Tucker Carlson says he doesn’t hate his former close friend, President Donald Trump, but feels “betrayed” by the administration’s recent military actions in the Middle East.
Carlson, the former Fox News host and one of the most influential conservative media voices in America, was once closely aligned with Trump and even served as an informal adviser.
Now, Carlson has become one of Trump’s most vocal conservative critics, especially over the president’s foreign policy and military actions in the Middle East.
He recently apologized for helping Trump get elected, saying Trump has moved away from his earlier “America First” promise to avoid foreign wars and has instead taken a more aggressive approach.
“I don’t hate Trump. I hate this war and the direction that the U.S. government is taking,” Carlson told The Wall Street Journal in an interview released Saturday. “I feel betrayed.”
Carlson said he believed Trump’s campaign promise of “no new wars,” especially in the Middle East, was sincere. He now argues that Trump has since been influenced by neoconservatives and Israel, and has moved away from that original anti-war position.
“Why can’t the U.S. government act on behalf of its own citizens?” Carlson asked the WSJ. “This is a generational problem that didn’t start with Trump. If anything, Trump just proved the system was stronger than him.”
Carlson has also faced his own criticism. Last October, he hosted Nick Fuentes, a known Holocaust denier, on his podcast and accused some U.S. politicians who support Israel of being overly influenced by a “brain virus,” which led to accusations of antisemitism and calls from some conservatives to distance him from the movement.
At the same time, Carlson had been privately and publicly urging Trump for months not to enter another war in the Middle East. He reportedly visited the White House three times to speak with Trump directly and stayed in frequent contact with him.
Despite those efforts, Carlson told the WSJ he failed to change Trump’s direction. He points to “February 28” as the breaking point, the day U.S. and Israeli airstrikes on Iran killed Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, a move that, in his view, deeply divided conservatives who believed Trump’s “America First” stance meant avoiding new wars.
Carlson described the man he helped elect to a second term as “charming, intelligent, and an existential threat to self-government.”
“Trump has proven his own point, unfortunately, which is that the people running your government are only about themselves,” he said. “You can run an authoritarian system that way. You cannot run a liberal democracy that way.”
On his end, Trump has dismissed Carlson and other former MAGA allies as having a “low IQ” for criticizing his handling of the Iran war. Carlson responded to that remark earlier this month in an interview with Newsmax, calling Trump a “slave” who “can’t make his own decisions.”
“I’ve always liked Trump and still feel sorry for him, as I do for all slaves,” Carlson said April 10. “He’s hemmed in by other forces. He can’t make his own decisions. It’s awful to watch.”
The Independent has contacted the White House for comment.
