he probably likes a lot of what Trump did and there’s no doubt he sucked up to Trump in public:

Tucker Carlson with Trump at the LIV Golf event. pic.twitter.com/Do6U7SJ9Ty

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) August 1, 2022

But in August, I wrote this about The Times’ Jeremy Peters’ appearance on Eric Bolling’s Newsmax show (Bolling is a former Carlson colleague):

Readers may recall that I have long suspected Carlson is not a Trump fan, he just wants to look like one. Then-New York Times columnist Ben Smith strongly hinted as much in a 2021 article when he called Carlson “the go-to guy for sometimes-unflattering stories about Donald J. Trump.” Smith also quoted CNN’s Brian Stelter: “’[Y]ou can see Tucker’s fingerprints all over the hardcover’ edition of his 2020 book ‘Hoax,’ which excoriates Fox News for amplifying Mr. Trump’s falsehoods.”

Smith also quoted Vanity Fair writer Joe Hagan who wrote, in 2020: “A canny TV diplomat, [Carlson] won’t say Trump is terrified, weak, politically doomed, in deep denial and surrounded by toadies and mediocrities.”

So, kudos to Peters for not beating around the bush like his former colleague. Appearing on Newsmax TV’s Eric Bolling The Balance, Peters said that in 2020, Carlson had said he was voting for Kanye West, not Trump. “So, he didn’t vote for Trump, as far as we know.”

“We know that Tucker Carlson is one of these people who benefits from having the Trump audience on his side but thinks very little of the people who make up that audience,” Peters continued.

That’s right, Carlson thinks as little of his audience as he does of Trump.

With Snerdley, Carlson went on to talk about how he really, truly thinks there was something wrong with the 2020 election before he kinda, sorta admitted, perhaps inadvertently, the texts represented his true feelings:

CARLSON: I will say this. My comments on TV -- I think my texts reflect who I am. And I'm vulgar in public, in private, rather. And I use, like bad language and stuff. I worked in a newsroom my whole life and my wife's always trying to improve me, which is fair, but my views are pretty transparent. I always say what I think. I can't keep track of too many lies, you know what I mean?

You can listen to Carlson try to rehabilitate himself below, from WABC’s March 20, 2023, edition of Bo Snerdley's Rush Hour, via Media Matters.

(Carlson image by DonkeyHotey via Creative Commons license)