Tucker Carlson delivers the softball interview that Putin hoped for

All in the space of a fevered few hours in American politics: the supreme court debating and then retiring to decide whether or not the spirit of the confederacy courses through Donald Trump; the description by a Republican special counsel of Democratic president Joe Biden as a “nice elderly man with a poor memory” and, as if that wasn’t enough to keep the Washington drawingrooms a-chatter, the evening time spectacle of Tucker Carlson sitting down for a chin-wag with Vladimir Putin.

This is the age of politics as showbiz and Tucker Carlson has made the full transformation over the course of a career in which he has moved from CNN to Fox to being a maverick independent who now sits in the strange and increasingly crowded neverland between journalist and propagandist. “He’s a useful idiot,” said Hillary Clinton when asked about Carlson’s scoop with Putin a few days ago.

“They make fun of him. He is like a puppy dog. I would not be surprised if he emerges with a contract for a Russian outlet.”

The last person to interview Putin before Carlson’s broadcast on Thursday night was Lionel Barber, then editor of the Financial Times. The Russian premier had been in Barber’s sightlines as an interviewee for a decade: it finally happened, in the Kremlin in the summer of 2019.

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In a fascinating interview with Molly Reynolds in Politico this week, Barber recalled the preamble intended to intimidate: the long day of waiting at the hotel in Moscow before an evening summons to the Kremlin. Then, the escorted walk to the Cabinet Room, where the guests were kept waiting – and standing – for hours. When chairs were eventually brought into the room, the security guards sat on them. Tea was served and with it came inevitable thoughts about polonium. After four hours, and close to midnight, Putin finally made an appearance and sat down for a 90-minute interview.

“Icy” is Barber’s word for Putin’s demeanour on the idea of Ukraine as an independent entity.

Barber was willing to wait to see the content of the interview before he would pass judgment on whether or not Carlson was summoned to Moscow by the Russian so he could use him as a megaphone to deliver select messages of his choosing. The litmus test, he suggested, would be whether or not Carlson would ask Putin about the imprisonment of Evan Gershkovich, the 32-year-old Wall Street Journal correspondent who has been detained by the Russians for more than a year on spurious charges of espionage.

When Carlson had finished his interview, he sat down before the camera and broadcast his initial impressions on social media. He, too, had been made to wait for hours before his interviewee made his appearance. Putin, he decided, was not very good at explaining himself – because it’s not a skill he has needed to develop – and he blasted the “the professional liars” in Washington who depict Russia as an expansionist power. “For all of Putin’s many faults, it is not an expansionist power ... I can’t even recall my point exactly.”

That was part of the problem. What point may have been behind Carlson’s decision to interview Putin in a format which dragged on for well over two hours and featured another of Putin’s tedious lectures on Russian history, dating to the last century, which he offers as justification for Russia’s territorial claims on Ukraine?

He delivered a few acerbic asides aimed at the United States and blindsided Carlson with a sly reference to the CIA, which the American had sought to join after leaving college. (“Try journalism,” his father, journalist and broadcaster Dick Carlson advised. “They take anyone.”). Now Putin reminded Carlson of his desire to join the intelligence agency. “With the backing of the CIA, of course,” he said during their conversation. “The organisation you wanted to join back in the day, as I understand. We should thank God they didn’t let you in. Although it is a serious organisation! I understand.”

It was the performance of a bully entirely in control of his surroundings. In the end, the fast verdict in United States media circles was that Carlson had delivered the “softball”interview that Putin had bargained on.

But Carlson did ask about Evan Gershkovich. It was at the very end of the interview and he at least pushed Putin to say he “would not rule out” that the journalist “may return to his motherland”. It was like a resurrection, however fleeting, of Carlson’s old journalistic instincts from the years when he would surely never imagined himself alone, in the Kremlin, listening to Putin talk and talk and wondering what he was doing there.