It’s hard to think of a current political media figure whose evolution has been more bizarre than Tucker Carlson’s.

Once upon a time, he was just another mild-mannered conservative talking head, with his trademark bowties accurately letting viewers know just how mild. Which is not to say his commentary was bad; I distinctly recall perking up whenever he would fill in on Hannity & Colmes, because if nothing else he was consistently less vapid than Sean. Carlson co-founded the Daily Caller in 2010, which was a solid enough conservative news site, but nothing revolutionary.

But something strange happened when he replaced Fox News mainstay Bill O’Reilly in 2017. Before long, his primetime show became known for some of the fieriest monologues in the field and confrontational interviews with all manner of hacks almost unheard of on cable news. He developed a special knack for channeling the frustrations of the sane and all-too-rare contempt for peddlers of madness—including many within the Republican establishment. Somehow, the bowtie guy had become what the kids call based (no, I’ve never entirely understood the term either).

If that had been where his evolution stopped, Carlson would be the most important figure in conservative media today, hands-down. He would be absolutely deserving of the Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’s description as a “fearless American who is unafraid to challenge the Washington regime, ask tough questions, and hold the ruling elite accountable.”

But something else was happening too. While he was becoming the surprise king of conservative media, there were signs that his common-sense-for-the-common-man posture was morphing into a brand of kooky populism under which government should ban driverless cars specifically because they’d take jobs from truckers (and the real reason to ban them, public safety, is just a pretext), and anyone to the right of isolationism is to be demonized as a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger.

Today, those tendencies are in full bloom, and Tucker Carlson has fully embraced his niche as a more presentable Alex Jones, telling the nation’s crackpots exactly what they want to hear, no matter how sick or how stupid. The garbage he’s peddled on the Russia-Ukraine invasion alone could fill a book. Helpfully, however, this week he gave us a soundbite so transparently insane that it manages to capture his entire schtick in miniature.

Speaking to Adam Carolla, Carlson said the following about Donald Trump’s odds of returning to the White House:

They protested him, they called him names. He won anyway. They impeached him –twice– on ridiculous pretenses. They fabricated a lot about what happened on January 6 in order to impeach him. It didn’t work, he came back. And then they indicted him. It didn’t work. He became more popular. Then they indicted him three more times! And every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, now you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man. We are speeding towards assassination, obviously. No one will say that but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion. Do you know what I mean? They have decided, permanent Washington and both parties, have decided that there’s something about Trump that’s so threatening to them, they just can’t have it.

Tucker may be monetizing the simpleminded, but rest assured he’s smart enough to not believe a word of this. He knows Trump’s 2016 win, while unexpected, was one of the closest in presidential history, heavily dependent on deep longstanding contempt for his opponent. He knows Trump’s 2020 loss is a big enough wrench in this narrative to skip it entirely. He knows the indictments have only made him more popular among Republican primary voters; the voters who actually decide elections hate his guts.

Most of all, he knows that “permanent Washington” does not consider anything about Trump the least bit threatening. We can safely deduce this from three simple points: having lived through one Trump presidency and witnessing how unthreatening it was, the overwhelming unlikelihood of him winning another general election (see aforementioned point and links about voters hating his guts), and my personal favorite, the fact that we know from Carlson’s own words—texted in private after the 2020 election—that Carlson himself did not consider the Trump presidency threatening.

Quote: “That’s the last four years. We’re all pretending we’ve got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it’s been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn’t really an upside to Trump.” (Carlson’s only explanation so far? Claiming he was mad not at Trump, but at a random Trump campaign staffer for sending him bad information. Yes, really.)

But assassination isn’t the only option. Carlson pitched another possibility, and it’s a doozy:

Once you start indicting your political opponents, you know that you have to win or else they’re going to indict you if they win. So they can’t lose. They will do anything to win […] What are they going to do? They’re going to go to war with Russia is what they’re going to do. There will be a hot war between the United States and Russia in this next year. Of course, they want it anyway.

Why? Because “they need to declare war footing in order to assume war powers in order to win. I believe that and I think the evidence shows that is true […] I think we could Tonkin Gulf our way into it where all of a sudden missiles land in Poland and “the Russians did it” and we’re going to war. I could see that happening very easily.

“I would bet my house on it, we’re going to war with Russia,” Carlson says. Spoiler alert: he is not going to bet his house on it.

This is so mind-shatteringly stupid that nobody who takes it seriously should be entrusted with anything as complicated as shoelaces, starting with the fact that they don’t need “war footing” in order to win. They don’t need to convince anyone to assume the massive lifetime risk that would come with killing a former president. They just need Trump to be their opponent.

Beyond that, while the Right’s populist faction may be convinced we live in a Code Pink fever dream where everyone in politics loves war more than anything else, here in the real world that would be the last thing Joe Biden—you know, the guy who initially suggested a “minor incursion” into Ukraine would be no big deal, and whose actual Ukraine policy has been to withhold critical aid over fear of escalation—or his handlers would want politically.

Mismanaging foreign policy to the point where a hot war with a nuclear power breaks out on his watch would be one of the few scenarios that could possibly top the political disastrousness that Covid-19 wreaked on Trump in 2020. It would be a failure of historic proportions, a situation ugly and frightening enough that even Trump might well seem worth taking a chance on again, even under indictment. In more than a few voters’ eyes, it would even transform Trump’s self-declared ability to end war in 24 hours from obvious BS to something genuinely tempting.

None of this analysis is particularly complicated; it just requires basic reasoning skills and paying a reasonable amount of attention to current events—two things that Tucker Carlson’s current grift counts on his audience lacking.