Tucker Carlson's interview with Putin captivated some GOP lawmakers

• Tucker Carlson's interview with Vladimir Putin was greeted with some interest on Capitol Hill.
• JD Vance said it was "interesting," and Ron Johnson said some of Putin's points were "accurate."
• "Putin is a studied man of resolute spirit," said GOP Rep. Clay Higgins.

When former Fox News host Tucker Carlson released his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin last week, at least a few Republicans on Capitol Hill tuned in with interest.

Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana, a House Freedom Caucus member, said he’s seen about 30 minutes of the more than 2-hour-long interview. And while he stressed that he doesn’t “trust and believe in everything” that the Russian leader said, he couldn’t help but greet the sight with some wonder.

“It was impressive,” said Higgins. “Putin is a studied man of resolute spirit, and he always comes across as very sincere in his beliefs. You come away from a conversation with him thinking ‘I may not believe what he says, but I know he believes what he says.’”

Several Republicans told Business Insider that they didn’t watch the interview, citing lack of interest or time. But Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas — who said he was too busy “looking at choo-choo trains in Chicago and Milwaukee” over the weekend to watch the interview, says he’s having a staffer brief him on it.

“I think Tucker Carlson’s great. Obviously, I think it was a great opportunity,” said Nehls as he lit a cigar at the top of the House steps, before offering an unsolicited prediction: that former President Donald Trump would be re-elected in November and bring a swift end to the Ukraine war by March 1, 2025.

“He'll say, Vlad, March 1st, you got to get the hell out of Ukraine,” said Nehls. “It's over.” 

The release of the interview comes just as Congress is considering sending another $60 billion in aid to Ukraine. The Senate passed a bill to do just that on Tuesday over the objections of a group of hard-right GOP senators. The bill faces an uncertain future in the House, with Speaker Mike Johnson and many other Republicans opposed to the aid package in its current form.

Among those senators was Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, who has long been a staunch supporter of Ukraine, even traveling to Kyiv for Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s inauguration in May 2019. But in recent months, Johnson has seemingly become convinced that continued US support for Ukraine is a futile exercise and has dropped his support for Ukraine aid.

“I think the Tucker interview was very interesting,” Johnson said during a recent interview on the conservative network “Real America’s Voice,” stressing that while Putin is a “war criminal” who is “obviously not telling you the whole truth,” there’s much to be learned from his interview with Carlson. 

“Take things with a grain of salt, but a lot of the points that Vladimir Putin made are accurate,” said Johnson. “Making people believe Ukraine can win, Ukraine can’t — Putin won't lose. Putin will not lose. He's not going to lose.”

‘Every nation tells stories about itself’

Over the course of more than 2 hours, the Russian President covered a variety of different topics, ranging from the imprisonment of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich to Russia’s territorial claims in Ukraine.

The Russian leader even appeared to make sly allusions to American domestic politics primed for a conservative audience, including Colorado and Maine’s recent decisions to bar former President Donald Trump from the ballot under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.

“America is a complex country. Conservative on one hand, rapidly changing on the other,” said Putin, according to Carlson’s translator. “Who makes decisions in the elections? Is it possible to understand this when each state has its own legislation? Each state regulates itself. Someone can be excluded from elections at the state level.”

The Russian leader went on to detail grievances with NATO expansion into Eastern Europe since 2000, claiming that the CIA orchestrated the 2014 Euromaidan revolution that led to the ousting of Ukraine’s pro-Russian President Victor Yanukovich, and arguing that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was about “de-Nazifying” the country.

“Saying that Ukraine attacked Russia in 2014, that is just such an obnoxious lie,” said Rep. Victoria Spartz of Indiana, a Ukrainian immigrant. “I hope people are not that stupid, and still understand what's happening.”

In asserting Russian claims to Ukraine, Putin noted the history of the Kyivan Rus, a polity that existed between the 9th and 13th centuries that both Russia and Ukraine view as a kind of cultural predecessor.

“He forgot to mention that the Rus was Kyiv Rus, right?” Spartz said with a laugh. “If you go that far, then Kyiv has more claims to Moscow than Moscow has to Kyiv.”

Those who study Russia have long pushed back on Putin’s historical claims, but for Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, who said he found the interview “fascinating,” that’s beside the point.

“Every nation tells stories about itself and its enemies that are at least partly rooted in bogus claims,” Vance wrote on Twitter last week. “The point is that if you want to understand world affairs and make smart decisions, you have to understand how people see themselves.”

Among Democrats, the interview was broadly dismissed, with some suggesting it was an error on Carlson’s part to go through with it in the first place. 

Democratic Rep. Abigail Spanberger of Virginia, fresh off of a trip to Kyiv over the weekend, told reporters this week that though she had discussed the interview “quite a bit” with other lawmakers on the trip, it “actually did not come up” when she engaged with Ukrainian leaders. 

“The ridiculous nature of an American so-called journalist allowing for Putin to unleash propaganda for an extended period of time just wasn’t worthy of the types of conversations that we were having,” said Spanberger.

But even Spartz, who maintained that Putin spouted lies during the interview, said there was “some truth to what he said.”

“He said you guys are spending money undermining your currency, and now China's on the growth pattern, and you guys are on decline patterns, and that's, you know, there’s truth to it,” said Spartz. “And we have to be smarter.”

And Higgins had little time for criticism of Carlson’s interview.

“I think it was a courageous endeavor on Tucker's part,” said Higgins. “Absent that interview, there would be like a void here, which we have a tendency to want to fill on our own.