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Pity poor Tucker Carlson. If you look at Donald Trump’s war in Iran—which Carlson has called the “biggest mistake” of the American president in his life—he is destroying his strong support for Trump in the 2024 election.
“It’s time to wrestle with our own consciences,” Carlson, a longtime prominent journalist in the MAGA movement, said this week on his podcast. “We will be tormented by it for a long time. I will be. And I want to say sorry for misleading people.”
Or, better yet, don’t feel sorry for Carlson. He’s one of several journalists who have second thoughts about Trump—and sometimes, take credit for it. But these analysts do not deserve forgiveness. Their second thoughts are wise, but they are very wrong, when many other analysts and journalists saw the truth, it denies them to be taken seriously in politics anymore.
The problem isn’t just that Carlson should have known better. It is that he did, as a journalist Jason Zengerle reports in his recent biography, Hated by All the Right People. Back in the early 2000s, Carlson had doubts about the Iraq war, but he swallowed them and became what he felt was a good right-wing player, Zengerle notes. Later, he said, he went “against my instincts in supporting it. It’s something I’ll never do again. Never.” (The disaster in Iraq may inform Carlson’s strong opposition to the war in Iran.)
And yet Carlson did it with Trump, repeatedly. He initially found Trump rude, but came around to him during the 2016 presidential campaign. By 2020, however, he would be disgusted by Trump, including his handling of COVID; Zengerle writes that Carlson first believed the president’s approach was too harsh, then too harsh. He told people he voted for Kanye West for president in 2020. When Trump tried to steal the election despite losing, Carlson lashed out at Trump’s allies on air and was more aggressive in text messages to colleagues.
“I hate him so much,” Carlson wrote in a memo that was revealed a few years later case against Fox. “That was four years ago. We all pretend we have a lot to show for it, because admitting how disastrous it was is hard to contemplate. But come on. There’s really no change for Trump.” However, after he was fired from Fox, Carlson repaired his relationship with Trump, advising him to choose JD Vance as his running mate and speaking at his rallies.
Recognizing the “real” Tucker Carlson is, Zengerle suggests, a lost cause, and anyway, it doesn’t matter whether Carlson was sincere when he supported Trump or is a zealot now. In any case, he has lost any reason to listen to him. And yet Carlson’s turn against Trump has won him praise for “A wonderful new honor” range from liberal as such Jon Favreau of Pod Save America. This was ill-advised, and not just because Carlson keeps mixing anti-Semitism and other fandom and his accusations of Trump. If the goal of these liberals is to make allies who can woo Trump voters, it’s also likely not working. As Carlson rejects Trump, so does his own popularity crater faster than the president’s.
Restoring American democracy after Trump will require reaching out to those who supported him. That’s good sense and good math: After all, he was democratically elected, and many of his supporters were fooled by him or didn’t believe he would follow through on his most brutal promises. In the case of the unpopular Iran war, voters may have been fooled by Trump’s claim to be anti-war; that feeling was enhanced not only by his words but also by the creation of ignorance in mainstream media. Every voter has a responsibility to do their best to understand the candidates in the election, and Trump’s mistakes should have been clear long before November 2024, but most people are also too busy and rely on the media, whatever they choose, to inform them. Creating a space for ordinary Trump voters to reject Trump does not require welcoming or letting go of the celebrities who mobilized the public to support him.
One group willing to shun is broadcasters like Carlson and Alex Jones, who has also responded strongly to the Iran war. “I love old Trump,” He said during an interview with former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, another MAGA rebel. “I’ll just tell the truth hatred this person. This is a disgusting shell of an old man.” (Strong words from the guy who falsely claimed that the Sandy Hook massacre was a hoax and the families of the murdered children were “victims of the crisis.”)
Second are the so-called Trumpist elites, who have tried to create an ideological system around MAGA. Author Sohrab Ahmari he argued (by Matthew Schmitz) in 2022 that Trump was “the only candidate who recognizes” that war-making was the root of America’s problems. Now, as journalist Michelle Goldberg it showsScore he writes that “Trump’s insane administration is exhausting Americans and the world” and he adds bitterly, “Bring Hillary back.” Conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell he announced the Iran war to be the end of Trumpism and wrote that “Trump’s virtues are not what you need to run a free country.” You get zero points for identifying Trump’s style and behavior right now, a decade into his reign.
Third are what you might call lifestyle broadcasters, many of whom make no pretense of being political pundits but happily take on the job, interviewing political candidates or making endorsements for office. This includes Theo Vonwho has called Trump’s attacks on Iran “satanic,” and Joe Rogan. “Make America Greater – I’m down. But Make America Great Again and it’s a movement of a bunch of dorks? Because most of them are dorks,” Rogan. he said last month, calling them “very weird, unattractive, stupid people.” If Rogan couldn’t detect this before, this says little for his attitude. (The White House seems eager to heal any rifts and hosted Rogan at the White House last Saturday.)
The suggestion that people like Carlson, Ahmari, and Rogan make to their viewers is that they are smarter or better informed than the average viewer, or have access to politicians that allows them to be important conduits of information and ideas. They have also argued vociferously that they are more credible and transparent than the mainstream media. If their most prominent political position was supporting Trump in 2024, and they’ve both regretted it, that says everything we need to know about their credibility going forward.
“It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’–or like, ‘Oh, this is bad. I’m out,'” Carlson said on the podcast. He is true, for once; maybe he tries to say nothing for a long time.
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- The Trump administration signed the order reclassify state-licensed medical marijuana as a less dangerous drugmoving it from Schedule I to Schedule III. The changes, signed by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, do not federally legalize marijuana but simplify some regulations.
- President Trump said he ordered it US Navy to “shoot and kill” any Iranian boat laying mines in the Strait of Hormuz.
- Israel and Lebanon are set to hold a second round of US-led talks in Washington today, continuing rare one-on-one talks following last week’s cease-fire between Israel and Lebanon. The talks come as both governments say they want Hezbollah to be disarmed, although the Iran-backed militant group has vowed to oppose such efforts.
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Despair of the Cubans
By Gisela Salim-Peyer
Cubans have for decades faced the brunt of power, oppressed by their own government, weighed down by economic crises, and portrayed as victims of a series of sanctions imposed by the White House. Ideas for a better life came and went, either because the government in Havana briefly allowed a little more freedom or the American government tried a new method to overthrow the communist ideology that has ruled the island for almost 70 years. So perhaps it is not surprising that Cubanos have so far found it here with everyone.
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this journal.
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