Tucker Carlson just did something most media figures never do. He went on his own podcast and told his audience he was sorry for helping elect a president he now regrets supporting.
The admission came Monday night during an episode of The Tucker Carlson Show, where the former Fox News host sat down with his older brother, Buckley Carlson, a one-time speechwriter for Donald Trump. The conversation quickly turned into a public reckoning with their shared role in Trump’s rise to power.
“You wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him. We’re implicated in this, for sure,” Carlson said to his brother, according to Deadline. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind,’ or like, ‘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.”
He went further, offering something close to a full apology. “I want to say I’m sorry for misleading people. It was not intentional. That’s all I’ll say,” Carlson said. “We’ll be tormented by it for a long time.”
What finally pushed Carlson over the edge
The breaking point for Carlson appears to be Trump’s decision to pursue military conflict with Iran, which Carlson has described as a betrayal of the voters who backed Trump specifically because he promised to keep America out of foreign wars. He has also taken issue with how Trump has spoken about religion publicly, calling out a profanity-laced social media post Trump shared on Easter morning. “Who do you think you are?” Carlson said on a separate podcast segment, per MEAWW. “You’re tweeting out the f-word on Easter morning. So, obviously, you’re mocking the religion of Iran.”
Carlson also questioned whether the warning signs were always there. “The question does present itself immediately: was this always the plan?” he said. “You don’t want to be a conspiracy nut, but clearly there are signs of low character. We knew that.” His brother replied that, looking back, it seemed like it was.
It’s worth noting that Trump’s relationship with the Epstein files has also raised eyebrows, with the president expressing surprising openness to survivor hearings despite long-standing questions about the relationship between the two men.
Trump fires back, and the poll numbers back him
Trump has not exactly taken the criticism quietly. Earlier this month, he attacked Carlson on Truth Social, writing that he was a “Low IQ person” who was “highly overrated.” In a separate post, he wrote that former allies like Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones “have been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them.” He even shared a video urging those critics to “shut the f*** up,” posting it twice in the span of a few months.
The numbers do appear to be on Trump’s side, at least within his own party. A University of Massachusetts Lowell poll found that 77 percent of Republicans view Trump favorably, compared to just 31 percent for Carlson. Trump cited that data directly in one of his social media posts.
Some Democrats have already moved to use the growing Republican divisions as political leverage, introducing a bill to remove Trump via the 25th Amendment as opposition to his leadership grows on both sides of the aisle.
This is not the first time Carlson has turned on Trump
Carlson’s latest break is the sharpest, but it is not the first time he has privately soured on the president. During the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, text messages surfaced in which Carlson wrote “I hate him passionately” just two days before the January 6, 2021 Capitol riot. That lawsuit ultimately ended with Fox paying $787.5 million to settle, and Carlson was dropped from the network shortly after. He later launched The Tucker Carlson Show as an independent video podcast.
Each time Carlson has publicly distanced himself from Trump in the past, he has eventually come back around to supporting him. Whether this time is different remains the key question. Based on the tone of Monday’s podcast, Carlson seems to be betting that it is.
