Tucker Carlson’s recent visit to Dublin is yet another reminder of Donald Trump and his fellow travellers’ surprising interest in the cabal of misfits that constitutes the Irish anti-immigration hard right
Trump, Elon Musk and now Carlson have all at one stage or another lent their support to this group, be it via a one-word endorsement on Twitter by Musk or Trump’s invitation to Conor McGregor to the White House on St Patrick’s day, in what was seen by some as a snub to the elected leaders of Ireland, North and South.
McGregor was also the subject of Carlson’s attention this week. They strolled around outside Government Buildings before retiring to McGregor’s pub in Crumlin.
The decision to invest time and energy in McGregor is hard to fathom. At this stage, pretty much anybody could tell them that his chances of getting a nomination in the coming presidential election is vanishingly small and his likelihood of winning even smaller.
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You could go down a rabbit hole of gaming out a scenario by which McGregor uses an unsuccessful campaign for a presidential nomination – and whatever other carry-on he can think of after that – to win a seat in the Dáil come the next election. Gerry Hutch’s strong showing in the last election shows such a thing is possible.
But then what? Maybe he pulls together a small group of like-minded independents. Maybe he does a Micheal Lowry. Maybe they push the centre of Irish politics to the right.
Maybe. It is a very long game, and even if it works, it is not exactly going to tip the scale of global geopolitics.
Perhaps the mistake is to think that there is a plan to all this, either on the part of McGregor or his US supporters.
I don’t know enough about McGregor’s successful career as a mixed martial arts fighter to form a view as to how strategic his rise to the top was. But it seems from the machinations of the Trump White House that impulse rather than reason currently holds sway.
The on-again off-again nature of Trump’s tariffs policy and his decision to back down in the face of a run on the US bond market belies any notion that there is any real plan. Instead, the events of the past few months seem to be the outworkings of a 30-year-old fixation that Trump had never bothered to think through. He is learning the truth about tariffs in real time, at the expense of the US economy.
Likewise, the attacks on Ivy League universities and large law firms are devoid of any coherent long-term objective and seem to amount to little more than vengeance and twisted class envy.
The firing of thousands of government employees to produce savings that are, in the overall scheme things, trivial, while disrupting services for ordinary Americans, also lacks coherence.
The US – and indeed Irish media – is full of articles that seek to find some unifying principle or overarching strategy amid all the chaos. They range from a quasi-coup to an attempt to implement a reactionary conservative agenda taking in the possibility of simple self-enrichment along the way.
None of them really holds up. In fact, most collapse under the weight of their own contradictions. But coming up with them is what rational people do. They look for rational explanations amid the chaos. Particularly when the alternative possibility – that there is no rational plan – is much more terrifying than any scenario mapped out the opinion pages of The New York Times, The Atlantic, Foreign Affairs or The Wall St Journal.
Which brings us back to the question as why the main architects of this chaos and their hangers-on are singling Ireland out for special treatment. Leaving aside the possibility that they may not actually be obsessed with us – Musk, for example, is also meddling in German politics – we have to consider that all of it has no real purpose.
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We can look for reasons. Maybe Musk has some hidden agenda around X, which is sort of regulated by Ireland, but in truth by the European Commission. Maybe they want to put the skids under the Government in terms of its wider negotiating strategy with the EU. Maybe they really do believe that the crusade against wokeness needs to be exported worldwide.
Still, none of these explanations is entirely convincing. There is one further possibility, which is that we are looking at this through the wrong end of the telescope. McGregor still has a big following in the US and ticks a lot of boxes in terms of the Maga base. It’s possible they are simply using him.
McGregor in the White House on St Patrick’s Day was much better television than Micheál Martin the week before. Likewise, more Americans are going to watch a Carlson podcast with McGregor than one with Simon Harris. In fact, pretty much anybody would.
This explanation has the benefit of simplicity – but once again we are falling into the trap of attributing rational motive to irrational actors. Maybe we have to confront the fact that these may just be clever but deeply unserious people making it up as they go along, and getting away with it.
