Jon Stewart once warned Tucker Carlson that his style of political commentary — the bellicose, structurally adversarial kayfabe he engaged in on CNN’s Crossfire — was “hurting America.” Change course, Stewart implored Carlson, and you will be able to “sleep at night.”
Carlson then was a vocal defender of the Iraq war, which he has cited as one of the biggest regrets of his career. More than two decades later, he has managed to avoid supporting another potentially disastrous American war in the Middle East, but his years of partisan hackery, extremist agitating, and political maneuvering have landed him in an even larger predicament: The president and political movement he spent years supporting is imploding. Carlson rode for Donald Trump in spite of clear warnings that he would bring nothing but destruction, and he is now experiencing some regret.
During this week’s episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, Carlson told his brother Buckley that he would “be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.”
“You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’
“It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say,” he added.
For weeks now, Carlson has been openly leveling criticism against the president over his war of choice with Iran, the tipping point in what Carlson sees as a series of broken campaign promises and the potential “end of the American empire.” Like many other prominent political commentators, Carlson has become more critical of America’s relationship with Israel and the influence the nation appears to have on Trump’s foreign policy. (Carlson also has a history of antisemitic rhetoric.) After Trump threatened to wipe Iran off the face of the earth, Carlson said it was “vile” and called on those surrounding the president to do whatever they “can do legally to stop this, because this is insane.” The president responded with a long tirade calling Carlson and other prominent right-wing influencers “NUT JOBS.”
Carlson may claim his role in misleading the public about Trump was not “intentional,” but he’s contradicted by the combined force of years of public and private musings (made public after the fact) that lay out with stark clarity the disdain he felt for the president, even as he encouraged voters to forgive and forget the myriad of sins he committed against the nation.
In private text messages to his colleagues at Fox News — which were only revealed after the network was sued for defamation by Dominion Voting Systems — Carlson referred to the president as a “demonic” around the time of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. “I hate him passionately,” Carlson wrote at the time. “I can’t handle much more of this.”
Carlson admitted that the claims of voter fraud that would propel the president’s fixation on a third run for the White Hope were baseless, and expressed hope that the ousted president would soon fade away from his coverage.
And yet, within a year of the attempted coup, Carlson was airing conspiratorial specials lauding the rioters as “patriots,” Carlson would go on to claim that the Jan. 6 mob was comprised of little more than confused “tourists.” He would campaign for Trump in the 2024 election cycle, and continue beating the nativist, xenophobic drum of white supremacist conspiracy mongering that made up much of the MAGA GOP’s anti-immigrant agenda. Through his show and through his broader influence across conservative America, Carlson helped legitimize many of the officials now enabling the warmongering agenda he decries — most notably J.D. Vance, whom Carlson lobbied for as a Senate candidate and prospective vice president.
If Carlson had reservations about the president — and we know he did — he pushed them down and did what he swore he would never again do after being burned by the Iraq war. He once again set aside his own concerns, his disdain, and his supposed principles, in service of the right-wing movement du jour. Carlson likely did so believing that even though he despised the president, the ends would justify the means, and he could use his platform and connections to influence outcomes and check the excesses of the man he once called the “single most repulsive person on the planet.”
Carlson’s admission that he had fallen for the charlatan figurehead of this movement should not be mistaken for an act of true contrition. His break with the president comes after years of documented disgust of Trump, and at a moment where a public rebuke of the president comes with no severe political cost. The Iran war is unpopular, Trump’s approval is at a historic low, and his conservative allies are becoming increasingly comfortable breaking with him on an issue-by-issue basis — or entirely.
Carlson is not standing alone. The MAGA movement as a whole is staring down the barrel of a future where Trump is no longer in the White House and someone else will have to take up the mantle of leadership lest they go the way of the Tea Party. What is taking place now is a scramble for future control of the most valuable portions of the Republican coalition, one which brings with it the kind of infighting and attempts to reestablish credibility we recognize from when the people who claimed the WMDs were definitely there admitted it was all bullshit, and that they should have known better.
The difference between the Iraq war days when Jon Stewart warned a young CNN host aspiring to bigger things that the reckoning was coming and today is that this time around Carlson cannot claim ignorance, youth, or inexperience.
If Tucker’s journey through media — from the three major networks, to reality TV, to independent production — has taught him anything, it’s how to survive. He knows that to leave or be thrown off of the ship is not the end. To see his break with Trump, his barely-there contrition for a decade of lies and misdirections, as anything other than a calculated beacon for his next political life raft would be to engage in the kind of blindness Carlson would like us all to believe he was afflicted with by chance.
