Kent: Third-party Group Pushed Carlson Run for Office; Carlson to Discuss It Tonight

The former supporters of President Donald Trump who recently gathered at Tucker Carlson’s home and sat for a group picture encouraged the wildly popular podcaster to run as a third-party candidate for president.

Carlson has said he has no intention of running. Nonetheless, former U.S. counterterrorism chief Joe Kent told Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks podcast, pressure is on the former Fox host to change his mind.

Two days ago, Kent appeared on Piers Morgan’s Uncensored program and said plans for a third party are underway.

Weeks ago, after Carlson left the GOP, he and former Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene announced discussions to create that party.

Opening Salvo

The Carlson-Greene divorce from the GOP became permanent when Trump unwisely began an illegal war with Iran on behalf of Israel. Carlson left the party in June over its groveling support for Israel.

“I’m out,” Carlson said. And “there’s no chance,” he said, he would vote Republican in the future.

During an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review in July, Carlson explained that enough is enough.

“The lesson of the last two and a half months” led Carlson to conclude that a third party must be built, he told the Review:

If you vote for Trump and you still wind up in a regime-change war — if Chuck Schumer is strongly behind Trump’s foreign policy, which he is — then we need options, or else let’s just give up and be ruled by the most unscrupulous people. And I’m just too young to accept that. We need a third party. …

I’m going to help build a third party. There should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country. I mean, if you make $60,000 a year, you’re degraded. Your life expectancy has gone down, and the promise of your children’s lives is likely gone. No one seems to care. It’s not even a factor. “What about Hamas?” I officially don’t care about Hamas. The U.S. government should have, as its first priority, the welfare of its own people. 

Yet Carlson said he is not interested in running for office.

Greene told Morgan she wants an “America-focused party that doesn’t fall into the traps of Democrats and Republicans, but could align some serious players from the right and the left and move forward.”

Such a party will take time to build, but there are “serious conversations happening,” she said. The new effort will require Americans “to step up because it’s not going to be a couple of players like Tucker and I and a few others that can roll up our sleeves and get this done.”

Asked whether she, Carlson, and others could operate within and change the GOP, Greene said no.

“We already did that. We thought we did that in 2024,” she said:

This is why we’re furious. … We’ve been betrayed, 100-percent betrayed. … They took Donald Trump — it’s like the Scooby Doo mask. They pulled his mask off, and what was underneath was a nasty combination of Lindsey Graham and Mark Levin. The wing of the neocon Republican establishment party that the voters in 2024 hated, loathed, rose up against, and voted to end that version of the Republican Party … here we are not even two years in and Donald Trump is leading it. Those are the phone calls he takes. Those are the donors that he has dinner with.

Greene said threatening to abandon the GOP will not force it to change. Party mugwumps will answer such a threat with what angry America First conservatives want to hear, then return to business as usual.

“The GOP is a disaster,” she wrote on X:

The Republican Party hijacked MAGA, pretended to be America First and MAHA, and then sold us all out.

Then Trump rubber stamped the entire con job while taking checks from literally everyone.

Kent: We Want Tucker to Run

Two days ago, Kent said much the same thing to Morgan.

Noting the photograph at Carlson’s house that included Kent, Greene, and outgoing Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Morgan asked whether a third party was afoot.

Yes, Kent said, because Americans right and left are “sick and tired” of both parties. “They want us out of these foolish wars.”

“Most Americans have no idea what we’re talking about,” he told Morgan:

They don’t know about Gaza, they don’t know about the Strait of Hormuz. They just know that billions of their taxpayer dollars, their blood, their treasure, their sons and their daughters continue to get sent overseas, our best and brightest get killed, our taxpayer dollars get spent over there while things continue to decay here in America.

Thus, Kent and the rest want to build a coalition that opposes foreign wars and foreign lobbies.

But the group in the photo pushed Carlson to run, Kent told Uyger.

Explaining why the group is creating a third party, Kent said “we don’t think the current political system is working just because of the results on the ground.”

“No matter who we vote for we get another war in the Middle East” he said:

No matter who we vote for, AIPAC and these major donors, most of whom most Americans don’t even know, they dictate a policy that sends our best young men and women off to go fight and die on foreign battlefields. They make our taxes go up, and then they give us nothing back in return but more debt and more wars. 

Kent said Americans have a “basic hunger” for a no-more-wars party that will not “let foreign lobbies dictate our foreign policy.”

As for Carlson, Kent said the group pushed him to run. “We’d all been texting each other for quite some time and having phone conversations or seeing each other in passing,” he told Uyger. 

Kent, Massie, and Greene “basically … invited ourselves” to Carlson’s home. He agreed to host the meeting.

The group did not discuss who would lead the new party, but “all of us at one point in time told Tucker he needs to run, and Tucker’s been pretty public that he’s not going to run,” Kent said:

So, we all made our pitch to Tucker as to why he should run. Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run; I would fully support that.

A Broader Coalition

But the group mostly discussed building a broader, antiwar, anti-foreign lobbying coalition.

Kent and the far-left podcaster also discussed how the party would get on the ballot in all 50 states, and how the group would raise money. The party would not raise corporate money, he said.

“We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise,” Greene wrote on X over the photograph at Carlson’s home:

But he’s betrayed us all.

Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center. 

The movement has begun.

“MAGA was betrayed,” Carlson wrote over Greene’s post:

We all were. It’s time for a new path forward.

Carlson, who boasts 17.8 million followers on X and 5.72 million subscribers on YouTube, will discuss the movement on his program at 6 p.m. this evening.