On the Republican National Convention stage on Thursday night, Tucker Carlson called Donald Trump “the funniest person I’ve ever met in my life,” and suggested that “the entire Trump project” is “to return democracy to the United States.”

“I do think the entire point, from the famous escalator ride nine years ago until today, of Donald Trump’s public life, has been to remind us of one fact,” Carlson said in what he described as an unscripted speech, “which is, a leader’s duty is to his people, to his country, and to no other.”

“And another word for this," he continued, “is democracy.”

Carlson’s ideas about how American leaders ought to think of, and enact, democracy, were threaded through his 11 minute speech on Thursday.

Carlson’s appearance comes over a year after his surprise ousting from Fox News, where he had hosted Tucker Carlson Tonight, once the highest-rated show in cable news. In the time since Carlson’s firing, he launched a show, Tucker on Twitter, and runs the Tucker Carlson Network, a streaming service which he describes as an answer to “news coverage in the West,” which he claims “has become a tool of repression and control.”

Since leaving Fox News, Carlson has notably grown his international influence in places like Hungary and Russia, interviewing their leaders, Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, respectively, within the last year.

Carlson has also shown himself to be deeply influential among Republicans in the 2024 election. He was the very first person to greet Trump as he made his big entrance at the RNC Monday night, just days after the former president survived a failed assassination attempt at his political rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. Trump “offered Carlson a firm handshake and put his left arm on the former television host’s shoulder. Carlson nodded, leaned in and smiled,” The Washington Post reported.

The past few weeks alone have demonstrated Carlson’s deep connections within Trump’s inner circle—including the anchor’s influence over who would be tapped for vice president. Carlson was reportedly key in Trump’s decision to choose Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who officially accepted the nomination during his Wednesday night RNC speech. “When word got back to Tucker Carlson a few weeks ago that Mr. Trump might be wavering on Mr. Vance,” The New York Times reported, “he intervened.” Carlson called up Trump on the phone, telling him that Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Governor Doug Burgum of North Dakota, two of Trump’s top VP candidates at the time, could not be trusted. Should Trump have chosen a neoconservative running mate, Carlson reportedly warned, “then the U.S. intelligence agencies would have every incentive to assassinate Mr. Trump in order to get their preferred president.”

Still, over the past several years, Carlson’s relationship with Trump has proven complicated.

“We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait,” Carlson said on Jan. 4, 2021, according to text messages unearthed in Dominion’s defamation suit against Fox News. He privately mocked Trump and his team’s bogus claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him and even texted of Trump, “I hate him passionately.” But in public, the pundit has sung a different tune; he’s said that January 6 “is probably second only to the 2020 election as the biggest scam in my lifetime,” adding that Democrats “become completely hysterical when confronted with any facts that deviate from their lies.”

In an interview Thursday morning with the Times, Carlson addressed his past negative comments about the former president. “I got pissed at Trump. So? I get pissed at my wife,” he said, “I’m a human being.”

Carlson’s friendship with Donald Trump Jr., and his fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is also of note. When asked this week by Axios co-founder Mike Allen what he thought of Carlson’s “dynamic in the party,” the younger Trump responded, “I think he’s one of the great sort of thought leaders of the party these days, I think he's a down to earth guy that understands real Americans and genuinely cares.” Carlson made news this week by visiting the Fox News green room at the RNC, where the commentator reportedly stunned executives at his old stomping grounds by showing up to the studio unannounced with Don Jr., who was getting ready to appear on Sean Hannity’s show. “Carlson was heartily welcomed by former colleagues,” according to a report from AP based on someone in the room.

Carlson came under fire while at Fox News for promoting the “Great Replacement” theory, a white-nationalist idea that welcoming immigrants, particularly non-white ones, into the United States is part of a Democratic plot “designed to undermine or ‘replace’ the political power and culture of white people,” according to the National Immigration Forum. A New York Times analysis in 2022 found that, in more than 400 episodes, Carlson “amplified the idea that a cabal of elites want to force demographic change through immigration.”

He has also been known to fulminate against feminism and the LBGTQ+ community. In 2022, he released, The End of Men, a documentary that, in a way, explored what makes men biologically different from women, and sounded the alarm about declining male fertility as well as America’s apparent crisis of masculinity. (The “Tucker Carlson Originals” said that “testicle tanning” could help.) Carlson has also referred to abortion as an “ancient religious rite called human sacrifice,” and said women are “like dogs,” adding, “they're extremely primitive, they’re basic, they’re not that hard to understand.”

On Thursday night, Tucker again turned toward what it takes for a man to be a man, and a man to be a good leader: “You can’t name someone a leader. A leader is the bravest man,” Carlson said. “That is true in all human organizations. This is a law of nature.”