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Tucker Carlson, a conservative podcaster, has said he is “tormented” by his support of Donald Trump, issuing in an extraordinary mea culpa that called for “a moment to wrestle with our own consciences”.
Carlson delivered that comment in a conversation with Buckley Carlson, his brother and a former Trump speechwriter, on The Tucker Carlson Show on Monday that reviewed the new money takeover of the traditional conservative values in a Republican party now dominated by the president.
“You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time – I will be,” Tucker Carlson said. “And I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional, that’s all I’ll say.”
Though Carlson in 1999 had referred to Trump as “the single most repulsive person on the planet”, he beat most pundits in calling for Trump to be taken seriously before he won his first presidency in 2016.
Then, as Trump successfully ran for a second presidency in 2024, Carlson supported him throughout the race, speaking at a campaign event for him just five days before election night.
But the podcaster has now been at odds with the president over US support for Israel and the war the two countries started in Iran in late February. Carlson called Trump’s language on Iran “vile on every level” – and said he took personal responsibility for the president’s return to power.
“You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’ – or like ‘Oh, this is bad – I’m out,’” he told his brother.
He added: “In very small ways, but in real ways, you and me and millions of people like us are the reason this is happening right now.”
Carlson’s revisionism comes soon after Trump issued a stinging attack on him as well as other rightwing media personalities who were hardliners of his Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, including Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones and others.
Trump recently published a social media post calling Carlson “a Low IQ person – Always easy to beat, and highly overrated!!!” And the president threatened to produce “a list of good, bad, and somewhere in the middle” Maga supporters.
Carlson’s latest statements come after he told Newsmax earlier in April: “I’ve always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him – as I do for all slaves. He’s hemmed in by other forces. He can’t make his own decisions. It’s awful to watch.”
Then, Carlson asked himself on his podcast whether Trump was “the antichrist” after the president launched a series of verbal attacks on Pope Leo XIV, who was born in the US and is an Iran war critic. The US president also posted to social media an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ.
“He’s mocking Jesus. He’s making fun of Christianity. The central figure of the religion is being held up for mockery,” the Tucker Carlson Show host said. “Could this be the antichrist? Well, who knows? At least that’s my conclusion. Who knows?”
In his latest comments, Carlson repeated his criticisms of the war in Iran, saying Trump “clearly had no plan for [it], wasn’t enthusiastic about [it], was fully aware of the risks, fully aware that it was a betrayal of his explicit promises for 10 years not to do this – he did it and did it against his will.”
Carlson’s rebuke of Trump on Monday came after he was fired from Fox News in 2023 after a 14-year run at the cable network. His firing came after Fox News struck a $787.5m settlement with the voting machines manufacturer Dominion, which had sued the network over false claims that Dominion was involved in a plot to steal the 2020 White House election that Joe Biden won to end Trump’s first presidency.
He soon launched his own media company; and in October, he stoked controversy by interviewing Nick Fuentes, an antisemitic white supremacist, on his podcast.
Other controversies that Carlson has invited over the years came after he promoted testicle tanning – while he was still at Fox – as well as his enthusiastically exalting the quality of a grocery store in Russia that he visited in 2024, two years after the country’s military invaded Ukraine.
