Tucker and Trump’s marriage of convenience heads for divorce court

But by then the writing was on the wall. Trump had waged a war of choice in Iran. In the eyes of Carlson, fellow former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, ex-congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, it was a fundamental betrayal of his “America first” ideology.

Carlson’s embrace of non-interventionism was forged by the disastrous Iraq war. He now contends that Trump had been unduly influenced by the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, fitting a wider set of beliefs on the far right that all too often reek of antisemitism.

“He’s leaving Trump because he feels that Trump has not stayed true to the ideology he was ascribing to him,” says Jason Zengerle, author of a recent book, Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. “People like Tucker and Steve Bannon believe that the Maga movement is an ideological movement and that there are principles to it that Maga voters subscribe to independent of their love of Donald Trump.

“This is a great test of that. Is Maga a cult of personality or is it actually an ideological movement? I think it’s a cult of personality: most people who are Maga supporters will support whatever Donald Trump does. People like Bannon and Tucker think that there is an ideology there that these people are supporting and it’s not just Trump – and we’re about to find out.”

For years it has been speculated that Carlson himself might run for president some day. His denunciation of Trump on Monday, with its implicit assertion that Maga is bigger than any one man, could be a step in that direction.

Zengerle adds: “He’s not really a media figure at this point. He’s a movement leader. He thinks he’s leading a political movement and he thinks that movement has been betrayed by Donald Trump and so he’s trying to move it in a different direction away from Trump while keeping it consistent with his ideological beliefs.

“He’s positioning himself and his movement to pick up the pieces of what he thinks has been broken by Trump, positioning himself as the true heir – this person who has stayed true while everybody else has betrayed the faith.”

Asked how likely it is that Carlson will mount a White House bid, Zengerle laughs: “It’s a lot more likely than it was before.”