Tucker Carlson, the first Fox News host who referred to GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump as “a demonic force” in 2021, kept things on brand this Halloween. That night, as costumed ghosts and ghouls roamed the streets in search of treats, Carlson was onstage with the man he also called “a destroyer.” And that’s not the only demon in Carlson’s DMs this week, as the YouTuber also claimed that a demon crawled into bed with him as he slept.
The mystery of how Tucker Carlson so swiftly descended from his perch as the right-wing cable channel’s biggest star has been the source of endless contemplation. Is it because he sent tests that were too racist even for the channel’s upper management? Was it because Fox Corp. chair Rupert Murdoch found Carlson’s advocacy for prayer off-putting? Or perhaps Carlson just wasn’t praying enough, if his recent claims that a demon physically attacked him were true.
The news that the Lord allegedly turned his back on Carlson broke this week upon the release of a trailer from the upcoming film Christianities? In a teaser posted to YouTube, Carlson is asked by interviewer John Heers if he believes that “the presence of evil is kickstarting people to wonder about the good.”
The question seemed like a wonderful opening for Carlson to explore the questions of evil posed by Trump, a man who just last week claimed that God chose him to lead our nation. After all, when anyone thinks of evil, they likely picture people who commit acts of treason, rape, and bigotry or who are just super into Hitler! Would this be the moment that Carlson, who in 2021 texted his then-producer Alex Pfeiffer to say Trump is “a demonic force, a destroyer,” would join other conservative patriots to publicly denounce the man he’d so happily denounced in private?
If he had, that sure would have been a stunner! But somehow, the truth is even more jaw-dropping. Instead, Carlson responded that he had “direct experience” with evil a year and a half ago, when “in my bed at night. I got attacked while I was asleep with my wife and four dogs and mauled, physically mauled.”
Occam’s Razor would have us assume that the culprit here was one of those four dogs. After all, those dogs were rumored to be powerful enough to deny former presidential candidate Ron DeSantis Carson’s primary-run endorsement. Sure, Carlson denied that rumor, but ask anyone who sleeps with their pets (this correspondent included): you are almost guaranteed to wake up with a scratch or a bump, between canine dreams of chasing bunnies and that early morning demand for food.
But Carlson went straight to Hell with his assumptions, saying that he was attacked “by a demon — or something unseen that left claw marks on my sides.”
“I was totally confused,” Carlson says. “I woke up, and I couldn’t breathe, and I thought I was going to suffocate, and I walked around outside, and then I walked in, and my wife and dogs had not woken up, and they’re very light sleepers.”
“And then I had these terrible pains on my rib cage and on my shoulder, and I was just in my boxer shorts and I went and flipped on the light in the bathroom, and I had four claw marks on either side underneath my arms and on my left shoulder. And they’re bleeding.” The claws came from a demon, he grew to believe, prompting him to spend “a year and a half reading [the Bible], and then I started rereading it, and it was a, just a transformative experience for me.”
That transformation didn’t come up on Halloween, when Carlson welcomed Trump on a Glendale, Arizona stop on his Tucker Carlson LiveTour. According to the Arizona Republic, the former president’s appearance was fairly sedate. Carlson threw “softball questions at Trump, who for about 90 minutes covered years of familiar material in rambling stories.”
“He peppered his comments with a casual viciousness,” the paper notes. Trump’s most noteworthy remarks that night—that he wanted to put fellow Republican Liz Cheney “with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her. OK? Let’s see how she feels about it. You know, when the guns are trained on her face,” went unquestioned by Carlson, who earlier this week also endorsed vaguely sexualized inter-family spanking.
The entire situation suggests that Heers might be onto something with the whole “presence of evil” thing after all—he just might be asking the wrong people about where the Devil truly resides.
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