Within the hierarchy of the Maga voices of influence, it was akin to a papal renunciation. For weeks, Tucker Carlson’s frustration with president Donald Trump’s “war of choice” with Iran had been simmering. But in his Monday podcast, while in conversation with his brother Buckley, also a disenchanted Trumpian with an endless array of Brooks Brothers plaid and gingham, Carlson reviewed, in long-lens elegy, his entire relationship with Trump.
He called the entire project wrong and issued a rueful apology for his role in helping to unleash a political force he has now come to see as ruinous and volatile.
“You and I and everyone who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him ... we’re implicated in this, for sure,” Carlson told his brother in a funereal tone towards the end of a two-hour broadcast.
“It’s not enough to say: well, I changed my mind. Or this is bad, I’m out. 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. So, I do think this is a moment to wrestle with our own consciences. You know, we will be tormented by it for a long time – I will be – and I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people and it was not intentional.
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“But the question does present itself immediately like: what is this? Was this always the plan? You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut but, like, there were signs of low character. We knew that. But there are tonnes of people of low character who outperform their character.”
Carlson was letting himself off lightly with his “in small ways” caveat. The confession drew mirthful cynicism – and some praise – from commentariat figures on both the left and right and radio silence from the White House. But the schism is significant. Carlson had played a decisive role in shaping the personnel of this administration, persuading Trump that JD Vance was the right choice as running mate and also reportedly lobbying for ultimate health secretary Robert Kennedy jnr and Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, when the returned president was putting a cabinet together.
Although the lead performers – and money makers – within the loose coalition of Maga voices had been fragmenting for some months, this was the most significant split from the Trump White House by any Maga figure since Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene resigned her seat and reimagined herself as chief prosecutor of her president’s every decision. Greene fell out of favour over her strident – and fearless – stance on the department of justice’s caginess about the Epstein files release last autumn.
Like Carlson, she stands in bitter opposition to the Iranian adventurism as a repudiation of the election promises enshrined in the America First social contract. And like Carlson, she also believes that it’s a war designed to do Binyamin Netanyahu’s bidding.
Carlson has already branded the Iran war “the single biggest mistake” by any American president in his lifetime and argued it marks the end of America as empire.
Robert Caro published the first book of his magnum opus on the life of Lyndon Johnson in 1982, but he conceded he had begun working on it as early as 1974. Book four in what has been, so far, an imperious and peerless biographical series, was published in 2012, bringing readers to the point where Johnson assumed the presidency after the assassination of JFK. Caro, aged 90 now, is still working on the fifth and final book.
If the study of LBJ is a life’s work, then what will be required of the biographer or historian who has the mental bandwidth and constitution to take on the entire eight decades – and counting – of Donald Trump? But any account of Trump’s political rise is bound to note the startling parallel career trajectory of Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson, who, at 56, has proven extraordinarily adept at navigating the atomic changes across the US media landscape over the past decade.
Broadcast news television is a brutal game of risk and reward. Scanning the list of the star anchors on Fox or CNN or the other cable news networks from a decade or two ago can be an eerie exercise. It is easy to disappear. Carlson could have been one of the vanished. He made the move from a highly regarded magazine writer in the late 1990s to the burgeoning world of broadcast news television and was hosting on CNN his own show, Crossfire, when, in 2004, he was confronted by comedian Jon Stewart, who unexpectedly excoriated him throughout the interview.
In one clip, Carlson, when asked his age, replied that he was 35.
“And you wear a bow tie,” Stewart scoffed.
“I’m not suggesting that you’re not a smart guy because those things are not easy to tie. But the thing is that you’re doing theatre when you should be doing debate. What you do is not honest. What you’re doing is partisan hackery.”
In a new book – Hated By All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unravelling of the Conservative Mind – author Jason Zengerle argues that the humiliating episode had a profound impact on Carlson. The immediate effect was the show was cancelled by CNN just three months later. Carlson drifted through the other networks and spent a period working, by his own admission, as former Fox News chief executive Roger Ailes’s on-air lackey as he tried to re-establish himself on Fox. Ailes reportedly enjoyed watching the Wasp-credentialed presenter reduced to daytime trivia and fill-in slots.
But Trump’s rapid takeover of the Republican Party during the 2016 election campaign was notable for Carlson’s prescient warnings, on the network’s weekend talkshow, that the New Yorker was a realistic contender. That summer, Ailes was out, in disgrace, after a series of sexual allegations led to his resignation. Rupert Murdoch had taken note of Carlson’s sharp eye and just five days before the 2016 election, he was announced as the anchor for Fox’s prime-time 7pm nightly show.
In the decade since, Carlson has publicly voiced his disdain and even loathing for Trump. But by the time Trump was revving up for a second run in office, Carlson’s virulently anti-immigrant and protectionist views chimed with the second coming of Trump Magaism. White America, Carlson told his audience, was under remorseless siege from the arriving immigrant class whose contribution to America, he said on air, was to make it “poor and dirtier”. The remark caused an uproar but it was a tame presager of what was to come once Trump hit the rally circuit.
By the time Carlson’s Fox show was abruptly cancelled in 2023 – there are differing explanations as to why the Murdochs jettisoned their star – he drew a nightly audience of about three million. He quickly parlayed that profile into his own broadcast company and has acquired a regular audience of up to seven million listeners on a show in which he is free to say whatever and interview whomever he pleases.
Among his more notorious stunts was his visit to Russia, in 2024, for a cosy interview with Vladimir Putin and his decision last November to host Nick Fuentes, the 27-year-old right-wing influencer who broadcasts undiluted anti-Semitic white nationalist views.
Afterwards, president Trump breezily defended Carlson, noting the broadcaster had said “good things about me over the years” and leaving it to “the people to decide”. Little over a year had passed since Carlson had sat with Trump at the first night of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, when the candidate made his first appearance since his miraculous brush with death in Butler, Pennsylvania. Carlson was also a speaker that week.
Since the Iran conflagration, their relationship has quickly soured and, as of Monday, broken down. But Carlson’s wish to definitively break from the Trump movement is not as simple as issuing an apology and a vague, confused plea that he was among the misled and the naive.
As Trump plotted his return from his post presidential exile in 2021, he had in Carlson a key disseminator of the former president’s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and one who frequently promoted the “great replacement theory”. Carlson cannot absolve himself from the fact he was a key messenger for the second iteration of Donald Trump.
But Carlson also represents something more than Trump’s most valuable megaphone no longer willing to cheer lead. Despite the hollowness of his apology, he will retain a loyal listenership as he continues to rail against the administration’s handling of Iran and the betrayal of the American value system. He has built a potent personal following in the fractured, disorientating debate stage of US conservative politics, rife with conspiracy theories and rumours soldered to unalterable fundamental beliefs.
It can’t be said Carlson seemed overwhelmed by his torment. Not long after their soulful discussion on Trumpism, the Carlson brothers could be heard enjoying a jocular exchange on the stories-they-could-tell on the sexual orientation of former White House occupants. Later, they riffed on an enjoyable dinner with Russell Brand and the enduring mythos of Camel cigarettes.
The distancing will stress-test the depth of the foundations of the Maga movement in that it will leave the support base to choose between the conflicting messages of Trump, its unifying persona, and Carlson, its most resonant voice.
Even before this breakdown, Carlson had been spoken of as a future presidential candidate in his own right. As recently as March, he scotched the notion in an interview even as Taylor Greene fanned the flames by speculating that “Tucker” would beat Trump if the president “tried to violate the constitution and run again for a third term”. The speculation will intensify now.
To watch that Stewart-Carlson confrontation from the distance of 20 years is to be struck by the relative civility of the conversation, and how polished both men have become as screen communicators since then. Stewart has remained true to his credentials as a progressive commentator with a sharp line in bitterly funny and occasionally heartbroken humour. Carlson’s transformative path to the uneasy and self-created role he currently occupies in American life was just beginning.
“You have a responsibility to the public discourse. We need what you do,” Stewart told him then.
Carlson listened and a flicker of mild hurt registered across his face – and then he moved to an ad break.
