TUCKER EVERLASTING

Trump's favorite pundit takes his show on the road.

- ANDREW MARANTZ

Sometimes, when Tucker Carlson is in the shower, he takes a quiet moment to reflect on whether his haters may be right about him. I know this not firsthand but because he recently mentioned it to a few thousand fans in Rosenberg, Texas. He said, "I have been through this process for so many years, where they call you something"-in his case, a very incomplete list would include "ven9966 omous demagogue," "crypto-Nazi blowhard," "anti-science ignoramus," and "a dick" "and I actually do try to take stock.

Like, am I that person?" These reveries always lead him to the same conclusion: he's clean. It is the haters who are wrong. That night, in Rosenberg, the epithet he lingered on was "extremist." He drew out the syllables in a derisive growl, followed by his foppish hyena bark of a laugh-a familiar sequence to anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson heap scorn on his enemies, which is to say, anyone who has watched Tucker Carlson. "Whatever else I am, I'm the opposite of an extremist," he continued. "My parents got divorced.

I'm totally opposed to change." He claims that his vision for the country's future is actually a vision of the country's past, one that strikes him as modest, even obvious: "I liked America in 1985." This was the ninth stop on the Tucker Carlson Live Tour-sixteen arenas, this fall, from Anaheim, California, to Sunrise, Florida, but mostly in the heartland.

At each stop, before bringing out his special guest (Kid Rock in Grand Rapids; Donald Trump, Jr., in Jacksonville), Carlson delivered a semi-improvised monologue, usually starting with some geotargeted pandering. In Michigan, he praised the local muskie fishing before slamming the state's "brain-dead robot" of a governor. In Pennsylvania, he extolled the beauty of the Conestoga River before describing that state's governor as "evil, actually." In Texas, he said, "There's something about being in a room full of people you agree with that is so great.