Tucker Carlson is talking about his break with President Trump over the war in Iran.
Carlson, who supported Trump so strongly that he spoke on his behalf at the 2024 Republican convention, tells NPR that Trump should be removed from office. Carlson even offered a theory that Trump was not in charge when he ordered the start of the war.
“I don’t think he had the latitude to make this decision on his own,” Carlson said.
Carlson is in the latest phase of his career. He’s been a magazine writer, a cable TV pundit, founder of the Daily Caller website, a Fox News star — and then, after Fox fired him, an internet personality with a big following.
His critique of Trump has raised questions about his ambitions, as has his talk of a third-party movement, though he says he’s not the person to organize one.
Carlson spoke on NPR’s Newsmakers podcast, meeting our crew in one of the rooms he uses for his popular internet program, The Tucker Carlson Show. It’s a space full of old books and historic artifacts — swords, guns, photographs and even a pen used by President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967. His father once ran the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which Congress defunded last year on the orders of President Trump. Carlson arrived in the company of two dogs, which were impressively well-behaved during our long talk.
Carlson has taken the view not only that Israel influenced Trump to launch the war, but that Israel gave Trump no choice, and in fact that outside forces control both American political parties, which he described as the “uniparty,” a single organization. Carlson’s theories have raised questions about antisemitism — a charge he denied before being asked. This became an extensive part of our discussion.
Carlson recounted a meeting with Trump in which, he says, Trump dismissed his concerns about the Iran war by saying, “We’ll all die anyway.”
In response to a request for comment from NPR, the White House did not address that point specifically, instead sending along a social media post by the president that describes Carlson and others as “stupid people” who want Iran to have a nuclear weapon.
Across the wide-ranging discussion, Carlson repented for his decades as a cable TV partisan, saying he called too much attention to the wrong issues. He said he should have paid more attention to the way the federal tax code is skewed against workers. He reflected on his faith as well as the president’s. He discussed Trump’s profit-making activities while in office — and asserted that if Russians were to pay off Trump to “end the war in Ukraine,” Carlson would approve. He even contended that Graham Platner should still be on the ballot — following Platner dropping out of the Maine Senate race amid allegations of sexual assault.
The conversation showed that Carlson has never lost the ability to command attention.
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