Right, i watched it. some considerations:
- i can respect the absolute autism of saying allow me 30 seconds to talk about history, followed by half an hour of historical details. i know americans don't like this type of historical talk, which brings about details that happened 1000 years ago, but it's quite common in Europe. Tucker's face during that part of the interview is telling in this regard. i doubt many americans had the patience to follow his entire presentation.
- Tucker: Where are we in history? Putin: Here's some documents, which i didn't even bother to translate into english, you can do that later. Tucker: But how are these details relevant? Putin: Thank you for appreciating my presentation.
- You could sense Tucker's despair at listening to a possibly endless history lesson.
- as a true tradecraft enjoyer, Putin seems to give high marks to the CIA coup in Ukraine (his words). man goes back to his roots and acknowledges a job well done. as he says in the interview, a job is a job. it's the political side that has to deal with the mistakes of that though.
- Tucker, and a lot of press today seems to expect bite-sized answers to very complex questions.
- the denazification thing is bizzarre, it feels like something not serious. i don't understand why Putin keeps insisting on this. i mean, i understand, it's a political talking point, i just find it weird.
- i did not expect Putin to go to the Bicameral Mind analogies.
- a lot of the Putin analogies are simply not relevant to everyday people, those are good for a room that's filled with people with his position - presidents. I understand what he was trying to do but for the regular people they will sound hollow.
- Putin seems puzzled about american leadership the same way Kissinger was when talking about Europe (who do i call when i want to talk to Europe?) - there seems to be a disconnect, from his perspective, between what he speaks with people sharing his level of responsibility in America, and what comes out after the same initial understanding is Washington-washed through a machine of interests. This is close to Trump's idea of a "swamp".
- Putin touches on a point that i believe has merit - America has a lot of cold-warriors that are now in the higher places of power and know of nothing else but hate Russia and may be pissed they didn't get the chance to shoot one in anger when the USSR collapsed, so their intellectual inertia still is a powerful force in America. Romney saying to a young Obama the russia argument and then getting mocked for it comes from that inertia.
- Putin seems to personally know more about America than any american president would know about Russia.
- a rather mellow interview. when you get the time to speak about Dostoyevsky you can gauge the level of that.
- Tucker's performance was better than i expected. I expected him to make references to america or american issues and he did not do anything memorable in that regard. The questions were not very aggressive, but within the range presidents usually get in this type of interview. He did allow Putin a lot of time to expand on his ideas, which was a more "russian" type interview, since they like to be declarative about things they consider important.
Overall, it's a 7/10 for me. Somewhat informative, but nothing really extraordinary. I don't see this interview changing minds one way or the other for many people. Everybody losing their minds over this needs to chill. But if there is such a thing as the Tucker Carlson brand, this interview was very useful for it. i imagine a Putin interview will open a lot of doors.