I want to get your perspective on
this moment, on your evolution, your worldview. You recently
made quite a dramatic break with President Trump over the war in
Iran, and I'd love to hear about that. I want to start, though,
in the lead-up to the conflict. You said that you spoke to the
president several times about the plan to attack Iran before it
actually happened on Feb. 28. Was it just you and the president
in those meetings? Can you give me a sense of what was going on
there?
Well, I've been speaking to him about Iran
for 10 years. Literally since 2016, maybe '15, because there was
enormous pressure on him, as there has been on many presidents,
to regime-change Iran. We know, based on our experience with a
much smaller country, Iraq, that that's a tall order, it doesn't
necessarily lead to a place you want to go, and it's not good
for the United States.
Trump knew that. And that was the main
reason that I supported him during my time at Fox News and
campaigned for him. It was really central to my views of Trump's
candidacy and presidency.
So when it became clear in June that we were starting down this
road toward a regime change with Iran, I was baffled. I was very
upset. Not because I have allegiance to Iran, but because I
thought it would be terrible for the United States, as it has
been, worse even than I imagined.
But I could see exactly where
this was going. And he was under enormous pressure to do this,
as all presidents in my lifetime have been. So we talked a lot
in June. He embarked on this effort to take out Iran's nuclear
program, which is really just the opening salvo in a
regime-change effort. He knew that. I told him that. Charlie
Kirk told him that. We did it, we got out, and then it became
clear in January that we were moving toward this thing that
we're in now, and I was absolutely panicked about it.
Did he explain to you why he wanted to take
the country into war? I'm just trying to understand the dynamics
of that conversation.
There were multiple conversations. I flew to
Washington three times in the weeks before and met with him in
the Oval Office alone with people filing in and out - the White
House chief of staff, the secretary of state, etc. I had lunch
with him on one of those occasions. And then I spoke to him by
phone many times on this topic. And he would begin almost every
conversation with, Do you want Iran to have a nuclear weapon?
To which I said: Well, I'm sort of opposed to
nuclear weapons. I don't want nuclear weapons, I don't want
Israel to have a nuclear weapon, I don't want anyone to have a
nuclear weapon. It doesn't seem like a good thing. But that's
not the question. The question is: What do you do about it? And
that was the end of the rationale for doing this. He never
seemed enthusiastic about it, ever.
I would say: Here are the potential effects of this, the
geography of Iran being the most important fact of Iran. Iran is
not a military power, it's an economic power. That was obvious,
because it controls the greatest span of coastline along the
Persian Gulf, which is the source of a fifth of the world's
energy, all well known now, and well known to him then. I think
he perfectly understood the consequences.
Why was he taking your calls then, if he knew
your position and he understood the perils? Was he trying to
convince you to back the war?
No. He made no effort to convince me at all
other than to say: It's going to be all right. Everything's
going to be OK. And I just didn't feel that way. None of this, I
should say, was about Trump or my relationship with Trump or my
feelings about Trump or his hair color or anything like that. I
just didn't want the United States to go to war with Iran.
And my strong feeling by the end of those
conversations - the last one was probably a week before the war
began - was that he felt he had no choice and that he was
resigned to it. He was unhappy about it. He didn't seem
enthusiastic at all. There was no effort to say, once we do
this, the United States will be at peace, we'll be safe, we will
be more prosperous. There was none of that. Zero.
You speak to many people in the
administration. Who was for the war, who was against it, while
all this was being discussed?
I'm guessing to a certain extent. I do talk
to a lot of people there still, but I don't work there, so it's
hard to really know. There are people with a long record of
making bellicose noises about Iran.
Specifically, the secretary of state slash
national security adviser has said, for many, many years, Iran
is the greatest threat we face, which is a ludicrous statement.
You're talking about Marco Rubio.
Correct. But that said, I didn't hear a
single time from anyone, including from the secretary of state
himself, who I spoke to about this, any enthusiasm for doing
this.
My strong impression, and I could be wrong
because I don't work there, is that no one in the building was
pushing for this, at least overtly. That all the pressure was
coming from outside - constant calls from donors and people with
influence over the president.
Rupert Murdoch, Miriam Adelson, etc., and
then a small constellation of, I guess they'd be called
influencers, beginning with Mark Levin, but there were others,
Sean Hannity, pushing the president to do this and telling him
that you will be a figure out of history, you will save and
redeem Israel or something. I think that was the case they were
making. [Hannity and Levin deny this claim. Murdoch and Adelson did not respond to our
request for comment.]
I didn't hear of anybody making the case
that this would be good for the United States. I don't think
that was ever a conversation.
There's been a lot of speculation
about the president's mind-set during this period. Part of it is
about what happened after Venezuela and the successful, in their
view, operation there, removing Maduro from office, and that he
felt emboldened by that and felt that this was going to be
similar. That he underestimated the Iranians and what they might
do in response to an attack.
I don't believe that. I think the Venezuela
operation allowed him to retreat into a kind of fantasy in which
he told himself this is going to be easy. But I don't think he
believed that. And I should say, having spoken to him a lot in
this calendar year, I detected no evidence at all of dementia,
mental decline. You hear people say he's gone soft.
That was not my impression at all. Trump is
not well informed on a lot of topics, is proudly ignorant on a
lot of topics, but he has remarkable powers of insight into
people and power dynamics. You don't get to be president by
accident. The guy's smart in the ways that matter politically.
And my strong read was that he was doing this against his will.
You know, famously, the head of the counterterrorism center, one
of the top intel officials in the country, Joe Kent, resigned
shortly after the war began and said exactly the same thing:
I think this decision is connected to a
series of seemingly disconnected events, all of which
revolve around violence, and we need to find out more about
how this happened.
And he was dismissed and threatened with an
F.B.I. investigation. And no one followed up on that. And again,
I don't know the answer. But this was not a normal
decision-making process. And my strong impression was that Trump
was more a hostage than a sovereign decision-maker in this.
Tucker Carlson
with Byron Donalds,
Donald Trump and
JD Vance
at the Republican
National Convention in 2024.
Credit: Leon
Neal/Getty Images
Tell me what you're getting at when you say
the president of the United States, the most powerful country in
the world, had no choice.
I don't know what I'm getting at. I'm just
telling you what I observed. That's the question. What I'm
fascinated by is the lack of curiosity on display into how
exactly this happened. What are the mechanisms by which a guy
who's supposedly sovereign, in charge, granted this authority by
voters, tens of millions of them, can't make a decision in the
country's interest or even in his own interest?
He knew, and I know he knew because I talked
to him about it directly, the potential consequences were
profound and profoundly bad - the end of his presidency, to
start, which I think it has proven to be. He knew that. This is
my read and I could be completely wrong - I don't know what's in
his head and I don't want to overstate my knowledge at all. But
this is my strong perception on the basis of many conversations
on this topic.
He felt he had no choice and he said to me, Everything's going
to be OK. Because I was getting overwrought. Don't do this. The
people pushing you to do this hate you. They're your enemies.
This will destroy you. This will gravely harm our country. We've
got kids. I'm hoping for grandkids. Let's not go there. And he
said, It's going to be all right, and he said, Do you know how I
know that? And I said no, and he said, Because it always is.
There's a kind of Teddy Rooseveltian optimism there, but that's
not really what it was. This is my read.
That was more a justification from a man who
feels he has no choice. That is my strong view. And not just my
strong view, the view of others who are around him and involved
in this deliberation to the extent it was a deliberation, which
is not much.
Who were the other people around
him who had that view?
I can't speak for the views of others, but I
will just say once again that I never saw, nor did I hear about
anybody who works for the Trump administration, who was
enthusiastically pushing this war on Trump, being like:
"You want to make this country great
again? We need a regime-change effort in Iran."
Instead there were a lot of cowardly people,
as there always are, and Trump engenders cowardice in the people
around him through intimidation. And there is a kind of quality
that he has that's spellbinding. And I think it probably
literally is a spell. And the effect is to weaken people around
him and make them more compliant and more confused. And I've
experienced this myself.
You spend a day with Trump and you're in this
kind of dreamland. It's like smoking hash or something. It's
interesting, very interesting. And there may be a supernatural
component to it. I'm not a theologian, but it's real, and anyone
who's been around him can tell you it's true. But whatever the
cause, no one around him was weighing in strongly, as far as I
know, on either side, for or against. But people from the
outside were strongly weighing in, calling him constantly.
I'm going to give an alternative
view on what may have happened...
And you may be right, by the way, because I
don't want to overstate what I know.
We've seen the president in his
second term be much more interested in foreign policy, as many
presidents are, much more open to taking action, not only in
Venezuela, but talking about Cuba, wanting the Nobel Peace
Prize, wading into situations he wasn't terribly interested in,
in his first term.
For sure. That's real.
Could that not be part of this?
It's a huge part of it. There's no question
about that, and all presidents decide at some point that they're
not interested in running the United States because it's hard,
and how do you fix Baltimore and Gary, Ind.? And what do you do
about homelessness in Los Angeles? These are hard questions.
We can't even make Head Start work, despite
many billions and a lot of well-meaning people spending their
lives on it. So these are hard problems and I think it's a
universal experience among American presidents, but also among
U.S. senators, to decide:
I'd rather run the world, because the
details are opaque. I don't speak these languages.
First of all, it's a display of male power:
Send the bombs in to kill the bad people. But moreover you get
to feel like I did something, and that's important and I get it.
And this is, as you wisely note, a process that all presidents
tend to go through. And so Venezuela, Cuba, I object to both of
those efforts very strongly, but neither one, in my view, risks
the future of the United States in the way that the Iran war now
does. So it's a big deal.
But because it is, by the way, a contiguous
neighbor of Iraq, and because Trump spent years talking about
what a terrible idea the Iraq invasion was - defined his
candidacy in 2016 on that point - it's hard for me to believe
that he just organically reached this place at the end of
February, like, Oh, I think it's a good idea. He did not think
it was a good idea.
Shutting down a fifth of the world's oil and
gas? Of all people, Trump knows that's bad.
You said he's a hostage just now.
You told the BBC he's a "slave" to foreign interests.
Correct.
I just want you to be explicit. Trump is being
held hostage by whom?
By Benjamin Netanyahu and by his many
advocates in the United States. And we know that not simply
because Trump started the war on Feb. 28, but because he
couldn't get out of it. He declares we're having a cease-fire.
He says, We're having a cease-fire and we're having these talks
and they're going great, and we are going to open the strait.
And Iran says, Yeah, one of our conditions is Israel's got to
pull back from southern Lebanon.
You can't use the Iran war as a pretext for
stealing more land from a sovereign country that's not your
country. And it's not just Iran who felt that way. I think the
rest of the world is like, What are you doing? I thought we were
fighting the great existential threat, Iran. And now you're
taking the opportunity to take Lebanon's shore, the Litani
River, and bombing downtown Beirut. What is this?
Anyway, this was all very well known. And within hours of Trump
announcing this, Israel publicly, in a way that was designed to
get the attention of everyone, including the Iranians, starts
killing civilians in Lebanon. Now, what was the point of that?
Not to secure the Israeli homeland.
The point of it was to end any talk of a
negotiated settlement, to keep this going until Iran was
destroyed and chaotic, which is the Israeli goal. I'm not
attacking Israel by saying that. Their goals are different from
ours, they're a different country.
They would argue that what they
are doing is neutralizing the threat that has been persistent in
Lebanon through Hezbollah.
OK, but they invaded Lebanon in 1982. That
was 44 years ago. They've had a lot of time to fix Lebanon. They
killed Nasrallah, they blew up Hezbollah with explosive pagers.
They've done a lot since Oct. 7 in Lebanon. They chose that
moment to derail the negotiations. And they've done this
repeatedly.
And so my perspective as an American is we're the United States,
we are a country of 350 million people. You are wholly dependent
on us. You're a country of nine million people with no natural
resources. I'm not against you, but we're not coequals here.
But the point I'm making is Trump could not
restrain Netanyahu. Netanyahu is the one person to whom Trump
couldn't say,
"Hey, settle down or we'll just defund
you and your country will collapse in about 10 minutes,"
which is true.
Israel can't defend itself without the United
States, despite whatever propaganda you may have heard.
So again, it's not an attack on Israel. It's an attack on
American leadership for not constraining its partner in a way
that helps the United States. Trump said, I want a negotiated
settlement. Israel stopped the settlement. Trump refused to even
criticize Netanyahu in public.
Are you joking? That's slavery. That is total
control of one man by another. And that's between Trump and Bibi
and God, as far as I'm concerned. But as an American, that is
our elected president, whose job is to protect our country and
our interest and our economy. And he is looking out for Israel
first. That's outrageous.
And no amount of "Oh, you're an antisemite" -
which I'm not, and I'm never going to be - is going to stop me
from noting that that's outrageous. It is outrageous.
Israel has tried to exert its
influence on a number of presidents. Many presidents have been
asked to decapitate Iran, to do a joint military operation in
the Middle East. This is the first time, really, that this has
happened, where the United States and Israel are doing a joint
military operation against a Muslim country. Other presidents
were subjected to the same pressures, the same donors. Bibi
Netanyahu has been there since the '90s. What do you think has
materially changed that made Trump more susceptible to that
influence?
That's the question that I would like
answered. And I don't know the answer, as noted. One argument
could be Trump is just uniquely weak. But that was not my
perception. I think Trump obviously has weaknesses and a lot of
his posturing is compensatory, of course.
I'm not interested in psychoanalyzing Trump,
but that's clear. What was it about this moment that allowed a
foreign leader to have this level of influence over an American
leader? And I don't know the answer, but again, I think it's
worth finding out. I would also note that this is not a defense
of Trump. Hardly. This is the single most foolish thing any
American president has ever done, in my opinion. I say that with
sadness.
But many American presidents have put Israel's interests before
our own. I would say the Iraq war was a very obvious example of
that. I mean, [Vice President Dick] Cheney's
office was completely controlled - and I knew almost all of them
- by people who were putting Israel's interests above America's
interests.
So I think the Iraq war was, to a great
extent, a product of that, and I believe that Trump felt exactly
the same way, because I talked to him about it a lot.
So what changed about Trump? What changed
after years of telling us our leadership is weak, they act
against our interests, they're stupid, they're foolish, they're
bought off by foreign powers and by domestic donors?
That was Trump's case. That was his whole
pitch. That's why he got elected. To switch on something this
big in the space of a few months? That bears some examination.
That's all I'm saying.
Credit: Philip Montgomery
for The New York Times
In 2020, when President Trump
killed Iranian Gen. Qassim Suleimani, you went on your Fox show
and said: "There are an awful lot of bad people in this world.
You can't kill them all. It's not our job." And you asked, Why
are we "jumping into another quagmire from which there is no
obvious exit?" But it wasn't until President Trump...
I was not heralded for saying that. I don't
think I've ever been more criticized. I'm opposed not simply to
foreign interventions, as you said, most of them anyway, those
not undertaken in self-defense - I'm against the whole frame.
I'm against the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas are at the center
of our domestic conversation.
Like, they're the big problems we face?
They're not! They are not a bigger problem than the behavior of
Citibank, I'm sorry. Credit card debt is a much bigger problem
than Hezbollah will ever be. So stop with the brainwashing. This
is bonkers. I live here. I'm almost 57.
I've lived here a long time. Hamas and
Hezbollah, while they're not getting my endorsement, are not
relevant to the experience of most Americans. So once you start
thinking like that, you've betrayed your country.
So it wasn't until
President Trump threatened Iran's civilian
infrastructure with a profane Truth Social post on
Easter Sunday that you actually started quite explicitly
speaking out against him.
Yeah, you can't attack Jesus. How's that!
In a monologue on your show, you said, "How
dare you speak that way on Easter morning to the country." Tell
me what you were responding to right then, because it really is
a seminal moment for you in terms of publicly breaking with the
president. I don't do monologues. That was ad lib. I didn't
write it.
I don't have notes. It's just like, that's
how I feel. So it's probably not as coherent as it should be.
But that was really just an emotional reaction to the experience
of waking up on Easter Sunday, the holiest day on the Christian
calendar, and a day of joy and hope, literally the resurrection
of Jesus, and seeing Donald Trump using profanity, threatening
to murder civilians.
I mean, that's a crime. That's a moral crime.
So to brag about that, and then to mock Islam? I don't think you
should mock people's faith. I don't care if it's Judaism or
Christianity or Islam. It's especially galling as a Christian.
I voted for Trump in 2024 - and I never vote typically, but I
voted for him this last election and campaigned for him in a
bunch of cities because I felt that there was clear persecution
of Christians in this country, people of faith, and it was
demonstrable. And I felt Trump - and I based this on his
explicit promises - would be a protector.
I never thought Trump was a Christian. But I
took him at his word that he would be a defender of people of
faith who need to be defended. And this country exists to defend
them. It's in our charter. So anyway, I was just completely
outraged by that.
Since that moment, you've gone
even further. You recently said on your show that you'll be
"tormented" for a long time by the fact that you played a role
in getting Donald Trump elected, and you said, "I'm sorry for
misleading people." That's gotten a lot of attention, as I'm
sure you know.
I don't know because I don't Google myself,
ever.
I would like to understand exactly what you
mean. Can you explain?
I'll tell you what I mean. I truly believe
that the base line requirement, the ticket of admission to the
conversation, is admitting when you are wrong. I spent 10 years
defending Trump on Fox News. I'd probably do it again, because
on the issues I agree with him. I never defended a single thing
I didn't believe.
But at this point, the consequences of this
decision are so bad for the United States and for my family and
your family that you have to say it out loud. I'm a small
reason. I don't think I moved a lot of votes, but I tried to. I
told people this guy will keep us out of the next Iraq,
specifically will keep us out of a regime-change war with Iran.
And here we are in the middle of a
regime-change war in Iran. Hundreds of Americans have been
wounded, some number have been killed. They won't tell us.
That's just the opposite of what I said would happen, so I'm
sorry.
I hear you say that, but I am
compelled to question it a little bit. Are you simply going
public about something that you've felt privately for some time?
Because, through the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News, some of
your texts went public, and in 2021 you said, "There really
isn't an upside to Trump." You said, "I hate him passionately."
Clearly you had some feelings of reservation about the president
before this time.
Without question. There's no doubt.
So I'm just trying to understand...
You know, I have a lot of thoughts and
theories about things which may or may not be rooted in reality.
So I hesitate even to spring any of my theories on you because
they're probably insane. But one thing that has bothered me for
many years is the fact that a lot of people in Trump's immediate
orbit have been hurt - and really hurt. Gone to prison, become
unemployable, publicly shamed, have gotten cancer.
And I am a believer in big-picture
assessments of things. So you're trying to think, Is Trump good
or bad? He's saying things I really agree with. But then people
around him are getting hurt. Is the country actually getting
better? I don't know. It's hard to know. Because to some extent
your vision is obscured by the intensity of some of these
debates. Mine was, has been, is easily obscured by that
intensity.
But did I have reservations about Trump? Of course. To some
extent I sublimated them or rationalized them away or focused on
areas where I agreed with him. All my fault. But I told myself,
and I to some extent still believe, it's the big decisions that
matter. And I knew - because I know the Democratic leadership
really well, that they're completely under the control of the
same forces - that we would get a regime-change war inevitably
in Iran if they were elected.
And so I told myself Trump is the way to
avoid the really bad thing.
There's the political case
against Trump that you make. But I do want to ask you about the
"moral" case that you've been making as well. That's a word that
you have used. In that monologue responding to Trump's Easter
post, you said that Trump's comments were "evil." And I just
want to understand that a little bit better. Do you think only
his comments are evil, or does the evil extend to Trump himself?
Is he evil?
I just want to be really clear that there's a
lot of evil in me and in every person. I've certainly
experienced it in myself and I have seen it in all people. We're
all capable of evil.
So I want to pull back on the judgment and be
very precise about what I was saying, which is you cannot mock
other people's gods and put yourself in their place. That is a
deal-killer for me. That's worse than the war with Iran, in my
opinion.
I ask because you've been talking
on your show about whether Trump is the Antichrist.
I have not said that.
On your show, the day after
Easter, you noted he did not put his hand on the Bible during
his swearing-in ceremony as president, and you said, "Maybe he
didn't put his hand on the Bible because he affirmatively
rejects what's inside that book." And then on a recent show, you
went further, saying: "Here's a leader who's mocking the gods of
his ancestors, mocking the God of gods and exalting himself
above them. Could this be the Antichrist?" I actually did not
say, "Could this be the Antichrist?"
[He
did.]
I don't know where that comes from, but I
know that those words never left my lips because I'm not sure I
fully understand what
the Antichrist is, if there's
just one.
I actually tried to understand it. I may have
said some are asking that. I am not weighing in on that because
I don't understand it, just to be totally clear.
In Revelation, the Antichrist is named in
different...
Not just Revelation, but throughout the New
Testament, there are references, and in the Prophets as well.
But no, I'm not speculating about that. I know that people are
speculating about that, but I would say it's enough to
acknowledge that Trump, like many leaders through history, is
putting himself above God, but even on a more terrestrial level,
to send out a picture of yourself as Jesus has got to be a red
line for Christians.
How could it not be? It has to be, and I wish
that Christians would speak up when he attacks Allah, when he
mocks the faith of Muslims.
So to be clear, though, that was
not what you were suggesting?
If I thought Trump was the Antichrist, I
would just say so. If I understood what the Antichrist is, I'd
say so, and I don't really.
You've been discussing it repeatedly on your
show, so I'm just trying to understand why. What do you want
your audience to be considering?
I want my audience to see what's happening
now in terms beyond just material. Obviously, the commodity flow
through the Strait of Hormuz is essential to the global economy.
Got it. But I also think there is a world beyond our senses.
Every culture and civilization has understood
that from the beginning of time. And we're in this weird,
anomalous moment where we've been trained not to think that, but
it's real. And this is a realization that's dawning on me. I
wasn't thinking like this at all until several years ago.
So I don't want to pretend that I'm a shaman
or anything like that. I just want to make the point repeatedly
again and again that there are unseen forces that act, that
there is a spiritual realm, and we are subject to those forces
for good and bad, and I don't think that any person can deny
that.
I just want to make the point
that you did say, "Could this be the Antichrist?" And then you
said, "Well, who knows?" You did use those words.
Man, then my apologies to you, if there's a
video of me saying that. I guess what I'm expressing to you is
it doesn't reflect exactly how I feel. It suggests a precision
that I haven't arrived at, that Trump is the Antichrist.
You'd have to define Antichrist, and I know
that I can't define it, and it's not clearly defined in the New
Testament or Old Testament.
So you're open to the
possibility?
I think what we're seeing is evil. Are you
allowed to kill people who've committed no crime? No. Super
simple. You're not allowed to do that. Under no moral standard
is that allowable. All of a sudden it's allowable in Gaza, and
our leaders are like, Yeah, it's totally fine.
It's not fine. It's repugnant to the
Christian understanding of the world and the human soul. Every
person has a soul. That's the Christian view, and not just the
Christian view, it's the Islamic view, too. And it's my view.
Your Easter episode was titled,
in part, "A Warning to Christians Everywhere." My interpretation
was that you were warning other Christians not to follow a false
prophet.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm warning.
That false prophet being President Trump?
Yes, and Netanyahu. There are a lot of
evangelical Christians who are convinced that God wants you to
support Netanyahu, which I find incomprehensible.
Christian evangelicals in this
country have been a hugely important part of President Trump's
coalition. Many support Israel because they believe the creation
of the state of Israel fulfills biblical prophecy. They're
called Christian Zionists. I will note you have said you dislike
Christian Zionists more than anybody. You've said they have a
"brain virus." You have apologized for those comments
repeatedly.
Yeah, I shouldn't have said that.
But would you like to see those Christians
stop supporting the state of Israel in the way that they do?
Of course, immediately, on many different
grounds. But it's really simple. Christians can never support
the murder of innocents, period. That's just a bright red line.
Find the place where Jesus is like, "These people are annoying,
kill them all." It's not there.
So where are you getting this? I'm hardly a
theologian. But I've asked many Christian Zionist leaders who
will speak to me. Now they won't talk to me, but I certainly
asked Ted Cruz this. I asked Mike Huckabee this. I tried to ask
Franklin Graham.
But I sincerely want to know where this is
coming from. It can't all be from the Book of Esther.
You did have this contentious
interview with Huckabee - he's the ambassador to Israel - where
you talked to him about Christian Zionism for quite some time.
And in that interview, you were pressing him on if the modern
state of Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people today has
legal or biblical legitimacy. You were questioning him on this
idea and you went round and round on this for quite some time.
And I was just wondering what you were trying to get at there.
I was trying to get an answer, which I
couldn't get, and instead was accused of hate for trying to
evoke an answer to a very simple question, and the question was,
on what basis are you making this claim? People whose ancestors
didn't live here now occupy the land - that's very common in
history, by the way. I'm not even objecting to it. What I'm
objecting to is the claim that it's God's will and that Israel,
because of this, has the unique right to exist.
Where does that right come from? Well, the
right comes from the Bible. OK. Well, I'm not a Bible scholar,
but I've certainly read it a lot. And I said to him, Where are
the borders? Because my read of Genesis is that's a big hunk of
land. That's the Middle East. Does Israel have a right? Because
you're referring to this text as the basis of the right to have
that land. And he said, Fine with me.
So on many levels, theological and diplomatic, kind of a big
thing to say. The White House was annoyed that he said it out
loud. I was grateful that he did because it's good to know what
the terms are. And the second question I asked was, If Israel
has a right derived from this scene in Genesis, then to whom
does it apply? Who are Abraham's heirs? And he said, Well, the
Jews. And I said, OK.
By the way, just to be clear, these are not
conversations that I sought. I was never interested in this
topic. Israel's a country with borders and sovereignty and a
seat at the U.N., and it's a nation-state like ours, like every
country.
The second you start telling me that as a Christian, I'm
obligated to support the government of this country, then I have
a right to ask you what you're talking about. It's that simple.
So I flew all the way to Israel, which I didn't want to do, and
I asked him, What are you talking about, to whom does this right
apply, and on what basis?
Shut up, antisemite! So from my
perspective, that was the most revealing conversation I've ever
had.
Carlson with Ambassador Mike
Huckabee
on
"The Tucker Carlson Show" in February.
Credit:
Screenshot from YouTube
Why, though, were you so interested in those
questions?
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. 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.
So on this question hangs the future of the American economy and
the lives of American service members. There's no more important
question. And the effort to push me away from that question by
calling me names, calling me a hater, saying I'm obsessed with
Israel? I would be grateful never to think about it again.
I find Israel actually geo-strategically
irrelevant except to the extent that we imbue it with relevance
at the behest largely of evangelical Christians. So you can see
there's a one-to-one correlation between these questions and the
future of my country.
Mike Huckabee and the people he represents
have made it the nation's business, at which point it is
entirely fair, in fact it's a requirement of good citizenship,
to press him on, What are you talking about? He refused to
answer those questions, at which point I say, as someone who's
still committed to reason, you've been exposed as a fraud and/or
a liar.
I think one of the reasons that
interaction with Mike Huckabee was particularly notable for
people, and the reason you got so much pushback, is because
there is an enormous sensitivity around Israel being the
homeland of the Jewish people and the attempt to delegitimize
that.
I have enormous sensitivity about the United
States being the homeland of my people and the burial place of
my ancestors. I have enormous sensitivity about the future of
the United States. Those are my concerns. I'm not dismissing the
concerns of any other group, including Israelis or Iranians or
Venezuelans or anybody else.
Everybody has his or her own set of concerns,
but my concerns revolve around my country. I'm not going to
subordinate my concerns and the concerns of my children to other
people's hysteria, no matter what country it is.
Why do you think you get tagged
so often with antisemitism?
I think there are two reasons. I'm not an
antisemite and I think that's obvious. I've expressed this many
times and I'll do so again: I have temperamental and religious
objections to antisemitism or any hate or discrimination based
on bloodline.
That is against Christian theology, it's
against my personal ethics, and I oppose it no matter who is
suffering from it, whether it's whites or Blacks or Jews.
Nobody can be punished for his bloodline,
period. I don't believe in collective punishment, unlike the
Israeli government. So that's No. 1: I am opposed to
antisemitism, and that's a threat because I'm not approaching
this as someone who wants to hurt Jews. I just don't want the
United States to be implicated in the crimes of other nations,
and I'm not intimidated.
And No. 2, that is a much easier conversation than answering
very simple questions. Like where does the right to exist come
from? I've been told for many years that Israel has a unique
right globally to exist. Where does that right emanate from, who
granted that right, and on what grounds? And they can't answer
the questions and they don't want to have the conversation.
So just to be totally clear:
Asking questions is not hate. Telling the
truth is not hate.
They don't want to answer the question and
they don't want to tell the truth. And by the way, it's not just
Jews - I think I've been attacked more viciously by Christian
Zionists than I have by Jews, just in point of fact. It's a kind
of nice universalism to it.
But I'm not intimidated. I don't know why I
would be. In fact, I think it's my obligation not to be
intimidated.
Can asking questions stir up
hate?
Language is powerful. Well, sure, I mean, you
could pose attacks in the form of questions. I've certainly done
that a lot, for sure. But the questions themselves hang in the
air. And a legitimate question deserves an answer.
The reason I want to press on this a little
bit more is that there is an entire antisemitic worldview that
has been based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," that
there was this cabal of powerful Jews that controls the world.
And that book was written in the early 20th century, but helped
the Nazis, and it really has informed a lot of the views of many
people today that there is this very powerful sect of Jewish
people who want global war and global conflict. And there's a
real concern that the rhetoric where everything is blamed on
Israel, where Israel has these supernatural powers to influence
the president, to influence the previous president, George W.
Bush, to enter into the Iraq war, to be involved in
assassinations, etc. - that it has echoes of that. People are
genuinely concerned that it opens the door to this idea that has
been debunked and has been used in absolutely vicious ways to
annihilate an entire people.
I'm not quite sure what that means. Let me
tell you my concerns. My main concern is the destruction of the
United States. And that is in no way to minimize anyone else's
concerns, but I have a right to that concern and I will not have
my own concerns hijacked. I will not submit to being told what
my concerns should be.
I'm an adult man who pays his taxes. I have a
right to come up with my own hierarchy of concern. And at the
very top is the destruction of my country, which I've lived in
for 56 years. And I know that it's not better than it was, and
it's not getting better than it was. And there are many reasons
for that. One of them is this war, but there are many others.
And so people say, "Well, I'm really concerned." Well, I am
really concerned, too. I'm really concerned that the prime
minister of Israel and his many cheerleaders in American media -
including at The New York Times, if I can say - pushed the U.S.
government into a war that hurts the United States. That's my
concern. And I would say that's at least coequal with anyone
else's concerns.
So that's the first thing I would say.
Second, as for "The Elders of Zion" or whatever, I don't know
what that is. I've heard references to it. It's like czarist
forgery or something.
I'm just wondering what the line
is for you - I am by no means purporting to understand
necessarily where it is - between criticism of the state of
Israel and how that could be perceived as feeding into
antisemitism.
Well, it breaks my heart that it is perceived
that way, and that perception is the product of a decades-long
effort to conflate antisemitism with any criticism of the
secular government of Israel.
The I.H.R.A. definition of antisemitism
lists 11 examples of antisemitism, and that has been adopted
globally. Forty different governments have adopted it as their
standard of what antisemitism is, and two-thirds of the examples
are criticism of Israel.
I don't get to write these standards, and I also don't have to
abide by them. And I reject as ludicrous, out of hand, the idea
that the criticism of a secular government is the same as
criticism of an entire ethnic group, many of whom do not support
that secular government, many of whom reject that secular
government, and a lot of those I know personally.
So you're just not going to get me on board
with the lie that criticism of Netanyahu is hatred of all Jews,
because it's not. And I don't care how many times someone
repeats that to me. I don't care. And by the way, I've lost
friends over this, and I do grieve that.
Is it just Bibi that you're against, or if
there was a different government in Israel, it would be OK?
I'm against anything that hurts my country.
Why wouldn't I be? I live here.
But I'm just curious. There are elections
coming up, and if Bibi gets kicked out...
I took my family on vacation there.
Obviously, I'm not against Israel. By the way, you can check the
record. Before maybe two and a half years ago, I certainly never
criticized Israel, but I rarely even mentioned Israel. I could
give you a long list of the things that I love about Israel,
particularly about Jerusalem, which is one of my favorite
cities.
Jerusalem and Beirut - greatest cities in the
world. It kills me to see them at the center of all of this. I
think the second that we ban criticism of a foreign country,
we're not free at that point. We're slaves of that other
country. Whatever you can't criticize is the force in charge.
By the way, I don't think it's good for global Jewry to have any
of this at all. If you tell 350 million Americans that it's
against the law, and it's very close to against the law at this
point, to criticize Israel, how does that help the perception?
Does that feed antisemitism? I think it does.
Not that it is my job to monitor or regulate
this stuff, but just common sense would tell you that's not
good. If you want to make the case on behalf of anything, any
idea, including ones I disagree with, make your case, tell me
why it's a good idea. And we're falling out of that habit and
instead try to hurt people who disagree with us. I will always
reject that. I guess I'm the liberal.
I would say it's not exactly
against the law, but I understand your point.
The second you say that criticism is the same
as a threat or words or violence, then of course it's very easy
to arrest people, as they are arrested in Great Britain.
They've had hundreds of people arrested in
Great Britain for criticizing Israel. I don't know why any
liberal-minded person, and I'm in that group - you have a right
to your views, I have a right to mine - would go along with this
and not say:
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is totally
bonkers. This is the road to totalitarianism."
And I would say that about any topic.
We've talked about some fissures that have
emerged among conservatives over Israel in the war, right?
Fissures?
Yeah, it's totally blown up.
I want to dig into that because earlier this
year, you told Megyn Kelly that there is "a huge scramble" to
define what the Republican Party is after Trump, and you said,
"I'm in the middle of it." Boil down the scramble for me.
Well, I lost that scramble. [Laughs]
Are there two sides? Is it driven by ideas,
personalities?
Look, there have been disagreements over
foreign policy within the Republican Party since 2015, when
Trump announced for president. [Before,] there was no
disagreement at all. It was a neoconservative party completely.
I was part of that for sure, and unthinkingly, and then
unwillingly, but whatever.
But since 2015, there's been this kind of
debate: What is the appropriate use of American power? And what
is our relationship with Israel? And those have been sotto voce
debates. But it's only with this full regime-change effort
against Iran that they've become untenable.
My own view is I'm always happy to eat with and talk with people
I disagree with. Again, I guess I'm the liberal here. But there
is a strong sense among the neocons who've completely taken over
the Republican Party that anyone who disagrees cannot be allowed
in the White House.
I don't make these rules. I feel sad about it
for a bunch of reasons. As a political matter, the constituency
for that is very small. There aren't 150 million people in
America who are really excited about the Iran war or who are
ever going to be excited about that. So you're dooming your
party to irrelevance when you do that. I don't know why they
would want to.
They hate Trump. The neocons hate Trump, have always hated
Trump. I had a first-row seat to this. And now they've destroyed
him. And I told him that. I said: These are people who hated you
from Day 1. They couldn't control you. They hated you for that
reason.
What you said about the Iraq war inflamed
them, it humiliated them, and they want to destroy you, and this
war will destroy you. I said that point-blank right to him. And
it's proven true now.
And what do you mean about you
being in the middle of it and losing the scramble?
Charlie Kirk and I were the only people, I
think, in June of 2025 to say to the president, to his face:
This is a very bad idea. The people pushing this are trying to
get you involved in a regime-change war. You've campaigned
against that. Don't do this.
And then, on Sept. 10, Charlie was murdered
by a lone gunman. So by the time this latest round happened in
January and February, I think I was the only person who said
that to Trump. We know who won by the effects.
From my perspective, it was a debate between
people who thought it was wise to use American power in the way
we're now using it and those who thought that it was dangerous.
Trump did it. So obviously he rejected my view.
As you mentioned, you were very
close to Charlie Kirk before he was killed. And he started
Turning Point USA, which is this very influential group among
young people on the right. And we're now seeing some on the
right who are questioning whether Israel had a hand in Charlie
Kirk's murder. And I should say the theories that Israel was
linked to Charlie's death were denied by Israel. There's been no
proof of that at all, and crucially this theory has been
condemned by Erika Kirk, Charlie's widow. Do you still have a
relationship with Turning Point USA?
Well, I have always loved Erika Kirk. I met
her when she was dating Charlie and thought so much of her. I
know a lot of people at Turning Point. I was the headliner for a
bunch of different Turning Point events. I haven't been asked to
do it this year, don't know if I will be.
Never said a word against Turning Point. I
would hate to see it hijacked by its donors to become an oracle
of neoconservatism. I think it'd be pretty hard to do because
its members are not for that, young people are not for that,
people of draft age are especially not for that.
Carlson at
AmericaFest,
Turning Point
USA's annual convention,
days after the
death of Charlie Kirk in December.
Credit: Caitlin
O'Hara/Reuters
When was the last time you spoke to Erika
Kirk?
A couple of weeks ago by text. So my concern
- and this is not about Erika Kirk or Andrew Kolvet or any of
those people with whom I've never had a cross word and hope
never to have a cross word - but my concern more broadly is
about the investigation into Charlie's murder, which was
short-circuited by the F.B.I.
And I'd like to know why. I don't care to be
screamed at for asking that question. It's a legitimate
question. And we know that. I know that for a bunch of reasons.
But the public knows it because Joe Kent said it out loud and
explained it. He was the head of the National Counterterrorism
Center.
He's O.D.N.I. And he was told by the F.B.I.
that he could not investigate it. And as a friend of Charlie's,
I'm not going to be intimidated into not saying the following,
which is, On what grounds would you do that? I'm not saying the
guy who's been arrested didn't pull the trigger.
He was handed over by his father.
Do we know that? I don't know what I know
because there hasn't been a trial yet. And again, it's like so
many things, and it's not just Israel, it's not just Charlie
Kirk, it's the existence of NATO or the way the economy is
structured. Why is capital taxed at half the rate of labor?
That's a question that bothers me. In every
case: Shut up, socialist, racist, conspiracy theorist. It's
like, I'm just too old for that. Why don't you answer the
question? That's my job.
Do you think Turning Point's
influence has waned since Charlie's death?
I haven't the faintest idea. I agree with
most Americans when I say this war is a disaster, it's
impossible to see how it helps the United States. And I would
like to see all self-described conservative groups pressure the
president, as Charlie did, to minimize the damage.
I hope Turning Point is working on that. I
don't know the answer, but I certainly hope they are. I can say
confidently Charlie would be working to do that.
Obviously, Turning Point is just one
organization trying to reach youth on the right, but you also
have Nick Fuentes, the far-right white nationalist influencer
who's called Hitler "effing cool," who also has a huge following
among young right-leaning men. How do you see Fuentes in terms
of the future of the right?
It's so hard to know. I'll tell you my
instinct on it. Most of the debates about race, ethnicity,
religion, to some extent immigration, are less resonant
long-term than debates about economics. I think the main
frustration among young people is not just that the composition
of the country is changing too fast, which it definitely is.
But the main concerns are about the lack of
economic opportunity for American young people, who are totally
screwed at a more profound level than people acknowledge. Older
people do not acknowledge that.
I had dinner the other night with a bunch of really smart kids
from Stanford. And one of them said that his best friend just
graduated with a degree in computer science last year and has
not been able to find a job. Stanford computer science, can't
find a job.
So that's a window into the total destruction
of the economic opportunity for young people, and what looks to
me as a non-economist like the true hoarding of capital by a
tiny group of people, a very lopsided and unfair economic system
guaranteed to radicalize young people - and not just young
people, but especially young people. And so I think most future
conversations politically will be about economics.
So you see that as Fuentes's
power waning?
For sure. I don't know about Fuentes in
particular. I wasn't even aware of Fuentes. I'm just in a
different world, right? I read The New York Times or whatever.
I'm older, OK? So I'm not an expert on Fuentes's reach or even
what he's saying day to day. I really don't know. But he has
been caricatured as a race guy, which he may be, by the way.
He was mad about the Jews or Black people or
whatever, but I'm just telling you I think the future, the
energy, not just on the right, but I think right and left agree
on this, under 30, is that young people have been shafted by
older people, particularly by the baby boomers, people born
between '46 and '64.
And I think they're right about that. I do
think that's the most selfish generation, most loathsome,
mediocre generation this country ever produced. Not all of them,
but in general, I would say. Their behavior has been shameful
and selfish. And I hear young people talk not about "I'm mad at
the Jews." I hear people say things like "Only baby boomers
would have a second home in Isle of Palms, S.C., but not help
their kids buy homes."
That's what I hear. I hear people who
understand that their lives will bear no resemblance to the
lives of their parents and grandparents and they're really upset
about it.
Meanwhile, there are all these people making billions on clearly
fraudulent enterprises. Crypto-related enterprises and other
enterprises that are not adding to the sum total of prosperity
in this country and not making the country better. So that's
where I think the radicalism is going to start.
And the murder of that health care executive
in New York, the health insurer guy? I'm against all murder,
just to be totally clear. I was surprised but not really shocked
by the positive reaction. All these normal-looking people on the
internet are like, "I am glad they killed him." They don't even
know his name. That reflects this revolutionary frustration. And
I do think it's revolutionary.
I think one of the reasons that Trump is apparently going to
make weed legal is just so we can lower testosterone levels even
more, make people more passive. Have some more benzos, it's
fine. Because it's not fine, is the truth.
So again, long-winded answer to a short
question, but the future that I imagine is not a future in which
we're yelling at each other about race. It's a future in which
people are legitimately revolutionary, maybe even violent, on
the basis of thwarted
Fuentes wants America to be a
white Christian nation among other things.
Well, he's very good at offending The New
York Times, but I think the real issues are not about Fuentes or
even about race. Immigration has a direct effect on economics,
and so the overwhelming majority of newly created jobs in the
past five years have gone to the foreign-born.
That's not an attack on the foreign-born, to
say that's not really the job of the U.S. government to provide
economic opportunity to the world. The job is to protect its own
people.
I can tell you don't want to talk
about Fuentes.
Well, I don't have a lot to say. I just
think, like, OK, he said naughty things.
Well, you caused a big uproar
when you had him on your show.
I didn't cause anything. People got
hysterical. How can you talk to this man? I've interviewed Ted
Cruz, who's calling for the murder of innocents. I don't think
Fuentes is doing that.
But that conversation [with
Fuentes] was pretty friendly.
People say that. I mean, whatever. I'm
naughty for talking to Fuentes.
But you've been doing this for decades. I have
watched you and your shows for a very long time, and you
obviously have a very savvy understanding of how to approach
your interviews and how they're going to land.
I don't know about that. I don't think I'm
that savvy. Maybe I'm underselling myself.
Why did you want to handle it the way that you
did? You started with talking about his background and where he
grew up. It's a different kind of interview than the one with
Ambassador Huckabee.
I've known Huckabee for over 30 years. He's
been a public figure for over 30 years.
But one was prosecutorial, you were building a
case. The other one was friendly.
If I agreed with everything Fuentes said, I
would just say so. The effort to divine my motives, when I state
my motives clearly. I think I'm telling the truth.
Carlson's interview
with Nick
Fuentes in October.
Credit:
Screenshot from YouTube
But as you have acknowledged in this
interview, you use questions sometimes as a form of attack.
If I could just state my motives, and you can
either believe me or not, and I've done this many times but I'll
do it once more and say I'd never heard of Fuentes. I first
heard him because he was attacking me and my family, which
enraged me. I did fall for the bait and so then I thought, Well,
this guy, I keep hearing he's very influential.
Let's have him on, hear what he has to say.
So I did that. On the question of hating Jews because they're
Jews, I'm opposed. I told him that to his face.
Lots of people decided that I should have taken a different
tone. Do your own interview with Fuentes if you want. That's OK
with me. But I guess what I've come to believe is that I didn't
feel it was a significant interview, except to the extent it was
used to try and make me into a Nazi, which again I'm not - I
would admit it. But what I think is interesting is the kind of
moral scheme that that interview revealed, which not
surprisingly is childish and kind of repulsive.
And by "moral scheme" I mean like what the
people in charge, including in journalism, think is right and
wrong. So I think anyone who calls for the murder of innocents
or justifies them is the lowest possible person. There's nothing
worse than that, than killing kids. And you take someone like
Randy Fine...
The representative from Florida.
Or Ted Cruz or Mike Huckabee. I don't know
Fine, but I know the other two very well and have for many
years, and both of them have been like, We should go kill people
and their kids, and then make excuses for that.
There's nothing worse than that. The only
controversial part of those interviews, from the perspective of
others in journalism, is that I was too mean, I was too tough. I
was tough on Mike Huckabee, who's a sitting U.S. ambassador, or
Ted Cruz.
I don't think that was the
concern.
But the point is, who do you think is more
morally repulsive: Ted Cruz or Nick Fuentes?
Who do you think is more morally repulsive?
Ted Cruz! Ted Cruz is a sitting U.S. senator
who has called for the killing of people who did nothing wrong,
whole populations, who advocated for this war. Nick Fuentes is a
kid. He's like 26 or 27. He has no power except his words.
Here you have a public official who we pay,
who has actual power, who's voting for things, who's making
policy decisions. And those decisions would include, in fact
they are focused on, the murder of people who did nothing wrong.
And yet no one thinks it's a big deal. If there's tape of Nick
Fuentes saying we should kill people because we hate their
parents or it's OK to kill children, I would love to see the
tape because that's disgusting.
And that's basically what the entire U.S.
Senate does every single day and no one notices. Nick Fuentes
said something naughty that I disagreed with. He made fun of
things that I don't think I would ever make fun of.
He's a white nationalist who has
denied the Holocaust.
OK, but is that worse than killing kids?
You know, I was just in Germany recently. And
it was such a good reminder that the Holocaust didn't start with
the gassing of Jews. It started with the dehumanization of Jews.
It was language that was used.
I couldn't agree more, and that's why when
you have a U.S. senator, a member of Congress, a U.S.
ambassador, waving away civilian deaths as if they don't matter,
that's the language of genocide, which results - and this is the
lesson of the Holocaust - in genocide itself. And it has.
So the lesson for me really watching all of
this is that this can happen in civilized countries. In all
human beings, there is the capacity to ignore the evil right in
front of you. And my point is it's happening right now, and my
job, to the extent I have one, I just want to remind people that
we're all capable of that, including me, and that we are
watching it right now. And if you think that Nick Fuentes is a
greater threat to other human beings than Ted Cruz, I would love
to know how.
I can imagine people hearing this
and thinking you are soft-pedaling Nick Fuentes, apologizing for
Nick Fuentes.
I'm hardly soft-pedaling Nick Fuentes. I'm
trying to awaken people to the killing of innocents in our
midst, which we are not only encouraged to ignore, but really
told to ignore on pain of being denounced. And I'm just saying
no, I'm not doing that. And Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee are two
of the main people making this moment possible, and President
Trump. But Nick Fuentes is the problem? OK. It's not a defense
of Nick Fuentes.
It's merely like a reality check for the rest
of us. What are we doing? [After this interview, we asked
Carlson to clarify his claims that Cruz and Huckabee had
supported the murder of children and other innocent civilians.
His representative responded with an email that just said,
"Gaza."
When asked for comment, Huckabee wrote, "No
sane person advocates for the murder of children or civilians,"
and called the allegation "sick and evil." And Cruz wrote that
we should spend our time "actually covering people who still
matter."]
We began this conversation by
discussing your rupture with President Trump. And I'd like to
ask about your relationship with the vice president, because you
were one of the people credited with getting him into that role.
You were close to him. You advocated for him. Are you still
close to Vance, considering your rupture with the president?
I will always love JD Vance as a man. I think
- and I'm making this judgment on the basis of his public
statements over many years - I think he's in a tough spot.
He's on the record repeatedly saying this is
exactly the thing that this administration would avoid doing,
and now they've done it.
President Trump was also on the record saying
similarly.
Exactly, and by the way, I wouldn't
characterize it as a "rupture" with Trump. He betrayed his
promises to me and everybody else, and I acknowledged that in
public. So it doesn't make me the person who breached the
contract. He's the one who breached the contract.
But it puts the vice president in a super
difficult spot. And I know him well and think so much of him as
a person. And it is my guess that, based on his past behavior,
that he's doing everything he can to mitigate what he sees as
the ill effects of this. But it's kind of hard to call the shots
when you're vice president, because that's not in the
Constitution.
You know, he was attacked endlessly for my Nick Fuentes
interview. Oh, so scary! I always felt bad about that. He didn't
do anything. You know what I mean? But I was used as a cudgel to
beat him over the head because the neocons hated him, because
they thought that if he ever became president, he would be less
compliant than the president turned out to be.
So I don't want to add to that at all. I
think he's a really good man. I know he's a good man because I
know him very well, but I don't have anything else to say to
anyone in the administration because I can't affect any outcome.
You don't talk to him anymore?
When was the last time you spoke to the vice president?
Oh, I don't know. But I wouldn't want to add
to his problems at all. I would just say what's obvious, which
is that I'm hardly an adviser to this administration. And I
think it's also clear that Donald Trump makes these decisions.
You really don't know the last time you spoke
to Vice President JD Vance? Weeks, months, days?
I don't know. I mean, I would never
characterize that. I don't want to cause him more problems. I
would just say I'm not advising. No one's seeking my counsel.
I'm not trying to influence anything. I gave it my best shot.
Didn't work.
Well, let me ask you this. Vance was not in
favor of the war, but he ultimately didn't seem willing to die
on that hill. He could resign. There's many things he could have
done, I suppose. Do you wish he'd been more forceful?
You know, I'll just be totally blunt about
what I'm doing, which is taking a pass on your question and say
that I know JD very, very well, and it's a super tough
situation. He's in my prayers. I mean that, and I just don't
want to add to what is clearly a really hard job.
I know that if you were in my position, you'd
press.
Oh, go crazy, but I'm being, I think, as
transparent as I possibly can be, or I'm attempting to.
However he has felt privately, publicly Vance
has been a loyal soldier, even going so far as to head the
recent negotiations with the Iranians. And we've seen and you've
commented how unpopular this war is among the American people.
Do you think the role that he is playing right now will hurt his
political prospects?
There are people in the White House who want
to hurt JD Vance and have wanted that since the very first day.
They were bitter. They wanted Marco Rubio to be the choice as
vice president.
And so JD has been subject to - this is well
known, but I'll just confirm it - nonstop treachery from people
on the neoconservative side.
Who are these people?
People around Marco Rubio, and by the way
Marco Rubio's got to be one of the most charming people in the
whole world. It's impossible to dislike Marco Rubio. I'm not an
intimate friend or anything, so I can't say to what extent he's
involved in it, but certainly he's the choice of the donor
class. The donor class is avowedly neoconservative.
That's why they give money for outcomes like
the ones we're watching. That's why this whole system is
completely rotten and just impervious to reform. And they have
been totally against JD Vance from the very beginning and have
been working to undermine him.
Who do you mean
specifically? Because it was interesting in those conversations
with [White House chief of staff] Susie Wiles, for example,
where she was very much praising Marco Rubio and had less
complimentary things to say about JD Vance. Is that
to whom you're referring?
I don't know, is the real answer. I don't
know.
You're accusing people of treachery, so I'm
wondering...
Well, I know there's been a lot of treachery
for sure! And I know they were so mad about JD getting that job.
Who's "they"?
Well, Miriam Adelson, for example, Rupert
Murdoch, people who were very much vested in using Trump for
what we're seeing now. [Adelson and Murdoch did not reply to our
request for comment about this claim.]
But within the White House?
I don't know the answer to that. I've never
worked there. So if you don't work there, you can say what you
think you know, but it's hard to really know.
This is me looking skeptical.
Well, this is me being honest. Like, I don't
really know. And you read all these things. Susie was, of
course, a product of Florida. And there's a whole Florida group,
and the consultants, and Marco, and all the rest. And people
whisper about that. Is that true? I really don't know. I've
never heard her say anything against JD. She seemed to love JD,
but who knows, man, who knows?
But I definitely know that outside, it's hard
to believe that Mark Levin and Laura Loomer, who have no
constituency whatsoever, would have influence in the White
House, but they do. And both of them have been out for Vance
from Day 1, big time. [Levin and Loomer deny this claim.]
Do you think it's hurting his
political prospects - to repeat the question - that he is
fronting these negotiations in Iran?
It's not even JD-specific. This whole thing
is dooming anyone connected to it for the foreseeable future,
including the entire Republican Party. If you're psyched for
President Gavin Newsom, I guess that's a good thing. I'm not, so
I think it's a disaster. It's a true disaster.
And again, I told Trump this. This is going
to blow up your legacy. All this gold you put in here, they're
going to take it down and mock you as they do. This is going to
blow up. You're concerned about your legacy. You're 80 in June,
I get it. This is not the way, and I think that's proven true.
So you think this will doom JD
Vance as well?
Doom? I'm obviously not good at calling the
future. I couldn't be a bigger fan of him as a man, but I think
anybody connected to this is going to have a hard time
explaining it, because how is this good for the United States?
It's not.
One more question on this particular issue. It
was just published that your son, who worked for the V.P., left
that job. Did your rift with Trump have anything to do with
that, and make it hard for him to stay with the administration?
No, zero. He was not forced out of the role
at all. Let me just say, in a normal world, in a decent world,
my son or my son's job would have no relevance at all to me.
Why did your son leave then, if he wasn't
forced out?
I don't know. You can ask him. He was there
for over a year, the White House is an intense place to work. I
don't want to talk about my son.
He's got nothing to do with this. But that's
kind of the point: We need to defend the core beliefs of our
civilization, which, by the way, are attractive to the entire
world. People move here not just for our robust economy, but
because they want to be judged on the basis of what they did,
not on what their parents did.
That's the whole point. That's collective
punishment. It's blood guilt. And we reject it. I gave this
lecture to Nick Fuentes. I gave this lecture to Mike Huckabee.
The lecture never changes because the idea is the core idea of
our civilization.
Credit: Philip
Montgomery
for The New
York Times
Since you mentioned Nick Fuentes,
I have one last question.
[Laughs]
You opened the door.
I don't care about Nick Fuentes!
He is not a JD Vance fan. He's called him a
race traitor because of his marriage to Usha, who is Indian
American.
I don't care!
Wait, let me finish the question. Given how
influential Fuentes is right now...
Is he?
Is he not?
I don't know, he doesn't seem to be. He
didn't get us into war with Iran. Like, who cares, actually?
That's kind of what I'm saying. All of this is like a sideshow.
Americans are being killed in a foreign country at the behest of
another foreign country, and it's going to wreck the U.S. dollar
and cause hyperinflation in our country.
And we're fretting about what some kid on the
internet said. It's like, who cares, actually. This is a way of
taking us away from the core issues, which are economic. And
that is the one thing that nobody ever wants to talk about. How
is the money distributed? Where does the money come from?
The only left-wing movement I ever had a lot
of sympathy for was the one that arose after the global
financial crisis, Occupy Wall Street. I didn't know exactly what
they were about, but I was like, yeah, we should be mad at the
banks because, like, they did this and no one got punished. And
within 20 minutes, we're talking about Black people and white
people.
I'm happy to talk about
economics, but your interview with Fuentes has 25 million views.
Who cares?
To say that it doesn't matter...
It matters in what sense? Like, does it
matter more than...
Can I finish my question?
Yeah, of course.
Thank you. Given how influential he is, and I
don't think that there's any argument about that, I'm wondering
how you think JD Vance could become the leader of the party
after Trump if you have someone like Fuentes speaking so
critically of him.
I'm so glad you asked that question because
its premise reveals everything.
All right, tell me.
So the premise of your question is that JD
Vance can't...
No, I'm not saying that he can't.
It's going to be difficult for JD Vance to
advance politically.
I'm asking, do you think?
Just the premise that JD Vance's interracial
marriage is a bigger problem than his foreign policy views.
No, I didn't say that. I'm saying
that there is a person who is incredibly influential...
Is he incredibly influential? On what basis
are you saying that?
Oh my goodness, there's lots of
evidence not only in the reach of what he talks about, but
also...
Can you name a single member of Congress
who's acknowledged his existence or said "I did this because he
told me to"?
That's a
Groyper? I don't know.
There's not a single member of Congress who
would ever stand up and say or even show evidence of being
influenced by Nick Fuentes, where out of 535, there's about 500
who are taking money from
AIPAC.
I have already asked about the war's impact on
Vance. This is a question about the future of the party, and the
future of any party are its young people. And in the same way
that Turning Point USA has influence on young conservatives, so
does Nick Fuentes.
I guess. I don't know how we're measuring
that.
Listen, there is a strain in the Republican
Party, especially among young people, who are racist, who talk
about JD Vance and his marriage in a particular way, and I'm
asking you, and you can decide not to answer it, but I'm simply
asking you if that is going to be a problem for JD Vance leading
the party.
Let me answer your question. You were unable
to tell me how Fuentes was influential in any way other than the
views on a video, which are probably lower than those on your
average porn video, so that's not a good measurement. It's not
meaningful. Does he have influence on our politics? I haven't
seen any. So let's just start there.
Second, JD Vance's problems with young people
and old people and the party itself revolve around his views on
foreign policy and economics, which are the issues that actually
matter. Race is thrown up as a distraction so often, as in this
case, to distract from what actually matters. Fuentes himself is
a distraction from the conversations that matter because power
is displayed through the structure of the economic system
globally and per country and in the use of force.
The economic program and the foreign policy program are what
matters in every government from the beginning of time. Those
are the two questions on which there is a bipartisan consensus
in Washington between Republicans and Democrats that we should
do this thing.
The public rejects that thing on both
categories. They reject the economics that are a consensus
choice in Washington, and they reject the foreign policies
consensus choice in Washington.
And so Washington's response, Wall Street's response as well, is
to be like, Let's have a race war and you guys can argue over
Blacks or whites or that JD is married to an Indian woman. So
Fuentes is incredibly useful for people with actual power to
divert the conversation to something that is both irrelevant and
divisive, because it's a divide-and-conquer strategy, and my
strong view, gained over 35 years of watching carefully and
being involved, is that that's come to its end.
JD's real problems are that his foreign
policy views, the ones he's articulated for 10 years, are in
direct opposition to the foreign policy views of the people who
fund the Republican Party and the Democratic Party. Same people,
and they have the same views.
This is the idea of the "uniparty."
On these questions, it's totally true. We can
argue about the trans thing. You can have legitimate views on
race, legitimate views on trans. Those are real issues. I'm not
saying they're not. But those are not the issues on which
empires rise and fall. The real issues are economics and foreign
policy. And on those issues, there's a bipartisan consensus. And
so they throw up like, No, we're disagreeing on trans, we're
disagreeing on affirmative action, or whatever.
But they agree on all that matters. And JD
disagrees, as Trump did, at least in his public statements. This
is the wrong foreign policy course. This economic system is
hurting young people. And so Fuentes shows up, and everyone
wants to talk about Fuentes because it's really safe.
No one wants to talk about, why are capital
gains taxes half those of tax on regular income? I think that's
like a critical debate. You will never have that debate. Have
you ever asked a question about that? No, no one ever asked
that. And I think nothing's more important domestically than
that. That's my opinion.
OK.
I wish I hadn't done the Fuentes interview.
Really?
Yeah, it was totally not worth it. It was
kind of interesting, I guess. But I added to the distraction.
What I really wanted to talk about was where we were going in
this war with Iran. And I spent like a month getting calls from
people being like, "You're a Nazi!" And I wish I hadn't done
that. It didn't imperil my soul.
I've interviewed far worse people than Nick
Fuentes, like Mike Huckabee - far worse person than Nick
Fuentes, hurt many more people than Nick Fuentes. Same with Ted
Cruz. So I don't think it affected me. I interview people I
disagree with all the time, and often I'm polite to them,
including war criminals.
The only person I've really been impolite with is Ted Cruz,
because I have limited self-control and he's just so repulsive.
I couldn't control myself. And I was a jerk, and I tried to
apologize. But if you had to sit across from Ted Cruz - it's
just there's something about him.
It's just repulsive, disgusting. Like if you
entered a men's room and Ted Cruz was there, you would be like,
I can hold it, I'm leaving. And I broke down under the strain of
his repulsiveness. But in general, I try to be nice to
everybody. But man, that Fuentes interview, I just added to the
distraction.
I think we're done for now. We're
going to speak again.
We're going to speak again?
You didn't know that?
No!
Oh, you thought this was one and done? Oh, my
man, no
.
A few days later, Carlson and I spoke again.
Thank you for taking time to talk to me again.
We ended our last conversation talking about Vice President
Vance. But I also wanted to ask you about somebody else that you
were close to, and that's Don Jr., the president's son. He
supported your new media venture after you left Fox. I'm
wondering what your relationship is now, considering your
comments about his father. Have you talked about it? Are you
still in touch?
I've known Don for a long time. We share a
common love of the outdoors and actually don't talk a lot about
politics. We talk mostly about hunting and fishing.
And so I have not spoken to him about the war
in Iran, and probably won't, but I think his views on that are
pretty well known.
So you're still in touch, in
other words.
Yeah, absolutely, and I expect to be. Don's a
friend of mine and a really good guy, but our relationship is
not political at all. I don't remember the last time I talked
about politics.
I guess it brings me to this
wider issue about how you critique the president. You're always
quite careful to say how much you like him personally. Are you
worried about alienating his base, because aren't they some of
the same people who tune in to your show?
I don't think I'm careful about saying it. I
want to be honest about saying it, in part because I was out
promoting Trump pretty aggressively for a long time. As for his
base, I don't have a base. I'm not a candidate for office and
don't plan to be.
You have an audience.
Yeah, and it's grown. It's not exactly clear
who that is. I get these readouts from our tech guys. We have
new people watching. Well, who are they? You don't really know.
But this war is unpopular, the idea of
sending Americans over to risk their lives to regime change in
another part of the world is itself unpopular, whether it's in
Iran or any other country.
So I think I'm on the side of the majority in
this country, and maybe the numbers reflect that, but I don't
really think about that when I'm thinking through what we talk
about, who I interview.
When you look at your page on
YouTube, you definitely see that the numbers are much bigger
when you talk about the war in Iran.
Well, it's the biggest thing that's happened
in my lifetime. And the potential consequences include nuclear
war, so it's an inherently big deal. And it's being ignored or
downplayed by most of the rest of the media.
So I think we benefit from taking it
seriously. But it's inherently serious. That's my view of it.
And so I would talk about it almost no matter who watched or
didn't. Because I think it's that important.
One more question about the president. Your
comments have clearly gotten under his skin. He's posted long
screeds on Truth Social about you. And to refer again to those
texts that came out in the Fox News-Dominion legal fight, there
was one from you saying that Trump is good at destroying things,
and you wrote: "He's the undisputed world champion of that. He
could easily destroy us if we play it wrong." Do you worry about
him destroying you now? He's got a lot of power.
I don't worry about him destroying me. I'm
turning 57. My kids are grown. What can you do to me? I don't
work for anybody, and I'm not that worried about my own life
anyway.
But he does have the capacity to destroy, and
I do think that it's a binary: You're either creating or
destroying in this life. And I think he has proved through the
course of his life better at destroying than at creating. He's
created some, but I have a strong preference for creation over
destruction.
One of the reasons that I appreciated Trump
from Day 1, in addition to always enjoying his company and
finding him hilarious, is because he was very good at assailing
the foundations of rotten structures. And I knew that they were
rotten because I am from Washington and I knew those
institutions well, and I knew that despite how they describe
themselves, they were basically just fatuous and long outdated
and probably deserve to be taken down, like a house with rotten
sills. And Trump was great at exposing that and taking them
down.
As someone from D.C., I knew a lot about
U.S.A.I.D. and I thought, Why are we doing this? This is
counterproductive to American interests. And Trump just went in
there and took it out. And I like that. But that is the first
step. That can't be the end stage.
The first step is you scrape the old
property. Then you build something new and better and beautiful.
And we haven't gotten to that part of the program, and it's not
even really being promised at this point, which is troubling.
Carlson with
Trump in October 2024,
after a
conversation for Carlson's live tour.
Credit: Chip
Somodevilla/Getty Images
Do you see a path toward supporting him again?
If he suddenly took actions that you agreed with, do you see
yourself coming back into the fold?
I'd support anybody who made life in the
United States better. It's absolutely not personal. And that's
part of what I hope to convey by always adding the caveat I like
Trump, because it's not personal. I would always support any,
and I mean literally anybody, no matter how unlikely the person,
no matter how much I disagreed with his previous policies or
reviled him as a man or whatever.
It almost doesn't matter, if someone's doing
a good thing. I want to be honest enough to say God bless you
for doing that. And I support that thing. So it's really about
what a person is doing. It's about the fruit rather than the
perception. You make this country better. I don't care who you
are. I will cheer you on because I live here. And I want the
country to get better. It's not getting better.
Now, it's very hard for me to imagine any scenario in which we
look back on the last two months, this war with Iran, and say
that really made us more prosperous, safer, happier, united our
country. I just can't imagine that. But there are a lot of
things I haven't been able to imagine.
So if that happens, I will be the very first
person to say:
"Well, I was completely wrong about that,
and I'm sorry. And I'm grateful that I was wrong."
And I will really mean it. Because I don't
have any agenda at all. The Republican Party could not be more
repulsive to me. The Democratic Party, same thing. So I am in
this weird, non-aligned place and it's totally sincere. I think
the parties, and I'm saying this on the basis of a lot of
knowledge, are rotten beyond repair, or at least simple repairs.
Can you imagine creating a new
party? Can you imagine there being a different party that would
more closely align to your views and perhaps others'? If you're
saying that these parties are rotten beyond repair, what are you
proposing, if anything?
Just to be more precise, nothing is rotten
beyond repair. Repairs are always possible.
OK, because you said "rotten beyond repair."
It's a cliché. I shouldn't have used it on
those grounds. Rotten beyond remodeling, I would say. You can't
just put a new coat of paint or fresh drywall on these
structures because they are ridden 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.
So of course I would be thrilled to see the
rise of a party that represented the majority of Americans, at
least by intent. It's not even a question of are you for this
tax rate or that tax rate. It's a question of orientation.
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.
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.
Am I going to build it? Absolutely not. I'm
not a politician, but I would support it.
And who do you imagine being the
head of that party?
I have literally no idea.
Could it be someone on the left?
It could be anybody. I'm not even sure what
"the left" means at this point. I have some very good friends on
the left. They're not conventional West Side liberals. They
don't have signs saying "In this house, we believe in science."
That sort of dopey lifestyle liberalism of my childhood, I think
that's kind of played out.
Angry ladies telling you to put your mask on
- no one wants that. But I have some sincere left-wing friends
who have a critique of economics and foreign policy that I agree
with completely, or substantially agree with, for sure.
You're in Maine. Graham Platner
is a Democrat who is vying to be the Senate candidate. Is that
someone whose ideas you are interested in at all?
I certainly appreciate his foreign policy
views. And I appreciate how different they are from everybody
else in his party. I haven't met him, and I plan to meet him. I
don't know a lot about his other views.
I think at this point, with A.I. poised to destroy some high
percentage of American jobs, there's really no justification for
immigration of any kind into the United States. You can't say 30
percent of lawyers are going to be out of work, and this
percentage of software coders or accountants or any other sort
of support-a-family type job, they're all going to evaporate
because of this new technology, but we have a bunch of new H-1B
people we'd like you to meet.
That's just cruelty, most importantly to
American citizens but also to the immigrant.
So anybody who's for diluting our labor pool with foreign labor
is clearly not acting in the interest of the country. And I
couldn't support anyone like that. But the prerequisite to
having a rational conversation about immigration is de-racializing
it. Not everything is about race.
We are looking at the elimination of some
very large, unspecified number of American jobs due to
technology. And there are going to be a lot of unemployed
people, including a lot of unemployed immigrants in this
country, and you have the potential for disunity and an actual
rupture of the social fabric, to the extent it still exists. And
so you have to shut down immigration right now.
I'm glad you brought up
immigration, because I was thinking about what you said in our
last conversation about race, and I'm going to quote you here.
You said, "Most of the debates about race, ethnicity, religion,
to some extent immigration, are less resonant long-term than
debates about economics." And you said, "Race is thrown up as a
distraction." You are someone who has spent a lot of time,
though, talking about those issues. You've denigrated
immigrants, saying that they make our country "poorer and
dirtier and more divided." You've long warned that immigrants
are going to replace what you call "legacy Americans."
Well, they have. The overwhelming majority of
new jobs in the last five years have gone to immigrants, not
Americans. So it's not really a debate, actually.
You called Iraqis "semi-literate
primitive monkeys."
What year did I say that?
I think it was in 2018.
Oh, I did not say that in 2018.
Oh, no, 2008. I'm so sorry.
Yeah, 2008. So the point is I'm a racist - is
that what you're saying?
No, the point is: Were you part of the
distraction? Because you were talking about those issues quite a
lot.
I wasn't actually talking about those issues
quite a lot, but I would say I have been involved in many
distractions, including that. I'm not saying race is immaterial.
Race is important. Race is real. It's not a social construct.
It's a biological reality. There are racial differences, real
racial differences.
They're much smaller than gender differences,
but they're still real. But my point, the one that I made
initially, was that for most Americans, people who are born here
- Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, doesn't matter - the real
concerns are economic.
And I do think that certain forces - the banks, people loaning
the money - have a real incentive to foment dissent within the
population against each other. Fight amongst yourselves while we
continue to charge you 25 percent interest on your credit card.
And as I said when we first discussed this, I noticed this after
Occupy Wall Street, which was the very first left-wing movement
that I thought, Hmm, I kind of like the theme here.
I wasn't camping out on the sidewalk in front
of JPMorgan, but the idea that you could have a global financial
crisis and no one responsible for it goes to jail, and the only
people who suffer are the people who took the loans, not the
ones who issued the loans? I felt like that's just not fair. And
so I supported the idea of holding the creditors accountable for
their crimes. None ever were held accountable by Bush or Obama,
as you know.
And then I noticed, and this is measurable actually by a Lexis
search of New York Times stories, that the terms "racist,"
"racism," "white supremacy," exploded in New York Times stories,
and not just The New York Times, but the rest of the legacy
media.
And my interpretation of this fact is that
the media was used to distract the population with racial
conflict.
You were part of the media,
Tucker.
Well, I've already said, I have been part of
many distractions. It took me a long time to recognize this. And
I'm trying to be honest about it now. Now again, there's been an
enormous amount - particularly in The New York Times, but not
just - of anti-white hate, which is totally normalized across
the American media. Whiteness is bad, white supremacy is evil.
Every other kind of ethnic awareness is great and celebrated,
but white ethnic awareness is Nazism, etc.
This absurd and pretty malicious double
standard. And that's annoying, and I've noted it many, many
times, but ultimately what I'm saying is that people care about
their economic fortunes and their ability to pay their bills and
secure a better life for their kids. And those things are way
more important to most Americans I have met than anything
related to race.
And that's why all the stuff about whiteness being bad - which
is an outrageous slur if you think about it - all of that, in my
opinion, was designed as a distraction from the fact that the
American economy was becoming ever more pyramid-shaped, ever
more lopsided, ever less middle-class. The middle class was no
longer the majority after 2015.
That was not even noted in most publications.
That's a tragedy, and no one even said anything about it.
Instead it was just like, White people hate Black people, Black
people hate white people. We got played. That's my view.
You brought up Occupy Wall Street
and your affinity with it. And you said in our previous
interview: "The future that I imagine is not a future in which
we're yelling at each other about race. It's a future in which
people are legitimately revolutionary, maybe even violent, on
the basis of thwarted economic opportunity." It made me wonder:
Do you believe capitalism is an evil system, a necessary evil,
something else? And also, what do you mean about legitimately
revolutionary?
Well, I certainly didn't mean to endorse
violence. I would never say that intentionally. I'm amazed that
you have a tape of me saying that, and I just want to disavow
it.
I'm not for violence, period. It's against my religion, and
so I want to be very, very clear that I'm totally opposed to
violence. What I mean is the current system - and I don't know
what you would call our economic system, I'm often told it's
free-market capitalism - it doesn't bear any resemblance to what
I thought free-market capital was.
I'm not sure the name is important except as
a way to mislead and bully people into being quiet about it. But
any economic system in which the overwhelming majority of the
rewards go to an ever shrinking number of people or proportion
of people is a doomed system because it makes people
revolutionary.
I saw this in Venezuela, which I visited as a child. It was a
prosperous first-world country, beautiful country, actually. And
then it proceeded along the path we're on, and the resentment
built. And you had this very volatile combination of electoral
politics, a democracy, an economic oligarchy, and those two
don't work well together.
And you had a left-wing populist take
over, Hugo Chávez, and the results are now well known.
So I don't know what you call this, but it's
not working and it's making for a very volatile country. You
know, people have to own things. They have to be vested in the
country in order to de-radicalize them. But when people own
nothing, they've got nothing to lose. I mean, these are very
obvious observations.
Two last questions. You can
dispute the premise, which I'm sure you will.
I don't know that I will!
I'd say two of the most seminal events in your
professional life were, one, the Iraq war and, two, the election
of Donald Trump. That's the premise. You were for both of them.
Now you say that they were both mistakes. So why should anyone,
after that track record, listen to you?
People probably won't.
But has it caused
self-reflection?
Well, I admitted it, so of course, it has
caused a lot of self-reflection. And I wouldn't say, by the way,
that the 2016 election of Donald Trump was a mistake. I didn't
mean to suggest that.
I was addressing this last year and what
happened to the campaign promises that a lot of us repeated
enthusiastically and thought were real.
But if you're saying that Donald
Trump could lead this country to a nuclear war, which is
essentially what you said could happen, then how could the 2016
election of Donald Trump not have been something that you
regret? If I was going to vote for someone who might lead us to
a nuclear holocaust, I would perhaps reconsider my vote.
Well, I don't know if you remember, but that
year was a choice between the lady who killed Qaddafi for no
reason and turned Libya into a gaping wound, which it remains,
for no reason, and then laughed about it, and a guy who said the
Iraq war was a mistake. So for me, that was not even a close
call. I mean, Hillary Clinton, particularly in foreign
policy questions, was a grotesque neocon from my perspective.
So I don't regret that. I'm grateful that he
won in 2016. My only point, once again, was he campaigned
against the things he's now doing a year and a half ago. So I
just apologized for repeating those campaign slogans as if they
were true. I thought they were true. They turned out not to be
true.
You know, I'm often wrong. I say that and I mean it. It's not a
pose. And if you force yourself to admit you're wrong, and I
always forced my four children to admit they were wrong - I
didn't do a lot of spanking, the punishment I meted out was
forcing them to admit that they had done something wrong -
that's enough usually.
It makes you wiser over time. It doesn't mean
you're not going to make mistakes. I will make many mistakes
going forward, I assume, but you're less likely to fall for
things once you've apologized the first time.
And the thing that I noticed, and that drove me so crazy about
Washington that I finally left, was the cyclical nature of bad
decision-making. They wouldn't just make bad decisions again and
again. They would make the same bad decisions again and again,
based on the same faulty assumptions, and they could do that
because no one was ever held to account for any failure or
disaster ever.
The only people who were ever punished were
the people who complained about it. And I watched that and it
drove me nuts. I don't want to add to that. I don't want to be
part of that at all. So that's it. I'm not running for anything,
and if people think I'm not credible because I changed my mind
about the Iraq war or because I was shocked that Trump launched
a war he said he wouldn't launch, I get it.
I understand why people would feel that way.
I'm not mad about it.
This is my last question. It's a
personal one. I talked to a lot of people, left and right, about
you. A lot of them used to be your friends, or they said they
were close to you or spent time with you.
[Laughs] They're all mad at me now.
Well, they all say that you've changed. Some
say you've become untethered from reality. And the question all
of them had was, What happened to Tucker Carlson? And it's
something that I've heard echoed a lot. You're an object of a
lot of fascination, continuing interest. You are at the center
of a lot of our cultural conversations. And I wonder how you
would answer that question.
Well, I marvel at it, and I mean this
sincerely: I don't find myself very interesting. At all. I feel
like I'm as transparent as I can be. So the idea that I've
changed - well, yeah, I hope so. America's changed a lot.
And if you still think that making the world
better is as simple as sending aircraft carriers to a foreign
country, if you think the way to improve discourse is by banning
words, if you think the vax is safe and effective, I don't know
what to tell you. Have you not been paying attention? Apparently
not. Or maybe you're just resistant to the conclusions.
But it's really important, if you advocate for something, to
watch, to stay patient, and see how it winds up. And if you
spend a lot of time telling people, "This is true," and then you
find out it's not true, you have an obligation to say, "I'm
sorry. I told you that was true, but it turns out it is not safe
and effective.
And regime change isn't that simple, and no,
speech codes don't work," or whatever you were advocating for.
So yeah, of course I've changed. The changes that have taken
place in this country since August of 1991, when I entered the
work force, are bewildering to me! So much has changed. So many
of my assumptions have been blown up, just evaporated under the
pressure of reality, that if I still clung to those, that would
be shameful.
That would be dishonest. And I don't want to
be that.
