One of the best things that could have happened to waning U.S. support for Ukraine was Tucker Carlson being pulled off Fox News’s airwaves last week. Carlson was maybe the most prominent and influential critic of U.S. aid, but he was also an extreme and conspiratorial one. He said he was actually rooting for Russia, he suggested Vladimir Putin wasn’t that bad a guy, he baselessly claimed the U.S. military was fighting alongside Ukrainians, and he used an apparently altered document to make his case.
But up there with that development might be what House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) just said on Monday. And it seems entirely possible that these two things are related.
During a visit to Israel, McCarthy made his strongest comments to date in favor of standing by Ukraine, after speaking dispassionately about the matter in the past and warning that a GOP-controlled House might pull back on the purse strings.
At a news conference in Jerusalem, a reporter who identified himself as Russian posited that McCarthy personally didn’t “support the unlimited and uncontrolled supplies of weaponry and aid to Ukraine.”
“Did he say I don’t support aid to Ukraine? No, I vote for aid for Ukraine. I support aid for Ukraine,” the House speaker said. Then he went further: “I do not support what your country has done to Ukraine. I do not support your killing of the children, either.”
McCarthy added: “You should pull out. And I don’t think it’s right. And we will continue to support [Ukraine], because the rest of the world sees it just as it is.”
McCarthy’s comments come as the GOP’s Ukraine supporters have begun to assert themselves, after about a year of the party’s base gradually but steadily turning against maintaining current levels of U.S. aid (polls this year show about half of Republicans think we’re doing too much for Ukraine). That was perhaps most evident in mid-March, when several Republicans criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s characterization of the war as a “territorial dispute,” which they viewed as dismissive of Russia’s invasion.
Around the same time, McCarthy said, “I support Ukraine.” But he also layered his comments with the GOP’s talking point about how the support shouldn’t be a “blank check.”
That’s where McCarthy’s new comments are particularly notable. He thoroughly rebuked Russia’s invasion in new terms, but it’s also worth emphasizing the question to which he was responding. The question didn’t posit that he opposed Ukraine aid, full stop; it was that he opposed “unlimited and uncontrolled supplies of weaponry and aid.” That’s a reasonable approximation of a “blank check,” and McCarthy could easily have reiterated the “blank check” talking point, but he didn’t.
McCarthy also said that “we will continue to support” Ukraine, which would seem to send a message to members like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and McCarthy’s newfound ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who have joined with Carlson to try to push the party in an isolationist direction.
McCarthy’s comments actually sound a lot like they come from the person who may be the GOP’s most high-profile supporter of continued aid to Ukraine, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.). McConnell has consistently made not just a moral case for helping Ukraine, but a pragmatic one as well. He and some others have argued that it’s a relatively cost-effective way to further U.S. interests, given that Russia’s struggles in the war have undermined its stature on the world stage.
What we now seem to have is the top Republicans in both the House and the Senate singing from more or less the same hymnal. And McCarthy’s move is significant given that he’s arguably the most important figure on this, as the man who leads the Republican-controlled House, where further aid faces its biggest hurdle.
One lesson here would seem to be that McCarthy feels emboldened to spend some of the political capital he has gained of late with the right wing. Say what you will about his debt-ceiling strategy; it suggests that he’s at least able to wrangle his party and that there is some goodwill built up with the House Freedom Caucus.
But we shouldn’t dismiss the Carlson effect. It was just three months ago that conservative former British prime minister Boris Johnson suggested that Republicans were too scared of Carlson to stick up for Ukraine. “I’ve been amazed and horrified by how many people are frightened of a guy called Tucker Carlson,” Johnson said.
When I wrote later that month about the GOP’s Russia hawks stepping forward, I noted:
As the GOP base has shifted on Ukraine, we’ve noted the lack of pushback from the party’s more hawkish wing and those who view the conflict as involving vital U.S. foreign policy issues. That relatively muted response is undoubtedly due, at least in part, to fear of alienating the likes of Fox News’s Tucker Carlson (as Boris Johnson recently ventured) and the more Ukraine-skeptical GOP voters.
There are surely lots of factors here — among them the recent Russian missile attack that killed children, which McCarthy referenced.
But there have been atrocities before. And it’s difficult to believe it’s a pure coincidence that McCarthy is coming out and saying this just a week after the dismissal of a man whom he’d been quite solicitous of. If nothing else, McCarthy need no longer gird himself for what lies ahead on Fox News’s prime-time airwaves.
