Tucker Carlson speaks at a memorial for conservative activist Charlie Kirk, Sunday, Sept. 21, 2025, at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. (AP Photo/John Locher)
Donald Trump owns the Republican Party. Of that, there can be no doubt.
Just a few years after surrendering the presidency to Joe Biden and disgracing himself by refusing to admit to his defeat, Trump romped through the 2024 GOP presidential primary en route to a commanding Electoral College victory that saw him win every major swing state. He boasts the most durable, personally loyal political coalition in modern American history.
But what will follow his reign over his party is yet to be seen. It’s true that Trump has flouted longstanding conservative orthodoxy on trade and certain foreign policy issues, yet much of his agenda could have been advanced by any number of the Republicans to run against him in 2016 and 2024. Trump’s popularity and unique hold over his party is attributable largely, though not solely, to his indomitable, one-of-a-kind personality, which endeared him to millions long before he ever ran for office. The ideological meaning of his rise, though, is still up for debate.
And that means, as Fox News’ Mark Levin observed on Monday, that come 2028 and Trump’s retirement from presidential politics, there will be a bloody, epoch-shaping war for the soul of the GOP.
“I’m gearing up for a massive political battle in 2028 within the GOP. We will see who turns out the most votes and who builds the strongest coalitions. And then there’s the general election, which cannot be won without us,” declared Levin. “We constitutional conservatives — who were crucial in the Reagan coalition, the Tea Party movement, Convention of States, and MAGA — have been awakened like never before. And we will be heard from one end of the country to the other. We’ve had enough of the grifters and neo-Nazis, the Marxists and Islamists, and their patsies and lapdogs in the media and politics.”
“They’re destroying our country. They reject Trump, Reagan, and our founding. And we reject them,” he concluded.
He’s right.
This conflict, unlike so many of those fought over the last decade, will not be about Trump, or even his legacy. Both Levin and his intra-party enemies, perhaps best exemplified by his former Fox News colleague and frequent sparring partner Tucker Carlson are agreed, at least publicly, on Trump’s merits. No, this war is to poised to be fought over the fundamental, rather than the fleeting.
In the years leading up to, and especially since his dismissal from Fox, Carlson has championed a nihilistic brand of right-wing politics that bears little resemblance to pre-2016 conservatism — and increasingly diverges from Trump’s worldview as well.
Carlson’s Republican Party would be more bitter and less conservative than not only Reagan’s GOP, as well as more conspiratorial and vindictive than Trump’s. Behind every act or event, Carlson sees nefarious forces — usually Jews — pulling the strings. He promotes an inauthentic, self-serving Christianity used as a vehicle for advertising his own victimhood, or Jews’ villainy. America itself, by his telling, is both the world’s principal victim and villain, a country that should step aside and allow its competitors a turn at the helm — for its own good, of course. He propagandizes on behalf of malicious actors across the globe, from Soviet wannabes, to modern slave-states, to “Death to America”-chanting jihadists. He entertains the very painful, braindead 9/11 conspiracy theories he once excoriated. Cultural victories achieved by conservatives at home are downplayed. Fatalism over losses is automatic.
His party, in other words, is one that is not just less likely to win, but would do immense damage to not just the country’s state at home and standing abroad, but its very character should it prevail.
In 2028, this party will no doubt be represented in the primary contest by Vice President JD Vance, whom Carlson has already identified as his horse, and has emerged as the leading purveyor of Carlson’s ideas within the Trump administration. He will enjoy the advantage of entering the race as Trump’s sitting right-hand man and natural successor.
On the other side, there is tenuous, but potentially powerful coalition waiting to be formed. The Trump years fractured the Reaganite wing of the GOP, some of which claims Trump as the Gipper’s natural successor, and the rest of which views Trump as a violent departure from him.
There is no longer any room for such fractures. Trump is a lame duck president. Over the next three years, he will do good and bad — or perhaps good or bad, depending on which group you belong to. And then he’ll be gone.
Inevitably, Trump will continue to loom over and wield great power. But at 82 years old, he’ll be term-limited, and the largest footprint he’ll have left on the Republican Party will be tonal, rather than ideological.
For those who recognize Carlson and his cohort for what they are, this will be the last opportunity to come together to stop them. Prior differences over Trump, or any other picayune dispute cannot be allowed to stand in the way of this all-important objective.
Because as Carlson demonstrated so vividly at Sunday’s memorial for Charlie Kirk, it’s not just those they hate that stand to suffer if the nihilists come out on top.
During a nationally televised celebration of his friend’s life, Carlson took the time to wink at the dregs of society by making a comparison between Kirk and Jesus — both of whom, he implied, had been murdered by Jews. To describe Carlson’s words is to be shocked by them. The assassination of a friend and the sacrifice of God’s only Son, both reduced in a matter of a few breaths to fuel for an ancient evil. It was a soul-destroying act; one that articulates the stakes of 2028 better than anyone else ever could.
It won’t just be a war for the “soul” of a movement, but a spiritual one with the survival of real, individual souls on the line.
The post Tucker Carlson’s Demonic Dogwhistle at Charlie Kirk’s Service Lit the Match on the Post-Trump GOP Civil War first appeared on Mediaite.
