On Wednesday morning, in a hotel lobby just steps away from the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Rupert Murdoch inadvertently found himself standing steps away from Tucker Carlson, the impish and still-influential-ish right-wing showman he had abruptly defenestrated from Fox News some 15 months earlier. Carlson waved and smiled, Murdoch appeared not to notice, and then the mogul’s entourage moved to shield him from view. Alas, life is an infinite string of missed connections—ô toi que j’eusse aimée!—and we are left only to imagine what might have been. 

Of course, it would prove impossible for Murdoch to ignore the presence of his former primetime star in Milwaukee. One night earlier, Carlson had shown up in the Fox News green room inside the convention hall in the company of Donald Trump Jr., “sporting a megawatt grin,” per the Times, as former colleagues like Jeanine Pirro and Jesse Watters came to greet him. That night, Carlson sat near Trump in the former president’s friends and family box, and was the first to greet him after his dramatic entrance into the arena. And on Thursday, Carlson himself ascended the stage to rapturous applause, delivering a 12-minute speech that weaved together praise for Trump, crass humor about Biden’s age, and a characteristically dark and foreboding vision of a world under Democratic tyranny. Most people may have watched the speech on Murdoch’s network, but Carlson was the star.