Welcome to Monday’s Washington Secrets, where we ask whether the world is on the brink of a new political movement, decorated with antler chandeliers? Plus, we have polling on how to win the data center wars (sort of). It may be slated to reach 87 degrees today, but Secrets has a cold. Send honey and lemons, and see you tomorrow.Tucker Carlson is in a plaid shirt in his man cave. Its wooden walls are hidden beneath racks of antique rifles, spears, and machetes.
Beside him, beneath a chandelier of antlers, Marjorie Taylor Greene has her hand on the arm of Brian Glenn, the former White House correspondent of Real America’s Voice, whom she married in Las Vegas last week.Around the table are other MAGA breakaways and their spouses. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has installed himself as a thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, and Joe Kent, who resigned as director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center in protest at the Iran war and the influence of Israel in American politics.“The movement has begun,” posted MTG with the photograph of their meeting, immediately raising speculation that this America First splinter group was planning to launch a new political party, founded on their shared critique of Trump’s failings. The result was an even mix of reverence and ridicule.The question is whether they can turn clicks into commitments. And social media presence into something real.The Tucker Carlson Network, for example, claims its content garnered 1.53 billion views across social media and podcast platforms in the eight-and-a-half weeks after the Iran conflict began.Secrets asked Glenn about the plan, but he said he could not discuss what was agreed upon at the meeting. He said there was a hunger for an alternative to Trump’s vision on the right.“MTG’s post with that picture has 8.5 million views, 74K likes, 13K repost, 13K comments, and has been bookmarked 4.3K times,” he messaged. “The support is massive. This is a political earthquake.”In a sign of how big they are thinking, he compared the meeting at Tucker’s home to laying the groundwork for the first Continental Congress in 1774.Last month, Carlson announced he would do everything possible to break up what he sees as a one-party system posing as a democracy.“And that’s the lesson of the last two and a half months, to me,” he told the Columbia Journalism Review. “If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war — if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is — then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people.”“And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party.” It’s fair to say that the reaction to the new movement was mixed.Some insiders suggested the photograph, with its candles and artifacts, gave off Arrested Development “Alliance of Magicians” vibes, with its rallying cry of “We demand to be taken seriously.”“They are about to discover that having an online following is not the same thing as winning elections,” a former White House told Secrets.Laura Loomer, the online influencer and Trump confidant who has clashed repeatedly with Carlson and Greene, said: “Every single one of these people belongs on a government watch list. Every person in this photo is a traitor to America and an anti-Trump operative amplified by foreign adversaries.”Glenn said the critics were forgetting just how Trump won the last election.“If you remember, Trump could’ve never gotten elected without MTG and Tucker Carlson,” he said. How to win the data center war
