You know the feeling. You’re lost in your thoughts or concentrating on a task when a dog starts barking and won’t stop. It intrudes on your thoughts and disrupts what you’re doing. There are balanced, centered people who can return to what they were doing in the blink of an eye and not give the intrusion another thought. They shut out the irritating sound and aren’t bothered further by it. I, alas, am not one of them. My mind gets reoriented. I wonder why the dog is barking and if it will ever cease. I try to think of ways to get it to stop. I mentally curse the owner for not taking care of the dog. I marvel at how the intermittent barking is so much more annoying than an equally loud and harsh sound would be if it were regular rather than sporadic. I may put on headphones or leave the house. Whatever I do, I lose the battle because my mind stays focused on the dog and the interruption rather than on the matter I was originally occupied with.

Politics, these days, is like that barking dog to me. Normally, it’s a subject I don’t have much interest in. Beyond voting, there’s not much I can do to influence outcomes. It affects me, but I have little control over it. It’s like the weather—a fitting topic for small talk, but unless you’re being threatened by a storm, there are more constructive matters to think about. What we have now, however, is a political storm that’s as hard to ignore as a barking dog. It impinges on my private thoughts and life and and shows no sign that it will ever stop. I think these posts are, in a way, an attempt to purge my mind of the noise and expel it, making it something external rather than internal. It may be the equivalent of alerting my neighbors, who, busy with their own tasks may not have noticed or been bothered before, but now become as annoyed as I am. Sorry about that.

The particular noise I’m addressing here relates to Tucker Carlson’s admission that he made a mistake and regrets backing Trump. A short clip of his apology shows that he, like other MAGA stalwarts such as Marjorie Taylor Green, Alex Jones and Candace Owens is renouncing Trump and calling for him to be removed from office. Seems like good news. Finally the tide is turning and those who formerly supported Trump are abandoning him. Many liberals, including Ilhan Omar, say those renegades who have seen the light and turned against Trump should be embraced by the Democratic Party. Some point to the horseshoe theory which posits that the far-left and far-right have more in common with each other than with the political middle, and therefore, it’s natural for hard-line right-wing figures to agree with those on the left on various issues, and it’s practical for them to unite and fight those battles together.

Such an alliance requires trust that I’m not sure all these remorseful folk deserve. They claim they were hoodwinked by Trump, and I can’t help wondering if they were so naive before or are being dishonest now. Did they ever truly like or respect him or did they latch on to him to gain power? Do they regret their earlier stances or are they abandoning the ship as it’s going down to stake out their own MAGA leadership claims? With the fiasco of the war with Iran and everything falling apart, Trump has never been in a more vulnerable position, and as enthusiasm for him wanes, maybe they’re just distancing themselves strategically in order to step into his shoes. I noticed that Tucker, MTG, Alex and Candace are alike not only in their new disdain for Trump, but in something else—their decidedly antisemitic tendencies. [note: Candace was named “Antisemite of the Year” for 2024 by the advocacy group StopAntisemitism (Tucker was awarded that honor in 2025); the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and former employees have documented instances of Alex using antisemitic language, hosting white supremacists, and promoting antisemitic theories; MTG famously blamed wildfires on Jewish space lasers and was stripped of committee assignments for her controversial remarks by the House in a bipartisan vote in 2021] To explore this angle further, let’s take a closer look at that conversation Tucker had with his brother, Buckley, in which he made his apology.