Literally five minutes before the GOP presidential debate began on Fox News at 9 p.m. last night, Tucker Carlson dropped his 46-minute pre-taped interview with Donald Trump, who skipped the debate, on the platform formerly known as Twitter. Carlson was fired by Fox earlier this year and Trump simply didn’t want to debate. Was there any doubt that the whole point was for both men to upstage their rivals?

To be sure, it worked — at least in terms of diverting a lot of attention away from the debate stage. As we went to press this morning, Tucker’s Trump interview had already surpassed 190 million views. But we don’t trust Twitter’s X’s metrics for several reasons. PJ Media’s Matt Margolis explains the problem: “That’s because the number of views attributed to a video includes those who watch the entire video, just a portion of it, or even scroll past it on their feed without even looking at it. Multiple views by the same user are also counted as unique views.”

Today, Trump will be in Georgia for his mugshot for what he twice told Carlson was another “bulls**t” indictment. Could he have had a better week?

Ep. 19 Debate Night with Donald J Trump pic.twitter.com/ayPfII48CO

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) August 24, 2023

The former president explained his decision to skip the debate as being driven entirely by the polls. As much as he loves talking about the issues, he said, why bother going? He’d just “get harassed by people that shouldn’t even be running for president” when he’s leading the polls by 50 and 60 points, or, this time he added, even 70 points in one poll. He then mocked and belittled a few of his competitors by name or sophomoric nickname.

Trump clearly made the most savvy play he could make by not attending the debate and instead getting to talk almost totally uninterrupted for 45 minutes about a wide variety of issues. And we do mean almost totally uninterrupted, given that Tucker asked only a handful of questions and mostly just listened as Trump opined on whatever came to his mind, some of which was very funny.

Judging by X (Twitter) reactions, it seems that the most talked about part of the interview was the roughly two minutes predominantly dedicated to the 2019 death of Jeffrey Epstein. It began when Carlson accused former Attorney General Bill Barr of lying about Epstein’s death in his book before asking what Trump thought of Epstein’s death. Trump tried to redirect the conversation to how “Barr didn’t do an investigation on the election fraud, either,” but Tucker wouldn’t have it, steering back to Epstein.

Despite our humorous title, the point of this article isn’t to settle that mystery, though it has been the butt of countless memes of ours over the years. But we will say this: Trump was right to simply note that Epstein “knew a lot on a lot of people” in Washington. In fact, that’s putting it mildly.

Anyway, Trump also talked about Russia and Ukraine, North Korea, China, and our own southern border — all areas where he was undoubtedly stronger as president than Joe Biden. Trump railed against the bureaucracy, especially regarding heavy-handed regulation in the name of saving the environment.

That led to one of the funniest moments for Trump, as he joked about electric cars: “The happiest moment for somebody in an electric car is the first 10 minutes. The unhappiest part is the next hour because you’re petrified that you won’t be able to find another charger.” Of course, Biden wants to mandate charging anxiety for all of us, which isn’t funny at all.

Speaking of laughing and Joe Biden, Trump brutally roasted the president. “I think he’s worse mentally than he is physically, and physically, he’s not exactly a triathlete or any kind of an athlete,” Trump joked in response to Tucker asking if Biden would even make it until November 2024. “You look at him, he can’t walk to the helicopter. He walks — he can’t lift his feet out of the grass, you know, it’s only two inches at the White House, right? It’s not a lot. But you watch him and it looks like he’s walking on toothpicks.”

“We have a president that can’t put two sentences together,” Trump added. “He can’t speak, can’t walk, can’t talk. I don’t think he’s going to make it to the gate.” Neither do we.

More importantly, though, Biden is “the most corrupt president we’ve ever had, and he also has the distinction of being the most incompetent,” Trump added. “He is in many ways the Manchurian candidate.”

On another serious note, Carlson asked about whether Trump ever fears for his life and whether he thinks we’re headed for another civil war. Trump called his Democrat opponents “sick” and “savage animals,” but he declined to say more about death threats. But because they so grossly overreach and exaggerate about January 6, Trump has always been inclined to go overboard the other direction, downplaying the violence by regularly insisting that “we said ‘peacefully and patriotically’ march” to the Capitol. He said of the J6 crowd, “There’s tremendous passion and there’s tremendous love.”

There’s a middle ground of reality regarding January 6 that the most vehement partisans on both sides ignore. Most Americans don’t, and it’s evidently going to play a prominent role in the 2024 election.

In any case, “There is a level of passion that I’ve never seen,” Trump ultimately concluded regarding the idea of civil war. “There is a level of hatred that I’ve never seen. And that’s probably a bad combination.”

It most certainly is, and Trump Derangement Syndrome explains a good bit of it.

(Updated)