NYT Interview: Carlson Explains Split With Trump on Iran, Whether Trump Is Evil, & Who’s Worse, Cruz or Fuentes

During a nearly two-hour interview with The New York Times, podcaster Tucker Carlson explained his break with President Donald Trump because of the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran, his suggestion that Trump could be the Antichrist, his view on Israel’s waging war on civilians, and his regret at interviewing podcaster Nick Fuentes.

Carlson claimed that Israel held Trump “hostage,” and that the president was highly skeptical of going to war, yet proceeded anyway after Carlson repeatedly urged him not to order an attack.

He said he regrets supporting Trump, and apologized for it.

On Iran

Noting that he has been speaking with Trump for 15 years about wars in the Middle East, Carlson told the Times’ Lulu Garcia-Navarro that Trump knew how disastrous the war in Iraq had been, which was a “main reason” Carlson supported and campaigned for him.

“It was really central to my views of Trump’s candidacy and presidency,” Carlson said:

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. …

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.

Carlson repeatedly met with Trump before the attack on Iran, including in the Oval Office. And Trump “never seemed enthusiastic about it” despite his oft-repeated mantra that Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon.

“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,” Carlson said:

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.

Carlson said “no one in the building” supported attacking Iran, but that the usual coterie of neoconservative Israel-firsters — Fox News tycoon Rupert Murdoch, moneybags widow Miriam Adelson, and Fox News bloviators Mark Levin and Sean Hannity — were importuning Trump to attack.

Asked about telling the BBC that Trump was a “slave” to Israel, Carlson said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and “his many advocates in the United States” hold Trump “hostage.” When Trump announced a ceasefire and peace talks, and Iran said a condition for peace was Israel’s not attacking southern Lebanon, “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,” Carlson said:

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.

On Trump as Antichrist

Carlson denied that he suggested Trump was the Antichrist, but when pressed, said, “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,” he continued:

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.

“I think what we’re seeing is evil,” Carlson said when Garcia-Navarro asked whether he is “open to the possibility” of Trump’s being the Antichrist:

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.

Ted Cruz vs. Nick Fuentes

Carlson also detailed his interview with the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee. And he said that GOP U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas repulses him, and that he lost his temper when he interviewed the Israel-first politician.

Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, he said, because he fell into a trap when the young podcaster attacked him and his family. 

Garcia-Navarro asked Carlson, “Who do you think is more morally repulsive: Ted Cruz or Nick Fuentes?”

Carlson: 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.

Garcia-Navarro: [Fuentes is] a white nationalist who has denied the Holocaust. 

Carlson: OK, but is that worse than killing kids?

“I’m hardly soft-pedaling Nick Fuentes,” Carlson said:

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 Ted Cruz and Mike Huckabee are two of the main people making this moment possible, and President Trump. But Nick Fuentes is the problem?

Regrets

Speaking to Garcia-Navarro remotely after the in-person interview in Maine, Carlson explained his remorse in pushing for Trump’s second term.

“He campaigned against the things he’s now doing a year and a half ago,” he said:

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.

Carlson said he is “often wrong,” and that he admits it because forcing yourself to apologize “makes you wiser over time.”

“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,” he continued:

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.