OPINION:
From his primetime days at Fox News to the campaign trail, Tucker Carlson was one of President Trump’s biggest fans and most high-profile cheerleaders, loudly championing the MAGA agenda.
All that changed in February when the president decided to join Israel in attacking Iran.
Mr. Carlson, who vehemently opposes the military action, now says he regrets supporting Mr. Trump. He has transformed into a vocal, highly influential critic of the administration on his podcast. That, he said, is all Mr. Trump’s fault.
In an 18,000-word interview with The New York Times, Mr. Carlson noted that Mr. Trump campaigned on keeping the United States out of foreign quagmires and regime-change wars, a stance that earned him loyalty. Then, he got pushed into war.
“It doesn’t make me the person who breached the contract. He’s the one who breached the contract,” Mr. Carlson said.
When examining how Mr. Trump was shoved into the Iran war, Mr. Carlson points the finger at external pressures rather than at strategic national interests. He notes that the president was relentlessly pressured by foreign allies, wealthy donors and hawkish influencers.
Mr. Carlson claims that Mr. Trump felt he had “no choice” but to launch the attack. He characterized the president as a “slave” to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Netanyahu’s powerful advocates in the United States.
Rather than acting as the sovereign commander in chief he campaigned as, Mr. Trump appeared “uniquely weak,” functioning more like a hostage to foreign interests who was caught in a spellbinding, cowardly circle of advisers, Mr. Carlson said.
The political rupture reached a moral boiling point on Easter Sunday. Mr. Trump posted a profane tirade threatening Iran’s civilian infrastructure and mocking Islam, which Mr. Carlson quickly condemned as an “attack on Jesus” and a “moral crime.”
The fallout has been so severe that Mr. Carlson has even used his platform to openly discuss whether Mr. Trump — a leader exalting himself while mocking the faith of others — could be the “Antichrist.”
This prompted Mr. Carlson to begin reassessing his own role in getting Mr. Trump elected, and he publicly apologized to his audience for misleading them about the president’s intentions.
Mr. Carlson acknowledges that he played a role in Mr. Trump’s rise to power. He noted that he was part of the “distraction” in the past, akin to how the media handled the Occupy Wall Street movement, where cultural wedge issues were used to distract the public from the actual economic and class issues destroying the country.
Critics, of course, might point out that Mr. Carlson has always been politically expedient.
Over his long career, he has worked for CNN, PBS and even MSNBC before adopting his populist “America First” persona at Fox News. But Mr. Carlson insisted that he has genuinely changed and that his current views reflect a harsh awakening to reality.
“Because we’re now in a war, which is in the process of destroying the United States economy and getting Americans killed, because Israel pushed the United States president, who caved,” he said. “And I’m not giving him a pass, but that’s just a fact. That’s what happened.”
“Israel has that power in our Congress, not because we have so many Jews — I don’t know how many Jews live in the United States, fewer than 10 million, I think — but because we have tens of millions of evangelical Christians who unquestioningly support Israel because they believe it’s their theological duty to do so,” he said.
At the end of the interview, Mr. Carlson looked to the future of the Republican Party but, sadly, said he sees little hope for reforming the current establishment.
“You can’t just put a new coat of paint or fresh drywall on these structures because they are riddled with rot. So I would like to see them repaired. That would be the simplest solution. I don’t think that’s likely to happen,” he said.
Instead, Mr. Carlson believes the country desperately needs a new political vehicle. “Are you going to have a political party whose No. 1 aim is helping the people who put it in power, helping the citizens of the United States? And neither party can say that, honestly, because neither party is very interested in its own citizens,” he said.
“The Democratic Party is much more interested in importing new noncitizens, making them citizens and making reliable voters out of them. And the Republican Party is much more interested in fighting wars for a foreign country. So whatever you think of those aims, neither one is focused on the needs of Americans. And I think somebody should be in a representative democracy. There should be a party that is speaking for most people.”
Does that mean Tucker 2028?
“Absolutely not. I’m not a politician, but I would support it,” he said.
• Joseph Curl covered the White House and politics for a decade for The Washington Times. He can be reached at josephcurl@gmail.com and on Twitter @josephcurl.
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