Tucker Carlson Told Trump to Pick J.D. Vance or the Deep State Might Assassinate Him: Report

J.D. Vance officially became Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate on Monday, but apparently the Ohio senator was struggling to get the VP nod locked up until the very last second.

The New York Times reported on Tuesday that “the lead-up to Mr. Trump’s selection of Mr. Vance was even more chaotic” than his selection of Mike Pence eight years ago, and was “uncertain down to the final hours, with a frantic lobbying effort until the last possible moment by anti-Vance forces, including Rupert Murdoch and his allies, with some of it playing out in public.” Trump, the outlet notes, “seemed uncertain right until the end, privately raising some of the negative comments Mr. Vance had made about him in the past.” (Those comments included calling Trump “America’s Hitler” and saying he is “unfit for our nation’s highest office.”)

The campaign against Vance for VP reportedly involved Murdoch sending top executives and columnists from the New York Post to meet with Trump and make the case against Vance’s candidacy. (The Australian billionaire apparently preferred North Dakota governor Doug Burgum.) Longtime Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway is said to have “argued privately that other options, such as [Senator Marco] Rubio, were better,” according to people familiar with the matter. Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin also “tried to persuade Mr. Trump not to choose Mr. Vance,” per the Times. (A spokesman for Griffin told the outlet that the businessman felt there were several good options and that Team Trump had been “thoughtful.”)

On the flip side, allies of the Ohio senator “ran a counter campaign to reassure Mr. Trump about” picking Vance. Elon Musk reportedly “told Mr. Trump directly that he should choose Mr. Vance as his running mate, describing the Trump-Vance pairing as ‘beautiful’.” (Musk did not respond to requests for comment from the Times.) Donald Trump Jr., who has grown close with Vance over the last several years “pushed…most insistently” in both public and private. Even Tucker Carlson personally beseeched the former president to pick Vance, making a wild, ominous claim about what might happen if Trump went with Rubio or Burgum instead:

When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Mr. Trump might be wavering on Mr. Vance, he intervened. Mr. Carlson, who was visiting Australia on a speaking tour, phoned Mr. Trump and delivered an apocalyptic warning, according to two people briefed on their conversation. He told Mr. Trump that Mr. Rubio could not be trusted—that he would work against him and would try to lead America into nuclear war. Mr. Carlson, who declined to comment for this article, told Mr. Trump that Mr. Burgum could not be trusted, either.

Mr. Carlson told Mr. Trump in that June phone call that he believed that if he chose a “neocon” as his V.P.—an abbreviation for Republicans who favor using U.S. power to implant democracy abroad—then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.

Also apparently hurting the non-Vance candidates’ chances was the fact that (1) Trump reportedly viewed Rubio “as disloyal for having campaigned in 2016 against Mr. Rubio’s friend and mentor, Jeb Bush, and wondered whether he could be trusted” and (2) Trump “was repelled by a Daily Mail article describing Mr. Burgum weeping at various moments.”

According to the Times, calls urging him to pick the Ohio senator continued “until the moment Mr. Trump finally told Mr. Vance of his decision, on Monday afternoon, less than half an hour before he announced his choice on social media.”

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