Though it’s hard to believe, Fox News host Tucker Carlson made his very first visit to Mar-a-Lago only a week and a half ago. The resort was hosting a birthday party for former Fox host Kimberly Guilfoyle, also attended by Florida congressman Matt Gaetz, and Donald Trump Jr.,—but Carlson wasn’t there for the party. He didn’t even know about it, he says. Instead he’d come with an urgent message for the president. He was there to pull Donald Trump aside and speak frankly about the dangers of the coronavirus epidemic, the gravity of which had not yet fully registered with Trump or his White House.

For his troubles, Carlson was actually exposed to the coronavirus, along with Senators Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott, all of whom had been in the room with infected Brazilian officials attending the party.

Trump had ample warning weeks ago that this crisis was coming and had mostly ignored it. On January 22, he told CNBC that the coronavirus problem was “totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine.” Five days after, former vice president Joe Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today, making the observation that “Trump’s demonstrated failures of judgment and his repeated rejection of science make him the worst possible person to lead our country through a global health challenge.”

Tucker Carlson started talking more extensively about the virus on his Fox News show on February 3, spurred, he says, by harrowing reports emerging from China. Trump, it seems, was the last to know. A White House adviser arranged for Carlson to meet with Trump so the TV personality could, in essence, penetrate Trump’s bubble. They talked for two hours. The oncoming pandemic, Carlson told him, was an existential threat to the nation. To translate it into Trumpian language, an existential threat to his reelection. Mike Pence joined at one point. Carlson won’t discuss the president’s reaction on the record, but suffice it to say that Trump’s denial went on for another week while the pandemic ballooned and right-wing allies—many of them on Fox News—suggested the virus was a liberal hoax and members of Congress, as recently as three days ago, told people to continue going out in public as if nothing was happening.

I’ve known Tucker Carlson for 20 years, since before his infamous Jon Stewart debate on CNN in 2004 and before his paleoconservative tendencies—he was always sympathetic to Pat Buchanan—found their moment in the election of Donald J. Trump, reanimating his career. Carlson has always been one of the most intelligent and reliably savage observers of Washington—even more so off camera. A canny TV diplomat, he won’t say Trump is terrified, weak, politically doomed, in deep denial and surrounded by toadies and mediocrities. But what he does say is enough to make you realize we’re entering uncharted territory.

Vanity Fair: When did you personally begin to grow concerned that the coronavirus thing was bigger than people were acknowledging?

Tucker Carlson: Well, in January is when we first started covering it on the show. And you know, there’ve been a number of epidemics to come out of China—the 1957 flu epidemic, which killed 100,000 people in this country. And so when these reports began to emerge, we covered it. Now, unfortunately, it was right in the middle of impeachment. So it was January, was impeachment months. And so we did a segment on this and said, you know, we’re in an age of air travel, capital-to-capital hourly flights, a pandemic is inevitable. It just is. And this seems to have terrified the Chinese government, which has, of course, less regard for its own citizens. So if they are afraid of it, then we should pay attention to it. And it was like shouting into the darkness.

And then I happened to be speaking a couple of days later to someone who works in the U.S. government, a nonpolitical person with access to a lot of intelligence. He said the Chinese are lying about the extent of this. They won’t let international health inspectors in. They’re blocking WHO and this could infect millions of people, a high percentage of them. And this was a highly informed person, very informed, and again, a nonpolitical person with no reason to lie about it in either direction.

So that really got my attention. And so that night we did a long script on this and said people are just not paying any attention. So that was February 3, which happened to be the night of the Iowa caucuses, which are, of course, a significant and confusing event this year. And then it’s sort of taken all the oxygen out of the news environment.

So it’s just a politically charged time. And when you live in a country where everything is political and people are seeing, you know, every development through an ideological lens, either as a way to gain advantage or as a threat to their current advantage, it’s very hard to tell a straightforward story. And it’s hard to get people’s attention if you know you’re saying something that they suspect is political propaganda. It’s something that people have worried about for a long time. What if there’s a crisis, no one will believe the coverage. Well, okay, that’s where we are.

I wouldn’t necessarily assign blame to either side. I have my own opinions about who’s more responsible, but clearly everybody is to some extent, probably including me.

We’re at the point where conservative media and right-wing politicians take their cues from Trump and from the White House. Tell me when you decided that maybe something had gone out of whack.

So a lot of Trump voters believe that all news about Trump is designed to hurt Trump. And they’re absolutely right about that. It’s been monomaniacal, the coverage of Trump. So when the moment came, when there was something that ultimately really didn’t have anything to do with Trump, which is the emergence of a weird new virus from Eastern China, they were trained to believe that all coverage was designed to hurt Trump. Because that’s been true. So it was very hard to convince a lot of those news consumers that this was fundamentally not a political story.

Everyone in America has been praying for three years to see all stories through the lens of political advantage, period. And so this isn’t fundamentally political. I mean, it’s affected, of course, by politics and the decisions that elected leaders make. But in the end it’s a story about health and economics. Do you know what I mean?

I do. But I also see that Trump’s political worldview, which 35 to 40% of the country believes, says they should distrust elites and institutions. And we now are in a situation where we need both. We need public trust, we need leadership, and we need faith in institutions to hold up. And now it’s not there.

No, no, we don’t. Now, let’s be wise here. We don’t need faith in institutions to hold up, listen to yourself. We need institutions to behave wisely. That’s what we need. And faith is restored when people make wise decisions. That’s the truth.

The truth is people distrust institutions because they’ve hollowed out the economy and made a mess of the country. Now, that’s just true. Trump has been an imperfect vessel for those sentiments. But the sentiments are rooted in reality, and there’s nobody who looks at America 2020 or 2019 who can say that people in charge have done a good job, ’cause they haven't, they just haven’t, period. So at a time of crisis, you need people to make wise, prudent, selfless decisions. That’s what you need. And you need the institutions to earn the trust of the population.

Our public health authorities have failed, and now we’re learning the extent of their failure. You know, I don’t know what you can do about that other than learn [a] lesson. You know what I mean?

When you say institutions have failed, I would include the Trump administration in with that.

Well I don’t think anybody thinks the government is going to save you. I really don’t. I don’t think there’s anybody who thinks that.

So let’s move up to the moment where you decide that it’s incumbent upon you to go talk to Trump about the epidemic.

I felt I had a moral obligation to be useful in whatever small way I could, and, you know, I don’t have any actual authority. I’m just a talk show host. But I felt—and my wife strongly felt—that I had a moral obligation to try and be helpful in whatever way possible. I’m not an adviser to the person or anyone else other than my children. And I mean that. And you can ask anybody in the White House or out how many times have I gone to the White House to give my opinion on things. Because I don’t do that. And in general I really disapprove of people straying too far outside their lanes and acting like just because they have solid ratings, they have a right to control public policy. I don’t believe that. I think it’s wrong.

I don’t want to be that guy, and I’m not that guy, but I felt under this circumstance that it was something small that I could do. And again, I felt a moral obligation to do it, and I kept it secret because I was embarrassed of it because I thought that it was on some level wrong. [Editor’s note: The story of Carlson warning the president about his slow response to the virus leaked to news outlets, including the New York Times.]

What made you think that the time had arrived for this moment?

I kept reading pieces about how easy it was to transmit the virus and I just became obsessed with reading about it, and there was actually a lot of publicly available information, a lot of it speculative, but it was informed speculation in my view. And it led me to think that this could be a massive problem in the United States. And the first thing I thought when I read this was, What about all the people with non-flu-related life-threatening crises who might be denied care because the hospitals are going to be flooded not simply with coronavirus patients, but with people who believe they have coronavirus?

Did anybody from the White House—you have friends that are advisers in the White House—did any of them express concern to you that maybe Trump wasn’t fully aware of the crisis?

It was very clear to me that after all the things that have been happening recently—the Russia investigation, impeachment, and then the Democratic primaries—that a lot of people on the Republican side in politics, including in the White House, had been thinking about the world in ideological terms and in political terms. I mean, why wouldn’t they? And because of that it was really hard for a lot of people to transition. We spent three and a half years arguing about whether the president was a Russian agent, and he got impeached, and they were in that way of thinking, and it’s just hard to transition there. And maybe that’s part of the cost of doing that shit, you know what I mean?

What you’re saying to me is that because of the political lens on at that moment, they were in denial. The president was in denial about what was happening around him.

I think that in general, the news media have given people no reason to trust that they know what they’re talking about—

C’mon. Don’t blame the media.

Oh, I’m definitely blaming the media and very much including Vanity Fair, and I hope you put that in there. And I also think, and obviously I think this or I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, that it’s part of the role of leaders to look beyond the media and to look at the data that’s coming in from the intel agencies—who have also been discredited and justly so—but still, look at the numbers and look at the reports coming in and to make cool and rational judgments about what that means.

There’s a ton of noise right now. I understand why it’s the temptation to dismiss it, but you can’t dismiss it because, however distorted it may be, fundamentally this is real. It’s an illness. You’re not allowed to sort of fudge on epidemics. You have to be straightforward.

And moreover, if you want to convey strength, and in a time of crisis, you need to do that, you have to convey strength—honesty can be strength. I’m being blunt with you. Strong people have no problem admitting when they’ve screwed up. They have no problem being direct. If I’m totally blunt with you, you know it, you can tell. We know deception when we hear it. So if you want to reassure people, follow your own instincts, go with what you know is true, and if you’re wrong in some ways, people always forgive you being wrong.

What they won’t forgive is you being dishonest or weak. They won’t. And dishonesty, by the way, is always an indicator of weakness. That’s what it is.

Yes, I think I’m getting your message. And so let’s bore into the story for just a moment here. Your wife signaled to you, “Hey, maybe this would be a time for you to become a messenger here.” And so you go to Mar-a-Lago on Saturday, March 7?

Yeah.

You’d never been there before?

No.

And what was your impression? There was a birthday party for a former Fox news host, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and in part you were there for that, right?

I had no idea that was in progress until I walked into it. I had no idea. I didn’t know it was her birthday until I walked into the room. My intention was to get in and out of there without being seen by anybody. And I had even asked the Secret Service to help me do that because, again, I was embarrassed that I was doing this and I didn’t feel it was my role. I didn’t want anyone to know I was doing it.

Was it prearranged that you were going to have an audience with the president?

Yeah, I mean, I had called over there. I have spoken to people there. Yeah.

And so they said there’ll be a time for you to go into another room with the president and have a private meeting.

Yeah. It’s not like Trump was calling me up and saying, “What do I do?” I mean, that’s the opposite of what happened. So it’s probably wrong for me to even say that this happened, but I am. But it would definitely be wrong for me to get into details to what they said or anything like that.

Tell me what it is that you conveyed to him.

I said exactly what I’ve said on TV, which is this could be really bad. My view is that we may have missed the point where we can control it. Once you get cases of community transmission, as we have all over the country now, by then it was clear it was happening. I know someone very well who was in the ICU—a personal friend of mine who I had just had dinner with a month and a half ago was in the ICU with double pneumonia and struggling for life. And so I just want to make it clear this is totally real; people you know are going to get it. And I’m concerned based on conversations I’ve had that we don’t have the medical capacity to deal with it. I think it’d be very hard to keep it from spreading given the nature of American life.

So my concern was that we may not have the capacity to take all these patients and that we may not have the drugs to treat them. And by the way, at this exact moment, two days before the official daily of the Chinese Communist Party issued a threat to the United States: Maybe we’ll initiate an embargo on all antibiotics, 97% of which are manufactured in China. So the Chinese government is threatening to shut down our supply of pharmaceuticals. I didn’t make that up. That was in print. And if that’s not ominous, I’m not sure what it is. If that’s not a reminder that we need to have control over the essentials, I don’t know what is.

The portrait you're painting here is of Trump in a bubble. Don’t you think he was in denial?

I think Trump has a really finely calibrated sense of danger and I think it served him well. I think a lot of the people around him, and I mean broadly around him—particularly Republican members on Capitol Hill, in leadership too—were determined to pretend this wasn’t happening. There are a number of members of the Senate who really ought to know better, who, by the way, are at risk of being really hurt by this personally [Note: Senators Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott were both exposed to the virus at Mar-a-Lago]—who were determined to convince him that this was not that big a deal.

And so while I’m not in daily contact with Trump, I do live sometimes in Washington—I know it really well and I know everybody, and I was watching this and I was thinking, That’s just wrong. And look, I couldn’t have greater contempt for the people who present the news. Most of them. I couldn’t have greater contempt. And I mean that. But that doesn’t change the truth of what I thought was happening. And the only thing I can control is what I say. And again, I felt like I had to do it, even though I suspected on some level it would probably hurt me if I did it. I thought I should.

And did it hurt you?

I mean, I don’t know.

Well you were exposed to the coronavirus. Can you wrap your mind around the irony of the fact that while you were there, everybody was getting exposed to the coronavirus?

I mean, I’m 50 years old, so it’s pretty clear to me at this point that everything is irony. So that does not surprise me. Of course that happened. Of course! [Laughs] It’s like the Beatitudes, it’s like everything is the opposite of what you think it is. Do you know what I mean? Like everything—that’s not a chance occurrence, that’s the rule. So of course I was exposed to coronavirus while attempting to highlight the risk of coronavirus! Nothing else could have happened, really.

Lindsey Graham and others went into self-quarantine. What was your reaction upon learning you’d been exposed to this? I mean, did you get tested?

Um, I tried. I couldn’t get a test, so—

It wasn’t available?

There were none available. There were none available. I’m a totally sincere fatalist. I’m almost a Calvinist. I really believe a lot of things are beyond human control. My one concern was my children. I have four children, and one had been living in Europe and had to be flown home, and they’re all at home. So I guess I’d like to get a test for that reason. The truth is I’m pretty isolated as it is.

What’s your assessment of how Trump’s been handling it in the last four or five days?

I think…um…I think they take it seriously. I think they’re really torn between—I think they know that we’re not prepared, because we’re not. And I think they’re really worried about tanking the economy in ways that are hard to fix. And I think that they should be worried about that. This is my view, and I have no idea if it’s shared by anyone in the White House. It doesn’t seem to be their focus, I think it should be: I think they should be most concerned about jobs. You don’t want millions of people out of work, especially vulnerable people, people in the service industry, you really don’t want that. Millions of unemployed people makes your country volatile. You could issue each person a check to replace lost income and you keep people from starving, which, of course, you should do, but you wouldn’t solve the problem. The problem is unemployment. And you know, Roosevelt talked about this a lot because they had 20% unemployment. Unemployed people make for a really unstable country. And you don’t want that. Not because of its political effects necessarily, it’s not a partisan question. You don’t want to live in an unstable country, period.

Tucker, are you unable to critique Trump directly? His response has been panicked. It started with denial, has moved into panic and is completely ineffectual and causing worse problems. He’s fighting with the governor of New York right now on Twitter. I mean, are you able to directly criticize him?

I am able to do whatever I want. I mean, I haven’t gotten a single directive from the company I work for. They haven’t said literally one thing.

But are you critical?

I was the only person in media to say that in America, to say that the State Department, the Trump State Department, was lying about the Syrian gas attacks, which they were. They were lying. Yeah. And we twice killed people with prison missiles in response to what was the lie, and I said that out loud and I meant it and I was the only person who did. And so yeah, I mean, of course I can criticize Trump directly.

Are you critical of his handling right now of this pandemic? Do you think he’s done a good job? Yesterday Trump was asked how he rated his own handling of the pandemic on a scale of 1 to 10, and he gave himself a 10.

I’ve been really critical of the administration’s response to this, repeatedly every night on my show. I think the mistake that people make, and I’ve felt this for three and a half years, is making everything about Trump. It’s all about Trump. And so really at a certain point, it’s like, no, it’s all about your emotional problems. I’ve lived in Washington since I was a child. My dad ran a federal agency [Richard Warner Carlson was an assistant director of the United States Information Agency under Ronald Reagan]. I know how the government works and there are many layers to this. It’s not all about one guy’s mercurial personality, and anyone who thinks it [is] is a child and should get out of the fucking news business, right? And I look around and it’s all children. It’s all people like Jim Acosta, Oh, Trump’s a racist—who cares? There’s a freaking pandemic, dude. Just stop whining about whether he calls it the Chinese coronavirus or not. Like, this is insane. Look, there are many roles that people play in American life and in the news media, but my role, I don’t want to make every show about Trump. Not because I’m covering for Trump, but because I don’t think it’s that interesting and I don’t think it’s actually the truth. And the truth is this: We have all kinds of systemic failures here, big time. And no one wants to say that because actually they’re covering for the people who created those problems in the first place. Do you know what I mean? So I would love to hear somebody on why does it fall to Bernie Sanders to make the obvious points about corporate America’s role in all this? Bernie Sanders is a completely mediocre guy who doesn’t even really mean it—but why is he the only one who’s saying some things that are true? That’s what the media should be doing, but they’re not. Because they’re so focused on Trump. Trump is tweeting too much. Well of course he’s tweeting too much! Okay, I got it, maybe don’t read his tweets. All right. But like, there’s a lot else going on, right? That’s my opinion.

I get it. But there’s a catch-22 here, which is that the way that Trump has been successful is to create a cult of personality as a guy who can cut through the bullshit and make things happen. Suddenly that strategy is no longer functioning. His strength has become a weakness. Don’t you agree?

There’s a moment in the life of every administration when you realize that your schtick isn’t working. And you see it play out in every administration—Holy shit, we didn’t plan for this. And that’s the point where you need to think of a new way to respond to things like you do. You have to be flexible.

I wouldn’t say flexibility is a major strong suit of the Trump administration.

I think that’s a fair criticism. But I would also say, because I think it’s really important to be totally honest—if you took Trump out of the picture entirely, if he retired this afternoon, it wouldn’t fix the problems. And by the way, if you retroactively fix every bad decision he’s made for the last three and a half years, we still wouldn’t be prepared for coronavirus. And you still wouldn’t have a clear path to mitigating the effects of that virus on our economy. So if you’re only thinking about Trump, you’re missing it. You’re missing the point. This is a call to fix some pretty basic things that are broken that nobody wants to fix. And because they don’t want to fix them, they spend a lot of time talking about Trump. And Trump is happy to play that game. So it’s not just a question of conservatives deflecting blame by casting stones at the media. It’s much bigger than that.

The Trump–media relationship and the way that it subsumes everybody’s attention has turned into a real Achilles heel for us.

Ya think? That’s been obvious since day one. Day one of the campaign. And coverage is just so childish and stupid and repetitive and boring—

But can I say something? You could say the same thing about Trump himself, and I know—

But of course. This is a symbiotic relationship. But okay. So that does not obviate anybody’s responsibility. So he did it too, so, okay, great. Yeah, but we’re all adults here. So now is the time for people to start acting responsible, try to do the right thing; you can express your political views, but do the right thing and stop with this crap. And I know it makes everybody feel virtuous. And I know the real root here is every educated person that’s really frustrated because they understand they’re never going to be as rich or prominent as they thought they were going to be because the economy is changing and they’re filled with rage about that. I know what’s going on ’cause I live in that world. Yeah. And they’re just placing all of that rage onto one guy. Some of it’s deserved, some of it’s not. But it’s not actually going to fix what’s making them mad in the first place. When do you start to ask, “Why are only private equity people prospering right now?” That’s the conversation you need to have. Instead the conversation is, “Can you believe he tweeted this?” Okay. But he’s never going to stop.

When I criticize the media, I say that as someone who’s been here since 1991 and worked in newspapers and doing magazines and all three networks, and, like, I know the landscape pretty well, as well as anybody does, and so my criticism is not reflexive partisanship. I’ve never been a reflexive partisan, and you can check—it’s totally sincere. I’m appalled by the dumbness. I’m appalled.

Do you acknowledge your own role in that?

Of course I acknowledge my own role in it! Are you joking? Of course I do.

Do you acknowledge your role in this ridiculous symbiotic thing that’s made us less cohesive as a country and less rational as a country and less able to function? The reason that we’re in this?

No, I don’t. I acknowledge my role in saying a lot of stupid things over the years. I acknowledge that I probably shouldn’t have gone and talked to the president about this since I’m not any kind of policy adviser, I’m not an epidemiologist. I acknowledge all of that. What I don’t acknowledge is playing the “Donald Trump is the only story” game. I have not done that. And you can look at my show rundowns every night for three and a half years, and you’ll find that we’ve done less Trump on TV. It’s not that Trump doesn’t deserve criticism, obviously I don’t think that. It’s that there are all these massive and profound [things] going on in American society that are being completely ignored, and coronavirus was one of them. And that’s the context in which I first introduced it to our viewers.

This is one of the things that’s happening that you should know about that no one was even mentioning because—the problem with impeachment as a news story is that it had a foregone conclusion. So why does this merit wall-to-wall coverage? I never understood that. And there’s a cost to that. It’s not necessarily a cost to Trump. He benefited from it. By the way, his approval numbers went up, Trump was helped by impeachment. The problem was that interesting and important stories that everybody should kind of be thinking about were totally ignored, and coronavirus was one of them. And that’s what I said and that’s what I think now.

Did your meeting with Trump have a result? Did it cause some shift? Was there a pivot in the way that Trump himself absorbed what was going on?

I don’t know. You can assess that yourself. You can look at the timeline, but my only comment would be that it’s not my job to do that. All I felt was I just want to say what I think and that’s my responsibility. And then I’m leaving and I’m not on some CDC conference call. I can tell you that. I could feel—I could just feel a sense of real danger. Not every premonition is accurate, but I just had a really, really strong one that I couldn’t shake and I have to do this.

And so, well, let me just ask that again. You saw the timeline afterwards. I mean, you saw with his reaction was, maybe it was like a week later or it was the Friday and Saturday of last week that he steps up and takes some actions.

I think the reality of it spoke a lot louder than anything I said.

Well the question all along has been: Is Trump in touch with that reality, or could he see it through the distortion of the media that he imbibes? And I guess that’s the question I have had all along is that the first reactions from a lot of people in his political sphere was that this was a hoax. Right? Even up until like three days ago, we had California Republican Devin Nunes and then Kevin Stitt, the governor of Oklahoma, telling people to go out to the bars and hang out and gather. I mean, this is where the political media vortex has become dangerous.

I don’t think that you should encourage people to gather in large groups right now, that does not seem wise. I also don’t think you should shut down public institutions like restaurants, hotels, without thinking through the very real economic consequences to people. That’s gotta be a factor. It has to be. And anyone who says it’s not a factor is an idiot, because it has to be. And I’ve noticed that a lot of the people who say that “if we can save one life,” they give you that speech. They’re people who will not be affected by that at all, except to the extent they can’t get fresh burrata.

This is a lot of people I know, and love, and I understand where they’re coming from. I think most people are being sincere. I think the hardened partisans on all sides will always lie because that’s what they do. But most people, even most politicians, want to do the right thing in the face of the crisis. I know them! I know almost all of them. So I know that that’s true. Some of them are dumb. There are a lot of dumb ones. But who else would go into politics? It’s mostly dumb people. Not all, but mostly. So I do think there’s a very, very complicated balance, and there’s a war between competing imperatives and it’s totally real. And I think it requires a kind of subtlety that almost nobody in our leadership class is capable of.

The populist politics that Trump has practiced has made him distinctly bad at dealing with this particular moment. What made him strong as a populist has made him a terrible manager of this particular crisis.

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. You don’t get populist politics unless your institutions are failing. Because satisfied people don’t resort to populist politics. So once again, if you believe that the current paralysis is all Trump’s fault, you’re absolving an awful lot of guilty parties, maybe including yourself. That’s what I’m saying.

Well here’s my last question for you. Given how it’s been managed, given where we are, given the unknowns of the next two to six weeks to three months, do you think Trump can survive this in November?

I haven’t the faintest idea. I mean, I spent months telling our viewers that Joe Biden could never get a nomination. So I mean, I have literally no idea. I know things are changed so completely in the last 10 days. Where will they be 10 days from now?

Do you think his management of this pandemic has damaged him politically?

I think this has scared the hell out of everyone, left and right. And we’re at the very early stages of this, and according to what epidemiologists say, we’ll be where Italy is three weeks from now. And if you extrapolate from their population, that’s a lot of people in the hospital and a lot of people dead. And so that will be a completely different country at that point.

I mean, this is all happening so fast, it’s hard to think it through, but there are a lot of potential consequences to the society. Not political consequences necessarily, but social consequences to this—to the economy, to the way people live, the higher education. I mean, you’ve got the entire college-age population home right now taking classes online at a time when college debt is overwhelming families and actually creating a really dangerous overhang, economically, in the economy. So why does this not result in fewer people spending 70 grand a year to go to G.W.? I don’t know. It might.

The divisive nature of Trump’s political style has driven half the population mad and the other mad in a different way. And you know that the dysfunctionality of it is precisely ill-equipped to deal with what we’re dealing with right now.

So if you really believe that explanation, which presumably you do, you have to ask yourself, this is a sincere question: What institution do you really trust right now? Honestly.

I was watching 60 Minutes last night. Did you see it?

No.

I was surprised to learn about the kind of state-level medical operations that they’ve put into place that are being built to deal with this. There’s a world of nurses and medical people out there who are pulling together in a MASH unit style to cope with this. It’s the people on the ground who are going to help us. It’s not the people at the top.

Well see, you’re sort of making my point for me. What you’re saying is you trust the decency and the resilience of normal people.

Maybe as we’re forced to come together, we’re going to realize that the political storms that we’ve been living through are not really what life is about.

I really fervently agree with that—really fervently, as much as I agree with anything. And I really hope for that. And I, again, I think you’re kind of reiterating what I’m saying, which is that the institutions have failed so completely that what we’re left with is each other.

Again, when you say failed institutions, I include the Trump administration in that. We shall see what happens next. But please get a test and don’t needlessly expose your children to the coronavirus.

Nope. I’m not gonna. I’m waving at them through glass right now.

[Through a Fox News spokesperson, Carlson said he is “symptom free and feels healthy.” He broadcasts from a home studio in Florida.] This post has been updated.

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— This is how Matt Gaetz became Trump’s ultimate protégé
— From the Archive: Inside Stephen Glass’s web of deception that emerged as the most sustained fraud in modern journalism

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