There are some furrowed brows (as well as some furtive giggles) over Tucker Carlson’s recent hypothetical musings about what the president might do should he decide he wanted to lose his 2020 reelection campaign.

Maybe he would cut funds for E-Verify, gratifying businesses that profit from exploiting the low-wage labor of illegal immigrants (that’s ‘undocumented workers’ in weeny-speak), but hurting American workers. Maybe he would make cuts to Medicare. Maybe — most deadly — he would raise taxes on gasoline, something that would matter hardly at all to those East coast elites who don’t drive much but that would have an immediate effect on those in the heartland who tend to drive more and are on a tight budget.

According to Carlson, Trump is pondering all of these expedients and more.

I take it the hypothetic proposition — the thought experiment ‘What might Trump do should he want to lose the 2020 election’ — is just that, a sort of debater’s gambit. As far as we know (which, admittedly, isn’t all that far) Trump wants to be re-elected. Being president is hard work. Especially if you are Donald Trump, it crackles with ambient hostility and contempt. But by all appearances, Donald Trump enjoys the job; he is good at it; and he seems to savor the bubble-wrap hostility of whiners like Jim Acosta, Pencil-Neck Schiff, and Jabba-the-Nadler. Pop, they go, pop, pop, pop.

So I surmise that Carlson doesn’t really think that the president would prefer to lose the election. Given everything we know about Trump, ‘losing’ is not in his vocabulary. Should he decide over the next year that the job was too much for him — he is, after all, on the wrong side of 70 — I think he would decline to run and bow out gracefully. (Well, he would bow out somehow.)

No, what Tucker Carlson was doing in that brief monologue was outlining some of the (many) things about which he disagrees with the president.