Donald Trump is reportedly revamping his address to the Republican National Convention this week to focus on themes of unity in response to the attempt on his life during a Saturday rally. But before Trump speaks on Thursday night, the convention will hear from Tucker Carlson, a demagogue whose rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of terroristic mass shooters and a longtime apologist for political violence undertaken by the right.

On Saturday, a gunman opened fire on a Trump rally in Pennsylvania, injuring the former president and killing an attendee before reportedly being killed by the U.S. Secret Service. The motivation of the shooter, whose actions have been rightfully condemned by virtually every figure in U.S. public life, remain unclear. The rally was scheduled to be Trump’s last public appearance before the Republican National Convention, which begins Monday. 

Trump and his team are telling reporters that he is rewriting his convention address as part of a post-shooting effort and wants to “bring the country together” and “unite a tinder-box America.” Historically, Trump’s calls for unity have revolved around his opponents giving him everything he wants and refraining from criticizing him, and early signs suggest this time is no different. But if Trump is actually interested in cooling the national temperature, he’ll start by dropping Carlson — currently scheduled to speak Thursday before the nominee — from the agenda.

Many, many aspects of Carlson’s commentary — before and during his tenure as a star Fox News host and since leaving that network in 2023 — should render him too radioactive to appear at a major political party’s convention. He regularly promotes unhinged conspiracy theories; his brand of blood-and-soil nationalism is anathema to America’s traditional ideals; he has offered a wide range of bigoted rhetoric; he waged a brutally effective campaign against vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic; he propagandizes for Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian Russian system; he knowingly deceived his viewers about Trump’s 2020 election lies; and much more.  

But what stands out in the current fraught moment is Carlson’s constant and casual deployment of violent rhetoric and courting of political violence. 

It was Carlson who pushed the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which posits that Democrats are deliberately seeking to import brown foreigners to replace what he calls “legacy Americans,” from white nationalist fever swamps into the mainstream right. His demagoguery continued even as white supremacists invoking the “great replacement” conducted massacres in El Paso, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. Indeed, as the conspiracy theory’s body count grew, Carlson doubled down, denounced his critics, and urged his viewers to do something in response to the Democratic plot he claimed to have uncovered.

When a mob of Trumpists, enraged by lies about a rigged election pushed by Trump, Carlson, and others, stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, Carlson knew just what to do. In the immediate aftermath, he validated the mob’s concerns, depicting their attack as the natural response of people who “begin to believe that their democracy is fraudulent.” And over the weeks, months, and years that followed, Carlson honed a counternarrative in which the perpetrators of the assault were victims who were set up by the government. Only a “small percentage” of the people present at the Capitol were “hooligans” who “committed vandalism,” he claimed, while “the overwhelming majority” were “orderly and meek.” He played a lead role in the right’s successful effort to dismantle the initial consensus that a massive instance of political violence was unacceptable.

Those horror shows are the tip of the iceberg. Carlson presents his audience as under siege from a left that threatens them with death, and suggests that the audience’s violent response is inevitable and justifiable. When a jury convicted a man for murdering an armed protester at a Black Lives Matters rally in Texas, Carlson successfully petitioned the state’s Republican governor for the killer’s pardon.

None of this seems terribly out of character for a convention aimed at nominating Trump, given the former president’s own long record of sanctioning political violence. But if there's really a “new” Trump — and evidence already suggests that of course there is not — a good way to help prove it would be to pull Carlson from the schedule.