It’s not possible to debate with Carlson about Jews and Israel, never mind reason with him, because he is a conspiracy theorist whose narratives revolve around Jews and Israel. For instance, according to the podcaster, Israeli Defense Force officers ran roughshod over Trump’s war secretary, Pete Hegseth, and took over the Pentagon during Israel’s 12-day war with Iran. Carlson holds Israel and the “neocons” responsible for dragging the United States into every Mideast conflict—including Trump’s own Operation Midnight Hammer targeting Iranian nuclear facilities—to serve the interests of the Jewish state.

But perhaps the most destructive antisemitic conspiracy theory Carlson has piloted is that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein led a Mossad blackmail operation that baited liberal elites with underage American girls. Thus, the failure of Trump law enforcement officials such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to produce evidence supporting his conspiracy theory is evidence of a cover-up. The implicit message, scarcely hidden, is that because the president has failed to make Bondi and Patel release information corroborating something untrue, Trump himself is concealing Israeli-sponsored crimes against Americans.

According to former Fox News broadcaster Melissa Francis, who is taking credit for brokering the Huckabee interview, Carlson told her that Trump “asked him to rein in the fight within the Republican Party over Israel, out of a concern that it was helping the Democratic Party.” Whether that’s true or not, Carlson saying so means his stunt was designed to rub Trump’s nose in the dirt, again. There’s no reason to expect anything else at this point. He’s targeted Trump’s most loyal constituency, evangelicals, for supporting Israel. “I dislike them more than anybody,” Carlson said. And he’s attacked the Republican Party. “I’m going to have to oppose it because I hate them too much,” he said, a pretty clear admission that he is undermining the leader of the party because he doesn’t like him.

And yet, Trump invited him to lunch at the White House two consecutive Fridays last month. The public message then, regardless of what the president may or may not have told him in private, is that the leader of the Republican Party still thinks Carlson is an important part of Team MAGA. What normal Trump voters hear is that what the White House means by unity is linking their fate, and moral probity, to the whimsies of a pathological liar with a large audience and a growing network of allied influencers—like Megyn Kelly, Jeffrey Sachs, and Shawn Ryan, among others—whose antisemitic conspiracy theories are weaponized to destroy the president and the party. And it is this, not a GOP civil war, that will indeed help the Democrats.

Earlier this week, Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio met with Republican officials to discuss the midterms, only nine months away. He urged them to stay focused on the economy and spotlight the White House’s efforts to ease affordability. In other words, the GOP’s success depends on its ability to address the normal concerns of normal voters. As Vice President JD Vance put it, “The question we’re going to put to the American people is, do you want to give the government back over to the people who, frankly, burned down the house and made most Americans much less wealthy and much less safe?”

In other words, it’s vital to show Americans that Republicans are the responsible party—but not if it means sidelining Tucker Carlson, even if he’s run an op on a senior administration official responsible for stewarding a vital strategic and political portfolio. After all, said Vance, whose meteoric political career is typically credited to Carlson’s interventions with Trump, “Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have substantive disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. … I’m also a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus.”

So, if it’s a choice between ensuring peace and prosperity for Americans and winning the midterms on one hand, and on the other keeping Carlson on board, the Jew hater is going to stay. And if you don’t agree that an antisemitic conspiracy theorist devoted to undermining the administration has an important role in the conservative movement, then feel free to vote for the party that mutilates and sterilizes children. Or you can stay at home on election day. In either case, if or when we lose, we’re going to blame the Jews as well as all non-Jews whose scripture, conscience, or grasp of world affairs inform both their support for Israel and their disbelief that we’re shielding an arsonist who has made clear his intentions to burn us all down.

And yet, often the tactics that appear to be morally hazardous make for good politics. So, is it a good political move to make room in the big Republican tent for a mobilized minority faction of maniacal Jew haters?

Trump was elected to a second term to take control of the country away from the party that burned down the house, which used, among other initiatives, Russiagate, the George Floyd riots, compulsory vaccines, and raiding a former president’s home to set fire to American norms. Trump’s mandate was to make America normal again. Maybe that sounds like a big comedown from what’s typically described as a transformational epoch in American politics, but all of Trump’s policy priorities—closing the borders, fixing the economy, reshoring America’s manufacturing base, ending the weaponization of the federal government, refocusing the U.S. armed forces on its primary mission to fight and win wars, etc.—are restorative.

The pity is that roughly half the electorate likes or doesn’t care that public life in America the past decade has not been normal. Proof is that despite the tumult the Democrats have nurtured and incited since the 2016 election, more than 75 million Americans voted for the party’s candidate in 2024. Even though Kamala Harris had only 100 days to campaign and was arguably the worst major party presidential candidate in U.S. history, she still won enough votes to beat almost any Republican candidate who wasn’t the leader of a generational political movement and hadn’t survived an assassination attempt—which means the party that burns things down has a hard floor of 75 million.

Thus, the country’s immediate future, and maybe its fate, will depend on which party a very small number of swing voters judge is more likely to address its normal concerns, like the economy. But Carlson’s proximity to the White House, especially his friendship with the vice president, tells voters that the GOP is not normal. It says there is no discernible difference between the party that validated the trans agenda and the party that thinks Hitler deserves a second look; it gives evidence that the latter is every bit as likely to burn everything down, not least because it is protecting a faction that even now is setting fire to the Republican Party from inside its own house.

There is no antisemitic swing vote that Carlson and his cadre of zombie influencers will help clinch; there are no maps of battleground states like Ohio or North Carolina showing where Students for Justice in Palestine activists might swing Republican if only GOP candidates lean harder into globalizing the intifada. If Republicans aim to prove that they’re just as nuts as the other side, then it’s a race to the bottom, and within four years the country will be in much worse shape and much less normal than it was heading into the 2024 election.

The buck stops with President Trump. Only the commander in chief can protect his presidency from those who mean to destroy it, the party he leads, and the country he governs.