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    The real victims of Olivia Nuzzi’s affair with RFK Jr are other female journalists | Moira Donegan

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    Anyone who is not a moralist or kidding themselves will admit that a good piece of gossip is one of life’s greatest pleasures. Gossip exposes the false sanctimony of the powerful: it reveals the smug and self-righteous to be grubby, selfish and embarrassing – just like the rest of us. If the pronouncements of politicians make history, and the reporting of the media shapes that history’s official narrative, gossip runs along behind them, like a bratty younger sibling, filling in their omissions to tell a truer story. “You left out this part.” “That’s not what you told me.”Maybe this is why media gossip about journalists and politicians carries such a frisson of transgressive delight: it breaks their monopoly on narrative authority. The people who have been appointed to tell us stories about our world, and about ourselves, finally get themselves subjected to the same treatment. It helps, too, to bust the bubble of a media industry that has long demanded more moral gravitas than it has really earned. These are the people, after all, who claim to be holding power to account. But how do they actually behave towards those in power?And so it was maybe predictable that so many people would feel a gleeful jolt of schadenfreude last week, when New York Magazine revealed that it had suspended Olivia Nuzzi, a young star reporter known for her biting wit and deep bench of Republican sources. The cause? Nuzzi had allegedly admitted to sexting with one of her reporting subjects: the anti-vax crusader, animal corpse desecrator, former presidential candidate and brain worm host Robert F Kennedy Jr.Love is blind, and it could be that Nuzzi simply has unconventional taste. But the incident has taken on heavy symbolic proportions, becoming a litmus test within media circles for various opinions on journalistic ethics, how to earn and keep readers’ trust, and the journalists’ vexed obligations to the truth in an industry where models of “access journalism” routinely incentivize them to have close – even cozy – relationships with those they cover.Nuzzi, in particular, has a talent for getting incendiary and controversial figures on the right to say things that they probably shouldn’t, and media watchers have long speculated that this might be because of her own conservative leanings: that she is able to ingratiate herself to rightwing subjects because she is able to convince them that she offers a sympathetic ear. In that much, at least, any honest journalist will have to admit that Nuzzi is not alone. But she seems to have taken her sympathy for her subjects far beyond the industry baseline.Not everyone finds Nuzzi’s conduct objectionable on journalistic grounds. Ben Smith, the former New York Times media columnist who now runs the outlet Semafor, used his newsletter to ask what all the fuss was about. He claimed that British journalists had texted him to the effect of: “If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?”The NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik characterizes this statement from Smith as “bananas”. We might also add that it is insulting to Smith’s colleagues, be they American, British or anything else – and in particular, to the women. It implies that there are large numbers of female journalists trading sex for access. There are not. It is rare, and more than frowned upon, for journalists to sleep with their sources or subjects: doing so compromises the integrity of the work. And most female journalists, like most female professionals in any field, are not interested in trading on their sexuality for professional advancement.And yet Smith’s defense of Nuzzi was not the only comment that seemed to take a kind of prurient delight in the story. Almost immediately, RFK Jr sympathizers started leaking stories to the media that seemed aimed at minimizing his own role in the relationship and portraying Nuzzi as a sex-starved obsessive, who “bombarded” the Kennedy scion against his will with “increasingly pornographic photos and videos that he found difficult to resist”, in the words of Jessica Reed Kraus. Sure.Other outlets, eager to credulously repeat these claims, took a similar track. The New York Post ran a story to this effect that featured an image of Nuzzi in a bikini. Another journalist, Keith Olbermann, chimed in with the irrelevant and unhelpful information that he also dated Nuzzi once, back when he was in his mid-50s and she was in her early 20s. The Daily Beast went to far as to publish a gross fictionalization of Nuzzi and RFK Jr’s correspondence.The schadenfreude has changed its tenor: from delight in the revealed hypocrisies of the powerful to delight in the sexual humiliation of a woman. It is assumed that it is Nuzzi’s sexuality itself – rather than her decision to direct it toward a subject of her reporting – that disqualifies her from public dignity.Let’s be clear: Nuzzi is not a victim. There is no indication that her relationship with RFK Jr was anything but consensual, however distasteful we may find it. Nor does she appear to be a woman of robust feminist commitments. Not only has Nuzzi routinely cozied up to powerful Republican political players, but until recently she was engaged to the Politico writer Ryan Lizza, who was fired from the New Yorker in 2017 for alleged sexual misconduct. The misogyny directed against her, then, raises an uncomfortable question for feminists: how do we criticize the actions of patriarchal women without falling into the trap of perpetuating misogyny against them?The most ungenerous interpretation of Nuzzi’s career – which is not necessarily the most likely one – is that she used her youth and good looks to her advantage, flattering the egos of men who could get her jobs or serve as sources. In this scenario, she would have made a trade-off – sexual attention for professional opportunity. There is a tendency to demonize this kind of use of sexuality by women (and a less pronounced, usually tardy tendency to criticize such trades when they are demanded or accepted by men). It is this tendency, feeding off the unspoken and unproven assumptions about just what Nuzzi and RFK Jr were offering each other, that has led to all the slut-shaming of Nuzzi in the media.Women who make such trades are not necessarily unequipped for the jobs they get by them: talent and corruption often coexist in one person. (And whatever the controversies and uncertainties about Nuzzi herself, there is no dispute that she is very talented.) But the problem with such transactions, where they do happen, is not that the women who make them are sluts. It is that they are scabs. Such trade-offs can be consensual, but they can never really be ethical: they make it harder for other women in their industries who are not willing or able to use their sexuality to advance to do so; they set the precedent that sex for opportunity is an acceptable trade to make to female workers; they encourage men to leverage their professional power to extract sexual favors. They cast all female professionals under the suspicion of corruptibility and unseriousness.Whatever Nuzzi was doing, she doesn’t seem to have been thinking much about her female colleagues; she appears to have mostly been thinking about herself. But she’s not the only one in this scenario who deserves our attention. Spare a thought for the other women working in journalism – including many of Nuzzi’s colleagues at New York Magazine – who will now be embarrassed by unfair comparisons to her. If there’s a victim in this story, it’s them.

    Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      Trump says he won’t run for president again in 2028 if he loses in November

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      Donald Trump said in an interview released on Sunday that he did not think he would run for president again in 2028 if he loses this year’s race for the White House.In an interview on the Full Measure television show with Sharyl Attkisson, the former US president – who ran in 2016 and 2020 – was asked whether he saw himself running yet again in four years time.“No, I don’t,” Trump answered. “I don’t see that at all.”He said: “Hopefully, we’re going to be successful.”In the polls, Kamala Harris leads Trump in most head-to-head surveys after Trump had previously established a solid lead over Joe Biden – before he scotched his re-election campaign after a disastrous debate performance. But the presidential race remains tight ahead of November’s election, especially in the key battleground states that will hold the key to victory.Attkisson asked Trump what positions he saw people such as the tech billionaire Elon Musk, the former Democratic congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard and the ex-independent presidential candidate Robert F Kennedy Jr, holding in his administration. Trump said he had not made deals with anybody because “it’s not appropriate to do it” and “it’s too early”.Still, he laid out what Musk, Gabbard and Kennedy, who are all former Democrats or supporters of the party, could potentially work on if he were to be elected.“Bobby will do great on health and on the environment,” he said. “He looks at other countries where they don’t use chemicals, where they use much less than we use, and the people are healthier than they are in the United States, which is not that healthy a country.”Kennedy has been campaigning for Trump since he ended his own independent presidential bid to support the Republican nominee.Trump described Gabbard, a military veteran who served as a Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii before retiring, as “a common sense person”. She recently said she would “be honored to serve” under a second Trump administration. Gabbard ran for president as a Democrat in 2020, but chose to support the Republican nominee in this year’s elections.During a Fox News interview, Gabbard said she was aiming for a role working on foreign policy.“I’ve known her a little bit, and it was a great honor when we got her,” Trump said in Sunday’s interview.Last month, both Gabbard and Kennedy were appointed to Trump’s transition team, which would help Trump choose policies and personnel if he were to win White House in November.Trump praised Musk as a person who can advance policies to cut costs in the federal government, an idea he has raised along with a “government efficiency commission”.“Elon is Elon,” he said. “He’s a big cost-cutter. He’s always been very good at it, and I’m good at it. But Elon, I’ll tell you what, he will go in, and he’ll say: ‘This is what you have to do. You have to do this.’ He is so into that, he feels there’s so much waste and fat in this country, and he’s right.” More

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      Reporter Olivia Nuzzi on leave after alleged personal relationship with RFK Jr revealed

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      A top politics writer for New York magazine has taken leave at the publication after it emerged that she allegedly had a personal relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr, a scion of the Kennedy dynasty who ran a high-profile independent campaign for the White House before endorsing Donald Trump.Olivia Nuzzi, who has written extensive long-form pieces about US politics, including RFK Jr, violated the magazine’s standards around disclosing conflicts of interests, the publication said in a statement.“Our Washington Correspondent Olivia Nuzzi acknowledged to the magazine’s editors that she had engaged in a personal relationship with a former subject relevant to the 2024 campaign while she was reporting on the campaign, a violation of the magazine’s standards around conflicts of interest and disclosures,” New York said.It added: “Had the magazine been aware of this relationship, she would not have continued to cover the presidential campaign. An internal review of her published work has found no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias. She is currently on leave from the magazine, and the magazine is conducting a more thorough third-party review. We regret this violation of our readers’ trust.”In a statement Nuzzi acknowledged the relationship but said it had not been a physical one and that it had developed after Nuzzi had written a piece about Kennedy and his quixotic and ultimately doomed run for the White House.Nuzzi said that “the nature of some communication between myself and a former reporting subject turned personal” earlier this year.“During that time, I did not directly report on the subject nor use them as a source,” she said. “The relationship was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict. I deeply regret not doing so immediately and apologize to those I’ve disappointed, especially my colleagues at New York.”A spokesperson for RFK Jr told CNN that Kennedy “only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece”.RFK Jr is the son of Robert Francis Kennedy, who was assassinated in 1968 while running for the Democratic nomination for president, almost five years after his brother and the US president, John F Kennedy, was assassinated.RFK Jr’s 2024 independent campaign never really took off to challenge the Democrats or Republicans and his extreme stances on some issues, especially around vaccinations, did little to endear him to mainstream Americans.Nuzzi has become a high-profile American journalist and television pundit. One of her most recent pieces included an interview with Donald Trump in which the former US president invited her to examine his ear, injured in an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Recounting the experience, she wrote: “An ear had never appeared to have gone through less.” More

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      RFK Jr’s name will remain on ballot in swing state Wisconsin, judge rules

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name will remain on the ballot in the swing state of Wisconsin, a judge ruled on Monday.Dane county circuit judge Stephen Ehlke ruled that Wisconsin law clearly states presidential candidates who have submitted nomination papers can’t be removed from the ballot unless they die. Kennedy’s campaign submitted nomination papers before the state’s 6 August deadline.“The statute is plain on its face,” Ehlke said, adding later: “Mr Kennedy has no one to blame but himself if he didn’t want to be on the ballot.”Time is running out for Kennedy to get his name off the Wisconsin ballot. County clerks face a Wednesday deadline to print ballots and distribute them to more than 1,800 local officials in cities, towns and villages who run elections.Kennedy asked a state appellate court to consider the case last week, days before Ehlke issued his ruling. The second district court of appeals has been waiting for Ehlke’s decision before deciding whether to take the case.The Wisconsin elections commission voted 5-1 earlier this month to approve Kennedy’s name for the ballot after an attempt by Republican commissioners to remove him failed. The commission noted the statute that prevents candidates from removing themselves from the ballot short of death.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe presence of independent and third-party candidates on the ballot could be a key factor in Wisconsin, where four of the past six presidential elections have been decided by between 5,700 votes and about 23,000 votes.In 2016, Green party nominee Jill Stein got just over 31,000 votes in Wisconsin – more than Trump’s winning margin of just under 23,000 votes. Some Democrats have blamed her for helping Trump win the state and the presidency that year.Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed Republican candidate Donald Trump. Kennedy said he would try to get his name removed from ballots in battleground states while telling his supporters that they could continue to back him in the majority of states where they are unlikely to sway the outcome.Kennedy won a court order in North Carolina earlier this month to remove his name from ballots there. Kennedy filed a lawsuit on 3 September an attempt to get off the Wisconsin ballot, arguing that third-party candidates are discriminated against because state law treats Republicans and Democrats running for president differently.Republicans and Democrats have until 5pm on the first Tuesday in September before an election to certify their presidential nominee. Independent candidates such as Kennedy can only withdraw before the 6 August deadline for submitting nomination papers. More

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      RFK Jr says he faces federal investigation for beheading whale

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr has said that he is being investigated by federal authorities for collecting the head from a decapitated whale carcass.During a campaign event on Saturday for the Republican nominee, Donald Trump, in Glendale, Arizona, the former independent presidential candidate said, “I received a letter from the National Marine Fisheries Institute saying that they were investigating me for collecting a whale specimen 20 years ago.”He added: “This is all about the weaponization of our government against political opponents.”Kennedy, who endorsed the former president after dropping out of November’s election, fell under scrutiny in recent weeks after the resurfacing of a 2012 interview that his daughter Kick gave to Town & Country in which she addressed the whale in question.Recounting how the creature washed up on a beach near Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, she said, “[He] ran down to the beach with a chainsaw, cut off the whale’s head and then bungee-corded it to the roof of the family minivan for the five-hour haul back to Mount Kisco, New York.“Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet. We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day to day stuff for us.”Reports of the decapitation caught the attention of the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, which called on federal authorities to investigate Kennedy. In a letter to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa), the environmental group said Kennedy “violated the Marine Mammal Protection Act, and possibly the Endangered Species Act, by illegally cutting the head off of a dead whale in or around 1994 in Hyannis Point, Massachusetts, and bringing it to his New York house.”The letter went on to say, “We hope that the NOAA Office of Law Enforcement, at a minimum, is able to ensure that Mr Kennedy surrenders any and all illegally obtained wildlife that he continues to possess, including the whale skull he took from the Massachusetts beach in 1994. Given Mr Kennedy’s reckless disregard for the two most important marine conservation laws in the United States, we ask that NOAA consider all appropriate civil and criminal penalties as well.”Kennedy in August faced a separate backlash after an unrelated animal admission. In that case, he acknowledged on a video that he was behind the dumping of a dead bear cub in New York City’s Central Park over a decade ago.Recalling the episode, Kennedy said that he picked up the carcass and put it in his van with plans to skin it and eat it later. However, he ran out of time to take the bear home and instead decided to stage a scene to make it look like a cyclist had hit the animal.“We thought it would be amusing for whoever found it,” Kennedy said. More

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      North Carolina court rules RFK Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots

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      A North Carolina appeals court on Friday ruled that Robert F Kennedy Jr’s name must be taken off state ballots for president, upending plans in the battleground state just as officials were about to begin mailing out the nation’s first absentee ballots for the 5 November presidential election.The intermediate-level court of appeals issued an order granting Kennedy’s request to halt the mailing of ballots that included his name. The court also told a trial judge to order the state board of elections to distribute ballots without Kennedy’s name on them. No legal explanation was given.State law otherwise requires the first absentee ballots to be mailed or transmitted no later than 60 days before the general election, making Friday the deadline. The process of reprinting and assembling ballot packages would probably take more than two weeks, state attorneys have said. The ruling could be appealed.Kennedy, the nominee of the We the People party in North Carolina, had sued last week to get off the state’s ballots after he suspended his campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. But the Democratic majority on the state board of elections rejected the request, saying it was too late in the process of printing ballots and coding tabulation machines. Kennedy then sued.Rebecca Holt, a Wake county superior court judge, on Thursday denied Kennedy’s effort to keep his name off ballots, prompting his appeal. In the meantime, Holt told election officials to hold back sending absentee ballots until noon Friday.A favorable outcome for Kennedy could assist Trump’s efforts to win North Carolina. The Republican nominee won the state’s electoral votes by just 1.3% over Joe Biden in 2020.More than 132,500 people – military and overseas workers and in-state civilian residents – have requested North Carolina absentee ballots so far, the elections board said.In an email, Paul Cox, state board attorney, told election directors in all 100 counties after Friday’s ruling to hold on to the current ballots but not send them. More than 2.9m absentee and in-person ballots have been printed so far.No decision has been made on appealing Friday’s decision, Cox wrote, and removing Kennedy and running mate Nicole Shanahan from the ballot would be “a major undertaking for everyone”, Cox wrote.Since Kennedy suspended his campaign, the environmentalist and author has tried to get his name removed from ballots in several states where the race between Trump and Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, is expected to be close.Kennedy on Wednesday sued in Wisconsin to get his name removed from the presidential ballot there after the state elections commission voted to keep him on it. Kennedy also filed a lawsuit in Michigan but a judge ruled on Tuesday that he must remain on the ballot there.Read more about the 2024 US election

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      The strangest insult in US politics: why do Republicans call it ‘the Democrat party’?

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      The Democratic party? Robert F Kennedy Jr’s never heard of it.On Tuesday, the former presidential candidate issued his latest condemnation of the “Democrat party”, endorsing a bizarre linguistic tradition among haters of the institution. As Donald Trump told a rally in 2018: “I call it the Democrat party. It sounds better rhetorically.” By “better”, of course, he meant “worse”, as he explained the next year: he prefers to say “the ‘Democrat party’ because it doesn’t sound good”.In removing two letters from “Democratic”, the former president is adopting a jibe that’s been around since at least the 1940s. Opponents of the party long ago decided, for some reason, that this brutal act of syllabic denial would shame their opponents. Democrats don’t seem particularly devastated by the attack, but Republicans and those who love them have stuck with it. We hear it regularly from party luminaries such as JD Vance, Mike Johnson and Nikki Haley; pragmatic independents like RFK Jr; and media voices across the vast spectrum from Fox News to Infowars. Last week, even Tulsi Gabbard, once a Democratic presidential candidate herself, wrote an op-ed proudly describing her departure from the Democrat party and support for Trump.But even if the misnaming doesn’t exactly leave liberal snowflakes in tears, it does serve a purpose, says Nicole Holliday, acting associate professor of linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s a marker of affiliation – an indicator of the media a person consumes and the politicians they listen to. She recently heard a friend remark on “Democrat party” policies and asked why they used the term; the friend wasn’t even aware they had done it. “Language is contagious, especially emotionally charged political language,” Holliday says. “Most of the time, we don’t have the cognitive bandwidth to think very hard about every single word that we’re using. We just use it because it’s what other people do.”That lack of awareness “shows how normalized it’s become”, says Larry Glickman, Stephen and Evalyn Milman professor in American studies at Cornell University, who likens the term to a “schoolyard taunt”. It suggests the party is “outside the mainstream of American politics so much so that we’re not even going to call them by the name they prefer. We refuse to give them that amount of respect.”It’s part of a familiar pattern, as Holliday has written: “Intentionally calling a set of people by something other than their official and preferred form of reference is a common tactic of opposition that is designed to confer disrespect.” If someone named Christopher prefers not to be called Chris, and you do it anyway, it’s pretty clear you’re being rude – regardless of your politics, she says. And she and Glickman both point out that we’re seeing a new version of the same unpleasant phenomenon when it comes to the pronunciation of Kamala Harris’s first name. Almost half the speakers at the Republican convention got it wrong, according to the Washington Post. At a July rally, Trump said he “couldn’t care less” if he mispronounced the word. Eventually, Harris’s grandnieces, ages six and eight, felt compelled to offer a lesson at the Democratic convention this month.Such bullying may be a Trump trademark, but its origins are a bit fuzzy. According to Glickman, the term first came to prominence in 1946 thanks to a congressman named Brazilla Carroll Reece, who headed the Republican National Committee. Unlike Trump, Reece saw himself as a liberal – at least according to that era’s definition of the term; still, he wasn’t a fan of the New Deal or other recent developments. He used the term to indicate that what was once the Democratic party no longer existed: it had been commandeered by “radicals”. In 1948, the Republican party platform left off the “ic” in “Democratic”, and in 1952, a newspaper columnist asked: “Who has taken the ‘ic’ out of the party of our fathers?” Senator Joseph McCarthy, meanwhile, helped popularize the term.Over the decades, the Democratic party became associated with liberal policies, and eventually, “the ‘Democrat party’ slur became a condemnation of liberalism itself”, Glickman wrote. The phrase was a huge hit in the 90s and 2000s; Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and George W Bush played it on repeat. By the following decade, Trump was mandating the word: “The Democrat party. Not Democratic. It’s Democrat. We have to do that.”Removing the “ic” does seem to suggest the party isn’t about democracy. But if that’s the goal, Glickman wonders: “Why not call it the undemocratic party? Like Trump used to say the Department of Injustice.” And anyway, as they’ve proved since 2020, democracy isn’t high on the list of Republican values. Instead, Glickman suggests, it’s more about a “babyish” tendency to misname people. Also, as Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker in 2006, “it fairly screams ‘rat’.”So what should Democrats do? Is it time to start calling Republicans Republics? Licans? Relics? President Harry Truman tried “Publicans”, and it clearly didn’t take off. Perhaps it’s best, especially considering that many people don’t even know it’s an insult, to just keep ignoring it. Getting mad would be taking the bait. “This would be constructed as Democrats are weak pedants who can’t take a joke and they’re policing our language and see how they’re so heavy-handed with regulation?” Holliday says.So Democrats can let the attempts at bullying continue. Trump and his gang clearly need to blow off some steam; might as well be through the world’s tiniest, oddest insult. More

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      Tucker Carlson lost his platform but crucially he still has Donald Trump’s ear

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      In spring of last year, Tucker Carlson was on the outs.The former prime-time host had been booted from the Fox News channel where he had made his name. Ensconced in his remote Maine home, Carlson launched a new show on what was then called Twitter, but as his viewer figures quickly plunged, consensus opinion was that Carlson’s position as a news and political tastemaker, someone capable of creating Republican stars and taking down careers, was over.It turns out that wasn’t quite right.The eponymous network that Carlson has since created, where he hosts interviews and delivers screeds to subscribing viewers, certainly lacks the reach of his Fox News show. But he has remained a key figure behind the scenes in Republican politics, someone with the ear of Trump and the ability to influence key positions. He had a headline slot at the Republican national convention, and next month is going on a tour that will feature JD Vance, Trump’s running mate.“He’s a confidant of Trump, and the GOP is the party of Trump now,” said Heather Hendershot, a professor at Northwestern University’s school of communication whose work focuses on television news and conservative and rightwing media.That relationship has allowed Carlson to become, if not a kingmaker, then certainly a prince-maker – playing a key role in Vance’s ascendancy to vice-presidential candidate. Vance was a frequent presence on Tucker Carlson Tonight during his run for Senate in Ohio, hopping on to pontificate on all manner of issues that Carlson’s far-right audience like. It was on Carlson’s show that Vance characterized Kamala Harris and others “childless cat ladies”, a comment that resurfaced in July.The pair stayed close, and Carlson had a key role in one of the most important decisions Trump had to make: choosing his running mate. The New York Times reported that Trump was “wavering” on choosing Vance in June, considering instead the more experienced Marco Rubio or the rich, inoffensive Doug Burgum. Carlson intervened in bombastic fashion, warning Trump that such a move could see him assassinated, according to the Times, and briefing that neither Rubio, the Florida senator, nor Burgum, the governor of North Dakota, could be trusted.“[Trump’s decision to pick Vance] is kind of backfiring for him now, because Vance keeps revealing his strange attitudes about women, childless women and childless women with cats. So it’s not really helping him that much, and Trump’s team isn’t really pleased about it, I’m sure,” Hendershot said.“It’s interesting that he had Trump’s ear for that, and his rationale was very sort of strange, or weird, is the word we’re using now, and kind of conspiratorial.”The conspiratorial aspect has long been key to Carlson’s appeal, and if his influence with Trump has increased – even in the face of texts emerging in 2023 that Carlson had said of Trump: “I hate him passionately” – it has done so as Carlson has become more fringe.In February, he aired an interview with Vladimir Putin in which he allowed the Russian autocrat to drone on for two hours about everything from a ninth-century Scandinavian prince to how he was allegedly prepared to end his invasion of Ukraine, and also gave a platform to Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist who was ordered to pay $1.5bn to the families of the Sandy Hook victims after he claimed the 2012 elementary school shooting was faked.“If anything, he appears to have descended into even more public crackpottery since he left Fox News,” said Matt Gertz, a senior fellow at Media Matters for America, a leftwing advocacy group.“Someone like that having a direct line to the former president of the United States, who could be the president again, is certainly a matter of great concern.”Carlson has retained that direct line even as his ability to reach the public appears to have declined. His Tucker Carlson Network has only 200,000 subscribers, the Wall Street Journal reported, while at its peak, his Fox News show attracted millions of viewers a night, although Carlson is popular on other platforms: his podcast is the second most popular on Spotify, behind only Joe Rogan, and his interview with Putin, while widely panned, was a success in terms of numbers: it received more than 200m views when Carlson posted it to X, although it is unclear how many people watched the entire thing.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“His media influence has diminished substantially since he left Fox, but his political influence is still quite potent,” Gertz said.“Tucker Carlson was really the most powerful single figure in the rightwing media. He was someone who was capable of swinging Republican primary elections, but also someone who was capable of swinging news cycles, of creating messages that would be broadly used by the right.”Gertz said that wasn’t the case any more, although Carlson remained “a potent political force”.“His relationship with Donald Trump seems to be the key factor here, he has been able, by publicly supporting him so loudly, to ensure that he still apparently has the ability to contact Donald Trump directly and advise him on key issues.”Along with the questionable guidance Carlson gave Trump over Vance, he was also key to bringing together Trump and Robert F Kennedy Jr for a meeting at the GOP convention, and Vanity Fair reported that it was Carlson and Donald Trump Jr who helped organize Kennedy’s subsequent withdrawal from the presidential race and endorsement of Trump. The New York Times reported that Carlson connected Trump and Kennedy “on a three-way text message” hours after the attempted assassination on Trump, a message chain that led to the pair speaking on the phone that night.Where Carlson’s influence ultimately leads will probably depend on whether Trump can win in November. But in the meantime, despite the low views for Carlson’s shows and his lack of a wide public platform, his position as a key figure is demonstrated from “Tucker Carlson live”, a 16-date tour he will embark on in September.Trump Jr and Vance, two of the people closest to the former president, will appear with Carlson in Florida and Pennsylvania respectively, for a tour that Carlson claims is “going to be interesting and fun as hell”.While the latter will depend on an individual’s politics and taste, Carlson’s continuing influence at the top of Republican politics is certainly interesting – and could be worrying should Trump be re-elected president. More

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      RFK Jr sues North Carolina elections board to remove his name from ballot

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      Robert F Kennedy Jr is suing North Carolina’s state board of elections after it refused to remove his name from the electoral ballot following his decision to drop his independent presidential campaign and endorse Donald Trump.The legal action comes after a series of ballot woes that initially impeded Kennedy’s campaign but are now threatening to undermine the impact of his decision to end it.Kennedy announced the suspension of his presidential bid on 23 August, saying he planned to remove his name from the ballot in 10 states, including vital swing states where his was presence was likely to damage Trump in knife-edge contests with Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee.“Our polling consistently showed that by staying on the ballot in the battleground states, I would likely hand the election over to the Democrats, with whom I disagree on the most existential issues,” Kennedy told journalists when he announced his withdrawal in Phoenix, Arizona, last month.He has since been enthusiastically embraced by Trump, who has appointed him to his transition team, despite concerns among conservative Republicans about Kennedy’s Democratic past and his support for abortion rights.However, Kennedy’s request to remove his name in North Carolina – a key battleground where recent opinion surveys have shown Harris taking a small lead – was rejected by the state election board after it said around 1.7m ballot papers had already been printed and that producing new ones would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.“It would not be practical to reprint ballots that have already been printed and meet the state law deadline to start absentee voting,” the board said in a 29 August statement.Sixty seven of the states 100 counties have already received their absentee mail-in ballots, meaning creating batches would create logistical problems, officials said. “When we talk about the printing a ballot we are not talking about … pressing ‘copy’ on a Xerox machine. This is a much more complex and layered process,” the election board’s executive director, Karen Brinson Bell, said.Board members split three to two along Democratic-Republican party lines in denying Kennedy’s request.A law suit filed on his behalf claims that the decision has damaged his rights of free speech.“By refusing to acknowledge Kennedy’s statutory rights and entitlements, defendants have irreparably harmed him,” the suit argued. “Even worse, by forcing Kennedy to remain on the ballot against his will, defendants are compelling speech in violation of [the US constitution].”The dispute with North Carolina is mirrored in two other states seen as vital to the outcome of the 5 November election.Kennedy has also been refused permission to remove his name from the ballot in Wisconsin and Michigan, where polls indicate his presence could help Harris at the expense of Trump.In Michigan, Harris gains 0.1% with Kennedy’s name on the ballot, according to RealClearPolitics, which already gives her a 2.2% lead over Trump from recent polling averages. The same analysis sees her gaining 0.5% through Kennedy’s presence in Wisconsin, where she already has a one point advantage in recent surveys.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWisconsin – where Kennedy was nominated by the Natural Law Party – rejected his request to remove his name on 27 August, citing election law that states that only death could result in a candidate’s removal once nominated.“Any person who files nomination papers and qualifies to appear on the ballot may not decline nomination,” the state’s election law says. “The name of that person shall appear upon the ballot except in case of death of the person.”Kennedy has successfully removed himself from the ballot in several other battleground states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona.His struggle to get off the ballot in some states has been mirrored by his difficulties in getting on in others, where his presence is unlikely to affect the outcome.In New York, an appeals committee last week upheld a judge’s decision to exclude from the ballot on the grounds that he lived in California and that an address he filed as a state residence was that of a friend.“This is not a situation where Kennedy erroneously listed a former residence in the nominating petition, but rather, Kennedy listed an address at which the record evidence reflects he has never resided,” the panel of judges wrote.Ironically, Georgia – another battleground state where Kennedy’s presence could adversely affect Trump – recently ruled that he was “not qualified” to appear on the ballot because of doubts about his New York residence. The Georgia secretary of state’s office has said that Kennedy’s name “will not be appearing on the ballot in Georgia this election”. More