An underappreciated aspect of Donald Trump’s rise to the presidency was how he co-opted the Republican Party’s power as his own. He had flirted with independent bids in the past, back in the era when Ross Perot had made that seem something close to viable. In 2016, though, he found actual success not by opposing the GOP from the outside but from the inside — casting the party as rotten and ineffective as he gobbled up its supporters and worked his way through its creaky system. The establishment was slow to realize what was happening and slower to figure out a way to block his path, and that was that.
Ultimately, Trump didn’t have any grand vision for what to do with the party he’d co-opted. His efforts were in service of himself, not any ideology more robust than what a weekend Fox News anchor might articulate. This was often useful to the party establishment, which had a president who’d nominate whichever judges the party establishment wanted and champion whatever legislation it presented him.
As Trump leveraged his fame and wealth to seize power, billionaire investor Peter Thiel was by his side. Watching. People tuning in to the 2016 Republican convention would have seen Thiel giving an awkward, generic speech about patriotism and Hillary Clinton and probably assumed he was just another one of the random people selected to testify to Trump’s business acumen.
But Thiel had his own philosophy and his own ambitions. As the 2022 midterm elections approach and two longtime allies of Thiel’s stand on the brink of election to the U.S. Senate, it seems safe to say that Thiel is doing to Trump what Trump did to the GOP: Leveraging Trump’s existing popularity on the right to build his own power center in American politics.
Thiel and his compatriots, including Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, are on the brink of seeing GOP-skeptical right-wing allies wielding as much power in the Senate as the state of California.
This week, Fox News’s streaming arm, Fox Nation, aired an episode of Carlson’s online show purporting to be a documentary covering the Senate campaign of Republican Blake Masters. Masters is a close ally of Thiel’s; in the show, he refers to Thiel as a friend. Masters worked for Thiel’s firm and co-wrote a book with him. Thiel’s outside funding helped push Masters to his primary victory in Arizona. The two are intertwined — as Carlson’s show demonstrates.
Carlson being Carlson, the show was less documentary than campaign ad. Carlson’s preferred mode of communication is to use his guests and subjects as tools for furthering his own ideological battles (see his interview with Kanye West), and so he frames Masters’s candidacy as existential from the outset.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say America is sliding into chaos,” Carlson narrates as the show begins. “The November 2022 midterm elections are the pivot point. Will Democrats be able to finish the job of gutting this country, importing gangs and terrorists? Or will anyone finally stand up and push back?”
“This is a matter of national importance,” Carlson continues. “And in some states, like Arizona, along our national border, it could be a matter of life or death.”
What follows is less documentary than hagiography. It’s effusive in its praise for Masters, ostentatiously tying him to all of the things that Carlson’s viewers are presumed to want to see. There’s a scene in which Masters tries out various firearms at a shooting range. There’s a meeting between Masters and some voters in which the camera lingers on a painting of Jesus for an extended period. But Carlson also spends a great deal of time emphasizing how much Masters needs to fundraise — perhaps the most important message the Masters campaign could have a national audience see.
When clips of the show came out, a great deal of attention was paid to a moment when Masters, shortly after his debate against incumbent Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), takes a call from Trump. Trump tells him that he “got a lot of complaints” because Masters had “a bad election answer.” Which is to say that, when pressed, Masters acknowledged that there was no evidence of actual voter fraud tainting the vote in Arizona in 2020. (In footage shot as he was leaving the debate, Masters predicted that this answer would not please many of his supporters.)
What’s striking about the clip, though, is how Carlson’s team and Masters position his politics as outside the Republican Party. During that conversation in the room with the Jesus picture, Masters states that he figures America will be unrecognizable by 2030.
“I absolutely blame the left,” he tells the small audience, “but I also blame these conservatives. ‘RINOs,’ whatever you want to call them, right? The establishment. I think what happened is, in retrospect anyway, we elected a lot of Republicans who said the right things, they talked the right game, but then they got in office, and they just fell asleep.”
Not atypical rhetoric. But then an important framing.
“I don’t think it’s left versus right anymore,” he says of American politics. “… Now it’s open-borders globalism versus a healthy nationalism. It’s ‘the world first’ and you’re ashamed of America, versus America first.”
Vox’s Andrew Prokop recently interviewed a writer named Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on what’s often called the “New Right” — a cluster of voices and individuals whose politics echo that latter sentiment from Masters. Both Masters and Senate candidate J.D. Vance of Ohio (also a Thiel ally and former employee) have cited Yarvin’s ideas or writing as influential.
Yarvin explicitly advocates an upending of American democracy, seeing that as the best or only path for dismantling what he views as America’s central flaw: Control of power by elites in the media and academia. Prokop notes that when asked about Yarvin by NBC News, Masters disavowed the end-democracy components but clearly shares in Yarvin’s assessment that the core political struggle extends beyond the boundaries of the Democrat-Republican spectrum.
Prokop also quotes a podcast in which Vance was interviewed and echoed Yarvinite rhetoric.
“I saw and realized something about the American elite, and about my role in the American elite, that took me just a while to figure out,” he says, explaining his transition from Trump skeptic to Trump ally. “… If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”
This separation between themselves and standard-issue Republicans is key. In the snippet of Carlson’s show about Masters in which Masters takes a call from Trump, the former president is heard only over speakerphone. As Masters takes the call, he’s respectful . . . but also half-laughing. It’s a call from a guy making silly arguments (like that he never held a rally for someone who lost, which is false) that’s literal background noise as Masters goes about his day. Trump got him past the primary. Now, in purple Arizona, Trump no longer has as much use to the Senate candidate.
At one point in the call, Trump asks Masters if Thiel has recommitted to supporting his general-election effort. This was a mystery for much of the summer: After heavily bankrolling an independent committee for Masters in the primary, Thiel backed off. At first it seemed that this was a negotiating ploy, trying to get the Republican Party to spend more — leveraging the GOP for Masters’s benefit — but as weeks passed, it became strange. Had Thiel given up?
“Is he sending some money now?” Trump asks, blurring the already blurry line between outside expenditure campaigns — which candidates aren’t supposed to influence — and the campaign itself.
“I think so,” Masters replied. “I think it’s gonna flow in now.” And, sure enough, Thiel made a new commitment.
As of writing, FiveThirtyEight’s model of Senate polling has Vance as a 3 to 1 favorite to win and Masters as a 3 to 1 to lose. Carlson has been doing his best to champion the candidates, hosting both Masters and Vance on his prime-time show. The Fox Nation special won’t get the same amount of attention, but it is presented to people who willingly sign up to give money to Fox each month, so it’s not a stretch to think they might similarly chip in for Masters.
It’s possible that both Vance and Masters will lose and that Thiel’s effort to inject allies into the Senate will be stymied. It’s also possible that it will succeed and that Thiel, who in 2009 famously declared that he “no longer believe[d] that freedom and democracy are compatible,” would have effectively injected two advocates of his far-right worldview into the Senate.
Regardless, it’s a continuation of the pattern: Use the GOP to build independent power. Use Trump to build independent power. The result may be that Thiel — or, at least, Thiel allies — has as much influence in the Senate as any individual state.