The Washington Post just published its own “why Tucker was canned” story.

Now it’s a mix of the endless controversy, Tucker’s hubris and his still redacted criticisms of Fox brass contained in discovery material from the Dominion case. But now the kicker is Ukraine. Rupert Murdoch got fed up with Carlson’s relentlessly pro-Russian commentary about the Ukraine war and his withering attacks on Ukraine itself. Even more, key Republican senators had had enough; and they were talking to Murdoch about it directly.

We’re about to have a Speaker Week Vote-O-Rama replay in which Speaker Kevin McCarthy will try to pass a pseudo-budget to kick start negotiations with Joe Biden over the debt ceiling, despite the fact that Biden has made clear he’s not going to negotiate over the debt ceiling at all. Biden has made clear he won’t negotiate but he’s definitely not even going to get into it until McCarthy says what it is is he wants. This pseudo-budget is the bill of particulars in which McCarthy says what he — or rather the Freedom Caucus — wants. As I said, it’s the Speakership vote all over again.

Following all this? Well, as you can tell it’s pretty convoluted. There’s a lot of kabuki and signaling wrapped around what should be an ordinary budgetary process. Because it’s so convoluted I wanted to provide some big picture points to keep in mind as this unfolds.

Kate Riga and I discussed this during the podcast today — for scheduling reasons we recorded one day early this week. But so many of you have asked me this question that I wanted to address it here in the Ed Blog. The question is this: Is it possible that Tucker Carlson’s termination was a non-public part of Fox’s settlement agreement with Dominion? I have no inside information. But I’m pretty sure the answer is no.

I’ve mentioned a few times my love/hate relationship with the media reporting of Dylan Byers and Eriq Gardner, the glitz media columnist for the prestige newsletter bouthemoth (boutique+behemoth) Puck News. It’s all leveraged buy-outs and acquisitions and gossip about top personalities and nothing much about journalism or the law of journalism. But, I thought, if they’re ever going to come through for me it’s going to be on the Carlson/Fox story. So I checked out what they had with no little expectation.

We just got news earlier this afternoon that Nate Silver is being let go by ABC News/538 as part of a round of Disney layoffs. ABC News is part of the Disney corporation. Just as important, though ABC News is apparently holding on to the 538 brand, they are apparently letting go of most of the staff.

I made the point clearly below that there’s going to be one big reason why Tucker Carlson got canned, not a bunch of little reasons that tipped the scales against him. It’s going to be one big, big thing that renders the secondary good and bad things basically irrelevant. Except there’s maybe one other possibility. Let me caveat this by asking you to think of this as somewhere between an edge case possibility and an explanation from an alternate universe.

Got it? Great. Let’s dig in.

We’re now a few hours out from the first reports that Fox News had canned its top rated host Tucker Carlson. As best I can tell there’s still no clear explanation of why this happened. There are reports he’d been too critical of Fox management. There are reports pre-pretrial discovery unearthed revelations that could be damaging to Fox News in other lawsuits. Yet another report says it was Carlson’s peddling anti-semitism or perhaps the hostile harassment-saturated environment he created at his show, according to the suit by producer Abby Grossberg. Many of these reasons are reported as ‘contributing’ to the decision to oust Carlson. And there seem to have been a lot of them. Indeed, there appear to be so many ‘contributing’ factors – of various different sorts – it’s a wonder Carlson lasted as long as he did.

We don’t have many details yet beyond a clipt press release from Fox and the note that the departure is effective immediately. There were a number of fall-out scenarios I envisioned after Fox’s settlement with Dominion. But this wasn’t in any of them.

There’s a key reason why.

It’s certainly not an unprecedented move, but it’s notable. Greg Bluestein of The Atlanta Journal Constitution reports that Georgia Governor Brian Kemp is skipping this year’s Georgia GOP party convention. He’s set up a funding committee structure that will essentially operate as his own party apparatus, separate from the state GOP. They don’t want him and he doesn’t need them.

I wanted to share TPM Reader JL’s note because it reveals a key blindspot. I think it’s mine. But I’m actually not sure whether it’s mine or JL’s. In any case, the point is that Ron DeSantis’s campaign makes a lot more sense if you assume Donald Trump either wasn’t going to run in 2024 or was going to mount what amounts to a placeholder campaign to help as part of his legal strategy.