There’s a new nepo baby in the White House. On Wednesday, an aide for Vice President JD Vance confirmed that he hired Tucker Carlson’s 28-year-old son, Buckley Carlson, as his deputy press secretary.
According to ABC News reporter Will Steakin, Buckley’s hiring has been in motion since at least Monday. He added that the former Fox News personality’s son has only worked on Capitol Hill since 2019, most recently as a communications director and deputy chief of staff to Rep. Jim Bank, Republican of Indiana.
President Donald Trump is known for building a White House rife with nepotism, so Buckley’s new role is sure to reignite backlash to what looks like biased hiring.
Then again, given that Tucker has long been a Trump ally and a prominent voice in conservative media, his son’s hiring might not come as that big of a shock.
Of course, this wouldn’t be the first time that Tucker might’ve pulled some strings to help out his son. The Washington Post reported in 2022 that Tucker and his wife, Susan Andrews, called on Hunter Biden to help get Buckley accepted into Georgetown University.
“I realize you don’t really know Buckley,” Andrews wrote in a 2014 email to Biden, who is a Georgetown graduate. “Maybe you could meet or speak to him and he could send you a very brief resume with his interests and grades attached.”
Vance and Tucker also appear to be close. After all, it was during Vance’s 2021 Senate run that he lamented to the then-Fox News personality that Democrats were promoting an “anti-family” agenda led by “a bunch of childless cat ladies.” This, in turn, became a campaign issue after Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate in July.
More recently, Vance was featured on Tucker’s streaming platform, Tucker Carlson Network.
But maybe the hiring of Buckley was done as some sort of a thank you. According to reporting from The New York Times, it was Tucker who told Trump that two other contenders for vice presidency, now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, “could not be trusted.”
Let’s hope that Buckley, a once-registered Democrat, has better communications skills than his father, who has repeatedly spread lies on air, including saying that immigrants make the nation “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided” and calling white supremacy a “hoax.”
Tucker abruptly left Fox News in April 2023 amid reports of tension between him and the network. We’ll see how long his son sticks it out in Vance’s office.
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